Wherefore blog?

When I was five years old, I wrote a poem for Marietta, the mother of a son who died in his early twenties. Marietta, a sculptor and artist, asked five-year-old me for permission to use a line of my poem on her son's headstone.

And so it is.

In childhood I always, always, thought that I would be a published author; I sat at the kitchen table in our old farmhouse and made little books, complete with a handdrawn publisher's mark: "ReadWell"

Writing came easy early for me, and for most of my life, I kept handwritten journals. My preference was for the inexpensively bound office Record books. The nice big pages and sturdy covers (canvas, likely to fray and bend at the corners in the way of antique ledgers) lent status to my thoughts, as if someday far in the future somebody would find them and sit poring over my words in a dusty attic, lambent sunshine illuminating the aged pages.

When I was a student I hungered for creative writing assignments. There was always a short period of complete blankness, and then I would feel The Zone coming in like benign fog, and once I gave myself over to it, my brain went someplace else and I was inside whatever I was writing. It was never work for me; it was always a deeply satisfying exercise in getting the mood right, making the words work.

Years of writing emails and business letters have kept the spark alive, but I want the structure of writing, for someone else's consumption, what comes out of my own head. I want to create here something that brings out an "exactly what I would have said!" or "What meaty language..." in somebody who's reading me, whether or not the aha! is reported to me.

I have not shared the fact of this blog with anyone in my day-to-day life because I don't want to be fettered by the need to speak to someone whose attitudes and thoughts I already know. I can do that with email, and that's a different world.

I blog because blogging is a satisfaction to my own soul.