2009
AML Award:
Online Writing
Presented to:
Sandra Tayler
For:
One Cobble at a Time
How do you make meaning out your days? The mundane and the exciting, the things that make us laugh and make us cry, our struggles and our dreams—all of these contribute to who we are. Making meaning out of these daily things, including family, community, self, work, and spirituality, is the task of Sandra Tayler’s blog
One Cobble at a Time ( http://www.onecobble.com ) . As Tayler writes, “A cobble by itself is just a small stone, but when many of them lay together they create a path.... This blog records some of the cobbles that create my path.”
In 2009 Tayler posted an average of one entry per day. Her posts, which range from a paragraph to several pages in length, combine the genre of the blog with that of the personal essay, offering musings on masking tape, the adventures of pink butterfly flip flops, her husband’s Hugo Award nomination, and even on “Sitting Still on a Summer Afternoon.” Her individual posts each possess a literary quality, offering insight and reflection that give meaning to the daily experiences of life. For example, after a trying week, Tayler paints her experiences in light of the analogy of “a little oil and a handful of meal,” giving purpose to her experiences as she writes, “I have poured myself out to answer the needs of others and somehow I am not empty.” Yet the real power of One Cobble at a Time lies not in the individual posts, but in the collection of entries that interact with each other, participating in a daily building of meaning for her readers, a meaning filled with inspiration, humor, reflection, and insight. The Association for Mormon Letters is proud to present Sandra Tayler with its first Award for Online Writing.