An Update! Some New Projects!
A book, and a spring cold, and some lucubrations
Dearest Doctor Waffle Readers,
It’s been a minute! Now that the dust has settled on another semester, my traitorous body has decided to collapse in on itself in the form of a nasty spring cold/flu. Since I am trapped on my couch in a midden of used Kleenex and screwed-up Halls wrappers, I’ve decided to spend a little time writing you an update. I have a couple new projects in the works that may be Of Interest.
First of all, a book! One of the reasons for the paucity of new posts is that I’ve been working on a longer project. It started life as a cluster of Dr. Waffle essays, on lawns and backyards and my memories of my father, but has taken on a life of its own. It is tentatively entitled Lawn: An Environmental Memoir,1 and it’s in a genre that I just learned already exists, called “researched creative non-fiction.” It will be sort of academic-ish in that contains a lot of ecocritical writing about lawns and their history, but it also has memoir-y bits about my father and his lawn and our relationship. In other words: scholarly enough to count as a book for promotion to full professor (fingers crossed), but personal/funny/entertaining enough that people will actually want to read it. I hope.
Second of all, I’ve been trying to think of ways to keep up a discipline of regular writing that I can share here while I continue to work on the book project. So here is my new idea. Since grad school2 I have been keeping a list on my computer of “sticky” words that I come across in my reading—words whose meanings I don’t know at all, words I kind of know but am not 100% sure about, and words I do know but never use and would like to incorporate into my vocabulary. So the new Dr. Waffle project is this: every week I will write a post in which I present a word from my list, provide the definition, and then write a very short, truly mini (less than 300 words) micro-essay using the new word.
Here is what I would love from you:
1. Enjoy the posts! A new word and micro-essay will be forthcoming every Sunday. (I think we could all use some fun little distractions right now.)
2. Send me your own words to add to the list! The full list is here, so you can check and see if your own “sticky” word is already on there.
3. Try to use each week’s new word out in the wild! In an email, a piece of your own writing, a social media post, a conversation with your barista.... And then tell us about it! Post a comment letting us all know how you used that week’s word.
4. Please share this project! I would love for this to become a Thing That People Do, because I freaking love thinking about and talking about weird words, so the more folks involved, the merrier.
And that is it for now! Please watch out for the first “Dr. Waffle’s Lexical Lucubrations” post next Sunday.
I am open to suggestions for better titles, really! I had originally wanted to call it Grass: An Environmental Memoir, but Mr. Waffle thinks that sounds like a book about my history of pot smoking.
In other words, for 30 years.