In accordance with asking all of you to blog as part of the practice of being a creative writer, I’m starting a series of mini-interviews with writers who blog.
Since I am the person most readily available to begin, here goes.
When and why did you get interested in blogging?
I got interested in blogging during my time in New England College’s MFA program. It was the summer of 2005, and I had been following my former teacher Bob Archambeau’s Samizdat Blog. He was getting into some interesting territory about the end of the age of indeterminacy in contemporary poetry, pushing for what he calls poetic contingency, an intertextual, investigative, relational poetics.
This blew my mind and set the stage for a vast widening of the lens through which I viewed what could be done in poetry and creative writing. Shortly after, I began to blog at Fluid / Exchange and edit a blog-based online journal, called Seven Corners.
Do you read blogs? Which ones? How often?
I follow many blogs across different blogging subgenres in Google Reader. I currently have 108 subscriptions, and my list keeps changing and growing. I check Google Reader daily like e-mail, but I’ve now subscribed to far too many blogs to read them all daily.
I read Samizdat Blog, Silliman’s Blog, Structure & Surprise, Harriet, Exoskeleton, swoonrocket, {LIME TREE}, Hot Chicks with Douchebags, wordlustitude, Forgotten Bookmarks, and many others.
How does blogging affect your writing practice?
Blogging has definitely helped me connect with writers I would not have under different circumstances. Whether we meet face to face or not, I feel I know these people somewhat because blogs are a semi-formal writing space through which we can learn quite a bit about the blogger’s personality and thinking.
Editing Seven Corners has been a life-changing experience. It has helped me codify my own ethos as a writer, allowing me to really support local poetry while also supporting poetry globally, and it has given me a great deal of confidence as a writer and editor.
Honestly, I wish I had more time to blog. Then again, blogging is a huge part of my pedagogical practice, so I blog often, really. I guess I feel guilty about not being able to blog more regularly at Fluid / Exchange, which I view as my first blog. I have a few interesting draft posts there that I haven’t published. Being in the academy makes me more shy to publish posts on a whim.
At this point, I wish all my blogs were on WordPress, which is far superior to Blogger. Maybe that’ll be my big blogging project, to covert my blogs to wordpress.
Leave a comment