All Quiet on the Blogging Front

 

Where lies the path to obscurity? Is it here, within the blogosphere? I scanned a minor conversation on Reddit earlier today where people wrote about using Chat GPT to create blog posts —this is now common. Writing is difficult, it's nice to find help, yet writing is so much more than the ability to string together words. It's about having something to say, something relevant (relevance can be chased or it can be created), and the drive to put it into words.

I spend too much time on a little device, fat-finger typing character-limited essays that exist at the algorithmic whims of Instagram. Why? We say the people we want to reach are there. I wonder if that is the reason I do not write much, here, any longer. 

A writer I met at MacDowell (formerly Colony) encouraged me to start a blog —in 2007. It was the thing, a new frontier of communicating directly with people. For a few months I struggled to begin; what will I say, how will I say it. By October, however, I finally etched a few words onto the ephemeral pages of the Web. Those words can still be found with a little exertion on the part of the reader, but I won't point to them. Frankly, they're embarrassing. A decade later, after chronicling so many activities and events, what I had to say had changed, the form those words took had changed, and I believe I became a better writer and, maybe more importantly, a better editor. The effort became less about chronicling and, I think, more about synthesis and more about connecting the visual arts, my visual practices, to broader cultural themes and questions. The writing became a way to pull it all together.

By the time I was running my native plant nursery, Shelterwood, I had little interest in journaling the effort. Much older now, close to 20 years after initiating this blog, I question how I became who I am, what had motivated me toward this self. This has led, among other creative endeavors, to writing privately. And this private activity was effortless, at first, until it became a lengthy bit of writing. I understand its form, in totality, but within that recognizable form is a palimpsest of words that is hard to unravel —a tangled mass of strands that needs to be pulled apart. 

Living in the mountains of Colorado, the spouse of an artistic director at a well-known arts center, wondering what's next, with a few projects on the table that I wish to complete and want to avoid, simultaneously. This is where I am.