I have avoided blogging for years. I’m a writer. I think presenting writing quickly on the Internet is the opposite of what writing is about. Writing should be slow, deliberate, well-crafted, edited, revised, and should only be published when it’s really ready. So blogging turned me off immediately. However, over the years, I’ve been invited to guest blog occasionally by friends who likely have more faith in my writing than I do (at times). I’m a very big fan of the essay form, and I think some blog posts happen to also be very well-crafted essays. I went to a talk at AWP a year or two ago by essay writers on the use of social media, and many of them seem excited about the possibilities of what different forms of social media can do for writing. One of the presenters talked about Montaigne as the first blogger, and it’s true that the open-endedness of the blog form can work just like an essay that muses, wanders, meanders, discovers what it means to say.

So with that in mind, I want to start blogging. The trend these days is to have a theme to your blog. People like themes. It makes sense, especially if you want to drive traffic to your website and get business, I’m told (though there is nothing appealing to me about the metaphor of traffic, and the idea of writing to make money, is, well, something that has never concerned me as a poet). One of the reasons I’ve never started a blog is because I don’t have a theme. I thought about starting a poetry blog, an editing blog, an art blog, a personal blog… and I am not invested enough in the idea of narrowing myself down to one theme, as though it’s imperative to brand oneself. But, clearly, I have thoughts. And some people out there like to read them, even when I think they aren’t polished enough to be out in the world, shivering in the cold on an empty field in the middle of the Internet.

So I’m going to start this blog, without the promise of a theme, without the promise of posting every single day, and without the goal of getting tons of traffic. In fact, if it’s only read by a few curious souls, that’s almost better. That’s how I always envisioned the audience for my poetry, anyhow. There are probably just a small minority of quirky folks in the world who will get it and love it, and you are my audience, and I am writing for you. I look forward to seeing where this new journey takes me. I invite you to come along and follow my wandering thoughts…