Introduction
November 18th, 2005After 25 years of journaling, the prospect of blogging seems daunting. Of course, I am a sporadic journalist. Once told that journalists must write daily, I nearly quit. Fortunately, I had the good sense to adapt my haphazard style to my journals–I simply created multiple journals for multiple subjects and wrote whatever I felt like writing, whenever the mood struck.
Occasionally I take my journals into class to show my writing-phobic students what they look like and talk about the pleasures of writing. My journals began with political diatribes and sketches of plants, then in college I started dream journals (I kept those up for ten years, until I had my two boys, at which point I no longer lounge in bed in the morning–but that’s ok). After taking a film class, a journal of movie critiques kept me busy. I also started journaling about language issues, as I began teaching an intro. to linguistics class (my kids’ early language experiments are recorded here). Of course, poetry covers several pages of different journals, and now that I have started to travel to conferences, I take both a travel journal and a teaching journal (airplanes are great places to think about class, especially if I can avoid talking to the alcoholic elderly men who sit next to me).
As I confront blogging, I am again given advice on how to do it–and again I am told that good blogs have daily entries. Well, I am not making any promises, except that I promise not to have a daily blog! However, I think that some friends and family might check in once in awhile (which would be a much larger readership than my written journals, which no one will see until I die). So, if you stop by, I hope you like what you read.