Top 10 Things We Don't Know About Mary Dyer....

I know not many people reading this blog know the story of Mary Dyer. I don't have the energy to outline the basics, but Wikipedia's entry on her isn't too bad -- and oddly enough it paraphrases my article about her at length as "a modern view," something I had no idea of until a friend looked it up and told me. Yikes!

Researcher and novelist Christy K. Robinson published a blog post called "Top 10 Things You May Not Know About Mary Dyer." I thought it might be interesting for others, and probably a useful activity for me, to create a list of the Top 10 Things We All Don't Know About Mary Dyer. Some of them involve missing factual knowledge, but some of them are more the sorts of things that anyone interested in her would deeply wish to know for actually understanding her, inner matters of feeling and motive that would not be knowable even with a fuller archival record. (Or perhaps even if she had kept a diary that was preserved, if it had been more a day to day record and less of a spiritual, introspective document -- how one wishes she had written a reflection on her life even as brief as her contemporary Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear Children.")

Anyway, here is my list, at least for now (and I apologize, I can't figure out how to space between the paragraphs in a list using the blog template). We do not know. . . .

1. Where Mary Barrett was born (and precisely when), who her family was, what her growing-up was like. Brushing aside the debunked speculations about her being Arabella Stuart's love child, the evidence suggests she was from a wealthy family, probably merchant-class, probably although not necessarily Londoners. She was highly literate (we have a holograph copy of her first letter, with excellent handwriting), so there were the resources and commitment to educate her as a girl. Winsser thinks she may have served at Court before her marriage. Fragments of an embroidered white silk dress survive, and a gold bodkin (I didn't know there were artifacts until very recently). I realized recently that even apart from the evidence of her education, she probably felt loved and valued as a child. Because otherwise, the confidence with which she acted, her ability to withstand public opinion, is much harder to imagine. Don't you think? 

History, fiction, and some space in between?

In a bit of serendipity that had the aura of the things Elizabeth Gilbert describes happening in Big Magic, around August I was doing some Mary Dyer Googling and came on a Dyer blog I had never seen, kept by an excellent independent historian, Johan Winsser, at least one of whose articles I'd read in the past. I learned some interesting details about Mary's grave and the location of the Dyer farm (which has led me to plan a visit to Newport and Boston this summer, in time for the anniversary of her June 1, 1660 execution -- but that's another post). I also learned than Winsser had an entire book on Mary and William Dyer in the publication process. I wrote to him immediately (he had seen my 2001 Dyer article and knew who I was) and he graciously sent me his manuscript in PDF. The book came out during the fall -- Mary and William Dyer: Quaker Light and Puritan Ambition in Early New England. (It had been accepted by a university press but for reasons he told me and I don't quite recall he pulled it and decided to self-publish. I just discovered it's free on Kindle Unlimited, if you're interested; of course, I purchased a copy.)  I started it right away, and after many delays, I finally finished reading and taking notes on it this week.

This is (for someone like me) an amazing book. It is the culmination of decades of research deep in all the archives, documented according to high academic standards, careful in its claims, clearly and at times beautifully written. This is the first biographical study of Mary Dyer that is actually reliable, that assembles what is known, judiciously evaluates what might be likely, and doesn't perpetuate hearsay or myths that can't be backed up by evidence, of which quite a few have accreted across centuries of Dyer-ology. I cannot begin to say the difference encountering this book at the very beginning of my work on the project makes, knowing I have accurate information to rely on and a clear indication of what primary sources I would need to check if I want to pursue further. It would have been pretty awful had I only learned about it near the end! This is a kind of scholarship I wasn't trained to do, and am not interested in doing myself, but it is so necessary.

Reading Winsser's book is also terrifying in certain ways. In my early writing I had been mostly working off my general knowledge/memory of Dyer and the Quaker "New England Martyrs" -- I wanted to get into the freedom of the project and start the more personal parts rather than distracting or intimidating myself with research. To focus on finding my voice in writing in a new way. It has been some years since I was immersed in the writings of the early Quakers in New England and the accompanying scholarship, although I have spent a great deal of time reading and taking notes on those texts in years past. Most of them are only available in image PDFs of 17th-century print, and reading them is a real headache. All the complicated specificity came back to me, all the material I need to re-master, all the belief and crazy courage and "enthusiasm" of those past people. So utterly different from me. And I wondered, why on earth do I think I can somehow interweave my life and Mary Dyer's? Outside of a few points of contact, I do not resemble her in the least. I was a Quaker once, but can hardly claim to be one now, though I have never technically withdrawn. Nor does her world in any but the faintest way resemble 2016-2017. 

My Mary Dyer has to be absolutely faithful to the historical one, so far as the facts are known and so far as I understand the world of 17th-century radical Puritanism and Quakerism (which seems to be, I will say, a good bit more than plenty of others who have written about her for a popular audience). But then, as is common for any early modern woman, so much is not known about her, and that's where imagination comes in. Winsser's blog is titled "Mary Dyer: Quaker Martyr and Enigma" and that's correct. I will write another post on what we don't know about her -- basically, it's almost everything we would want to know. We know the outline of where she lived with her husband, what children she had and whether they lived or died, where she went that got her in trouble and with whom, what she (purportedly) said in several highly-wrought encounters with authorities, and what she wrote in two letters (or rather, what she wrote in one that was later edited for publication, and in another of which we have only the edited version). And what her husband said about her in two crucial letters seeking to intervene on her behalf with the Massachusetts authorities, that may or may not be a close reflection of the intimate truth. There are crucial gaps where we know almost nothing about her life (her family and upbringing prior to her marriage; critically, what she was doing during the six years she spent away from her family in England, from which she emerged a Quaker). Mostly, we don't know the things that are the most compelling: what she felt, what she thought, why she did x, y, and z. Any of the private experiences, reflections, character traits that led to the choices she made, that any of us make. Things like Quaker beliefs and discourse and the influence of Foxe's Book of Martyrs on both self-fashioning and strategies of resistance form, as I see it, the container that shaped her and others' actions -- but there is still another level beneath that of human response and motivation that ties her story together from events of the 1630s to the events of the 1650s, that begs to be read. And that is where interpretation comes in -- or really imagination. Interpretation can work with the evidence, but it takes imagination to attempt to enter into the psyche of another and create a story for the gaps. These are the parts of Mary Dyer I am most compelled to explore.

Here is the next place I get anxious. I am so very, very far from the first person to have wanted to imaginatively reconstruct Mary Dyer. Besides the considerable number of less-reliable biographies that exist (from something like Horatio Rogers's solid entry of 1896, to many more popular and sketchy entries, which often insert scenes and dialogue we have no documentation for), there are numerous historical fictions. I knew these existed in the past; what I have learned since beginning the project is that there are a bunch of recent ones too. 

I have an ambivalent relationship to historical fiction. On one hand, I have included in my classes, and in recent years gotten more interested in thinking about it as a form -- I researched all the commentary on historical fiction in the North American Review for a paper at the NAR Bicentennial Conference in 2015 which I recycled for another conference in 2016, and found it quite fascinating and worth reflecting upon even now. I am, obviously, deeply interested in the uses of the early American past; that is, truly, one of the reasons I was first drawn to early American studies as a field: even though "presentism" in historical scholarship is highly suspect, it did feel continuingly relevant to me, and to anyone seeking to understand, live in, and create America. Historical fiction is about the past that is its subject, but also, when you dig beneath the surface, about the era it is written in, a doubleness I find compelling. But. The thought of actually reading historical fiction, especially recent fiction (novels that are not themselves historical texts) on figures I have studied and care about, like Mary Rowlandson or, of course, Mary Dyer, makes me feel almost physically nauseated. Why?

Part of it is simply cringing at the things the writers get wrong, or seeing things I know are made up that are getting passed off with the same status as fictively represented historical facts. I want to know where the imagination is, and I want other readers to know. Anything fast-and-loose bothers me. Part of it may be, at least for Dyer: I want to imagine her, in my way. How can anything I do be worthwhile, if others have gotten there first, and no doubt better, and with a fullness of novelistic imagining that I am not even planning to undertake? I'm just one more person perhaps violating her memory and mystery by imagining her. Isn't what I am going to do just slightly more responsible, but vastly less satisfying from a literary standpoint? And if I'm bringing in my own life too, that is even more historically irresponsible, just in a different way.

Anyway, I know of several fictional works on Mary Dyer that I probably should read, but have, at least for now, decided to defer to a much later stage. One is a multi-part work by an independent researcher/novelist named Christy K. Robinson, Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013) and Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014). Robinson also has a Dyer research blog and has published her posts (as nearly as I can make out) as a book (some useful material, and broad cultural background, but clearly amateur work and terribly undocumented, which is one reason I was utterly thrilled to discover Winsser's professional-level scholarship). A more mainstream publication with serious good reviews and awards is Beth Powning's A Measure of Light (2016). That one scares me. And last night I discovered a one-woman play by Jeanmarie (Simpson) Bishop, The Joy: the Mary Dyer Story (2016), which I ended up reading through on Kindle Unlimited. And yes, Bishop's Dyer unsettles me, both in ways she sees her that are like me, and ways that are different.

If anyone wants to reassure me that the fact that other people are writing imaginatively about Mary Dyer now doesn't mean that I should not -- that it just signifies she has some kind of resonance at our historical moment -- I would be more than pleased to receive such comments. I can say that to myself, but, like most self-offered reassurances, I'm not sure I believe it. How much I wish that I had a lesser-known figure to engage with (and one who wasn't such an embarrassingly ready-made heroine: white, wealthy, even, as attested by multiple sources including hostile ones, notably intelligent and beautiful). All I can say is that I didn't choose Mary Dyer as a figure to write about; she chose me in some way, and has been in my thoughts since the late 1990s.

I don't want to write history about Mary Dyer, except to the degree that I have to explain events and contexts for my book to make sense. I don't want to write academic interpretation -- well, I did that as well as I could years ago ["From Monster to Martyr: (Re)Presenting Mary Dyer," Early American Literature, vol. 36, no. 1 (2001), pp. 1-30]. I want to meditate on what is known and not known; I want to imagine, but in the voice of personal and lyric essay, where I am open and conscious about the act of imagining, and about how what I imagine is shaped by my life, my desire, my historical moment and its needs. I want to expose all the seams and pull at their threads. I want to think about what she means to me, might mean to other women. That personal and historical desire infuses all historical fiction too, but what excites me is being open about it and exploring it directly. Maybe it shows how I still cannot escape being something of an academic, but it is the way of writing that seems honest to me, and beautiful and urgent in its honesty. 

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And a postscript: Googling to check the page numbers of my article just now, I came on yet another of-the-moment Mary Dyer reflection (August 2017), this time nonfictional and political (Sacco and Vanzetti! Angela Davis!) -- another dimension of my project. So we really are in a Dyer moment, and maybe I just need to accept my project as part of that. 

Another version of an explanation

I wrote this earlier this fall, striking back at an attack of self-doubt. I don't know whether it will go in the literal book or not, but I like it. It's as true as I could make it. Really pushing myself to write without bounds.

An imaginary Twitter thread on why I am writing a book about myself and Mary Dyer, or warfare with the demons on both sides that tell me this is nuts

I write about Mary Dyer because I want to tell my secrets, but don’t want to be the center of attention.

Because nothing happens in my story, except everything I never do and everyone who leaves.

Because I don’t know what my life adds up to, even now. So how can I write a memoir? If my life adds up to anything it adds up to this.

Because I was too busy searching to remember.

Because I am middle-aged but still want to be a heroine. Or to have one at least.

And most of what made her famous happened after she was forty-five.

Because I am apparently still arguing with that historian at the conference who insisted that religion and sex are separate categories.

Because I have spent decades in the seventeenth century pretending it was not my own story.

Because I was afraid to become a writer, so I became a scholar, and now I need to figure out what I really am.

Because I fear you would find my life so strange, I might as well hold up what seems even stranger.

Because I want to share what I love, and dare you not to love it too. Strange as it is.

Because Mary Dyer loved Anne Hutchinson, and now I think that was the secret engine of her life.

Because I imagine her as daughter to Anne’s mother, femme to Anne’s butch.

Because she survived losses, common and unspeakable.

Because through believing these things about her I can pretend that she is like me.

Because my foremothers are lost and strange to me in nameless shtetls, so I have chosen to borrow a past.

Because she lived with what she knew to be lies, held up by others as an emblem of error.

Because the meme of monstrosity wrapped around her from the beginning--a whisper, then an excavation, a scandal passed from tract to tract.

And still somehow she managed to breathe.

Because this is what all of my sisters are struggling to understand.

Because she did not stop there but followed her deep longing, and stood up in resistance.

And she dared to leave her husband and children behind to do so.

There would be consequences and yet she chose them: to be imprisoned. To be bound in the words of others again. To be bound in the noose.

Because who among us has gone to the scaffold, been walked down from it alive, and then gone back to it again?

Because I want to be brave. Because the thought of the world ending strangles us all with fear.

Because she found a language that pulsed with divine extravagance. With love and grief and fury.

Because she found her people, so that even when her neck snapped she still spoke.

Even if they took her words and made them their own, yet again.

Even if that is what I too am doing.

Because somehow this is the one story I want to have time to tell.

The Project, described

The most interesting thing about my writing project is that it came to me in a revelation. Fittingly enough. So to me by an immediate revelation said Anne Hutchinson, when she let her real thoughts fly.

I was sitting in a session at the Society of Early Americanists conference last March in Tulsa, my mind wandering as I listened to a paper (I confess my mind has always wandered terribly at these events). The spring after Trump's election, after the winter when I spent a lot of time contemplating the end of the world, the end of my world, Last Things in general, and the call for courage and resistance. And thinking abstractly about killing myself as a final refuge if needed. I don't recall the preceding train of thought, but it came to me all at once: what I wanted to write, while time permitted, the true book I wanted a chance to write before I died, was not an academic book but a personal one, or one that was both personal and engaged with everything I'd cared about as an early Americanist. It would be about the life of the seventeenth-century Quaker martyr, Mary Dyer (whom I am fascinated by and have written and published about before), but also about myself:  her life and inner life freely reimagined through the empathy I have gained from my own life and inner experiences. A fiction, inevitably, but open and speculative about that; essayistic imaginings, not a novel. But then -- and this was the new part that shot through me and made me realize I could and needed to write this now in a way that I never could before -- interwoven in this personal/historical hybrid would also be the political: what all this meant about how to live now, about the power of women, about the power and agency and, hell, heroine-ism of middle-aged women in particular. About women being memed as monsters and not being silenced by that. About women loving and loyal to other women, even as those women were attacked: Mary Dyer loving Anne Hutchinson and me and so many others, yes, loving Hillary Clinton with our whole hearts. Unrepentently. Plus other less public loves I wanted to declare.

What all this would look like I am still figuring out. But in that moment of revelation I knew that within this framework I could talk about everything I truly care about. This includes some things that have made it (more or less safely translated) into my academic writing and things I rarely talk about, that only a few people who know me know would know were ever part of my experience. And because it would also be about our lives now, I thought that for all the weird and personal stuff there would be in it, there could be people out there who would want to read it, who could be moved. Whatever happens, it would be a testimony to our times.

Recently I have been reading Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. I'm eager to read anything that offers courage and inspiration to be creatively daring, these days. Gilbert talks about her admittedly magical-thinking theory that there are ideas out there looking for a human being to say yes to them. Most often people don't.

But sometimes -- rarely, but magnificently -- there comes a day when you're open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, the feeling of falling into love or obsession.) . . . Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention. (36)

That is pretty close to what happened.

I have had ideas in the past that gave me flashes of excitement, but I never took them anywhere. This one started taking form right away -- I made myself get out my laptop and sit in a chair (safely away from my office desk) and start drafting a couple of short, imagistic personal sections as soon as I got home, some writing that captured the feeling and scenes I wanted to convey, summoning myself as a religiously-obsessed young woman, struggling with identity and transcendence and desire. The first personal writing I had done in years. I still had language, it seemed.

Since the spring I have been drafting lots of pieces for the book. Just trying to respond to inspiration and actually write any piece I was thinking about, anything that called out to be written. Now my goal is to start to be more systematic, somewhat more linear, if not entirely. Early on I did come up with a five-part structure for the book, loosely tracking the trajectory of Mary Dyer's life as a framework, that has remained solid for me. I know generally what I want to focus on within each section, but I'm also discovering it more specifically as I write, and discovering what the pieces exactly are. In the broadest sense each section will contain multiple short chapters, lyric essays of a  kind, some personal, some historical, some political, but lots of blurring and crossing between those. I think.

Mary Dyer's story -- her life, death, and afterlife -- is a fixed quantity (in its outward facts; there is however virtually no documentation of anything we might actually want to know about her -- how it felt to be her, what she loved, how she understood the innermost story of her life beneath the religious ideology that shaped it -- so it is all open to interpretation, to imaginative channeling). What I am coming to realize is that, while I know the past experiences I want to talk about, I also need to figure out the story of my life that I am telling here. Where do I come out? I don't yet know that, just as I don't know what is going to happen to America and the world. That is scary. I hope that by this summer I am further in my understanding. I have already begun to sense that the process of writing the book, of claiming a writer's voice, is itself a central part of the story.

It is hard to write about the present, to write up to the present. It makes me think of the early American journal/histories like William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, that start off in retrospective narrative but fragment as they come to the end, written year by year in the murky troubling present. The pathos of not knowing. I imagine any future reader who will know things I cannot. I just tell myself that I just have to do it, keep going. All closure is illusory anyway, right?  Mostly a rhetorical act?

The folder is still called The Project in my Google Drive, as a name didn't come with the inspiration. More recently I have begun trying out thinking of it with the title Red Door (with a subtitle to follow), which is the title of one of the chapters talking about my most deeply sacred and painful experience and invokes ideas of passion and barriers and crossing-over, but that is still open.

The sections have titles:  "Monster," "Convincement," "Erotics," "Persistence," and "Flag." (You might wonder the most about the last. A member of the Boston General Court was purported to have said of Mary Dyer's hanging, "She did hang as a flag for others to take example by." But of course there are multiple other connotations, which makes me love it.)

Oddly I did begin writing it in Google Docs rather than Word. This has the advantage of letting me work on it easily across devices -- with travel I expect to be using my laptop a lot. But also it felt like a separate space, away from everything academic that Word inevitably signifies to me, the aura of responsibility and judgment and (yes) failure. A sign that this writing was different. The rightness of that has stayed with me, although as I go on I'm going to need to figure out a better way to save drafts of things I revise. I've been learning a bit about academic software and when I learned what the new Scrivener 3 does I realize I probably need it, although it hasn't yet been released for PC. Going to explore this more after the holidays. (Yes, don't worry, I've downloaded the Google Drive folder to my PC periodically to be backed up on the computer's hard drive and its daily backup to my external hard drive.)

I am not the first or only person to find Mary Dyer relevant in the present. Some weeks before my revelation I saw this image (or something like it) that a friend had shared. It is by Christy Robinson, a nonacademic researcher and novelist of Dyer (and blogger). I love it, but when I saw it I only thought wow, that's awesome, so apt. It must have helped seed my inspiration, but it wasn't itself the source of it.

I still think it's apt. I only know that I am going much, much further. I'll write about the statue (by a famous woman sculptor, Sylvia Shaw Judson) eventually too.

A few weeks ago I came upon the realization that "persistence" has two meanings: the obvious one above, signifying continued or renewed effort, and another, something that continues whether we will it or not (think of "a persistent condition"). One is about agency, one is about things we have no control over. This project is, for me, about both of those. Looking back into the roots of everything that has persisted for me; commitment to persisting in writing this perhaps utterly crazy thing, in the face of all obstacles and looming destruction, to see where it leads. To bear my testimony, for what else is there to do?

"Why I Write"

I am in the middle of an online course called The Writer's Rebellion, created by Andrea Balt, founder of the Rebelle Society. It is very nonacademic and from a lot of standpoints pretty woo, but I can tell I am getting a lot out of it -- certainly at the level of getting in touch with myself and confronting my relationship with writing (a source of deep shame and pain in recent decades) and who I am and what I want out of life. (Less sure how much of a difference it's going to make to how I actually write -- too soon to tell, although I've definitely gained by some of the practice prompts I've done, if only in terms of memories I've now put down in as vivid writing as I can muster.)

Anyway, one of the early exercises was to create a five-point manifesto on "Why I Write."  The basic instructions: “Reflect on your hidden motivations as well as your most obvious ones. Write the truth about why you write, even if messy.”

I've come back to this over a couple of weeks, and what I put down here still feels completely true to me. Of course I feel so little qualified to define myself in public as a writer, when I haven't written anything except academic stuff for so long, and far less than other people of that. But whatever else, this course is helping me reclaim some deep things I know about myself and my core identity which I have silenced for so many decades, and I am working to overcome that blockage and fear. So yes, I understand how inflated this will sound to anyone who knows me (knows the me I have allowed to be revealed).

Why I Write:

1. I write because I hear the rhythm in language, it feels so right when it flows through me. Powerful, erotic. When I am crafting sentences through my mind and ear I know it is what I was born to do.
2. I write because the things that drive me are truth and beauty. Even my parents knew that about me, sometimes calling me jokingly “Miss Truth and Beauty” because I was so uncompromising. I seek and strive for beauty in various forms, but writing is the activity in which I have the greatest gift to create and shape, and in which “truth is beauty, beauty truth” most clearly. The beauty of thoughts and ideas is a big part of what excites me, and you need language to explore that. So while I am also very visual and always loved art and (now, with my phone) making photographs, visual art alone could never fulfill my deepest needs.
3. I write because I have always felt different, because I need(ed) to try to understand myself, my feelings, my perceptions, my odd loves. And I had no one to talk to, nowhere to turn to (outside books) -- what life was like growing up before the internet -- so I needed to talk to myself. And even when there have been people to talk to deeply in my adult life, like therapists and occasional close friends or lovers, l still need that.
4. I write because in the world at large I am so silenced. Not oppressed in any identity category (except in the ways women get inevitably silenced by men at times), but through my personality structure, my INFJ-ness, my aversion to pushing in. I keep myself back. People never shut up, I could rarely get a word in edgewise with my larger family, my friends are often yammering away focused on themselves. And even when the conversation is one I can get involved in, it almost never goes to the level at which I want to communicate. Or I say things and they just drop like rocks, no one gets them. The best way to convey my true and deep thoughts is to write them carefully and beautifully, and then people can choose to read them if they want, if it feels safe enough for me to share.
5. I feel like if I could write the way I wanted and get it out in the world, I could be loved the way I desire. And admired, praised, which I will take if I can’t get love. In my heart of hearts I have always felt I would never truly deserve and hence never find love until I write a book. Maybe on one true side that means, I intuit that I will never find the love I want until I convey and open up my full self to the world, so that I can be seen and loved for all of who I am. (From another side it means I have to achieve something to earn love.) But at this point I have trouble imagining that happening, no longer expect or even really long for realized human love in my life, so it feels like I would accept being praised and esteemed and validated as a writer, and in the life experiences that prompt the writing. Loved in some way, if not soulmate love.

A deep-in-the-night inspiration....

In the middle of the night, wakeful, I suddenly thought it might be a worthwhile idea to create a blog to share thoughts and experiences while on my semester leave from UNI. This is a surprising and ironic thought, because previously I have done some private eye-rolling at everyone and their blogs, or the idea of blogging as a creative outlet for aspiring writers. A transformation of the Emily Dickinson poem has been much in my mind: "How public -- like a Frog -- / To tell one's name -- the livelong June -- / On a self-admiring Blog!" Hence the name for this one (and, OK, I'm a bit proud of it; Googling suggests no one's gotten to the phrase before me). Though I really am not thinking of this as a wider public project, and don't necessarily intend to continue it indefinitely -- of course, we'll see.

My as-yet-incipient idea is that I will write for myself and anyone who's interested about my creative process/struggles and other experiences as I work on the personal book project that is before me, and probably share pieces of what I am writing. Even with what I've been working on so far I can feel that this writing is a deep emotional process that is going to change me in ways I cannot fully guess in advance. I know that I will be wanting to share, if only because I am working in considerable isolation in real life. Doing it here will be better than sharing directly on Facebook, "since this may be read or not as anyone pleases," as Ben Franklin wrote in the first paragraph of his Autobiography. I guess I will post links on Facebook at least some of the time, since I know I'd never manage to follow any friend's blogging without reminders.

It will hopefully become something like keeping a journal again, only not writing only for myself this time. I know that putting down more into words will be good for me, and the more writing the better, right? If I am daring to write a book that shares all sorts of things I almost never tell anyone, I need to practice letting people in to my thoughts and feelings in smaller ways before any Big Reveal.... I am trying to move ahead with both things in the faith that if I dare to communicate more, my thoughts might actually connect or be useful to somebody.

I will share some more about the exact nature of my project soon. I need to gather my thoughts a bit regarding how and how much I want to describe it here.