Nuance—subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound.

I feel like most things I think about are nothing more than nuance. I also feel like it takes nothing more than nuance to profoundly alter how children learn, how teachers experience teaching, or how any of us goes about our days of living in this world.

I care about nuance. I love what’s oblique. What’s ordinary and un-noticed. The small things. The small things that are actually immense.

The book that most significantly speaks to my heart continues to be The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. I can still remember the feeling of reading it for the first time—”How does he know me? How could a book be written just for me?”

And so here I am right now writing this first blog post of a new blog that I think I will call nuance. I have started blog projects before and didn’t stay with them. But I am different now. Now I write every day and I have a rhythm for my writing and my thinking. I think this might be the time for me to share more of my thinking in a public way. I can’t really call myself a writer unless I share it, right? I can’t just wait for book proposals or drafts to be accepted by publishers or agents. I have be present and write and share.

So here I go. I am not sure how often I will share my small morsels of nuance about small things in the world, and I am not sure if anyone will care to read them. But my heart is open to share.

-Melissa A. Butler