AfterWords

Crossing a bridge (watercolor)

I am starting AfterWords as a blog that might help me navigate the space I find myself in at present–somewhere between the world of words that I have lived in for my whole adult life as an English professor, teacher of writing, scholar of language and literacy practices, and discourse analyst, and a world that I’m moving into both professionally and personally, one that involves more than words–a multimodal world of internet composition involving images and sounds and, particularly, visual processing, and in my non-work life, more involvement in the visual arts (with watercolor, for example), in music, and in activities such as yoga that offer a different, non-verbal experience.

An afterword, which comes after the body of a book, as a sort of epilogue, marks a transitional space between the world created within the main text (whether fictional or other), and the world beyond the text, commenting in some way on what’s gone before but standing outside of it and thus preparing the reader for a reentry into a larger sphere. In my case, I am trying to craft a space that comes, literally, after the work with words that has dominated my life, still using some words, but intentionally making space for more than words.