About a year ago I visited my parents back in Louisville.

I walked in the door and found the dining room table full of paper scraps.

Or, more precisely, book scraps. A book my mom was making.

My mom (Ruth Spangler) always has a project. She’s about the most curious person I know—always asking questions about the world and gathering information and sorting it and sharing it. One year it was a quest to learn about the patterns painted on the top of grain silos. (Turns out they served as a branding mechanism for the different companies that built grain silos.) Another year she tracked down the historical context of all the notes she had found pencilled under the wallpaper of their old home. (“President Lands in France!”, for example, marked the first time a sitting president had visited another country.)

Anyway, a while back I had told mom about this new thing called Lulu.com where you could publish your own books. One little conversation on a walk through the park was all she needed. Off she went, creating books.

One of which now lay in pieces on the dining room table.

I started sifting through the scraps, and about an hour later I was still there.

See, what she had done was take a trip back to her old college, Whitman. There had been a professor there by the name of Thomas D. Howells—called Tommy by many. And Tommy, it turns out, was… well, here’s how mom describes him in the introduction:

Unpretentious, wryly humorous, hat-tipping Thomas D. Howells was the Emily Dickinson of understated performance whose venue was the literature classrooms of Whitman College between 1938 and 1987.

The guy was an artist. And the classroom was his venue. What mom dug up on that trip to the Whitman library was a collection of quotes that students had written down in class. One in particular, Melinda Jones, had known what a treasure those little quips were, and had filed hundreds of them away in her notes.

Then, luckily for all of us, Ruth Spangler came along and found them. And organized them. And printed them out, and spent many a day searching for the best way to present them, and sifted out the quotes from other writers that students had erroneously thought were from Howells.

I’ve had a chance to read a little of Howells’ more formal work. It’s very good. But it’s also the writing of a mind with time to condense. It’s thicker, less loose. The stuff that really sets your ears ringing came from the classroom, where the immediacy of the venue gave his words their sharpest, most memorable form.

I was also lucky to see a video of Howells’ recorded on the occasion of his visit to Northern Kentucky University in 1981. The live lecture truly was his element. His manner of talking to and with the room was both humble and masterful.

Well, my mom did finish that book that lay strewn across the dining room table. If you’re curious, you can find it on Lulu:

I was reading through it last night, and thought: this would be perfect on Twitter.

So, with mom’s permission, and hopefully without the disapproval of Mr. Howells, I’ve gone ahead and given Tommy a presence on Twitter.

It will be a gentle, slow-paced feed of Howells’ quotes from the book. I’d invite you to follow along, because I think you’ll quite enjoy it.