Mission to Berkeley, Part One

Hello

Fresh from the cross-country trip to Chico, CA, just last week, I was airplane-bound once again today as I made my way to the bastion of liberal thought — Berkeley, CA,  (favorite sign so far: “Support Stem Cell Research — Grow Bush a Brain”) — for another adventure with the National Writing Project. A co-director at our site, Susan, and I are here to launch a Monograph Book about the way our Western Massachusetts Writing Project site re-organized itself a few years back. Some impetus for that change came as the site was relaunching its web site and the redesign of the web presence forced our leaders to re-imagine the structure of our entire WMWP organization.

I immediately noticed a difference between Chico and Berkeley — it was very cool here, and I completely underpacked. Apparently, I still had the 110 degree heat of Chico in mind. So, as I wandered through the streets of this very lively and fun place, I bought a sweatshirt to keep me somewhat warm for a few days. I wandered around town and the campus for a few hours today and sat under a grove of eucoplytus (I had to look up the spelling of that one!) and did nothing but think for a bit.

Berkeley
Tomorrow, Susan and I begin some writing in earnest and begin planning out this book project. I am suggesting that we use Writely as a collaborative site for writing and we’ll see how my partners feel about that.

Peace,

Kevin