I am preparing to teach a workshop on blogging at the Lawrence Arts Center. I love the freedom I have as an instructor there to develop ideas for classes. I wanted to lead this class because creating a blog was instrumental in helping me find my voice as a writer. And I have you, dear reader, to thank.

Blogs exist for a many different purposes but all share the desire to have an audience of some sort. I always thought of as audience as terms of people sitting in chairs with their gaze affixed to the stage (as a result of my dance background, I suppose) but now realize it is a larger, less defined thing. An audience receives you in some way.

According to the statistics section, this will be my 120th post. If asked what my first post was, I would have told you I had no idea. But of course, I found it – The Final Days of Krause Dining, Our Home-Based Restaurant. It seems appropriate that I started seeking my writing audience as I was losing my cooking one. And my, have both the circumstances and my desires changed since I wrote that post in 2010! Thank you for reading with me along the way. Not only has my hairstyle changed (Hi, it’s long-hair Molly, I have said more than once in recent years when someone clearly doesn’t recognize me), but also my sense of identity; my title to this blog for years was The Chef’s Wife. It was Robert who suggested a few years ago that I should change it.

At the end of my first post, I posed the question – Will I ever want to cook again? And the answer, eight years later, is yes! Well, yes in my home kitchen, not in a restaurant kitchen. In fact, I was inspired recently to collect twenty of my favorite produce-inspired recipes in an ecookbook, and it’s now available.

It’s not yet available for sale, but I will send you a complimentary ecopy for hopping over to my website and subscribing to my email list. I occasionally send out emails (separate from this blog) of events, classes, speaking events and readings. I won’t bombard you with spam! Once you are listed on my end as a subscriber, I’ll send you my thank you ecopy of the book.

As much as I’ve appreciated looking back at the beginning of this blog, I am also excited about where I am today. Thanks for being with me along the way.

Love,

Molly