Saturday, September 21, 2013

In four days (FOUR DAYS!), I will be starting a brand new chapter of my life. My undergrad years are—at long last—behind me, and I have the diploma on the wall  to prove it. I’ve chosen a topic on which to focus my research, and I’m ready to begin the process of taking that much-too-broad subject and distill it down to a juicy little question. I’m ready to become a graduate student.

Now, you may wonder why I bring this up. Why do I think anyone will really care that I –a somewhat obsessive mid-life female—am ready to commit myself to yet another round of classes, readings, research and papers? Well, I'm hoping someone will  because I plan to use those very things to study what I’m doing right now—blogging. Obviously, I have no intention of reviewing my own blog, or even my own writing process, but I hope to use this blog as a platform—both to inform my research, and to reach out to those of you who are bloggers, or who read blogs, or have ever thought about starting a blog of your own. Over the next year or so, I’ll be looking for feedback to my questions, ideas about blogs and their multitude of intended purposes, and especially, to connect with other bloggers. (Did you know that new blogs spring up at a rate so fast that about 10 new ones have sprouted in the time it’s taken you to read this paragraph? Yeah, I was surprised, too!)

 At this early point in my journey, I am most interested in the idea that people use blogs to create a certain kind of identity for themselves—a self-portrait, so to speak. And for those of you who might be into that sort of thing, I also plan to look at blogs through the lens of narrative theory, with an eye to considering them as acting as a sort of modern-day storyteller or a new format for folklore.

So, there—in a nutshell—is my purpose. Up to this point, my blog has served as a showcase for some of my creative writing pieces. It’s been fun to get them “out there,” in hopes they might be read by someone that I haven’t coerced into reading them. I may still throw a few of those in from time to time as they act—for me—as a mirror of my own self-identity. But from here on out, I plan to post at least weekly about my blogging research, and I hope to hear from those of you with ideas or comments—or a list of your favorite blogs

—please (and thank you!)