To Fresh Starts

Ok. After celebrating Dining and Opining's One-Year Anniversary and then taking a few days off to regroup, I had high hopes for my return to this blogging space. I hoped to come up with some clear, clever structure that would allow me to post less frequently, but more thoughtfully and usefully. One day on "dining" (with photos/recaps of actual food/cooking experiences) and one day "opining" (with more discursive essays on food culture, politics, or history)? Or one recipe and one article analysis a week? Or maybe some riff off those photo-a-day projects, where I tried to post one photo each day that chronicled my experience with food during that day, along with some creative nonfiction that put the photo in context? Or a focus on food memoir, to go along with the course I'm teaching this semester, where I shared stories from my food-filled past?

All these ideas whirling around, but as is often the case with good ideas--they all started raising my expectations and leaving me feeling more and more anxious about my return to the new and improved D&O.

I imagined all my eager readers, holding their collective breaths until I unveiled my grand return. And then those same eager readers (all 10 of them!) feeling disappointed when that return didn't turn out to be so grand after all.  

So, I psyched myself out. And stopped posting altogether.  But that's no way to be, is it?

Now I want to lower those expectations, remove the pressure to post each and every weekday, and just write and reflect when the spirit moves me. Perhaps as I begin to get into this new groove, one of those earlier clever structures will reveal itself as appropriate, and I'll settle into another rhythm. But perhaps not. You'll all bear with me one way or another, I hope?

To make sure I don't feel off the wagon entirely, my goal will be to share at least one post per week, with Friday as a deadline for the end of each week. But hopefully this will happen automatically, without my forcing anything.

Some things I have on deck for all of you:

• A guest post I'm planning to write for the wonderful blog A Liberated Life, in which I'll share some thoughts on living authentically as it relates to food.
• A guest post on my place within public humanities for the University of Wisconsin's Center for Humanities blog, Humanities NOW.
• Recaps of the local food tour I'll be leading for the American Society for Environmental History conference at the end of March.
• Stories and photos from this semester's GreenHouse Global Food for Thought Meals
• Food memoirs I write along with my class in Eating and Memory

And so much more! As always, I'd love to hear from you...