I'm semi-surprised it took me this long (ten years?) to rethink the name I use for online writing. Nearly since it began being a thing, a genre, it was classified as a blog, a conflation of web and log (just another name for journal or diary). Blog is certainly better than wournal or dog.
Still blog doesn't seem to get it for me now, nor does blogger. It's gotten such a taint with stand-up comedians taking some hilarious pot shots at outraged "bloggers" in their acts (Iliza Shlesinger and Bill Burr are two that leapt immediately to mind). Writer is so much better than blogger.
I tend to love the simplest of terms, like that: writer.
That's still the first thing I say when someone asks me what I do. I say, "I'm a writer." (If I say I'm a teacher, there's some surprise and some sympathy; if I say I'm an English teacher, people respond, "I better watch what I say"; if I say I'm an English professor, folks just back away slowly.)
The things I write online are really stories of my thinking. My writing online acts as a space for the preservation of a thought or two. (I rarely write fiction.) I look back on writing I've done--saved to the long memory of the web--and there it is, my thinking made visible. I can recall where I was, why I was thinking that way, where an idea came from, maybe even who my audience was (me and sometimes a person or two in particular).
I've found that by writing online, I have a kind of accountability that I don't have in relative privacy (pretending that writing on a computer is private? ha). Writing on paper doesn't do the same thing for me: 1) I want to write faster than I physically can; 2) I can't always read my own handwriting. But I do like to think and like to go back and synthesize my thinking. I've spent my whole grown up life figuring out how things connect: story, history, poetry, science, art, dance. I read for joy and I read to connect. Writing online helps me chronicle how I make connections. THEN, the most important part: I have previous thinking to tap into for teaching.
Teaching is the thing that drives my reading and my writing. It's the thing I am most about at this point in my life. Everything, all the threads I collect and pull, really weave into that tapestry: having many threads for this work is important. Writing online helps me remember what my thinking has been. My thoughts become visible for me to find again.
Writing is that, though, isn't it? A memory keeper. Whether we tell stories of who we are, what we think, or stories entirely fictional, those are memories kept through the act of writing and potentially sharing. Online is simply the easiest. It might not last, but for now, it's happening and it feeds my need.
I've struggled with writing on paper for years--I got out of the habit and can type much faster than handwriting. BUT... once in 2007, my struggles were near crisis level. A dear friend forced me into a writing camp with pen and paper for a week of sheer bliss. I thought it was hell on Earth. At first. I was offended that there was no wifi in the rooms--only in the lobby. I was shocked when we could only write in class with pen and paper. How backward! But I paid for it, and I was going to deal with it the best I could. I had a hard time ratcheting down the energy to write thoughtfully and slowly, but it was a good lesson. I created substantial writing that week and finished one big project that I still love. I look back on that time with deep love and longing and pride. I now occasionally write in notebooks for inspiration and/or collection, but I lose the notebooks still (one of my failings with "real" objects). I don't enjoy that part of who I am. Lost notebooks feel something like losing a book, those oh-so-precious vessels of get-away-ness, well, like this:
By Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul –
When I've worked in a notebook for a long time and lose it, I'm so heart sore. I may lose everything on the internet one day, but in the meantime, I know where I put my thinking.
(An aside, I just remembered this poem by Emily Dickinson existed--and I want to assign it for my spring class on creative thinking since we'll be exploring metaphor. I never would have remembered this poem without this meandering. Writing is thinking.)
As far as I know, no one in my family wrote to think like I do. Many wrote letters filled with gossip about the family, about what was happening at work, or what they were growing. (Most were big gardeners--all having come from farms. And by the way, they were all very competitive gardeners, really into one-upsmanship with the gardening stories when we'd all be together. Sometimes even insulting each other, "Oh Bill, your beefsteaks are never as big as you think they were--everyone knows you have bad eyesight" or "Lucille, honey, your squash was so mealy last year, it should have been squished.")
I can only think of one great uncle who wrote, and I didn't know that until I was almost out of high school. I'm not sure others knew of his writing. Great Uncle Earnest (he's long dead) wrote notebook after notebook after notebook and kept all his writings in a trunk. I saw the notebooks and the trunk when my family visited him and great Aunt Betty (she was my maternal grandfather's older sister). He had heaps of notebooks. All neatly written in with blue or black ink. All kinds of notebooks, spiral, perfect bound, composition books, steno pads. At least, that's what I recall. I only saw the notebook trunk once.
I have no idea if anyone read his notebooks after he died, or if anyone even knew they were in a truck upstairs in the corner of an unused room. I don't remember what he wrote about: fact or fiction or both. I only remember that he said he felt compelled to write, so he did. I vaguely recall reading through a couple of pages, but mainly I flipped through notebook after notebook, stunned that he had written so much. The handwriting was so neat and even. But there was just so much. I am talking a big trunk filled with notebooks. Like Anaïs Nin-level notebooks (she wrote diaries from a very young age until her death). [Photo from the Anaïs Nin Foundation web site: the author with her volumes of notebooks in a bank vault.]
I had no intention of writing about Uncle Earnest when I started this, but WHOOSH, I start writing in this kind of space and memories come flooding in, and now here I am. Writing for me. For anyone who wants to read it. That is how memory works: online or in notebooks, in trunks in the mountains of Colorado where my great Uncle used to live. And that is how writing works, if you let it.
I was surprised to learn Uncle Earnest was a writers, as I chiefly remember Uncle Earnest as a funny man; his pratfalls were designed to made me laugh--he would often "lose" his nose in the screen door accident, then stick his thumb between his index and middle finger and say, "Oh no, the screen door lopped off my nose again." Then he'd pretend to put it back on. I would laugh hysterically. He would also pretend to fall over the ottoman and onto the couch and end up with one leg over the back of the couch. Then he'd blame my grandmother for trying to kill him because he said he thought the chicken was too salty. He was what my family called, "a real kidder." In a good way. He was thoughtful and kind-hearted and quite entertaining when playing cards, too (something my family usually took very seriously). He was the sort of adult who bothered to interact with kids and make visiting a delight rather than a chore.
Growing up, I was much left with my grandmother, Blanche, who I called Nonna. She was a natural born entertainer, like Uncle Earnest. But instead of slap stick and jokes, her medium was the story. She told me stories about living on a farm in Wisconsin in the early part of the 20th century. She told me stories about the one-room classroom she learned in with a teacher called Miss Sydney Lingin. She told me stories about her siblings, all of whom were so different but each one so talented musically and vocally. Everyone played multiple instruments and all sang. She told me stories of the pickle factory that her family's farm supplied with cucumbers. She told me about a legendary encounter with hogs. She told me about how her sister was a delicate little flower who never worked on the farm but always was inside doing "women's" work. She sang me songs from her childhood, her youth, WWI (I can still hum a few songs from way back then.) Titles of her stories included these: "Percy and the Rotten Cucumbers," "Why The Pigs Attacked," "Fern Pees the Bed Again," "The Rooster Who Ate Mother," "The Frozen Flagpole," "Leo and the Baseball Team," "Donny Won't Go to School," "Picking Blackberries with Bob."
She also told me stories of the 1920s, of her life in Chicago, then in Minneapolis. She told me stories about her nieces and nephews, her siblings all grown up. Sometimes she included were stories of heroic deeds: the time Aunt Fern's house blew up and, her brother, my great uncle Leo, rescued her children by catching them as they jumped from the second story while the house burned around them. He was burned but got every kid out. That's the time in Aunt Fern's life when her head started to shake and it never stopped.
After that, one of her children lost all her teeth from sucking bread and she later set her brother on fire. One child became a professional piano player and a famous alcoholic. Aunt Fern's head never stopped shaking. Everyday she would get up anyway, get dressed in a suit and stockings and jewelry with a fancy hairdo, and make her house perfect; she cooked, she gardened, she canned. She sewed everything from women's and men's suits to wedding dresses to coats to elaborate draperies and of course, quilts. She crafted everything, and that included a Christmas tree she created one year made entirely of sequins, styrofoam balls, and toothpicks. I am not kidding.
Nonna told me stories about making bathtub gin and going to flapper parties and stories about her children, my mother, Jean, and Uncle Dicky, and what they were like and what they did and where they lived and what they liked and didn't. My uncle liked cod liver oil, so he would offer to take my mother's portion if she'd do him a favor, let him play with her doll or read him a story. I didn't even know what cod liver oil was (I do now, but yuck); clearly, it was disgusting to my mother but my uncle strangely loved it, and somehow it was very funny the different ways he'd try to out maneuver my grandmother to get my mother's portion of cod liver oil. He'd tap my grandmother on the opposite shoulder when she was trying to give my mother a tablespoon of cod liver oil, and when my Nonna would turn away, my uncle would swoop in and suck it up. Cod. Liver. Oil. If that's not oddly hilarious, nothing is.
Writing is thought made visible: thought stories. Just look what I resurrected now through this text. I wanted to rename what it is I do as a writer online, and I wandered through life story and family history, recalling cod liver oil. Cod. Liver. Oil. It elicited such a strong reaction from my mother all her life, that I only had to say those three words, and she'd have to stop what she was doing and gag for just a moment. "Cod liver oil" got me out of quite a few jams (that's what it's good for).
This is not a blog, a log, a web, a dog, a wournal, or a tweet. It's a chronicle about what I am thinking, what I believe is valuable to ponder, it's a story that must come out. It's creativity and fun and joy. It's hard work. (Useful writing is always hard work. I've been drafting a bit on and off for four days and changing a little here and there. I also lost a chunk through some sort of pilot error, a whole paragraph I cannot remember and couldn't reconstruct.)
Then thoughts are made visible, then I can track them. It is always, for me, that writing is thinking is learning.
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