By and By

I didn't post about it, but Rhetorical Healing turned 5 last month.

For brevity's sake, I'll just say that finishing this book was pretty hard. Sure, I used the same case studies in it as I did in its predecessor, but there were so many struggles. Struggles with the editors about its name. Struggles with interruptions at work. Struggles to even read the page proofs that arrived while I was struggling through sudden life tragedies. Struggles with the pricing and format. Struggles with the uptake. Struggles.
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Nowadays I teach my students that writing is rarely finished. I do this because I need them to be able to make peace with walking away from a piece. I need them to believe that meaning will happen when it does. I need them to be satisfied in ways that I wasn't.
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This afternoon I had a phone call with the producer of a national podcast to prepare for my interview on an upcoming episode about wellness culture. Today, I made connections that I wasn't able to make five years ago. Today, I was able to plant this book even more firmly in the histories of rhetoric I study. Today, I was able to describe how the literacies I stumbled on while writing this shape my own pedagogy. Perhaps, the peace I couldn't get is because this work about healing is not over for me. 

A favorite hymn that we sing in the Black church contains the lyrics, "we'll understand it better by and by." Today some things made sense.

*originally posted on FB, 11/23/2021

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