Writing blog: an introduction

Some years ago, when I was a child and then a teenager, I kept a blog. I kept a blog like most people keep a secret. For a long time, I worked hard, squirrelling tiny, salvaged bits of my selfhood away to a place that felt simultaneously within the world's reach, and sacred to me.

For many years, the blank page with a blinking cursor felt like the one place where no one could take anything away from me. Where no one could compel me to give up my sense of self, in service to their own anxieties or fantasies. My blog was the place where I went to feel safe. It was the place where I went to feel like me.

When I turned 19, I decided to stop blogging in order to learn how to live more fully in the world. 

It took me almost ten years to achieve this. Even six months ago, I would have said that I wasn't quite ready yet. But now, I've decided to start keeping a blog again, to test the tensile strength of what I've learned about sensing and exerting my authentic self. I'll use this space to talk quite generally about the writing life - to share my experiences around submitting, journals, residencies, etc. that might interest other writers who are just starting out (or who live outside of a big book market, like I do!). When it comes to writing, I've never been one for in-person connections - writing is something that I do best alone, away from the currents generated by other people. So most of what I've learned about the etiquette and nomenclature of the writing world came to me distantly, from online sources. I hope that my blog might help other writers who prefer a voice in the dark to direct connection - I am like you. 

I might also blog on here about topics that interest me more broadly - like sound healing, psychoanalysis, poetry, and so on. I'll share new work that I publish, and discuss the process of journeying through a dense backlog of creative trauma, as a working adult. I can't promise that I'll blog very often - in fact, it's likely that I'll blog approximately twice per year, which is the same rate at which I write my essays. At a comfortable rate, in other words. At a rate that feels like me.

The year is 2021. Reader, welcome to my blog.