With my spouse away for two weeks, and completion of garden planting, I cleaned the house for summer and have been considering what I want to accomplish next with my writing. The second volume of memoir is with early readers whose assignment was to finish it before the end of summer. Memoir-writing is on the back burner until then. What next?

I keep a personal journal yet this post is about what I call public writing. I write in public in different ways. In no particular order, they are, letters to the editors of newspapers, creative tales based on my experiences, reports about events in which I participate, posts in which I advocate for a particular outcome, reviews of things: books, people I know who died, and other transitions in life. Whatever I wrote in public found its way to this blog as a form of centralized record-keeping.

I am best known in the community for my letters to the editor. These short pieces on timely topics have been a mainstay of my writing since my first letter in 1974. Venues continue to be available, so why would I stop now? These letters will continue to be part of my portfolio.

Short pieces are my bailiwick and this blog is a suitable platform. Expect more of the same. If anything, I will circulate these posts in other places like Blog for Iowa, Bleeding Heartland, and my substack account. I haven’t used substack very much, although when I do, the writing gets noticed. I foresee using substack for certain categories of posts about the environment, energy, and the climate crisis.

At a crossroads, I find myself asking a question. Which forking path will I take on the next longer project? Fiction is out. Until I have something new to say in autobiography, that’s in remission. Whatever the longer piece is will draw on the short pieces I wrote in the last 50 years. Two things seem obvious.

The first would be some form of book about gardening, food, and cooking. Not a cookbook per se, but one that takes essays already written and expands them to create a way to live related to food. There are lots of examples of this. My current favorite is Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal. This is somewhere in my immediate future.

The second is a greatest hits compendium of my past writing. I recently started using the WordPress plug in Print My Blog which can gather up writing based on tags and categories. I ran a couple of these reports, and it gave me new perspective on what I had written. This bolstered new writing. Besides being a self-help, it would be a way to share my writing with others without sending them 20 years of blog posts. I’m thinking of an eBook with 50 or so posts.

Mostly, I want to go on living, and daily writing is part of a well-lived life. My private journals enter into this, but with public writing, we need to navigate this weird digital world in a way that takes us new places and provides insight into where we have been. I also want to share what I write.

I will be living in this neighborhood as summer begins.