We are over halfway through our semester here at Salt and I’d say today marks the official start of my personal “crunch time”. Things have been cruising right along thus far: research conducted, stories locked in, the bulk of interviews completed, transcriptions underway.

These have undoubtedly been a busy couple of months, but things were feeling manageable….until today.

Today I realized I actually have to write these stories.

The hours of recordings, pages of transcriptions (and the many I have yet to type), beautiful anecdotes, remarkable quotes and interesting tales of life in Maine—I now have to gather all of this information and somehow craft a “creative non-fiction” masterpiece that will grab and hold readers and make the generosity of my subjects’ time and honesty worthwhile.

Yikes.

Thankfully, in addition to the mounting pressure, I’m also feeling the warm fuzzies of a building full of support and empathy. Although we’re all busy working on our own stories and collaborations, there is a sense that we really are all in this together.

And somehow, that makes this all just a wee bit less daunting. So here we go…

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