This week the Write Where It Hurts blog is one year old. With this in mind, we thought it might be useful to look back over the past year, express our appreciation to the many people who have contributed to the growth and development of the blog and its associated social media sites, and glance toward the coming year.

On June 6, 2015, we launched Write Where It Hurts online and on social media sites with the hope of providing resources for and generating conversation about the personal and emotional aspects of teaching, research, service, activism, and other elements of scholarly and creative life and experience. With this goal in mind, we spent the year utilizing our social media presence to disseminate information and resources, and posting 42 blogs covering a wide variety of topics from a wide variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and traditions. Our hope was and remains to, as one regular reader noted at a recent conference, create a space for open dialogue as well as resources for people managing the personal and emotional aspects of academic and activist life.

Whether looking at numbers or conversations, the past year exceeded any expectations we had at the onset of this project. We have received word of cases where posts from the blog have been useful resources for teaching in classrooms, educating potential allies in activist groups, and sharing experiences in interpersonal settings. At the same time, the blog has garnered much more traffic and attention than we expected it to (especially in the first year), and we have had far more people seek us out at conferences and online for further discussion than we thought would happen. At the same, response to our social media sites has been far more active than we initially expected, and has led to interesting and useful collaborations. All of these and other observations throughout the year suggest this type of space is useful for many people, and encourage us to continue developing it for broader use.

We have also benefitted tremendously in the past year from the talent and bravery of our guest authors. We have truly been privileged to work with incredibly talented and insightful guest writers, and in each case, we – as well as the blog – have benefitted immensely from their perspectives, experiences, and analyses. It is with this in mind that we reiterate our ongoing calls for guest contributors, and encourage anyone looking for a space to Write Where It Hurts to reach out to us with your ideas, compositions, and other thoughts as there may well be space for you on the blog and there may well be others who would benefit from your offerings.

As we move forward, we simply wish to thank you all for an incredible first year in the academic blogging world. Thank you to all the readers, sharers, tweeters, guest writers, and others who made this year possible. Thank you as well to all the people in person and / or online who shared with us the ways the blog posts and / or social media sites were useful to you personally and / or professionally. Thank you all for making Write Where It Hurts first birthday feel like a celebration. We will continue to work on the blog and on social media, and we look forward to all the conversations to come.

Xan, J, & Lain