Introducing THE GAP

I’ve been thinking a lot about gaps lately.

Where I grew up in Appalachia, a gap is a pass through the mountains. The place where you can finally see to the other side. Every gap has a history (trails worn by the Cherokee, then by settlers, then by everyone who came after and needed to get through).

So, that’s been on my mind: the gap as the place where passage becomes possible.

But there’s another kind of gap I’ve spent been sitting with. This one’s more ethereal. Existential, even. This gap sits between what we know and what we don’t. Between what we see every day and what we hope toward. Between the world as it is and the world as we sense it could be.

Stories live in that gap. Always have.

For awhile now, I’ve been thinking and writing about education. How children learn, what it looks like when a young person gets to direct their own learning, what schools could be. That work is important to me. I’ve recently started a newsletter (On Learning) where I’ll be riffing on the past, present, and future of education.

But that’s not all I want to write about.

There’s a Caleb who exists before and beyond the researcher. A kid who grew up between mountains and spent more hours than he should have lost in books. A real nerd, who loves to explore literature and philosophy and the various ways humans grasp at the in-between spaces of existence.

The Gap is where that person gets to write.

What you’ll find here: short fiction, book reviews, and whatever I’m turning over about stories and why they matter. Some of it will connect to ideas about learning and the human search for meaning. Some of it won’t.

This newsletter will go out once or twice a month. Not too much. More than anything, it’s a place for me to wrestle with thoughts, ideas, and stories. The Gap is my way of screaming into the void.

I’m inviting you in because I think the readers who care about education and the readers who care about stories are, more often than not, the same people. People who believe that how we make meaning matters. That the stories we tell shape the world we build. That there’s something in the right word, sentence, or phrase that can reach through the page and touch something true.

That’s what I’m after here.

If The Gap sounds like something you want, stay subscribed. Either way, I’m glad you’re here.

— Caleb Patton Collier