About PWA

In Chapter 17 of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale meet in the forest to speak of the last seven years of their lives and all the tremendous changes, trials, pain, and joy that they have experienced.  Whereas Dimmesdale has suffered under the burden of his sadness, allowing it to paralyze him and sap his spirit, Hester has thrived, making the most of every opportunity to do good, to show compassion, to rejoice in the life she has been given.

Towards the end of the conversation, Dimmesdale moans (in his typically whiney fashion) that he does not know what he should do, given the weight of all of the sorrows on his soul.  Hester admonishes him with the following advice:

Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or,—as is more thy nature,—be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated world.
Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!

The past several years have brought a number of challenges for me, and for many of us, I suspect. This blog is my personal chronicle of recapturing the joy in my life, of rejoicing in the abundance that surrounds us all.  For those who know me, the title of “PreachWriteAct” is fitting, as my faith is the core of my life; my career is that of a professional writer and English professor; and one of my great areas of interest is the theatre.  Thus, the verbs are precisely the ones that best encapsulate the ways in which I most effectively express myself.  I’m sure the posts will seem like self-indulgent pseudo-intellectualism at times (mostly because they will, in fact, be self-indulgent pseudo-intellectualism), but I will try to be as genuine and honest as possible.

That being said, thank you for your interest and/or curiosity, as well as your comments and feedback.  I’m excited to begin to follow Hester Prynne’s timeless advice to all of us who have developed a tendency to wallow in our circumstances.