For this week’s blog entry, I’d like to deviate slightly to spend my space talking about how much I’ve enjoyed working with Diabetes Self-Management‘s Web Editor, Tara Dairman. As many of you may have read in the weekly Diabetes Self-Management e-newsletter, Tara is moving on in her life and career, and so she’s winding down her tenure at Diabetes Self-Management, and very soon a new editor will take her place.
For most of the past two years, I’ve been corresponding with Tara weekly regarding my blog entries. Often I would to write her and run a few ideas in her direction to see what readers might want. Sometimes I’d tell her that I was stumped, fresh out of ideas, and ask for a list of potential topics. I was never disappointed in the directions she’d suggest I go; quite often I’d get a two- or three- (or more-) parter out of one of those suggestions (some of you who’ve been following my blog for a while may remember the early entries that, serialized, went on for weeks and weeks).
But what I like most about this writer–editor relationship with Tara isn’t just the words on my screen to her screen to yours. Nope. Although she’ll no longer be working with me as I continue to write about my diabetes, over the past two years Tara’s become a pretty good friend. Sure, she’s one of those friends I’ve yet to meet in person, what with her in New York City and me out here in Michigan. Nevertheless, our discussions about television shows, movies, books, politics, and literature, ongoing as they’ve been, have been fun, and both she and I agree that were she and her soon-to-be husband and my wife and I to get together for drinks, we’d have a pretty good time (and she knows there’s a standing invitation for a visit if she’s ever out this way).
It’s been a pleasure to work with and write for someone who, while she does not have diabetes, is incredibly in-the-know about the condition and sympathetic to my points of view. What’s more, I can’t recall ever having had a topic censored by Tara. In fact, I’m sure that were I to self-disclose even more than I already do about some of my thoughts regarding living with diabetes, she’d have been all for it. But, given who I am and the de facto public sphere in which this blog lives, I have sometimes written blogs that go back into the folder, never to see the light of day.
But back to Tara…
When I wrote to her in June of 2007 with the idea of writing a weekly entry from the perspective of a newly diagnosed diabetic (at that time I was 33), she was receptive to the idea and asked for a writing sample and a bit more about my condition and what I intended to provide to readers on a weekly basis.
Over the past two years, and over 100 blog entries later, it’s with a bit of sadness that I wish Tara the best in whatever’s next for her. A bit of selfish sadness. But I have no doubt I’ll enjoy working with new Web Editor Diane Fennell, and this week marks the first time I submit my blog to her. (Hi, Diane!)
Tara, I look forward to continued correspondence with you, as well as keeping up to speed, via your blog, on the adventures that lie ahead as you and your husband travel the world for the next 18 months. May your journeys be exciting and safe.
