Time for a Change

After fourteen years maintaining my blog Just Keep Swimming, I decided it was time for a change. When I started blogging those years ago, blogs, shorthand for “weblogs,” (remember that?) were fairly new, and I was deep into building a career by writing articles for academic journals. I knew that autobiographical narrative Curriculum Theory (my professional writing) would not be a lucrative venture. It wouldn’t earn money or attract thousands of readers. I determined that I would use the blog as a journal. I wrote personal essays in memoir style that might later be crafted into journal articles–a sort of pre-writing holding station. I also told myself that my blog was really only for me. I thought this would lessen my disappointment at having no readers. That part was sad because I really wanted somebody to read what I was writing.

So, the blog was a patchwork of ideas and topics with loose themes and frameworks pulling them together. Not surprisingly, then, I had difficulty giving it a name. Sarah helped. The more I obsessed over finding just the right name for a blog nobody would read, the more I secretly hoped someone would. The more I obsessed, the more she tried to help me get centered. She tried to help me find some resilience somewhere. “Just keep swimming,” she said, as much a suggestion for my state of mind as for the blog title. It fit. For almost a decade, I have worked on justkeepswimming.life–mostly sporadically. During those same ten years, my career evolved from faculty member to department chair to college dean. As a small-town girl from Littleville, Alabama, I wanted to see just how far I could go. I told myself I didn’t have the time to write regularly. I did well to just keep swimming.

This Spring I will once again be a faculty member in the college, without an administrative role of any kind. I’ve been thinking about this change a lot, and I reckon it will be a good move. I am looking forward to teaching again. I am also eager to have some autonomy over my time. Faculty generally work more than 40 hours per week, but oftentimes, when and where we work is up to us. This kind of flexibility will take away an important excuse for not posting regularly—that’s the goal. Updating the blog’s purpose and branding reflects the updates going on in my life. What is my new identity–who am I now that my decades-long professional identity has changed? What kind writing do I want to do, and what will I write about? What do I, as one white Southern professor with blue collar roots, have to say?

Heading Out To the Front Porch

I reflected on what I wanted the blog to be. I asked myself why I started blogging. It isn’t to have a journal to springboard into professional papers. Nor do I write to make money or achieve celebrity status as a blogger. I write blog posts because it brings me joyful engagement. This engagement gives me purpose. It also provides an immediate connection to you, and you to me. And somewhere among the joy, purpose, and connection, there is also the urgency of needing to tell.

In her book, Why I Write, Joan Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear” (“Why I Write.” The White Album, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, pp. 192–194.). Her quote has been shortened over the years to “I never know what I think until I read what I write,” which is unfortunate since it leaves out the part about what one wants and fears. When I write I am participating in the world around me and putting meaning on what I see and experience. And yes, desire and fear are part of it, just like they are ever-present in one’s consciousness. What anything means to me won’t be what it means to you, for you are participating from your consciousness, your home place. And that’s what I’d like to evoke with my stories–for both me and you.

In essence, then, I am re-claiming my identity as a writer. Who am I? I value education, so I got a PhD and became a professor. I am a Southerner to my soul, and my perspectives for writing are shaped–and shape–that identity. I write about the South, my particular anchor of homeplace. Homeplace is a treasured concept for me, one that encompasses family, food, religion, politics, music, sexuality, culture–it is the landscape on which my life has been written. I view the landscape through a lens–a veil, as I like to think of it–of nostalgia. As I write, I hold the present up, looking backwards to the past—my recollection and understanding of it—with a questioning eye toward the future. To symbolize the space from which I can observe and cast a critical eye on Southern place, I chose the front porch.

A front porch is more than just a place—it’s a state of mind. It’s where stories are told, where folks sit and hang around together. It’s a place where the world slows down just enough to reflect on what truly matters to me. With The Front Porch Professor, my goal is to bring the warmth and depth of this space into the stories I share. I work through the tensions between issues that matter to readers today. I also offer honest, insider critiques of the South. Sound idyllic? It can be, but just like the South, the front porch can also be a troubled and complicated place where anguish, heartbreak, disappointment, and violence take place. Every few days, I have to sweep the porch to clear dust and cobwebs to make sure it is an inviting place for myself and others.

Who Should Read It?

The intended audience for The Front Porch Professor are folks who appreciate stories that resonate on both a personal and universal level, blending the warmth of lived experience with the relevance of today’s challenges. My readers might be older adults, reflecting on their own life journeys and drawn to narratives that echo their experiences. They might be educators or seekers who appreciate the intersection of storytelling with deeper ideas about culture, family, and identity.

This blog also speaks to those who find meaning in the everyday—the simple joys of a shared meal, the comfort of homeplace, or the peace found while sitting in the shade in a back yard. I believe there is also value for people who can’t recollect joy from their homes. There may be appeal here for them as well. Home for some–if it means anything at all–are places of atrocities, hurt, and darkness. Home may be a place of utter ambivalence. If this is you, then I invite you, too. In this blog, I look for the mysteries to be found in simplifying the complex and complicating the simple.

Why Does It Matter?

Our world is a noisy place, and it feels to me like we are distracted by it–not just distracted but affected in other ways. Noisy politics, for example, has polarized some of us to the point of violence. It has also created animosity with friends and family. We seem to have lost focus on the things that matter, which is always others. I hope my stories can balance out some of the clutter. I hope that together we can pause and look for grounding–the kind that I find from recollecting and observing what happens around me and to me.

Maybe you, like me, want to have a deeper engagement with life around us and with others in it. Maybe you, like me, want to nourish a homeplace of the heart, our own personal touchstone where inward reflection points us out-ward toward purpose. A safe and joyful place of our making–whatever that might look like for you–where we contemplate how our own sense of belonging connects us to others. I hope The Front Porch Professor is engaging and entertaining; still, I do not consider life merely to entertain. As you read, I invite you to actively participate with me as we pause, surmise, and make meaning. Don’t just read. Come along with me on our shared journey.