blogging about writing

So I decided to start a blog to document the literary related things in my life.
I've had some blogs before but never any under my real name. This will probably still feel like a persona.
I was going to just go with a simple background to reflect my boring personality, but then this really pretty coral-themed hummingbird template popped up and I had to choose it!

I'm really awful at writing creative non-fiction (or even uncreative non-fiction) so I think I'm going to start off in point form:

-Throughout March I've been trying to write a short 800 word article about Talking Fresh 9 which was amazing, occurred march 4-5 and featured incredible poets Dan Tysdal, Brenda Schmidt, Karen Solie, Michael Trussler. I also did an email interview with Karen Solie and she was incredibly generous in answering my really dumb questions that took me hours of agony to make seem not quite so dumb. In the midst of trying to write an article that captured the hilariousness of Dan Tysdal or the inspiring seminar by Brenda Schmidt, an article that wouldn't merely summarize Solie's thoughts on nostalgia or Trussler's anecdotes about Mandel, I stumbled upon a really lovely and perfect piece by Kathleen Wall on blueduets.blogspot.com. So instead of trying to cover the same ground that she did, I referred my hypothetical reader to her summary of the panel discussion and hacked my way through writing the rest of my article.

One day I would like to be able to write creative non-fiction better. But I think I have issues with the self-reflexiveness of it all. The New Quarterly is holding a personal essay contest and on their blog The Literary Type, they describe their criteria:

"i) I want to learn something new, but
ii) I want the author to take me there through his or her personal connection with the subject matter, and iii) I want to fall in love with the words you use to bring both halves of the equation together"

In regards to 1) I feel that I have nothing to teach (yet), 2) I feel uncomfortable in forcing the reader to experience things through the lens of my experiences... 3) I like the part about words but I feel weird about teaching the reader while simultaneously making the piece about ME. I realize this is really paradoxical considering I am currently writing a personal blog about myself.... but I think in my creative work I want to maintain a sense of impersonality.

I'm in a creative writing class and all semester we've been looking at poets who are either really personal and confessional in their writing (like some of P.K. Page and Starnino's poems), and those who are really impersonal and often use personas (Cohen or Bok). The other day after workshopping my portfolio my prof mentioned that my work is among the most impersonal in the class. I was really surprised to hear this since I feel my work is really self indulgent a lot of the time but then I realized she is absolutely right, at least in regards to current projects. I'm writing a book of riddles, in which the speaker is almost completely obscured by persona, and other poems that are really far removed from the speaker's perspective. I think my discomfort with the personal is probably due to (incorrectly) equating the confessional with a sort of stream of consciousness unrefined or theraupeutic outpouring of emotion. I feel like no one will care if I just write poems about myself and boys or whatever. If I write poems about ideas, then I feel like (probably people still won't care) but the poems will be based on ideas or form, and will be stronger.  I realize this is ridiculous because a lot of the poems I really love are incredibly confessional and based on personal experiences. I do feel like when I start to gain more confidence with my writing, I'll be able to approach more personal topics. Just right now I feel better maintaining a distance... almost a guise of objectivity which I know is false and ridiculous and even more self-indulgent than in the first place.

Yet when I write academic essays, I always place myself and my perspective at the forefront. Usually my essays are more about me figuring out what I'm arguing rather than just arguing the point. I think that in "academic" essays I'm more comfortable with this because I'm trying to resist the overwhelming wall of impersonality that academia sometimes feels like.

-I also recently got contacts and I feel like this is related to my writing perspective... Without the frames of my glasses, I feel like I can't hide as well from the world around me. I'm forced to take it all in at once and my perspective is at the forefront instead of obscured. I'll have to think about this a bit more for sure. Thinking how optics are so important to Page, ideas of the scop.

There's a reading at Campion College tonight--Dennis Cooley and Fred Wah. Pretty exciting. I will write about it tomorrow.