Lately I’ve been sharing a few book links – so excited to be making progress on non blog writing. It has me thinking about why I keep a blog?
I also keep trying to pin down what I want to write about and why to share it on a space like this.
So part of the reason I blog is to introduce people to my creative work, and give them a sample of poetry, memoir, photography and the creative process. Another reason – to share things that are truly important to me, like the essential evolving role of women in society, the need to care for the mental and spiritual health of our young people, and just things that are dear to my heart.
I did originally keep the blog for family and friends to read, but I don’t think most of them read it that often. Although lately my own children like to look up older stories now it has a longer back log of memories.
Sometimes I like to experiment and see if I can write humour, or try out a writing exercise and share it in the raw form. Other times I find an excerpt from a notebook, diary or old poem and like to stash it on my blog. A blog can truly be like a nest. I tend to treat facebook a bit that way and collect links and threads which I might then put into a storify creation.
Another reason I like to blog is preserve memories and events in the spaces of life and travel. Sometimes it’s small things and other times its massive things like cyclones. Life just happens and you go with the flow of that to write about.
This is not why everyone blogs, but it is the sort of blog, that personally I enjoy visiting. I’ll share some of the blogs I like visiting in some future blogs, but for today this blog ends with a free form capture in words of country life.
Standing on the edge of a circle of parents
talking about how many lessons they take their children to
on the treadmill of taxi parent hood
and the dreams they have for their children
Driving past the circling hawks that
even hang out
over the local supermarket
or the carrion on the road
Midday day terrors as a cane truck drives
up behind me too fast and honks on his horn
to push me off the road
and I am driving the speed limit
on a back road home
Listening to poetry on a verandah
about places, and domestic violence,
aids and post colonialism
and treaties that hide in
big words and non meaning words
that are tinged with superiority
Staying at a friend’s house and
wandering out to take sunrise pictures
but waking the dogs
My best friend says she can’t follow more than
four blogs about things that mean something to her
there are just too many blogs and too many stories
it’s cluttered chatter if you
are pulled into the vortex of blogland
And we laugh and continue to plan our book
A room full of marking and
a loungeroom taken over by
end of year teacher stress
and my dear husband who is
in that profession so many put down
but they are underpaid, overworked
and those who care so much work so hard
if only more parents could see our lounge room flood..
Writing country
or is country writing me
with memories and somewhere are the lost youth who’ve
given up on life and I wonder
how we rewrite the country to be a place to grow and dream
and not end up speaking
of yet another suicide
Gumboootspearlz 