Welcome to The Big Think in the Ivory Tower Boiler Room.
The Ivory Tower Boiler Room is a collaborative effort. Adam and Andrew’s collaboration on the podcast spawned the writing group. Andrew invited Mary to the writing group, Adam brought Erika on board (credit summer camps for those connections–Andrew and Mary went to camp together, Adam and Erika connected through the alumni network for the summer camp they both attended.) During one of the writing group check ins, the idea of some episodes about mental health and trauma came up and Erika offered to draw on her social work background to help give the episodes structure. Mary also had her own stories to contribute, and the four of us discovered that we collaborate together well, and we also enjoy working together. When we decided to create a blog as part of this website, we had to figure out how to incorporate all of our voices, even when we have different things to say, and so we want to introduce “The Big Think.” The Big Think is a weekly post where one of us gets to practice omphaloskepsis and really dive deeply into a topic or question. Each week (usually on Monday) you’ll hear a different voice from inside the Boiler Room reflecting on a big question or theme, something important to that person. This month, as a team, we decided to have a theme uniting our four separate contributions: “writing about ourselves as writers.” Future Big Think pieces may or may not have us looking at a theme together, but they will give you a chance to get to know each of us and see the different ways we look at big questions.
This is still a blog and so you will see a lot of other things too. And it won’t only be content generated by us, either; we want you to see different sides of all our contributors: book reviews, photographs, visual art… You might see original poems or stories from Ivory Tower participants, and of course links to podcasts we love. We welcome all of it. We want to create a space here where we showcase contributions from the entire Ivory Tower community, and so we encourage you to use the comment section and talk about what you read. You can of course suggest things that you might like to hear us talk about, whether that’s with a guest on a podcast episode or during a writer’s roundtable (for more on that, check out the upcoming podcast episode,) or here on the blog. And please, let us feature your work–reach out and share what you’ve got; thoughts of your own on our Big Think topic, an original piece of your own, a call for beta readers. This space belongs to all of us, and we want your work to appear here, too.
Grab a nice cup of tea, settle in, and enjoy the read.
