Language & Literacy A Writing Life

An Idea, Aging

One preoccupation at a time, tracked across the years

Four preoccupations that recur across the collection, each traced chronologically — a handful of pieces at intervals, sometimes decades apart, returning to the same idea. Read a thread top to bottom to watch a thought age.

The cracks in the floor

The same image across three decades — cracks in a concrete floor, first read by the prisoner in a high-school story, reread in a college poem, returned to in fiction twenty years later. The oldest thread in the collection.

  1. 1994InsideThe high-school story: a prisoner reading the cracks in a cell floor.
  2. 1999Lines in the Concrete draft 2The college poem that returns to the same concrete — a pairing first surfaced when the archive was mapped by similarity.
  3. 2007Grappling With ThisA 395-word blog post on expression as survival.
  4. 2015StreamflowThe pattern turned outward: a life read as current and constraint.
  5. 2019Phineas Gage (draft)A fiction draft asking, in its own words, “How do we become ourselves, riveted from the many possible streams?”

How we come to hold language

From early fiction about what words fail to carry to the recent essays on how children come to hold language — and what a machine that only predicts it still misses.

  1. 2003WordsA story about what language fails to carry between two people.
  2. 2023Language—like reading—may not be innateThe turn to the research: language, like reading, may not be innate.
  3. 2023Speaking Ourselves into Being and Others into Silence: The Power of LanguageLanguage as power — who gets spoken into being, and who into silence.
  4. 2024The Algebra of Language: Unveiling the Statistical Tapestry of Form and MeaningThe statistical shape underneath meaning.
  5. 2024Language, Cognition, and LLMsWhat a machine that only predicts language still doesn't hold.

Schools as living systems

One analogy, worked at for fifteen years: a school is not a machine but an ecosystem. It runs from an early blog post to the epilogue of a book manuscript.

  1. 2007SES and PermaculturePermaculture arrives as a lens — the first hint that systems beat silver bullets.
  2. 2011Public Schools as Ecosystems: Part III: Open Source CurriculumThe ecosystem metaphor stated outright for the first time.
  3. 2013A New Approach to Sustainable School ReformThe fullest early statement: schools as ecosystems, not machines.
  4. 2017Epilogue: From Tahoe to The BronxThe book manuscript's epilogue, tracing the analogy from Tahoe to the Bronx.
  5. 2020What will it take to improve the conditions for learning in our schools?Eight years on, the same argument, carried forward.

Who we lose

Elegies at intervals across three decades, from a high-school poem to the pieces written for his father.

  1. 1993RainThe collection's earliest piece — a high-school elegy.
  2. 2021A Painful MemoryA loss reopened decades later.