The Lexington Wordography was born from the realization that no matter who we are, or how we spend our days, we are all writers now. Of course, few of us have time in the day to sit and write such beautiful work as Wendell Barry or Barbara Kingsolver, yet our lives are increasingly permeated by words. Our days are measured in emails, Facebook updates, lists to ourselves, reports, letters home, personal journals, blog posts, online chats, notes scribbled to ourselves while we’re sitting in traffic. Maybe all of these words will never coalesce into passages that last for all time, but they are still significant parts of our days. We are all writers now, whether we know it or not. Whether we love it or not. Whether we want it or not. We are writers now. Words are traces of ourselves and our lives in this place.

So, what exactly is a wordography? You might imagine it like a collective biography that manages to capture who we are in moments that might remain invisible to others, and even to ourselves. It is a collective story of our relationships to the words that surround us and structure our days. It is the story of how Lexington residents use words, see words, and dream about changing their lives through words.

Currently, the Lexington Wordography is profiling as many people around Lexington as possible. Some of the profiles, such as the one that follows, feature well-known figures in Lexington. But other profiles feature ordinary Lexington residents who you might not otherwise know. They are office workers, restaurant cooks, unemployed adults looking for a job, new mothers, and so on. We ask them about their writing habits, their thoughts about language, their relationship to words. We would like to share some of these profiles with Ace Weekly readers.

If you would like to join this collective snapshot—a wordography of Lexington—please let us know. Send an email to lexingtonwritersproject@gmail.com.  You can also visit The Digital Distillery at https://digitaldistillery.as.uky.edu to learn more. This ongoing project is directed by the Division of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at UK.