In the evenings, after I've closed the office for the day, I often noodle around with writing (yes, more writing), but in a more personal direction. I love a good memoir or personal essay, one's own reflections on one's own life, as I think that the really riveting ones require an attention to detail that, outside of writing, just makes people competent and interesting and revelatory. About a year ago, I was working on an essay called "History Lessons," but it was way too long and included too much history, and I couldn't seem to pare it down to make it short enough to send out for publication.
I live in a place where history is very alive, very present. Prescott, Arizona, is an old mining town nestled between the Bradshaw Mountains, the Santa Maria Mountains, and the Sierra Prietas ("Black Mountains"), named for the landscape's dark granite boulders painted with desert varnish. Those rocks and mountains have seen a lot of peoples come and go: the Sinagua, the Yavapai (who are still here), the Spaniards, the Cavalry, the '49ers and the miners that followed, Confederate veterans, "soiled doves" (old-timey sex workers), homesteaders, cowboys, snowbirds, retirees, addicts seeking recovery, and now, refugees from hotter, more expensive, and more progressive places like California and Phoenix and the PNW.
If you live long enough, you develop a deep history too. Enduring friendships, a satisfying career, trips to new and old places, family obligations that ebb and flow – if you're lucky, right? Those lasting personal histories are the pieces I love to peel apart in my personal reading and writing. I am finalizing this post just after returning home from a very magical 35th Reunion at my alma mater, Smith College, on the other side of the continent, so those deep historical synapses are presently firing.
It's no secret that I also really love the history pieces of my worklife, too, and sometitmes they overlap with something personally meaningful to me. The historical arc of a word's root, and the way it intertwines with the word's relatives, can be reminiscent of human family trees. I love the birthmarks of etymologically-driven graphemes, the detours from default spellings, the silent letters that are stories waiting to be told. The words story and history are fundamentally the same word, after all, though they have taken on different characters as they've diverged.
Several of the 65 lessons in Sixty-Five Weeks are based on historical patterns, like Lesson 17 or Lesson 60. Recent edits caused formatting issues that are being fixed now. These lessons now have a history of their own, too, one that's longer than anyone would like, whose end has been in then lost from sight a couple of times now. I am optmistic for midsummer shipments now.
In honor of the gifts of long histories, even the frustrating or painful ones, I'm dedicating spring Pop-Ups to history. I missed April, but I'm going to shoehorn a May class into the mix, and schedule one for June. The topics are as follows:
~ May: A Grimm's Law Pop-Up: This 90-minute session will explain the history and structure of the First Germanic Consonant Shift, or Grimm's Law, and demonstrate its relevance to the study of Present-Day English orthography.
~ June: A Slice of *PIE Pop-Up Redux: A repeat of the April 2024 Pop-Up, this 90-minute session offers an understanding of Proto-Indo-European and its role in the study of words and word families for teachers and students of English spelling.
Dates, times, and sign-ups are below.