Originally, my blog began as a personal journey—an expressive writing endeavor much like Emily Dickinson described when she wrote: “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” However, my teacher self kept creeping in like the beautiful bougainvilleas that lined the cedar fence surrounding my childhood home in the tip of Texas. And, as I wrote expressively alongside my students, the lines between personal and professional writing continued to blur.

In 2022, after fifteen years at the same school, teaching the same subject at the same grade level, I bounced between different districts and sites annually for three consecutive years. This series of transitions proved to be a journey in and of itself.

During this time, I read and edited my dear friend’s doctoral dissertation, which examined the impact of the National Writing Project on a handful of teachers across the country. As I became engrossed in the best practices of these teachers, shame and longing began to bubble inside of me. Somewhere along the way from school to school—probably dating back to the onset of the pandemic in 2020—I lost sight of how to balance the growing test-driven mandates of PLCs with the community of writers I once cultivated in my classroom.

After that friend was officially dubbed “Doctor Durham,” she and I formed a writing group with a third friend and fellow Oklahoma Writing Project teacher consultant. As we began establishing a monthly routine of meeting, sharing, and discussing our writing, the absence of writing groups in my classroom caused more shame and longing to bubble up toward the surface. My students were missing out on these rich experiences.

The lack of expressive writing in my classroom left everything seeming, well, dark. Its absence had extinguished the spark of joy I used to find in my job. Now that I am settled once again, having found a site at which I intend to stay—and my husband is ever-so-grateful he won’t have to move the contents of my classroom a fourth time, which is more of an undertaking than one might imagine for this veteran teacher of eighteen years—I plan to experiment this last quarter of the 2024-2025 school year, weaving expressive writing into the curriculum like those tenacious bougainvilleas. The time has come to rekindle my lanterns.