Our First Anniversary -- Hello, Goobye, and Hello Again

This weekend marks my one year anniversary as a blogger. More accurately, as a blogging poet and writer. It has been one of the most remarkable and personally fulfilling years of my life.

At the beginning of February, 2011, at the suggestion of a new online friend, the terrific German poet Claudia Schoenfeld, I built this blog -- A Thing for Words -- to share my poetry. One of the reasons I needed the blog was to join the fun and collegiality of Claudia's and her friends at the One Stop Poetry site. Because of One Stop's One Shot Wednesday feature, I was writing at least a poem a week to share with other poets around the world.

And I was making new friends, some of whom I will cherish for the rest of my days. You know who you are. I tell you that all the time.

With the unfortunate demise of One Stop, I was astonished when Claudia asked if I would be willing to become a staffer with a new online poetry site/community, dVerse Poets Pub. That honor brought even more of you to the blog, and I met more and more of you.

And now it's been a year of blogging my guts out and I am ready for the next moves -- hopefully finding a publisher interested in the poetic impressions of a reawakened man and artist (that's the hard one) and moving A Thing for Words to a new blog platform and design.

So here are two bits of news you might use. One, I never really expected to be a poet. In fact, I didn't want to be one. But once I began, I found poetry fulfilled my need to truly express myself as a man and artist, and it made me feel special. You made me feel special. I still write my short stories, as you have found on these pages, but sometimes it's not so easy. So I write poems, some good, some not so good. But I write them, which is the most important thing, right?

The other bit of news is that you can find A Thing for Words at its new Wordpress home here: http://athingforwordsjahesch.wordpress.com/

I hope all of you followers of the old blog will follow me there. You've made Joe Hesch believe he's a poet. I'd like to show that you were right. Thanks for a year of great thrills and friendship. Bless you all!