A Probe & Ponder Newsletter…September 2026

---

Exploring books, learning, travel, life experiences & adventure with author, Roberta E. Sawatzky

If you’re someone who’s curious, courageous, and eager to grow through fresh ideas, practical writing tips, thoughtful prompts, and real-life reflections, you’re in the right place. Here, I share my ponderings and discoveries with a community of readers and writers who’ve connected with me through my books—and who love exploring how writing shapes the way we learn, create, and experience life. Let’s dive in together.

To learn how/where to order my books, click here.

---

Every January 1st, I consider a few resolutions. They are usually vague—write more, be more disciplined—and by February they’ve dissolved into the general noise of winter. But every September, without planning to, I do something different. I clear my desk. I buy a notebook I don’t need. I start acting like a slightly more disciplined version of myself. I’ve been doing this since I was six years old, and decades on the other side of the classroom haven’t changed it.

I think September is the real new year. January just has better PR.

I’ve had a lot of Septembers. Once my kids were in school full-time, I went to work in the business world for a several years, then moved into teaching business full-time for thirteen years. So September has meant a few different things to me over the decades—the start of my children’s school year, then the start of my own second career, then, later, the start of a new academic year, over and over, for thirteen years straight.

Then I stepped away from all of it. My husband’s health was declining, and I retired to be with him. For eighteen months, September came and went and meant nothing in particular—there was no classroom to return to, no syllabus to write. Time moved differently, on his terms, not the calendar’s.

Eighteen months in, I went back to teaching. I don’t know if I could tell you exactly why, except that I needed something that was mine, some structure to stand inside. Six months later, he passed away.

I tell you this because I don’t want to pretend that September’s pull, for me, is only nostalgic. It’s not simply about pencils and blank notebooks and the particular quality of early fall light—though it is a little bit about that too. It’s that I have watched this rhythm hold me up more than once. It was there when my kids grew old enough to let me go back to work. It was there every year I stood in front of a classroom. And it was there, unexpectedly, at the hardest point of my life, offering me a place to put my mind when I didn’t know what else to do with it.

So this September, I’m using it again, on purpose.

My teaching schedule is fixed, for now—Tuesday evenings, Thursday mornings, through the end of exams in December. Being part-time, or term, means I’m never guaranteed a course load; each semester gets built fresh, and I won’t know what January looks like until it’s closer. For a long time I let that kind of uncertainty be the reason I hadn’t built a real writing practice—”once I know what my schedule looks like, once things settle down, I’ll commit properly.” But I’ve learned, more than once now, that “once things settle down” isn’t a date on any calendar. It isn’t a date at all. So I looked at what this semester actually gives me: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, open. Two hours each, at the desk. That’s the whole plan–for now.

It isn’t dramatic. There’s no “finish the book by December” energy to it. And I know January may hand me a different set of days, a different shape to fit around. That’s fine. The commitment was never really to Monday-Wednesday-Friday. It was to two hours, three times a week, wherever those days land. The schedule is just this semester’s version of a promise I intend to keep regardless.

So here’s my actual resolution, the kind I intend to keep: two hours, three days a week, at the desk — Monday, Wednesday, Friday for now, whatever it becomes in January. The same notebook I didn’t need to buy, open on the days that are mine.

Discipline on paper is one thing. Staying inspired enough to actually sit down for those two hours, week after week, is another. So alongside the schedule, I’m building a few habits meant to feed the writing itself, not just protect the time for it.

1. I’ll be reading books on writing craft. Right now the one that has my attention is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, by Neal Allen and Anne Lamott — Allen built the list over years in journalism and the corporate world, and Lamott, known for Bird by Bird, brings her own take alongside his. What I appreciate most is that it’s aimed at the sentence level—not big-picture inspiration, but the practical work of making a sentence better. That feels like the right kind of company for a Monday morning at the desk.

2. I will continue to learn from podcasts. Three favourites that always seem to provide insight and challenge are: The Oprah Podcast, The Creative Penn Podcast, and Beyond Better. I’ve linked to a suggested episode for each that I think you’ll enjoy. There’s a particular kind of relief in hearing another writer describe, in detail, a problem you’ve been quietly circling for weeks—the feeling that someone else struggles with, and has found guidance to similar issues is reassuring.

3. Lately I have been enjoying audio books. The trouble is, I don’t slow down and really listen. Rather, I clean, or drive, or…do any other mundane activity while I’m listening. I want to stop, sit with a coffee or a dram of scotch, and get lost in the book. I’m making time to read for escape and pleasure again—not research, not craft study, just books that are well written, reminding me what good sentences feel like from the inside. It’s easy to forget that reading well is its own kind of practice. (I’ve joined a book club…first one ever, and this is the first book. It was a great read.)

4. Finally, I’m going to cut back, hard, on television and social media. Not out of any grand principle — just arithmetic. Every hour spent scrolling is an hour I’m not reading, not writing, not thinking about the thing I said I wanted to build.

September gave me the schedule. This is what I’m doing with the time it protects. I’ll report back next month on how it going.

How about you? How are you making time to work on that book, or poem, or painting? Is it possible you may need to use September as a ‘get back on track’ month?

“Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you’re writing is any good or not.” Anne Lamott

I drafted and shaped this piece with the help of Claude, an AI assistant — the ideas and the story are mine, but I used it as a thinking and editing partner along the way.