Write write write--but why?

This is it--the first Writing Wednesday of summer break. I'm sitting in a library classroom tapping on my laptop alongside two faculty colleagues, three of us in all--a small start perhaps attributable to some problems in communication. I faithfully followed new campus procedures for getting the word out but somewhere there's a glitch in the system. Three people! Better than none, I suppose.

I have spent two hours writing, although perhaps "writing" isn't entirely the right word. I have revised my Agnes essay to include info about that historic hurricane and sharpen up some phrasing; now I need to decide whether I want to call my brother and ask what he remembers about our family's encounter with the worst natural disaster in Pennsylvania's history. And then I need to figure out where to submit the essay. Literary magazines are closing and possibilities are shrinking, so I'll need to do some serious research.

And then I opened the folder containing the larger project I started during last summer's Writing Wednesdays. I'm happy with the first chapter and I'd love to submit it somewhere as a stand-alone essay, but again, where? It's too personal and not theoretical enough for an academic journal but too steeped in literature for a casual outlet. Where are the hybrid publications where an intelligent person can combine close reading with practical classroom experiences? (Asking for a friend....)

I haven't looked at the rest of the project since last August and so I was surprised, both by how ambitious it is and by how fragmented. I see some lovely sentences and paragraphs but an awful lot of gaps and brackets. I'm reminded of the seven-page single-space notes-for-a-memoir document we discovered among my father's papers after his death: whenever he seemed to be getting close to a really interesting part of his life, he would write ETC. Now it's too late to ask what all those etceteras were eliding.  

And that's the conundrum about this writing project: as I near the end of my teaching career, I feel the need to pass on a whole bunch of etcetera lest it perish with my passing, but it's hard to write when I don't know have the first clue who might serve as audience. Writing these essays is either an opportunity to pass on some important insights or a massive, thankless waste of time.

For right now, though, it's therapy. Putting down words, imposing some order on the chaos, feels like an accomplishment. And that's why I look forward every week to Writing Wednesdays, even if, in some sad dark corridor of my mind, I fear that every word I write takes me closer to The End.