Hi Reader!
Will you join me for a short stroll down memory lane?
In February 1984, sixth-grade Tracie Jeanette Rivers published a book.
It started as a school assignment.
The result - a book.
It was called Short Tales by Tracie.
It included three original stories, hand-drawn illustrations by my father's coworker Sandra Craft, a publishing company called Rivershouse Publishers, and all the confidence that tiny Tracie could possess.
I scanned every page.
Looking through the stories, I feel recognition.
One story follows a conversation with a little purple man from another planet. Another imagines a world where computers take over. A third explores the unintended consequences of a chemistry experiment gone wrong.
The writing is exactly what you would expect from a sixth grader. The spelling is questionable. The punctuation is adventurous. The science is... flexible.
AND it's all me.
Because beneath the typos and typewriter ink . . . the same things that still shape my work today:
Curiosity.
Observation.
Questions.
Wonder.
A desire to understand how people experience the world.
A belief that possibilities are worth exploring.
Over the last few years, I've created conversation experiences, question decks, leadership frameworks, and community gatherings. This artifact reminds me that none of those ideas appeared out of nowhere.
The seeds were already there.
The throughline was already there.
Sometimes we spend so much time trying to figure out what comes next that we forget to look for the patterns that have been with us all along.
This book reminded me that I've been me for a long, long time.
Below you'll find a link to the perfectly, imperfect 1st publication from the author formerly known as Tracie Jeanette Rivers.
