A Change in "Pack Mule for the New School"

Several years ago, Joel Brouwer, a poet who teaches in the University of Alabama’s creative writing MFA program, came to speak to my high school creative writing students and told them at one point that creative writing is a great career if you’re interested in everything. He went on to describe his own varied reading habits and how he incorporated this autodidacticism into his writing life. Even though he was really there to speak to my students, I learned something that day, too – I felt like his explanation had finally given me license to admit that I too am interested in everything. For most of my life, I can remember wanting to read every book and go every place and listen to every album and see every movie and meet every person . . .

Of course, I’m exaggerating a little bit— there are some things I don’t give a shit about, like bungee jumping and collecting figurines. But if there were a thousand hours in a day . . . Lord, what I wouldn’t do!

The problem is that I have let this blog too often reflect that side of my wandering mind, that rambling energy that is always corralled by the time the books or articles or poems that I write go into print. As a result, I am committing here what might be the biggest faux pas in blogging: just writing about whatever is on my mind at the time. By being about anything, it ends up being about nothing at all, really. It might be my Catholic education classes one day and my dismay at a politician like Herman Cain the next.

Oddly enough, the posts that have generated the most interest are the ones that have focused on the main subjects in my professional writing work:  the culture of the South, the work of writers and artists, and ideas about positive action and progress. I named this blog “Pack Mule for the New School” after a line in a poem that I wrote once – it also contained phrases like “the dynamite of hindsight” – and by its name I meant to describe what it is that I do: the slow, plodding and often thankless work of trying to aid in positive change, including surfacing neglected and forgotten voices, proffering new ideas about old subjects, educating young people about the power of critical thinking, and furthering the arts as important cultural forces.

Beginning in December 2011, “Pack Mule for the New School” will focus solely on those subjects that have dominated my work as a writer, editor and teacher. I guess I will find a way to restrain myself from writing anymore posts about old movies that I save off Turner Classic Movies or about Apple’s customer service shortcomings. New posts will be published once a week, on Mondays at 4:00 PM (Central).