It has once again been over a year since I’ve posted on this writing blog, so it’s once again high time I gave an update! My projects have been trucking along. I’m excited to share what I’ve been up to.
What’s more, ten years have now passed since I first began writing. Ten years! That’s a big milestone—so I’ve been reflecting on the whole past decade of writing and life, and I want to tell you about that too.
What’s Been Going On with My Books
Long ago, when I started writing my first memoir, I never thought I’d still be working on the same project now. But here we are—because the project has morphed and grown, and what started as one book about Peace Corps has turned into a four-part series about my whole life.
And because of the order in which the writing has unfolded, it happens that the Peace Corps book will be the very last of the four to be completed. Poor, neglected Peace Corps book! It’ll be delicious to finally pick it back up again—which I’ll be doing soon.
There are a couple reasons for the delay. In a ten-year span, it’s unsurprising that life threw out some hurdles that interrupted my focus. There was Dad’s cancer and death, my own illness, Ron’s and my move to Portland, and, most recently, the pandemic. Writing takes concentration, especially book writing. Each of these big events derailed me for a while. Now I’m back in the flow again, but I often feel like I’m racing against time, trying to finish my books before the next major disruption occurs!
Another reason for the slow progress was my initial inexperience. It took me a lot of trial and error to learn how to write a book—or at least, a book that felt right.
Way back in 2013, I did complete a draft of one book, the book I’d decided to write about my dad. I wrote it fairly quickly, in under a year. But in the end, the draft didn’t feel like me—something felt inauthentic about its voice.
What I really needed was more time: more years of writing, but also, more years of living. I needed to discover who I am, what I want to say, and how I want to say it. I needed all those pesky disruptions.
So now, years later, I’m a far more confident and skilled writer than when I started, and I’m a more grounded and mature person, too. Although I still have plenty more to learn about writing, I’m confident that the material I produce is truly my voice. That makes me much more efficient.
I’m undaunted by how much time has passed. Things are on track. I have two out of four drafts completed, and I think (fingers crossed!) I can get the other two finished in the next couple years. Then I’ll begin editing, showing drafts to my family, and considering how to market the books.
Stay tuned!
Why I Decided to Edit My Blogs
Meanwhile, I’ve also been blogging.
Even though my memoirs take up the bulk of my time and I’m pouring my heart into them, they’re invisible to the world. So I’m grateful for my website and blogs, where I produce writing I share frequently. I love the feeling of creating something I’m proud of and showing it to people I know. And I miss the working world, where I often felt like I was making a difference to others or to the landscape—so I love how blogging helps me contribute to others’ lives in the here and now.
A month ago, it occurred to me that if I died unexpectedly, my blogs would be the only thing I ever published. I often have morbid thoughts like this. From a young age, I’ve shaped decisions around how they’ll feel looking back from my deathbed, and my life-threatening health crisis in 2016 gave me a keen awareness of my own mortality.
What if I died in a car crash? I thought. Or died of COVID-19? None of my books would be done, so they’d never see the light of day, but my blog posts would become part of my legacy. Did I like this legacy?
The thought made me uneasy. After ten years of blogging, I couldn’t remember everything I’d written. What if I’d said something mean about someone? What if I’d expressed an opinion I no longer agreed with? What if some of the writing was just really…bad?
So I decided to take a month off from memoirs, read through everything I’d written on my blogs, and edit it. Briefly, I wondered if this would be ethical. Would modifying old posts be dishonest, a misrepresentation of my journey to the present? But soon I realized I didn’t care about that question. My website has my name on it, and it’s published online. It’s my offering to the world. I want it to contain energy, ideas, and craftsmanship that make me proud.
I decided to be conscientious as I edited—I’d minimize changes to content (as opposed to style)—but I’d go ahead and edit stuff I’d written in the past.
A Blast from the Past: Revisiting Old Blog Posts
As it turned out, reading through my old blog posts was a lot of fun.
I’d forgotten what a long and varied history my blogging had seen. I’d started writing in response to the 2011 Wisconsin protests that broke out in Madison after Governor Scott Walker announced his “Budget Repair Bill.” Soon afterwards, I began writing about civil political discourse, which was quickly becoming a passion as I helped co-found Reach Out Wisconsin with Ron and our Republican friends.
Meanwhile, I also began writing about writing. Blogging helped catalyze my decision to take time off work to “Become A Writer.” As I made the shift, I began interspersing writing posts among my politics posts. The rhythms of writing took getting used to—at first, I experienced anxiety being home by myself and focusing so intensely on my own history. And I wrote things I was learning about style, editing, and voice. Later, I moved the writing posts into this separate blog, recognizing that not all my political followers cared about my writing process.
It was moving to relive these two beginnings, my life in politics and my life as a writer. Reading posts from this era, for several days I was awash in a melancholy nostalgia.
Ten years ago, I was able-bodied. Ron and I were immersed in a vibrant community of friends, people we lived near and saw almost daily. At work, I felt accomplished, respected, and confident in my own scientific expertise in stream ecology. And as Reach Out Wisconsin rapidly took shape, I became a community leader, often interviewing in local and occasionally national media.
In those years, I had a sense of belonging and stature that I haven’t felt since. I miss it all. And I miss the culture of Madison, which is more cheerful and lighthearted than somber, intellectual Portland. I miss the beer and brats and fish fries and cheese curds—even though nowadays, I wouldn’t be able to eat any of them!
In 2012, everything changed. There’s a six-month gap in my posts, followed by an explanation: my father had died of cancer, and I’d stopped writing to spend the rest of the year attending to him and to Ron’s and my wedding. After that, there’s another gap, then in 2014, the beginning of my blog about ulcerative colitis.
Now I was no longer able-bodied and no longer leading Reach Out Wisconsin, and Ron and I were moving to Portland. My new, all-consuming focus became my illness. My posts covered the lead-up to my 2016 health crisis, its unfolding, and its aftermath.
And I changed. This illness is where much of my wisdom has come from—the wisdom I was missing when I started writing. Although I’m no longer as able-bodied, I’m now more grounded, and I began to find a new, quieter, calmer writing voice.
In 2018, another dramatic shift occurred when I began blogging about politics again for the first time in six years. I had regained a semblance of health, and I was finally ready to once again contribute my voice to the world and promote civil discourse.
But it’s fascinating to see the difference between my political blogging in 2018 and 2012. Back when I’d started, I was earnest and optimistic, confident in my message. In 2018, that confidence became tempered with a new defensiveness.
Now we were in the middle of the Trump administration. While the civility movement was building momentum across the country, many other voices were decrying civility, protesting that we needed to fight, not build bridges. Racism and racial injustice had come to the forefront of the national discourse. Civility was often equated with tolerance of injustice. I wrote many posts parsing out what I meant by civility, and explaining that we can be civil and fight for justice at the same time.
Then the pandemic began. Although at first, I lost my focus, I eventually regained it and had a very productive year-and-a-half. I’ve had plenty to write about, in both my politics and colitis blogs.
What I Changed and Added
It was exhilarating to read through all this history. To my relief, I found very little that I needed to change in terms of content. Reading my old posts often filled me with pride. I like the energy and messages I’ve been putting out into the world! In my memory, I had amplified the negatives, the ways I’d fallen short. I’d overlooked the positive things I had achieved. Isn’t this often the case?
This is one of the gifts I’ve gotten from memoir-writing, and now from blogging as well. Revisiting my old writings reminds me that for most of my life, I’ve been a good person, and that the self-criticism in my mind is often overblown.
At the same time, I did find plenty to change. After not looking at these old posts for many years, it was easy to see flaws in writing quality. I flew through the posts, often correcting grammatical errors, eliminating wordy paragraphs, or rearranging sentences for clarity. I’ve made the writing better. If anyone ever does go back to read what I’ve written, it’ll be more enjoyable.
What’s more, I’ve restored many old posts I had previously taken down. These were posts I removed because I couldn’t figure out how they fitted in—posts detailing the 2011 protests, or making arguments for my own liberal stances on various political issues, or describing early insights about my writing process. These posts didn’t always fit into my blogs’ various iterations.
But they do fit now, and it was fun to read and restore them. Here are a few of my favorites, in case you’re curious or want a dose of nostalgia:
- Posts about the Wisconsin protests, starting here. They include many pictures!
- “My Other Gun Story” – when my sister and I faced a loaded gun.
- “My (Free!) Nose Job” – the tale of my broken and mended nose.
- “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” – on how language shapes culture.
With the restored material back online, this website now contains the vast majority of the blog posts I’ve ever written. It has become a wonderful archive of the last decade of my life. There are around two hundred posts, and I’m guessing they contain around 500,000 words—something like three to five books’ worth of writing.
That’s right—if you count my blogs, over the past ten years, I’ve drafted enough material for several more books!
Renewed Energy for Blogging
When I started this blog-editing process, I was actually imagining wrapping up my blogs. Not quitting altogether, but beginning to write less frequently, so I could focus more energy on my books. Blogging has always been an add-on, a back-burner project I did largely for fun.
But this process has changed my thinking. My main projects are still my books, but I now see much greater value in my blogs as well.
I’m still feeling proud. I don’t have a large audience, but I believe in my messages of healing, resilience, and compassion. The world needs to hear these messages, and I do want to keep writing them.
I always have a giant backlog of post ideas, and I thought I might now begin tucking it away. Hadn’t I already said everything important? But now I see that I still have a lot more to say!
So I’m planning many upcoming posts—around eighty in all. They’ll be scattered among my three blogs, with many about politics, some about chronic illness, and a few about the writing process. Over the coming year-and-a-half, I hope to post them all. Then we’ll see if I still have more to say. 🙂
(For followers of all three of my blogs, don’t worry: after this week, I’ll generally be posting only once a week in any of them, so you’ll get no more than one email a week from me.)
Thank You!
Writing is a lonely vocation. The pandemic has made that even clearer, because for a year-and-a-half, I got to have Ron here in the house with me while he taught from home. He disliked online teaching, which doesn’t really work with the sensitive, special high schoolers he teaches. But we both loved having each other nearby.
Now he’s back at school, and I’m once again alone in the house, holding chatty conversations with the cats and switching on Harry Potter audiobooks at lunchtime to keep me company. I miss hearing Ron’s voice in the other room.
But you, my blog readers, are a solace. Thank you for reading what I write and occasionally responding, which always makes my day: I’m not alone! Someone is out there listening!
Thanks for believing in me and supporting me. You make what I’m doing worthwhile.
I don’t know how long I’ll live, although if I have anything to say about it, I intend to one day become a feisty old woman. But just in case, I’m hellbent on finishing my books soon, so I can share what I’ve written there with the world. In the meantime, I’m so happy to be writing here too!
