The Colloquial’s Resolution
New Year’s resolutions should be realistic and achievable. Like Woody Guthrie’s list; thirty three points mainly containing simple daily to-do’s and reminders. His was an attempt to set up good habits and prevent falling into bad ones. An optimistic outlook on how to better yourself and remain optimistic throughout the year. Woody wanted to love everybody, change his socks, and save dough. He threw in some specific attempts to improve his work too, by writing a song a day and to work by a schedule. The Colloquial staff has taken plenty of inspiration from Woody Guthrie and we hope to continue that in 2021.
The Colloquial Magazine brought our readers 75 published articles and 26 straight weeks of newsletters last year. That’s 6 months of original content created while all of our writers were juggling employment changes, quarantine nightmares, national guard duty, and all the other headaches that 2020 provided. Our first site was launched in June. Five months later we revamped, giving it the look you see today. This allowed us to merge with the Fire Escape podcast as well. We are extremely proud of the progress we’ve made in both content and vision.
The Colloquial Team wants to improve in 2021, but we want to make our goals reasonable like Woody’s. We hope to be more consistent with our published articles in both content and timing. There were quite a few newsletters in 2020 that were thrown together on a Monday night with nothing yet published since the week before. We hope to be better about that, and to be proactive in our writing and not reactive to timelines. We have committed to match our 2020 output of 75 articles by April 1st. This isn’t a goal for goals sake. We believe creating more content will help us find a more consistent voice and allow us to exceed our reader’s expectations.
The Colloquial staff is committed to being more like Woody this year. We are going to work more and better. We are not going to get lonesome. Most of all, we are going to help win the war and beat fascism. We are also hoping to continue to grow and open up our platform to others. If you have an idea for a piece for the magazine, let us know! We hope to work out a process to bring on guest writers in 2021.
I’m not one for resolutions, personally. I am not going to learn to write code, or play an instrument, or speak French in 2021. Well, I might try, but I am not going to fall into the trap of assuming all these wants will come to fruition. I won’t read as much as I want to this year. Knowing this in January should help tamper my guilt come March when I’ve not touched the book on my bedside table since Valentine’s day. But my hope is to write at least one article a week for The Colloquial and in doing so perhaps find a voice worth sharing. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished and so thankful you have stuck around to read our work.