I’ve been radio silent for a while.  During January, Rob and I finished and submitted our book manuscript to Routledge Press.  I drafted and submitted a grant proposal to the National Writing Project.  I wrote my annual faculty activity report for Grand Valley.  And as of today I have a draft completed of a presentation I’m giving on Friday called “Comparing norms: A pragma-dialectic examination of model argumentation in U.S. secondary schools.”  Whew.  I used to believe that I was a procrastinator, but I don’t think that’s true anymore.  It’s Wednesday.  The presentation is Friday.  Yes, I still need to practice it, to make sure that the Power Point is what I want it to be, and to gather resources in order to be prepared for a question and answer session afterwards, but it’s good enough.  I can look back and see how much I have learned by writing it.  I can also see the road ahead that this presentation argues for–a mission should I choose to accept it.

All of this writing doesn’t make me immune to regret that I have not also been writing blog posts.  But making the list of what I’ve done helps me to tell that regretful little voice that life is full of hard choices.

This presentation, for the University of Amsterdam Department of Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric, could have been so daunting as to discourage me or paralyze me.  But it didn’t.  Something in me is changing.  No, it has changed.  I no longer despair that I have ideas that I can’t express in words.  There was a time that I did despair.  Once in graduate school, I had lunch with a professor to hear about her writing process.  After twenty minutes on the topic of her success, I excused myself from the table, went to the bathroom, and cried.

Today I know that thinking and writing are different artistic media.  The translation from ideas to sentences will always be a transformation.  What has changed is that today I’m ok with that.  I feel confident that I can make something with words that will have substance.  I can, that is, if I have the time.

Time, I have learned this last five months, is the fertile soil out of which written texts can grow.  I knew this intellectually before sabbatical, I just had not experienced that fertility.  Yes, I had plenty of time to myself without distractions when I was writing my dissertation, but I needed all of that time to get to this time.  Having had that time, I know more now than I did then.  Therefore I have more resources, more building blocks on my table when I sit down to make something.

This is not to say that I have all of the building blocks that I need.  I don’t know what I want to say already and only need the time to sit and write it down.  First, interesting scholarship isn’t like that.  And second, I have been and continue to be too much of an intellectual jack-of-all-trades to have a handle on even the small subfield of argumentation within the larger field of rhetoric and composition.  I’ve got a lot to learn.

Suddenly, though, I believe I will have a lot to say as I go about that learning.  I’m excited about the work I’m doing.  It’s fun.  It feels right, like I’m hearing the music for the dance steps I’ve been learning little by little for years.