Toodle Loo Bankybear

So my new blogosphere of devotion is SheWrites. Their tagline is "A Room of Her Own Just got Bigger" which makes me want to die it's so genius. I've been trying to figure out how to 'bust out' my blogging if you will. I'm not a genius photographer (not that I couldn't become one), I'm not a proficient chef (see reason #1), I don't enjoy posting pictures of my outfits online (though maybe one day?) and I don't get a kick out of blogging about other people's outfits. I don't plan weddings, or deliver babies, or craft my day away making custom camera straps or pants for children 4-10. I write. And I want to write well.

On my portfolio site (which is in desperate need of a facelift) I want my blog to be reflective of who I am as a writer. Here I can swear, and talk about my marriage. I can post links to cute baby pictures or hilarious YouTube vids. There I want to grow as a writer and make a point of exercising my ability in different forms. One of my creative writing classes next semester is writing for new media which looks at blogging and similar new forms. I want to take this next period of time to really become familiar with it.

Which is why I'm so excited about SheWrites. Like NaBloPoMo, it's a site that is a support to writers and to bloggers. And because they quote Virginia Woolf, they are fun, feministy types.

Hopefully, this site can help me to articulate better what kind of writer I want to be. I know why kind of writer I don't want to be but as G.K Chesterton says, you end up standing for nothing.

This is from SheWrites. May this be a fruitful union.

Literary Love Affair

When I first began to read, it was everything from Bailey School Kids Mysteries to Black Beauty and Little Women. I read Number the Stars and Under the Quilt of Night and they opened my eyes to the possibility, tragedy and fascination that the world held. I went through a lengthy "cute animal centred mystery" phase.

When I first began to write, I had books like I am David and The Giver on my mind. I began to write very young and while I can't necessarily stand by my writings of the 'old days'. I wanted to travel to distant places and my imagination could take me there.

When I first began to raid my mother's bookshelves, I read The Red Tent in junior high and it blew my mind. I think I read through the entire Old Testament that summer.

When I first began to have my bookshelves stocked by English professors, it was Margaret Atwood, Alice Monroe, and Sylvia Plath. I read Faulkner, Twain and Adrienne Rich. I read Aristotle, Anne Sexton, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

When I fell in love with poetry, it was Margaret Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, and Anne Sexton.

When I fell in love with the short story, Alice Monroe, Flannery O'Connor and Tim O'Brien.

I can't remember when I didn't love the novel. Lately it's been Audrey Niffenigger, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein actually scared me when I read it), and C.S Lewis.

Over the years my writing teachers, Dale Wallace, Bill Gaston, Carla Funk, Joan McDonald and John Gould. The introduced me to writers that I couldn't help but find. John Vailant, Leonard Cohen, Martin Amos and I, Claudia.

Music hijacks my mind. I've been listening to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford soundtrack lately and my fingers just fluttery. It pulls me into a different space. Explosions in the Sky does the same. Mind. Blown.

My friends Ginny Monaco, Jenica Chuahiock and Kirsti Doggart remind me that I'm a writer, even when I don't write. (My mom and dad do that, too.) We sit around our workshop and ooze what makes us passionate and simultaneously ecstatic about writing.

Who inspired you to write? Who inspires you now? Tell us the story of your literary love affairs.

Margaret Atwood (my computer will probably know her name off by heart I talk about her so much), Susan Perkins Gilman, Eli Weizel, John Vailant, Anita Diamant and C.S Lewis.