Maybe I never did.
Or maybe I had big brothers who were so much older and cooler than I was that I grew up having to do my own thing regardless of what they thought was cool or awesome and that made my skin thick and my will steady.
Or maybe that’s what my professors and writer friends have been telling me (us) to do all along. Maybe the whole point is to learn everything you can and then forget it when it comes time to perform (Waiting for Guffman, anyone?).
Ultimately, not worrying translates to a course to do something different, unique, rebellious.
As a writer and a fine arts graduate, it isn’t that writing a blog is meant to be defiant of what I was trained to do or that I want to do something despite my writer friends, as if there is a stupidity or carelessness in not writing freely.
I just feel like the public gives blogging and otherwise free displays of work or personality or ability a bad rep. I don’t want to stifle my creativity because of that.
After spending so much creative energy in college and grad school on assignments, getting to know established and emerging writers and figuring out my own craft I’ve been needing to let loose. You know, sometimes it just feels good to get reckless and free-wielding if only to remember why you started in the first place.
I was going to call this post “Why I Gave Up on the Industry Standard” because I wanted to rant or maybe just vent about the stress behind finding publishers and glad-handing people I don’t really know. I’m an introvert. I’m not mean or disinterested. It just takes me time.
To be fair to everyone in my program and the writers I have met, I’m not really known out in the communities that write the stuff I’m most interested in. I’m not really a part of the niche of my (purported) industry.
While I’ve come across really great and interesting writing in fantastically produced and well taken care of journals, magazines and what have you, I only feel like a reader, a fan. Worse, I start to feel like I’m only reading around the internet and in book stacks to find someone to publish my work. Yuck.
I want to meet people of like minds, temperaments and creative dispositions, not just get in contact with a publisher or send out poems blindly hoping a particular piece happens to resonate with someone on the right day in the right mood in the right light.
Here, the lights are always on. I just want my writing and person to be visible even when I’m not feeling extroverted.
I love the writing community. It’s inclusive, caring and invites the kinds of thinkers and doers that keep the world moving in the right directions. I’ve always felt welcomed and listened to. I just want more of that by spreading into the digital realm.
Twitter is great for writers, but I don’t have short, witty and sudden things to say. And reading so many Tweets in a given night takes away from other, full on book reading.
So, here I am, writing a blog without giving a about how perfect every post is, how on point each on keeps its focus, how ramble-y or stuck up I come across.
This is the long toss.
I’m hurling myself into the internet ether in ways that could be put toward publications and round table discussions on prose v. prosody (Well, hopefully that still happens) in the hope that I can connect with people and they can connect with me.
Hello writing/reading world, here I am. The quiet kid who wrote poems on the bus at track meets, who showed his first poem to the high school teacher everyone thought was cruel and unrelenting, the guy who regularly decides to do things others think are stupid or a waste of time. The guy who can’t figure out social media because social things always made him anxious or quiet. The guy who is pretty sure people exist but doesn’t know how exactly to find them.
Why not, you know?
Dan Dorman 