Dear Reader

When I started this blog about 1 year ago on my 30th birthday, I was keeping a promise to myself to write more and trying to break the sometimes isolating experience of being a parent. I wanted to find and share creative endeavors that can get lost to sleep deprivation.

This year, inspired by the painting-a-day painters, I will be posting more frequently and daily when possible. As WH Auden once said, "I write so that I know what I think." That is certainly true for me. But beyond that, I hope that this year, Teaworthy continues to be a place worthy of your time and relevant to your experience.

In December, my daughter and I spent an afternoon in Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. I was so moved by all of the parents there, like me, juggling children, snacks, cameras, coats and strollers. We all helped each other by holding doors, picking up a dropped blankie, and navigating strollers into elevators.

It was just one of those times in my short tenure as a parent when I looked around and felt like I had everything in common with everyone there. We all were there just trying to have a good day with our kids, make something magical for them, and a memory for us to have long after they have outgrown needing wipes for sticky hands.

Part of me wanted to be a family photographer for each person there: for the parent who can't see how they look carrying their sleepy toddler on their shoulder, facing a wall of blue water with waves of light passing over their faces each time the sea turtle swam past. I wanted to write it down for them, for me, for all of us, or film it at least. There's an Indigo Girls song about those moments though when you can't. "Don't write it down. Don't take a picture. Remember this in your heart. " I think about that a lot.

A few days ago, I saw John Grisham on Charlie Rose and he said that when he writes, he doesn't think about the critics. He thinks about the fan who buys his book the day it comes out. He wants his readers to be so absorbed with the novel that they, "stay up late and call in sick to work" just so they can keep reading.

I write here in this place with you and days like that at the aquarium in mind: the universality of human experience. I hope this is a place you stop in with your coffee or tea where you can read something that makes you feel that we are all in this together.

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And speaking of Audience, I get such a kick out of Nick Hornby and love what he wrote here about his readers. Enjoy:

From Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree, October 2003, p. 21-22:

"If you write books -or a certain kind of book, anyway- you can't resist a scan round the hotel swimming pool when you go on holiday. You just can't help yourself, despite the odds: you need to know, straight off, whether anyone is reading one of yours.

You imagine spending your days transfixed and humbled, as a beautiful and intelligent young man or woman, almost certainly a future best friend, maybe even spouse, weeps and guffaws through three hundred pages of your brilliant prose, too absorbed even to go for a swim, or take a sip of Evian.

I was cured of this particular fantasy a couple of years ago, when I spent a week watching a woman on the other side of the pool reading my first novel, High Fidelity. Unfortunately, however, I was on holiday with my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law provided a gleeful and frankly unfraternal running commentary,
'Look! Her lips are moving.'
'Ha! She's fallen asleep! Again!'
'I talked to her at the bar last night. Not a bright woman. I'm afraid.'
At one point, alarmingly, she dropped the book and ran off.
'She's gone to put out her eyes!" my brother-in-law yelled triumphantly.'"