I started my first blog 15 years ago, posting to it for five years before taking it down. Back then a blog was a sort of long-form tweet, a wordy Instagram post. I had just moved to Hawaii and wanted to share my sliver of life with family and friends (and whoever else might be interested). A blog was a journal of the quotidian—one’s personal, but not too personal, life. Thinking about it now, I must have taken it down around the time I started using Instagram. Social media companies reduced the friction of sharing (and over-sharing) personal details with the world.
So why blog in 2022? I’ve been writing seriously for years and earned an MFA in Creative Writing a few months ago. I write with the hope that someone will publish my work, help deliver it into the world, not that I’ll put it out there (for free) myself. Blogging is so antithetical to my idea of writing that it hadn’t crossed my mind in years. But I now realize, after having a cohort of writers to read my work the past three years, I want people to see my work. I love to write and I write for myself first, but I also like knowing that someone beside the polite person who sends out New Yorker rejection notices is reading my writing.
I want a small grove in the woods where I can plant my creations and be content with the hope that whoever stumbles upon them will find a slight, but not inconsequential, pleasure in what I’ve made.
I envision The Everyday Essayist as a repository of thoughts. A place where I can warm up my fingers and mind, try out different ideas (as the French root of essay—essayer: to try—suggests) before developing them further into the writing projects I spend most of my time on. There will be no novel excerpts, no short stories or essays I hope to submit for publication, but perhaps some flash fiction, thoughts on life where I’m at (currently northern Japan), and random ideas on whatever is sticking in my mind.
More to come soon.
The Everyday Essayist 