The Day After #NDOW, I Realize #WhyIWrite. Writing Helps Put Together A Complicated Puzzle - LIFE.

Two days after I decided it would be funny to buy a 1,000 piece puzzle and hand every trick or treater one piece in their Halloween satchel (along with candy) - and I presumed it would be symbolic for young people to realize each of my trick or treaters is a single piece that, together, builds a community - my dog, Glamis, decided  to leap on me and my laptop at the exact moment my MacBook Pro inquired on whether or not I wanted to update the operating system.

Pant, pant.
     Leap.
        Um, "Ok."

The result of her intrusion was that I lost a few hours of my regular writing routine. My dog lives for one thing: to play. More specifically, she lives to play with me. Even more detailed, she loves to play with any toy she can find while she sits on my lap (and she's 65 pounds). This sometimes works in contrast to what I live for - that is, to write.

The reboot yesterday meant I wasn't able to post on National Day of Writing like I did in 2012, 2013,  and 2014, until this morning (which would be today). I did venture, however, to a local Panera to compose last night, but the lukewarm coffee, hipster music, and poor wireless connection caused me to fall into a grumpy state. I threw in the towel and left without posting.

What I would have written at Paneras is that I write because I'm merely a puzzle piece in the tapestry of a larger puzzle. The life thing has me perplexed and I compose daily to find my way through it (I used to do it in personal journals and now I do it on blogs). There are days I write to celebrate happiness, I write to complain, I write to discover, and I write to reflect. Writing, to me, is life, itself.

Writing is the fact that I just loaded a Kong with biscuits so I could have ten minutes on the laptop piano this morning without her nibbling my ears. It is the fact that I'll likely write to Panera's to complain about the awful coffee I was served yesterday. It is the compilation of research that I just entered in my Endnote to help me make sense of the ways English teachers have worked with violence in their curriculum (a writing project I'm currently working on), as well.

More important to me than writing, though, is the promotion of writing through my directorship at the Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University. Leading summer institutes for teachers and promoting youth perspectives through Young Adult Literacy Labs (it's writing, Y'ALL) brings me great serenity. Why? Through the teaching of writing (and the reading of written work), I'm blessed with a multitude of puzzle pieces that come to my table to figure out. They state: This is what life is all about!

Finally, as anyone who knows me can state with 100% conviction, writing as a teacher and teaching as a writer is the influence of the National Writing Project. Simply peruse this year's blog or last, or any of the years before and you will see I am who I am because the National Writing Project helped me to realize the importance of why words matter. As a Louisville Writing Project fellow, XXI, I've been promoting their practices and professional development wherever I go.

And with that noted, the hound is back whining at my feet to declare, "You had your ten minutes. Now pet me behind my ears."