I achieved tenure and promotion. Then I converted my role from bipartite (teaching professor) to tripartite (research professor).

I got pregnant, finally stayed pregnant for an appropriate amount of time, and had a second baby. I went on maternity leave. I have kept this new human alive for over a year.

I applied for and was awarded a sabbatical, which will begin 1 January. My first peer-reviewed podcast made it to the world.

The government changed in the US, and then in Canada. It feels like things are pretty much worse everywhere.

Covid is still happening, though we’re mostly pretending it’s not.

There’s a genocide in Gaza, though we’re mostly pretending there isn’t.

I quit Twitter and Instagram and (mostly) Facebook — like so many of us, I have a blank profile for keeping up with school news and community events — and joined Bluesky.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how if I invested in this blog (or any previous incarnation of my blogs) the way I invested in Twitter and Instagram and (sort of) Facebook and now Bluesky, I would have a record of all my thoughts and a lot more control over my web presence.

Which is sort of what prompted me back here.

I’m also here because my postpartum brain is so slow, and I have so many loose ends I would like to wrap up before my sabbatical starts. I have a co-written article to finish, a conference paper to write, and I need to finish the book manuscript I have been plugging away at in fits and starts while I have been on leave (it’s a textbook, and it’s very fun to work on). I get about 30-60 minutes a day to write, and I have been telling myself that means I don’t have time for blogging, but maybe the opposite is true. Maybe little bits of writing here would make big bits of writing elsewhere feel more possible.

I have a to-do list around here, too. I kind of hate this theme now, which felt so edgy and analogue a couple of years ago and now feels unreadable and tired. I also want to do some work on my website itself, which also kind of feels bleh to me. I want to set up a space for journalling my sabbatical, too. I want to do a better job of cataloguing my writing elsewhere. And maybe I want to start another podcast, who knows.

And posts! I have so many draft posts. About grief. About AI. About talking to my kiddo about edtech.

Cognitive completionism is one of my absolutely most unhelpful traits and the more I want to do with this space, the less time I spend here. The number of times I have thought to myself that I will definitely write again as soon as I find a theme I like. As soon as my main site is redesigned. As soon as I finish my book manuscript. And in the meantime I don’t write anything at all.

But what if I wrote something anyway?

Even if just to ask: is this thing still on?

The benefits of this, it seems to me, would be many. I love a creative constraint and I love a goal. I have felt my thinking stagnate over the past few years, as the pandemic sameness of my still-cloistered life takes its toll. I would like to think a little bit about a bunch of stuff and see what gets me excited — lately, the idea of penning a conference proposal gives me hives, which is partly because I can’t imagine attending an in-person conference in a pandemic and everyone is rushing back to in-person, and partly because my thinking is so slow. The agility of my previous writerly self is gone and I wonder what will come next.

Anyway, it all seemed like an awfully good idea, and then, on October 19th, my dad died suddenly.

I am unmoored.

I’ll share here an excerpt of the obituary I wrote for my dad — how is that even a real thing I had to do? — because sharing who he is — was, but also is — helps.

Robert Gray of Merrickville passed suddenly at home on 19 October 2022.

Bob, as he was best known to his friends, was a true and eclectic autodidact — equally comfortable plumbing and wiring a heritage home, discussing the great theorists of psychology, or tinkering with and reviving any Apple product. His knowledge was far-ranging and he delighted in opportunities to share it with people he in turn could learn from, ideally while also sharing a laugh. Bob was known for his quick and sardonic wit that outshone his sometimes curmudgeonly first impression. He loved supporting music as much as he loved listening to it, whether at the pub or dragging gear across Eastern Ontario, roads he knew so well from years spent rallying with Gill as his navigator. He was most in his element before a classroom of undergraduates; ankle-deep in the cold waters of Bay of Fundy; on the race tracks of Mosport, St. Jovite, and NASCAR; or puttering in his garden with his constant companion, Kushie.

He leaves an absence that will be felt most acutely on Formula One racing Sundays; his favourite holiday, Groundhog Day; or anytime politics and life are being discussed.

You would have enjoyed him.

Anyway, the idea of picking up the writing plan seemed impossible. It still does, honestly. I feel like I am moving through molasses all the time.

But.

My dad was the number one supporter of my public scholarship. He also loved old-school blogging. I remember that the website he ran off a server in his office for all of the 1990s and most of the 2000s was called “autodidactics in action.” He provided me with my first access to computers in 1988 and my first email address in the early 90s. He signed me up for computer camps as a tween. When I got my first paid blogging gig at the launch of Book Riot in 2011, he read every word (even the ones he vehemently disagreed with). When I put my tenure portfolio on the open web pre-adjudication, no one was prouder — I know, because I know how hard he tried to explain it to people who had no idea what tenure or the open web meant.

Writing this post is impossible — tears streaming down my face as I do it — because the idea of writing words that Dad will never read feels impossible. Like writing his obituary, it is something that should be happening to someone else.

And yet at the same time, I know how if he was here and I launched this mini-project, he would read every single post — and subscribe to the RSS feed, and wade into the comments, and chat with other people there, and enjoy the participatory web as he always did. And that’s why I’m going to try to follow through.

The reality too is that Twitter is less usable every day under the new leadership, and recommitting to blogging feels like an empowered act. Dad would have liked that, too. Own your hosting; own your platform. That was his ethos before it was a movement.

I miss my dad. I also really miss writing. I can only have one, as it turns out, because this shit just is not fair. But I know he would like this project.

See you tomorrow?

I’m more of the, like, re-develop every course you ever teach entirely from scratch every semester because the idea of revisiting your own notes makes you want to die kind of gal.

It’s not ideal, but we make do.

Anyway.

One of the things I have always found the most difficult about maintaining my own blog space is the part where you have to maintain it. Like, once a year, or something. You have to renew the frigging thing! Seems fake.

It’s been a rough year for me, and among the many things I let slide was checking the email address that those renewal reminders went to. And so, blog.communityofpraxis.ca and brennaclarkegray.com both expired, joining the once beloved notthatkindofdoctor.com on the scrapheap of my internet history. And like all my domains before them, they were snapped up within a few weeks of expiration, and now there’s stuff on them that isn’t mine.

Ah well.

I actually do have backups of those sites, and one day I hope to getting around to restoring them. But for now it’s a fresh start — and calendar reminders for renewal dates, too!