Our most recently constituted writing class had just adjourned. Benjamin and I walk out of the building in a group that includes our instructor.
“I think it’s really cool that you guys have kept up your blog,” she was saying. “Last year you were just getting it started.” This was our first experience with taking a class from an instructor from whom we had taken a class previously. I remembered her clearly. ( Last summer, in her class, I wrote biographies of six-words, fifty-words and two-hundred words, from which I learned a lot, and I was looking forward to more of the same. ) The implications of her remembering us hadn’t occurred to me. She was dragging us into one of them now. “I want you to tell us about it.”
“What kind of blog is it?” someone asked? “Technical?” The suggestion may have been made because of my interaction at the end of class with one of our fellow students. She is an engineer, as I am, and I had asked her if she knew anything about ‘entropy,’ a concept that I not only failed to master in school ( so long ago ), it’s one I still fail to get even as a concept. I had asked if her work touched on it.
“Well, no, it’s not technical,” I believe one of us responded.
“Well, then … ?” The question lingered in the air like an inquisitive hummingbird; by the time an answer was required, we were going our individual ways and I made the promise to tell about the blog if our instructor provided the forum.
“Yes, but what kind of a blog is it?”
I have said that writing for our blog is like public speaking without the speaking. Public speaking requires preparation, a certain amount of courage, the ability to put an argument together and speaking before a group. Writing for the blog requires the same but when nobody comments on the material it’s like not delivering the speech. That’s how writing for the blog is like public speaking without the speaking.
“Yes, but what kind of a blog is it?”
Benjamin and I share an interest in writing and I have shared in this space what I hope to get out of writing for the blog. With each of us committing to posting weekly we figured we’d have the required spark to write on a regular basis.
“Yes, but what kind of a blog is it?”
The blog is flexible in the extreme. It is a space to try out new material, to say something needing to be said, to share an attempt at a writing homework assignment, to share something about ourselves, to plug the website of a friend. InkFounta.in has hosted all of this for us.
“Yes, but what kind of a blog is it?”
Writers, a hundred years ago, when writing about anything and everything, wrote with pen and ink. Prolific writers needed a lot of ink … an Ink Fountain. Viola! This named our blog. It’s a writer’s blog.
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