Back on the Blog

Sorry I haven't written in a long time.  I've been busy reading.  And living my life.  It's been pretty amazing in the past few years.

I'm not the same person who started writing this blog, but I'm pretty close.  I may be wiser.  I've certainly been more places.

Last week a good friend said she missed my blogging, and challenged me to start up again.  So here it goes.  Back to the blog.

What were you thinking?

The source for this post is my recent project of "spring cleaning" on my gmail account... since I hadn't used it in two years, a fair number of unread messages, mostly from listservs, had piled up.  When I merged in all the messages I received as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had 1,637 unread messages.

The most interesting part came when I went through my "drafts" folder.  Which is a snapshot of ideas I was in the middle of forming two years ago:

What use are stories?

Last August, I had the singular pleasure of reading, for the first time, a few essays by Brian Doyle, as part of a class about essays. At the end of that class, I had another great pleasure and privilege: that of sitting in the room during a phone interview with Brian Doyle himself. Here are my notes:

"The reason that poetry is in the end the greatest literary art is that it’s closest to music. It can be easily abused. There’s more bad poetry than anything else.

To say something big in a small space is a great virtue.

Part of our training as writers is to write poorly, you have to learn the craft by learning what not to do.

A lot of early writing is about the self, it’s kind of self absorbed—maturity as a writer involves looking at the glory and beauty in other things.