Resurrecting Blog

A New Year’s resolution: resurrect my blog. I didn’t quite realize how long it has been since my last post. But lots of things have happened that made writing for my personal blog rather out of my control.

I'm going to start this Resurrection with a short summary of my health because it will come into play quite frequently in future posts. I’ve had a rare blood cancer for 35 years and have had a great life doing the work that I felt called to do. I thought I would die in my chair working! But that is not to be. Last summer I had to go on long-term disability after all these years, 35 years also as a librarian. Fatigue that often keeps me in bed all day, pain and itching, and night sweats that interrupt my sleep and keep me from having restful sleep are very usual.

I have some cognitive dysfunction that makes it impossible for me to focus on the technical reading that I would need to do to keep up with the library world and keep the Paul Bechtold Library at the cutting edge. And other tasks, like budgeting, are hard to focus on. My memory is just not functioning as it should. In addition, the stress of starting new medications, such as a round of chemo that did no good, and being a guinea pig for clinical trials for new medications, made working on regular basis difficult. There are other things that have impacted my work life finally making it impossible to continue. After the chemo failed we decided to try another clinical trial. This was a godsend because when I actually went on disability I thought there were no more trials available. Further, I worried that none would be coming up anytime soon, and I found this rather depressing. Fortunately, this one came along at the right time! So I have begun the fourth clinical trial of the up and down world of post-polycythemia vera myelofibrosis. I have tolerated it as well as any other trial I have participated in. It was far less stressful at the onset of a trial to not be so worried about work at the same time. It’s been a couple of months and I don’t see any improvement so far, but we are keeping our fingers crossed and hope that my quality of life will improve. So far quality of life improvement is the focus of all these clinical trials. None are thought to be curative, though new types of gene editing and other miracles of science could possibly change the field.

I can’t, however, just sit still and do nothing. So I have been doing some editing and have been fortunate so far to be given work that I find very interesting. My colleague and friend Steve is publishing a collection of essays on contextual theology and I have recently finished editing it and will begin indexing it very soon. I will write more about it when it appears in print. The book series that the Paul Bechtold Library publishes is ongoing and the new librarian hopes to continue the series. I have volunteered to be the book series editor as long as possible.

I had already, before I left my job, accepted a third book, which is a collection from Korean American theologians. I just finished editing it and it will be published open access very soon and also available as a paperback from Amazon. In addition, right before Christmas I was approached by a group of theologians from Santa Clara University who are publishing a series of essays on contextual theology. I’ll start editing it soon. I would like to have a rather steady stream of such editing, but we will have to see how that turns out. I am also continuing as the managing editor of New Theology Review, an open access journal published by the Paul Bechtold Library. We have an entirely new slate of editors and I’ve been working with them to provide training for the platform used to publish the journal and to get them up to speed on the process that gets our journal published.

These seem like ‘official’ editing projects to me, but I also have the distinct pleasure of editing for two people I dearly love, my dad and my daughter-in-law. My dad writes stories about growing up in the Great Depression and about his extremely (to my mind and others) interesting life in the Air Force. We’ve published one book of stories written by him and my mom, Boy, We Had Some Good Times, and now I’m editing some more that we will try to gather for a second book. My daughter-in-law just began a master’s degree in second-language acquisition—she teaches children in a DC public school whose native language is not English. I am finding that just doing a light edit (really proofread as she is a fine writer) of her work is teaching me a lot about cognition, motivation, and other things that I find fascinating. It’s always great to edit and learn about something one wants to learn about at the same time!

As I began to think of winding down my career, I have found some other projects I would like to work on at times when I am not quite so busy and I see these intersecting with this blog; one is Hymnary. I love hymns!! I think this is a really great website with a fabulous purpose and I’d like to be involved with it. More details about my hymn life will be forthcoming soon in the blog when I start 1) writing about hymns and other songs about heaven. My vision for this is that it will turn out to be a long series of blog posts about music that I would like to be played at my wake when I die (This is not impending as far as I know, however after 35 years of cancer life, I’ve had plenty of time to think about death and resurrection to new life and I do not shirk from talking about it at all).

Before going on long-term disability, I met with the oncological psychiatrist several times and she has encouraged me to 2) write about suffering from the point of view of someone who has suffered for many years and has given suffering thought as a Christian theologian. My theological skills have waned over the years as I needed to put more thought into moving the library forward. However, I did focus on eschatological theology in my master’s degree in systematic theology--this gives me some basis for thinking about these kinds of issues in what I hope might be a more systematic way (though I rather doubt it--somehow I feel my discursions into suffering will be rather random).

Another way I hope to have a rather constant supply of things to write about is that I’m hoping to succeed in 3) a project called A Century of Books, which a couple of other bloggers whose literary blogs align with my literary interests are promoting. This project entails, during the coming year, reading a book, and reviewing it in a blog post, from every year of the past century. The way my fatigue works is that once I’ve hit the wall I can no longer manage to sit up but I can usually lie around and read books that are not technical or heavy going. For me, this means mystery novels, children's and YA novels, and middle-brow British writers for the most part. Anyway, the fatigue I cope with means that I have a lot of time to read and I hope that I will be able to finish A Century of Books.

Maybe at some point I will try to refresh my 4) memory of my 6-month long sabbatical around the world trip and post a few mementos and memories from it. My working partner, Miriam, and I often have 5) interesting discussions that would make us happy to have a recollective blog post of.  And of course, I will always 6) promote the editing projects I'm working on! When I started this blog years ago, I said it was to be “An eclectic blog on sustainable scholarship and libraries, book jaunts and research, and odd interests like vocation, children's lit, and ??” and I feel like it will still be that, with a few other ideas in mind.