Stories

I just finished a wonderful book about African-American (the book called it "colored") domestic help, during the 60s, in Jackson, Mississippi (by Kathryn Stockett). It made me think how valuable keeping diaries and writing down our stories can be. When I was a girl, I kept diaries for years. Having found them in my attic recently, many entries are lame. I had more crushes on boys than I ever remembered! But they were my stories. When I was a professor, my students once gave me a journal, and every night I wrote. For awhile. Then I got busy. Recently at work we were laughing about all the funny/sad/amazing things that have happened in our field and somebody said, "Someone should write a book!" Absolutely! That's just what Stockett did. More of us should do that.

Then I realized, that's just what Blogs are. People's stories. Some are academically oriented; those are written by our scholars. Others are collections of interesting thoughts and ideas. Many are business-like Blogs that report things. Of course there are the lame ones (like my childhood diaries), but that's okay; they are stories, too. Many have collections of short stories or poems, highlighting our creativity. Heck, look at all the stories on OEDILF! But the point is, these are our stories! Like we do, Blogs change from time to time. For instance, here I started just talking about epicaricacy, but that was too narrow. Our Blog stories might not be as cohesive as Stockett's, but they are part of us. Let's embrace them!