Never thought it would be this way. I thought perhaps someday if I was lucky and my research career had gone well it might happen. Afterall, research, writing, teaching, publishing seemed to be the norm of hardworking anthropologists. But my life has been all but normal or routine. My dissertation is still under development and meanwhile I have navigated the most difficult years of a birthing a company and had 4 kids.
In a couple of weeks I will be sending to a printer – not research, nor is the topic business or technology – short stories developed for children for use in schools. The initial run is small but it still is a new strange twist I had not planned.
The opportunity came through a client relationship. One afternoon charing a cup of coffee we started talking about how to serve local schools, how to complement our children’s education. Little did my client know that education was a great side-interest of mine, topic of my ever present dissertation. Our mutual interest led to me proposing an educational project sponsored by my client that fostered loyalty and targeted purchasing to access educational materials. To help explain the project I went on to create sample materials, a "this is what it would look like scenario." Soon those "sample" ideas became the starting point. I don’t konw where this will take me but I am enjoying the new adventure.
In the course of developing the materials I have gone "back to school." I am collaborating with Jim and thinking back often to our college days and how he helped me engineer various sculpture projects of mine. Nowadays, he is bringing me up to date in his craft: computer generated and tweaked graphics. I am not the best student in the world but I am having a great time.
The stories are in Spanish and can be accessed through www.puntosdelsabor.com.