Weaving What?

If you came here looking for craft projects or how-tos on actual weaving, I am sorry to disappoint you.  I am a crafty girl, and I suppose I could weave if we survived an apocalypse and I needed to make my own cloth.  But mostly, I’m a writer and what I weave are stories.

I am also a secular-homeschooling mom (of two) and a college professor.  I thought about calling the blog Spinning Plates or Three Rings in the Circus because, yeah, that’s my life.  But plates and rings are inflexible things, separate and in their own little spheres.  (Plus those fragile plates, up high, wobbling–anyone can see where that’s headed.)  I like to think that the roles I play interact with each other–my experiences as a homeschooler change how I shape my college classes, what happens to me as mom and prof enrich my writing, and my writing fundamentally changes everything.

So . . . weaving.

Eudora Welty called the source of her stories, the patterns of her narrative, confluence—you know, when rivers merge but keep their distinctiveness even as they become something new.  Like this:

Welty saw the world as an ethereal, fluid landscape that brought together past, present, and future; her experiences and research and imagination and the feel of words in her mouth and the meanings of them in her mind working like magic to weave author and characters and readers into the same narrative tapestries. 

Confluence/weaving makes a nice, organic, flexible pattern for seeing the world and all the stories in it and how they (and we) all touch each other if we can only learn to follow the threads.

And so here I mean to follow the threads of the writing life, of teaching writing, of living while writing.  If you’re a writer, I hope we can inspire each other.  A homeschooler? I hope we offer each other encouragement.  If you’re a teacher, I hope you’re a life-long learner like me and that we can share ideas.

“All serious daring starts from within.”–Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings.