We are bringing back named recurring columns

Starting in August

By Moristotle

[Note: I’ve decided to refer to myself as “Moristotle.” That is, after all, who I am.]

We have decided to return to naming recurring columns in the sidebar^*. The reason is simple: a number of members of the staff confessed that they needed recurring columns to motivate them to write more things for the blog. And they cited a need for encouragement from me (some called it nagging) to get with it and submit something!
    I myself have to admit that after we announced, on December 4 last year, that “Moristotle & Co. abandons regular scheduling,” I let up on everyone and all but stopped nagging (although I would not say that I stopped encouraging).

So far as we can collectively remember, we started the first regular column on July 6, 2012: “Announcing: Fish for Friday.”
    Other weekly columns followed, and, on December 22, 2012, we published our first monthly column, James Knudsen’s “Fourth Saturday’s Loneliest Liberal: Gun owners have to own this one.”
    Similarly, other monthly columns followed. The December 4 announcement (mentioned above) listed the regular columns at the time of the announcement. A number of those columns have continued to be published anway, without the “First Monday” or “Second Tuesday” or whatever label. “The Loneliest Liberal” is probably the best example, for James has missed only one Fourth Saturday since his column began – and that was our fault. His most recent column, “The Loneliest Liberal: Primates in a panic,” was published on July 23.

Just to be clear: The adjective “recurring” was chosen to liberate us from committing to a regular weekly or monthly schedule. Some columns might appear more than once in a given month – or less than once (i.e., not at all that month). To understand the reason for this, remember the reason I gave on December 4 (when I was still only 72 years old):

[It is] no longer working for me to try to live up to the blog’s commitment to have regularly scheduled columns. I [want] to give up specifying the days of the week (or month) on which particular columns [will] appear, so that there [will] be no stated or implied commitment to publish anything on any given day.

    At the age of 73, I want to continue to avoid a commitment to publish anything on any given day (or during any given week or month). But the staff would like to return to the – I guess we can call it – “discipline” of named columns for the extra motivation to bring good writing (and good imaging) to our readers.
    We would like to have it both ways, I guess. We hope our readers would like that too!

Our masthead now explicitly invites our readers to “Join our community by commenting....” If you have never commented before, join us today!
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* The list of recurring columns, as it now stands, is as follows:

Boldt Words & Images (Bob Boldt)
Sketches from Salt Lake (Geoffrey Dean)
Growing Up in America (Rolf Dumke)
The Loneliest Liberal (James Knudsen)
Poetry & Portraits (Eric Meub)
Fiction (open)
Interview (open)
Review (open)
Science (open)
Susan’s Stuff (Susan C. Price)
West Coast Observer (William Silveira)
On Franklin Hill Farm (Bettina Sperry)

Copyright © 2016 by Moristotle