Mosaic and Writing: Two Paths Leading to the Same Place

My Write of Passage and a BIG sale announcement

Everything shifted the day I coined a definition that will never make it into the dictionary. It will never be an entry in Oxford or Merriam Webster or Wikipedia. And that’s just fine. Because my little definition is now printed into my internal Rachel Dictionary. Like a rogue electrician, re-wiring a house without a permit, my definition did not ask for permission.

My little definition, it turns out, is kind of big.

This definition helped me, and my students and colleagues, pave new pathways into the modern mosaic landscape. It was the kind of definition that broke open old understandings about what mosaic can be. My seven-word definition encouraged mosaicists to think about interpretations. One simple sentence re-framed a thousand years of being shackled to things like material, adhesive, substrates, and design. One sentence carefully sidestepped the sticky establishment details that have kept mosaic mortared in the past. Not that there is anything wrong with the past.

I won’t get …