I teach the course on fluency disorders at the University of South Carolina, and developed an additional interest in cluttering after working with a few clients who clutter. In November of 2007, while in Boston for the annual convention of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA), I decided to attend an organizational meeting for the fledgling International Cluttering Association. This meeting was organized by Kathleen Scaler-Scott, at that time a PhD candidate in communication sciences at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Dr. Scott now works as an assistant professor of speech-language pathology at Misercordia University, and continues to serve as the coordinator of the ICA.

During that meeting, Kathy must have noticed that I took copious notes, because a few days later she sent me an email asking if I could convert my notes into official 'minutes'. Before I realized what was happening, I had agreed to serve as newsletter editor for the ICA, with very limited exposure to cluttering and no newsletter experience whatsoever.

The first issue came out in February of 2008, after much hard work by several people, most notably Kathy Scaler-Scott, Klaas Bakker and Judy Kuster. The ICA newsletter is called the T.R.A.D.E., which is an acronym for 'Treatment, Research, Awareness, Diagnosis, and Education'. The newsletter is created in Microsoft Publisher, which takes a while to get the hang of; it's fairly intuitive though, and it gets a little easier each issue. Originally, the newsletter came out four times a year, however the executive board just approved changing this to three times a year. Typically, I believe that newsletter editors usually beat the bushes among the membership of their organization for material to print, but thankfully Kathy tends to do this for me. She kindly asks when I'd like to have material due by, and then broadcasts an email among the membership and the executive board.

Fortunately, certain sections and reports are recurring in the newsletter, so in many cases all I need is a 'report' of some kind from each committee leader. Of course, each issue will have some sort of special section or two, and hopefully some photographs dispersed throughout. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in starting (or taking over) a newsletter consider this 'recurring section' approach; sometimes, the newsletter almost seems to build itself, and my biggest problem is formatting and arranging things so that they divide nicely across pages, and there is some logical flow to it.

I encourage you to peruse the website of the International Cluttering Association, including the archives of the ICA newsletter, the TRADE: http://associations.missouristate.edu/ICA/. A single issue of T.R.A.D.E. is available HERE

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