Category: Uncategorized

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Slow Blogging

As months go by, I keep thinking: “Maybe I will post on this blog once a month…once every two months…once every five months….”

…once every six months…

After all, much of the real work is happening underground. If content is meant to mushroom up, what mycelium is nourishing and connecting it?

Where are the examples of slow and methodical rhythms of thought and experience? What liturgies are possible in this virtual world, to turn us back towards the physical, the spiritual?

Back towards each other?

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

Czesław Miłosz
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Space for Joy

“The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”

Audre Lorde

How do I create spaces for joy in my daily life?

How have others–artists, writers, friends, mentors–created spaces for me to experience joy?

How can a book be a place of hospitality?

What joys can I share with people who are different from me, with people who disagree with me?

What space am I asked to make for others?

What space am I called to take up for myself?

How have I experienced joy as a bridge across differences?

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Little Steps Forward

Shortly after attending the Hudson-Townsend Publishing Institute, I discovered Joe Biel’s book A People’s Guide to Publishing. The founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing, Biel’s Guide is an approachable introduction to founding a publishing company with both DIY panache and business savvy. It was the summer in the middle of my full-time MBA program, and I was pursuing my writing with a mentor instead of a more standard MBA internship. Biel’s book pointed me toward delight and possibility, toward playful engagement with business tools as movement-building resources.

As I learn to relax into my own voice as a writer, I am also listening for others’ voices to amplify as a publisher. What movement am I called to, what–dare I say–ministry?

Onward.

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Playing with Publishing

A year ago July, I stocked up on cardstock and vellum when the Pat Catan’s craft store in Tiffin, Ohio was having its going-out-of-business sale. In May, I had attended the Hudson-Townsend Publishing Institute at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The whole process of publishing captivated me: from acquiring manuscripts, to editing, design, production, and marketing. As we folded papers together to create our own chapbooks–nothing, really, inconsequential–I felt a spark of delight. This playfulness with the physical form of words; this attention to communication, both through words and through design. Sign me up, I thought. I want to be a publisher. But what does that look like? What does that mean?