Deanna planted a seed for this post by suggesting I might write my “blogging story.” Here ’tis.

“Our challenge is to edit Life’s choices, but not too carefully, and to remain fully awake in each moment to precious possibility.”

Those words were the final sentence of my very first blog post. The year was 2003. It was September, and the cable television news stations were full of candidate profiles for the upcoming 2004 elections. I remember listening with one ear while I cooked supper.

“. . . and the candidate’s spouse is keeping an online web log of campaign events.”

I put down a mixing spoon and sprinted into the living room.

“Buck! What did that reporter say?” My husband tried to explain, but I kept interrupting him.

“No — I mean that word. What was that word?”

Naturally, he thought I had (once again) taken leave of my senses. He has seen that look in my eye before! I went back into the kitchen, muttering to myself. “Web log. Web log. What on earth is that? I’m going to look it up.”

Dial-up internet service was still a minor miracle, so it took me a little while to get the full scoop on web logs, which had not yet fully morphed into blogs. Once I did, I was riveted by the concept.

The impetus for me to start a blog was curiosity, plain and simple. I had no training in http (hypertext transfer protocol) and blog templates were not nearly so seamless to create in 2003. Then, as now, one of the great rewards of blogging is that it forces us to learn constantly, and to reach beyond our initial grasp.

The first time I pushed the “publish now” button, I didn’t really believe it would work. It was exciting to see my post, called “Lunch Hour,” on the screen. But when my first commenter posted, that’s what set me on fire. It was a one-word comment: “Amen.” By following the link, I was able to find his blog and learn how to create a blog roll. Then, I was off to the races, finding and linking up with other pioneers in this wonderful new world.

Since that first blog post, I have pursued writing like a dog worrying a bone. There are days, even months, where I forget where I buried it for awhile. But I always come back. It wasn’t until 2008 that I realized I had written a lot of words, and that maybe some of them had “the stuff” to be polished and published. That realization started another chapter in my life. For the first time, I began to think of myself as a writer, and it made me incredibly happy.

My first published story was based on a blog post. My blog doesn’t attract hordes of readers, but like good friends in the real world, you don’t need many like-minded, genuine folks to form a meaningful community. It’s a writer’s learning lab for our small circle, and a great source of warm fuzziness that brightens my days and nights.

The blog archives are maintained with the help of “cloud” computing back-ups, so that anytime I want to pull out the files and explore old pathways of my life, the material is there: words, photographs, and even several videos — a multi-dimensional scrapbook of memoir raw material. Whenever I feel a writing dry spell coming on, the years of blog posts are like some great steaming compost pile of ideas and themes.

You can find the second blog post I ever published at Switched At Birth by clicking here. It was posted on September 19, 2003. It still breaks my heart a little to think of how four good friends broke their relationship and were never, like Humpty-Dumpty, able to put it back together again.

Thanks for reading — and thanks again, Deanna, for the invitation to “guest blog.”

I’m happy as peaches to have this chronicle of a writer/blogger’s beginning. Here’s more about her:

Elizabeth Westmark’s essays have appeared in Brevity Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Camroc Press Review, and Dead Mule, among others. She maintains two story-telling/memoir blogs, a food blog, and a microessay blog from her home in a Longleaf pine preserve near Pensacola, Florida, where she is writing the memoir of a small forest, essays, and short stories.

Thanks, Beth!

Mercy for Fil

Fil woke up in his usual world. It had been a life of twists and turns for sure, but being able to predict the beauty of the land he lived on, rain or shine, made it bearable. This was it: animals loving to see him, the same hills, fields, sounds, neighbors, and events.

Study of an Old Man's Profile, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze

One time, however, he knew that something was different. Close to ninety now, the noise of tiny children nearly finished, he thought he heard something else. He might have used the word silence, and maybe this was all there was to it. The moments seemed…friendly, a balanced and simultaneous mixture of remembering – and forgetting. All of his years of having to make up his mind, to always need to answer to someone, didn’t seem to matter. It was rather nice.

He didn’t know what he was doing next. Sometimes he thought his mind had forgotten to care, but he didn’t know for sure. Other times he spent hours wondering what else there was. There didn’t seem to be a straight answer, or the answer, being straight, wasn’t quite right.

He decided it would be best to forget to remember. He pulled on his clothes, laced up his boots, and returned to his fairly lonely, but safer, existence.

One’s a loaner, the Scientific American issue from 2005 about consciousness. Thanks to my friend Laura I can browse some of science’s surmises on the brain, since I have an idea in my brain to write a piece about decision-making and belief.

Three are brand new. The book I’m holding, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, if you don’t know by the picture, is about Richard Brautigan. It arrived yesterday, and although I’m well into rereading On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, I scanned the first sentence of Fishing and was hooked. My great thanks go to Keith Abbott, good friend of Brautigan’s throughout the late sixties and seventies, for putting into words his knowledge of the man and of the times they shared in Haight-Ashbury and beyond. (Also thanks for updating this biography and including lots of pictures.)

For some time I’ve wanted to read Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola. I’ve only begun the introduction, but it looks greatly worthwhile.

And while I’m not a book review person, I will probably post about my friend Linda Clare’s novel, The Fence My Father Built, after I finish it. Linda was one of the frozen writers I visited in December who looked joyful despite her circumstances signing books at the fairgrounds. (Another of them, Dorcas Smucker, had her latest book for sale then, too. I’ve already finished and recommend Downstairs the Queen is Knitting as a great follow-up to her others.)

My treat to myself a few months ago was subscribing to Poets and Writers, and I hope to make time to finish each brimming edition as it arrives.

I haven’t even mentioned that in November I finished Dracula, and I really do recommend it. Not for nothing a classic. You’ll see where much of our vampire lore comes from. I learned that Buffy the Vampire Slayer got it right in her “dusting” method of killing vamps, mostly. The sinister creatures crumble to dust, if they are really old when you stake them (and cut off their heads, by the way, just to be sure).

One more book I’ll bring up, because I’ve dubbed it my favorite for 2009. While tending my dying dog, I plucked from the shelf a book I’d found months ago at Goodwill but never yet started. Stephen King recommended it as his favorite memoir, so I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing. But the title, A Three Dog Life, drew me. It’s a wonderful story, not really about the dogs, although they are critical characters. Abigail Thomas, you’re my current creative nonfiction hero.

In those days going around with Brautigan was like traveling inside one of his novels.
~Keith Abbott, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, Astrophil Press, 2009~

How apt an analogy for the work each of these authors has put in. I don’t yet know, though I’d like to someday, what it takes to persevere through the writing, production, and sale of a book. I’ve had tastes so far of the chill in lonely hours predawn, the icy stomach pit when the Inbox message reads, “Thank you for giving us the chance to consider for publication … we appreciate your interest and your commitment ….”

Yep. I know it takes commitment. The frozen writers I bought books from know even better, and still they smiled. I just hope they warmed up sometime later.