I’m sitting here in my home office on a rainy Labor Day in Philadelphia, my fat cat splayed across the desk as I type my way into meaning. I’m finding my way back into blogging after a few starts and stops. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with blogging, and I blame it on Montaigne. If you’ve never had the pleasure of being introduced to Montaigne’s essays, please stop reading this blog immediately and go read them.

I remember attending an AWP panel a few years ago about essay writing and the Internet and how Montaigne might be described as the first blogger (or proto-blogger). I love that idea, but I’m hard-pressed to find a contemporary Montaigne in the blogosphere (though if you know of one, link away!). It was holding myself up to that standard that made me feel I couldn’t blog. Montaigne’s essays are fresh, beautiful, insightful meanderings of the mind. His topics are at times mundane, quirky, and profound. He allowed himself to follow trains of thought without worrying about where they would lead.

If you read advice about blogging, you’re often told to find a niche. What if someone had told that to Montaigne? He definitely did not have a niche. He wrote about very random stuff, but it wasn’t the stuff itself that was interesting but the way he allowed his mind to wander across the page. Nevertheless, I came back to the idea of blogging because I actually do have somewhat of a niche, or at least a clear topic.

I am going to blog about my writing process. This is something I’ve resisted for some time. As an editor, I tend to be overly critical of my own work. The idea of revealing the messier parts of my work and myself is scary. I fret over my poems, and I wouldn’t dare keep a 30/30 blog in April (30 poems in 30 days) and show the world my horrible first drafts (though now that I’ve said so, maybe it will be an interesting challenge). But at the same time, there’s something valuable in allowing oneself to get closer to the mess. Writing can be scary, difficult, intimidating. I’m often paralyzed by my own fears of not writing a really great poem so much so that I won’t write for a while (though one book has helped me immensely with embracing this fear: Writing from the Inside Out).

So here’s what I’m doing. I’m working on a book of poems that respond to climate change. It’s weird to say it out loud. Saying it out loud means I’m beholden to it, and I’m telling the world it matters. It does matter. It’s just taken me some time to get used to the fact that I really have something to say. I’m going to blog about this project to keep myself on track and to examine aspects of the writing process, to see what I learn along the way, and what might be useful to others.

As I listen to the rain coming down here in Philadelphia, the awkward rhythm of drops tapping on the roof, I’m thinking about nature as both chaotic and patterned, like the mind. I’m reminding myself that I, too, am a beautiful mess, full of thunder, splashing this way and that. And I’m going to put that beautiful mess on the page and see what comes.