It has been ELEVEN YEARS since I began blogging. Nearly half of my life has been spent partly writing to strangers and friends on the internet.
It was late in February, which is a time known for birthing wild ideas. I was a bright-eyed, overly romantic 14-year-old, and naturally I felt I had things to SAY. Really, most of it related to swooning over fictional characters.
I remember when I first discovered the world of homeschooled period-drama fangirl bloggers. Finally, I thought, here is somewhere I might fit in well. And I did. I am still ever so grateful for the world of whimsy which that first blog opened up for me. The fact that I, a homeschooled teenager who didn’t even use a computer until I was 12 years old and had zero computer skills, could start a blog for free and catapult my thoughts about British costume dramas from the 1980s out into the universe where they were met by people who were interested to read them — wow. That was truly a gift.
It’s rather amusing to have a sort of time capsule that takes you back to what you were doing and what you were thinking so many years ago. At the same time, it can be awfully embarrassing. This is why people burn their journals. This is why I have burned journals. (This is also why my first blog is private.)
Writing has always been my impulse, my modus operandi, my default art form. I cannot imagine living without this urgency to write down stories that I conjure up or things I hear people say.
Once, my mom signed me up for a creative writing camp. It was at a university, and it was a small group of 16 and 17-year-olds like me who were mostly city kids. Basically, this was a pre-college scenario attempting to inspire us to attend their creative writing program. We ate in a cafeteria and analyzed a lot of modern poetry. I remember thinking most of the assignments were dumb and stifling. Also, why on earth was everything we were reading so dismal and depressing? I did not want to write slam poetry, and I could not identify with being suicidal. I disliked being told what to do, especially when it was a limit on how many words I could include. All I wanted to write about were pioneers in covered wagons, apple blossoms in spring, and my dog, my farm, and my family.
Though I’m sure the writing exercises were helpful in some way, the whole experience had the opposite effect of what was probably intended. The result was that I knew I definitely didn’t want to go to college to study writing. I would probably never write to make money, because this somehow took all the fun and the romance out of it for me. It wasn’t for naught, though, because I ended up going back to that darling town to attend the college across the street for a different trade. My dear, quirky Alfred. If I had not spent two years in that town, I would have missed out on a lot of beauty.
By the time I was 20, I was far too embarrassed of my first blog to leave that thing up for people to creep on. I began this blog to chronicle my time during college. There was little mention of period dramas anymore, because my world had become much broader. Instead of swooning over fictional characters, I had begun to swoon over real people. I wrote songs about thwarted love and told stories to occupy toddlers and watched far less tv.
Now it is six years later, and I am not a wild college girl anymore but a demure married woman. Well, I don’t know about demure, but married, most definitely. My sweet, hardworking Anthony — he is the opposite of me. He is not a capital R romantic, and no love songs about thwarted love were necessary in our story. He is patient and kind. He won me with his quiet strength and heart. We live an old-fashioned life here on the Plains, this unruly, wind-whipped territory I am still learning to love well.
Isn’t it funny the way things keep a hold on you? For some it may be gardening, others flying a plane, or for others it may be their particular job that they just know they’re meant to be doing and they can’t imagine giving it up. Perhaps we’ll say it’s a calling. I’ve used that word before in reference to my literary inclination, though I’m still not sure what that means. Called to what? If I write only ever for my own expression, it feels incomplete and even selfish sometimes. If I write with the intent to follow a strategy or system designed to make money, it feels ingenuine, and before long I detest myself.
(I’m definitely not saying that people who write for money do so for less than honorable reasons or that it makes what they write any less valuable!)
I still haven’t the wherewithal to turn my love for writing into a source of income, at least not for the moment. I am too fragile. My words are too precious. They are too young and naive to meet the world yet. Plus…I don’t follow rules very well.
My dream ever since I was a little girl is to write and publish books, and it’s still my dream. It’s not a very practical dream, but then, it’s not the prerogative of dreams to be practical. In between raising little ones, and keeping house for my husband, and milking a cow, and loving my neighbor, it would be such a thrill to put at least one good story out into the world in print for others to read.
For the moment, though, I’m just here. I’m in a little apartment in Ohio, letting my imagination latch onto all the beautiful things there are to be found in Ohio. (There are some, be it known.) I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done, and hopefully do it better. I’ll keep journaling what life is like in this particular time and place for posterity’s sake. I am honored to use this humble online space to share some of these stories!
Thank you, as always, for being the reader to my writer. ❤
“Keep up your writing. Write the things you know and understand…” she smiled down on her, “…your own prairies and your own people. Write it in your own way…the way you see it. Don’t imitate or copy…you wouldn’t do that with words…but don’t ever do so with the spirit of the thing. Don’t try to look at your own prairies and your own people as an outsider does. Interpret them as you feel about them…knowing that there will be others who see and feel as you do.”
~ A White Bird Flying, Bess Streeter Aldrich
Threshing Floor Kitchen 