Category: writing

  • I’m not a professional blogger, but I play one on TV…

    I blog regularly (meaning daily or semi-monthly) at five different blogs. One of these days I’ll tally my wordcount and see how many books I’ve written since the birth of enivri.com. I doubt I’m anywhere near the book every three weeks rate of this blogger. But I’ll bet I do have a few books under my belt by now. Leitch claims that blogging is the hardest job ever. I’m going to guess that he’s never been a mother of a toilet-training 2 year-old or a maid (and neither of them have great tans either). Really.

    Much has been written about the relative lack of sales success for books written by bloggers, as if bloggers were an ethnic group, or some sort of easily charted genre. Every blogger is different from the others; I can’t think of a single shared characteristic among bloggers, save for lack of a tan. The one thing we do do, however, is write. A lot. I’ve worked for newspapers, magazines, television stations, doctor’s offices, you name it, and no job requires more daily effort than being a professional blogger. If people have a slow day at the office and do a little less work than usual, hardly anyone notices. If I have a slow day, every commenter on my site lets me know immediately.

  • it’s the flying

    This has got to be the best-ever article about blogging. An excerpt:

    “It’s the flying. It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives…

    Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ;-)”

  • making history


    I posted another episode of my Making History Podcast earlier today. This was really a fun one to record–Martha Hodes, author of The Sea Captain’s Wife, is one of my biggest historian-heroes.

    Take a listen and let me know what you think! :)

  • fyi…

    I am not doing the NaBloPoMo this month. Just had to tell you that…

  • pilgrimgirl classic: Why I Blog

    Friends, I read through this post from 7/24/06 last night and thought it might be about time to repost it. Enjoy!

    I’m preparing to speak about Mormon feminist blogging in a few weeks. So as I’ve been mulling over various thoughts, I thought I’d make a list of the top 10 reasons why I blog….

    1) For reflection. Each time I sit at my computer to write a post, I reflect on my life and cull the gems that I feel are worth sharing. This affords the opportunity to recall joy, blessings, frustrations. I like these moments of examination, they offer great insight.
    2) For FUN. Often, blogging is play for me. I take an experience and try to render it in text. I experiment with phrasing, punctuation and pauses. I attempt to express humor and pathos.
    3) To tell it like it is. I like having the uninterrupted space to tell my stories. No one is cutting me off mid-sentence or censoring my words. It’s probably the narcissist in me that enjoys the blog as both soapbox and pedestal.
    4) To speak the unspeakable. On my blog I’ve often discussed my disability. This is a fairly taboo subject in mainstream culture. It’s empowering to me to tell the stories of my different body without framing them in terms of an inspirational or pity-full narrative. Yet, ironically, it is the parts of my life that are the most visible (my religious practice, my academic pursuits) that I discuss least often. I’m not yet sure why that is. (more on this in #10)
    5) To share pictures. I’ve just started really enjoying photography. I know our camera sucks and my photos are amateur-ish, but they bring me great joy. I love sharing my ‘lens’ with you.
    6) For community. Several of you, dear readers, know me only through my blog. Others of you are old familiar friends who like to continue to keep in touch through cyberspace. I cherish my virtual neighborhood. Your blogs and emails nourish me, your thoughts buoy me, and your comments affirm, challenge, provoke and validate my musings.
    7) For memory. What joy it is to scroll through my blog history and remember the fun things I’ve done!
    8) Because I’m a geek. Hmmmm….yes, I spend a good chunk of my day sitting at my laptop writing emails and composing blogposts. ‘nuff said.
    9) To mimic John. I’m not really the jealous type, but I saw all the benefits that he’s gotten from blogging through the years, and I wanted in on it, too!
    10) To be vulnerable. Though the personal essays and other opportunities I’ve had to share the intimate parts of my life over the past 10 years, I have often been afraid. I’ve been afraid to tell the truth as I see it, I’ve been afraid of offending, I’ve even been afraid of ‘discipline.’* But there is something so empowering about laying out truth bare. My truth-telling brings me closer to others, creates bonds with strangers, allows an intimacy that is both frightening and exhilarating.

    *I suspect that the reason I feel reticent to discuss school and church are because of fear of backlash. Within academia there’s a pretty high barrier to becoming personal and vulnerable. The LDS church has a history is censuring its more outspoken members, especially feminist women. So far, no one in the Mormon ‘Bloggernacle’ has been disciplined by church authorities for what they’ve written on their blogs, yet I am still wary. I love the freedom of the LDS community on the Net. I don’t want to see that change.

  • blogging in academia

    Attended this panel today about blogging and academia. It was a bit discouraging to be one of the three people in attendance who weren’t getting course credit for being there, but I guess that’s just to be expected when you plan a panel on Halloween…

    That said, there were some good points made, perhaps the most memorable contribution was Liz Losh‘s rejoinder: “Don’t blog while angry, it’s like driving drunk.” She mentioned this in the context of a discussion about the ‘permanence’ of webwriting and other forms of electronic communication. Each panelist concurred that blogging is best done with a ‘drafts’ folder to let ideas gel for awhile before hitting the ‘publish’ button.

    A few other thoughts:
    Scott Kaufman spoke about how blogging made him love writing again. Daily, he stops working on his dissertation after dinner and then allows himself to blog. What he said rang true with my experience as a blogging academic. When I am blogging I am a better academic writer because I feel so much ‘juice’ running through my brain. I also have a momentum built from blogwriting that carries through into all other types of writing. I can literally feel my wrists and hands loosen as the words just flow. The only challenge of being an active blogwriter is that of time–making sure that I don’t get so preoccupied with blogthoughts and blogdramas that I forget what’s most important (i.e. my dissertation).

    Liz gave a few statistics that I thought quite telling. She quoted the following percentages of responses as to why academic-types blog (note: just a few stats of the many she offered and I wish I had the citation for the study, but I didn’t get that either):

    91% praised the intellectual stimulation of blogging
    63% liked blogging because it facilitated interdisciplinarity
    64% said it fosters community

    My two criticisms of the panel discussion:

    1) Each blogger seemed sheepish about their blogging, admitting that it was extra-curricular to their “real work.” This made me sad–what I wanted to see was a panel that legitimized the ways that blogging can enhance an academic career, not a bunch of folks who admit its frivolousness.

    2) There was the expected ivory tower elitism–some slams at BoingBoing and the ‘bad writing’ of most blogs. While I agree that many blogs aren’t masterpieces (I’ll include myself in that bunch), I’m not sure that all of the panelists really ‘get’ the genre and form of the blog. It has a different audience and intention than a NYTimes article. For the most part, it’s intended to be rough and raw and fast. It’s more about connection to communty than polish, IMO. Of course, YMMV.

  • gem

    A thought gem from this article:
    Greg Dening, “Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay,” History and Theory 41 (Feb. 2002): 1–24.

    “I read fast most of the time. That is because reading books…is my conversation with the world. My eyes are ahead of my mind when I read fast. I gobble sentences, paragraphs, pages whole. There is a white noise in the back of my mind as I read. It is the babble of worldwide conversations that affect my thinking. I’m in conversation with novelists, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, critics in this sort of reading. It is full of erotic, ecstatic moments when I think that what they are saying is what I myself am just about to say. But I am going to say it better!”

    I like his certitude. Often when I read what others write and I have one of those moments when I realize that they are saying what I wanted to say, well I just throw my hands up in the air and despair of ever having something important to contribute…