Writing stuff

I just sent back the proofs for an essay about teaching students to write in the context of chemistry research, titled "The Write Stuff."  I'm also settling down to doing some writing for the workshop I'm going to at the Collegeville Institute later this summer.  I'm writing about writing about writing...

I'm fleshing out a couple of pieces I wrote on the blog, and I wanted to be able to browse through it without a lot of clicks.  So I turned all ten years of writing into a PDF (thank you BlogBooker), printed it out (double-sided) and had it bound by the delightful guys at the local printer. More than a thousand pages, more than a thousand posts. Almost 400,000 words.

It's hard to believe I've written this much, in this space -- it's like a tiny time machine, I can pop back into a moment from the past, and remember what it felt like to be grading over the holidays (like having an ugly Christmas ornament hanging over my head) or see again the pigeons on an icy day in Philly sliding down the wheelchair cuts like snowboarders down a half-pipe.  There is a solidity to these memories, now printed out like this.  I wonder if a granddaughter or great niece might one day happen across this in a box, and what she might think about Crash and The Boy...

It's a good reminder too, as I stretch myself to write a more sustained piece than a column, or a blog post, that at least some of the time, I have the "write stuff."