In Question: Introduction

As a high school English teacher, I’m always wondering what my writing hobby has to do with my job.

Yes, I do all of the stereotypical things an English teacher does: tries to write novels and short stories, tries to write essays that may be of note somewhere, reads as if our eyes evolved to parse type instead of variations in our environment.

I’m fortunate enough to find a career that aligns with my passions. If you could set me to kind of do what I wanted, sure I would structure things a little more comfortably, but I’d want to do the same things: learn, teach, write, think, create, discuss, and read.

As someone who teaches for a living and has only published a few things, this blog is kind of perplexing. It’s amateur publishing, if that. Readers of each piece of writing number in our prehistoric abacus, our hands. So I’ve have been treating it like a dumpster fire for things I have no idea where to send.

Truth is, I have no idea where to send anything except short stories. (I need to work on that.)

In my day-to-day life, I do a lot of journaling and thinking about weird things, like stationery implements or the weirdness of creating a food group called “protein” or something interesting about rock climbing culture. Previously, I chose to really flesh these pieces out. Make them publishable, but instead of sending them off to get published, I put them on my blog.

I think that’s a mistake for me right now. I think my blog is less than amateur, so just let it be that in all its qualities.

Writing helps me think things through, to understand the things that are nagging at me on the day-to-day, the week-to-week, the month-to-month, etc. And most of my writing–if not everybody else’s–comes in the form of, “Isn’t this an interesting thing? What’s going on here?”

This all means that I’m going to try and use my blog to think through things and not so much go through the writing process. I don’t mean that I aim to post pieces with terrible typos and meandering prose. I want discovery to be my main goal, not communication. But, communication comes with the form, so blog it is.

For now, posts that have “In Question:” in the title are posts that have been revised at least once but not thrice. I want to do a lot of these, and I don’t want them to inhabit the space of any of the reading and writing that I’m doing now.

I mean, I’d still like to get published somehow.