Hanging up my Mask and Fins

I came to this “wreck” with a book of myths, too. I thought I knew what literacy, teaching, and media “ought” to look like, which stories get told in classrooms and which stay underwater, unread. Threadbare Beauty became my way of climbing down the ladder anyway—“face down in the ladder and the ladder is always there”—to see what else might be waiting in the dark.

Over the years I’ve dived in and out with notebooks, lesson plans, novels, and newsfeeds, trying to record small, weathered treasures from teaching, reading, and everyday life. What began as a space for reflection grew into something stranger and more personal: book reviews that turned into conversations, media explorations that questioned the frame, creative writing that tried to name the currents underneath the surface. This blog has been a logbook of wreckage and resilience in language—what stories do to us, and what we do with stories in return.

Now, though, it’s time to surface. The air in my tanks is better spent elsewhere; my curiosity and energy are tugging me toward other depths: new projects, new classrooms, new pages, different kinds of dives. This site will stay up as a record rather than a destination—a hull you might swim past now and then, noticing how the light of your own current reading, viewing, and writing changes what you see here.

“I did not come to explore the wreck alone,” Adrienne Rich reminds us, and that has been the best part: the “we” that formed quietly around this little corner of the internet. Thank you for reading, commenting, disagreeing, recommending books, sharing classroom moments, and finding something of your own practice and imagination in these threadbare, salt‑stained notes.

For now, I’m hanging up the mask and fins, stepping off the ladder, and leaving this particular wreck to rest. The words and images we’ve made together remain here as part of an ongoing archive of literacy, teaching, books, and media, but my next dives will happen elsewhere—and off this page