I’ve written, and written, and written. Writing and the written word itself was my first love in this world. I spent hours pouring over books and penning my own scribbles. I wrote a short story in fourth grade about a girl named “Robin” who was going into middle school on my parents’ slow, old desktop computer in Microsoft Word. Once I got to middle school myself, I wrote in a diary about school-girl crushes and all the awkward wonders of adolescence. Halfway through high school, I started writing about my journey through an eating disorder and into the life of navigating recovery. And since I’ve gotten to college, I’ve never stopped writing. And now, I speak. When I first listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History, I tried to pin down exactly what it was that made it so wonderful to me. So captivating and engaging. And I realized that Gladwell was pulling his words off of the paper and out of the pages of his book and breathing new life into them, allowing us to hear the emotion and thought behind every word he labors over with a pen. I realized that I wanted to create my own spoken-word creation. My classes allow me to speak straight from my heart to my students, and that’s a connection I’ve always cherished just as much as any piece I’ve ever written. And so, this podcast is born; born out of a used microphone I bought off of Amazon last Friday and the first chapter to a book gone unpublished. This podcast will be me sharing the stories of my heart and of those I love. It will be a way to incorporate different, diverse voices into the singular one I share on this blog. It will be a way to branch out from the firm, yet intentional, boundaries of genre I’ve established here. It will be a new way to explore my voice.