Eye to Wonder

I'm still curious about exactly why I am writing this blog. Is it a book review blog? A parenting blog? A general personal blog? Who do I want to share it with? But the more I write, the more I think that maybe this blog is serving as my own personal compendium. When I was a sophomore in college, I took a creative writing course. I forget the exact title of the course, but it was something along the lines of reading as writers. Each week we read a different novel and examined how exactly the writer told a story. An ongoing assignment in the course was to create a compendium. The compendium was a place to record lines that stood out to us, quotes we wanted to remember, or moments of beauty in each novel. It was essentially our personal collection of writing we encountered throughout the course; it was the bits from each novel we wanted to hold on to. Having this space allows me a compendium for various ideas, quotes, or memories in this stage of my life where I am not primarily a st...

So far, the book that's had the greatest impact on me this year is not really a book I selected at all. I came across You're Not Listening by Kate Murphy twice before I gave it a shot. Don't you just love it when that kind of magic happens where you hear about a book several times in a row right at a moment when it speaks to you? The first time I encountered the book was through the Libro.fm Educator ALC program . If you're a teacher, librarian, or in other related fields, you can request to join this program which provides you with a diverse selection of audiobooks available to download for free each month. Even if you're not eligible for the ALC program, I still highly recommend checking out Libro.fm as way to support your favorite indie bookstore when you buy audiobooks. I downloaded You're Not Listening without thinking too much about it. Then I few days later I heard Kate Murphy speak about her book on one of my favorite podcasts Vrain Waves , and I was co...

A few weeks back, we were talking to some friends on zoom when I noticed a colorful framed print in the background that said, "This Must be the Place." I asked her about it--it was beautiful, and also the title of a Maggie O'Farrell book I read last year that I loved. She said she didn't know about the book, but that it referred to a song she liked. Ever since then, it keeps flitting in and out my mind. It's such a strange time with a global pandemic and the normal rituals and spaces that connect us  are completely disrupted. Some days I leave my house and just feel this jaw-dropping sense of how much has already been shattered--people who are sick or have died, and how many businesses and store fronts are shuttered. But other days I feel so absorbed in my family, my students and navigating virtual teaching, and chasing after my increasingly mobile 10-month old that the big picture of the situation feels far away. I think "this must be the place" captur...