For those of you dear folks who read The New Yorker, who like to make fun of other people’s grammar, who use the word “umami” in passing while cooking, and who refer to all movies as films, you may want to check out The Rumpus, an interesting new website made just for people like us.

And if you’re so inclined you can also check out the book review I wrote for them on Aaron Gwyn’s new novel, The World Beneath. As always, thanks for reading.

I keep telling myself that the reason I haven’t posted anything to this blog in over a week is because I’ve been busy. But that’s not true. The real reason is that someone wrote an anonymous hateful (and very personal) comment on one of the posts and it completely deflated me.

I know that whenever you put yourself or your opinions out into the world there will always be people who have nasty things to say about it. I expected it when I started this blog. But I would be lying if I said that it didn’t still feel like a slap.

I started going through old posts, removing the most personal details about my life that I had written, thinking that if I shared less about myself I would be less vulnerable to personal attacks. I thought about changing the format of the blog, about giving it up entirely. I wondered if it wasn’t a completely self-indulgent project in the first place (surely my anonymous commenter would say it was).

Then I thought back to why I started this blog, which is because I believe in the power of personal storytelling. I believe that when we share pieces of ourselves, when we offer a window into our lives for other people to look through, it serves as a kind of communion. And at a time in history when we often feel cut off from one another because of technology, culture, and lifestyle, it seems important to grab little pieces of each other whenever and wherever we can.

The things that have affected me the most online, the things that have caused me to stop what I am doing and to examine my life, have not been news blurbs or special reports. They have all been personal stories written (or told on video) by other people. Not all the personal writing out there has had this effect on me, but when I sit down to think about what type of writing has most changed my life I keep coming back to personal narrative, creative nonfiction, memoir, and the first-person essay.

I have noticed a good deal of distain in modern Western culture for these types of writing; somehow we see them as having less value than straight-forward nonfiction, historical works, or journalistic accounts of important events. We think of their authors as narcissists, self-obsessed nobodies, or as thinking they have something important to say when, in fact, they do not. And in some cases, that is true. But I don’t believe it is any more true of the writers who attempt to uncover universal ideas from within than it is of news writers who attempt to uncover universal ideas from without.

I believe that personal writing should be evaluated in the context of something much larger. It is not just about the individual writer or the pieces that he or she is writing. It is about the lot of them. If we were to string together all the personal scraps—all the essays and the blogs and the love letters and the memoirs—written at one point, we would have a record of that time more faceted and nuanced and rich than anything we could ever hope to find in a history book. Subjectivity is not the enemy of objectivity. Writers who share parts of themselves and their experiences fill out all the holes in our objectively written history, they are the keepers of our collective memory—one day, one thought, one word, one comma at a time.

So to my anonymous commenter, and to anyone else who thinks that personal writing and blogging is a self-indulgent whine fest: I invite you to stop reading at any time.¹

And to everyone else: thank you from the bottom of my heart for your interest in my teeny tiny sliver of our shared history.

A friend of mine has been encouraging me for months to start marketing my writing. According to her, no one can find out about your work if you sit at home in your pajamas and never go outside or talk to anyone.

      ”But I don’t have anything to promote,” I told her. “The book’s not finished yet.”
      ”If you wait until you have something to promote, it will be too late. You need time to build up a following.”

I always wanted a following.

So I did what she told me. I signed up for Facebook. For Digg. For Red Room. For Twitter. ¹ And I have not done any writing since. It turns out that marketing your work is more time consuming than working on your work. But it has given me the chance to dip my toe in the sea of self promotion, a deep and terrifying place.

What I have seen is humbling. The world is awash in talented people who all seem to have more time to self promote and more moxie with which to do so than I. Some even have secondary blogs to promote their primary blogs, which in turn promote their radio show, which helps to keep their speaking engagement dance card full.

But I am just a writer, a person who can only figure out her place in the world by sitting in front of a typewriter for six hours a day. I am not particularly telegenic, my voice is not mellifluous, and I don’t thrive in a crowd. I have only one blog, and its sole purpose is to interest people in the things I find out while sitting in front of that typewriter.

So how does someone like me cut through the clutter? With so much content floating about it feels like a daunting task. I wonder if we aren’t approaching a state of supersaturation. I myself have become so consumed with building an audience that I sometimes find I have little energy to be a good audience for other interesting people I meet along the way.

It begs the question: Is our attempt to share our creative endeavors with as many people as possible having a paradoxical effect? Is the barrage of information numbing and narrowing all of our potential audiences? One can’t help but notice that in a time when it is easier to disseminate one’s work than ever, it is harder than ever to get people to notice it.

I just applied for a staggeringly large writer’s grant. The application was grueling and involved many essays, one of which was a response to the following quote by Virginia Woolf:

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”

My response:

It is undeniable that women have emerged at the forefront of countless fields in the last decades, years, even months. We read articles in the newspaper about the glass ceiling being shattered into a million pieces. We now have women running multi-billion dollar corporations, receiving the most prestigious awards in the arts, and occupying high government office (who can forget the first time George Bush uttered the words, “Madame Speaker”?) Women enjoy more power now than in any other time in history. But if we look closely, we will see that theirs is a conditional power, one that has not reached full maturity.

First, it is such a salient event in our minds when a woman achieves unprecedented prominence that it gives the impression that equality is more a part of the culture than it truly is. In fact, women are woefully underrepresented in the highest echelons of most fields. According to National Census figures, women living in this country began to outnumber men as early as 1999. And yet an informal online search for the names of influential women in the field of postmodern architecture, for example, reveals something quite interesting: nothing. Not a single name. A similar search for influential postmodern artists and authors shows that women comprise about 15-20% of the names noted. In politics the numbers are similar: about 16% of U.S. political representatives are women.

Even more important than the numbers, though, are the qualities of the women whom we have anointed in this country. Politics is a good microcosm in which to examine this issue. Certainly women in politics are at the front of everyone’s minds and on the tips of everyone’s tongues at the time of this writing. The women who have emerged most recently—Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, Condoleezza Rice—are as divergent in their politics as they can possibly be from one another. But in the context of women’s roles in America, they are merely four faces on the same body. They wear the same suit, the same pearls—they are expected to look like ladies on the outside—but their feminine qualities are to remain in the aesthetic and superficial realms only. They have reputations for being “tough,” “fighters,” and “ballbusters.” They must be single-minded, unemotional, and unflinching (even better if they can appear somewhere carrying a gun). In short, they must behave like men. But isn’t this to deny the creative power of women? In her book A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes that “…[women’s] creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place.” Doesn’t the masculinization of our women in politics hinder and waste their true creative power, and so deny their contribution to society?

A woman’s strength lies in her ability to be intuitive, receptive, collaborative, and emotionally intelligent. But unfortunately, we have been conditioned to think of these traits as a crack in the armor of professionalism, power, and accomplishment. When Senator Clinton became teary eyed on the campaign trail speaking about how much she loved and respected her country, how passionate she was about helping people, some felt that it was her truest and most authentic moment. But the media eviscerated her for it, calling into question how fit she could be to govern (never mind that Joe Biden broke down more recently when speaking of his son’s death, and was perceived as sensitive and sympathetic).

Imagine if women were given the opportunity to rule in a way that was more aligned with their basic nature. Imagine a president who sat down with her country’s so-called enemies to find common ground, who brought people and nations together, who did not lead with her power but with her heart. Imagine a president who was allowed to become emotional, to be overcome by emotion, and to use those feelings to govern with empathy for those who are suffering.

We have not yet come to a collective reckoning about the value of what women have to offer the world. And our confusion is not limited to the sphere of politics.

Women in business face many of the same challenges as women in politics. And women in the arts, while given more latitude for expression by the nature of their pursuit, are still subject to the predilection of the critics who tend to give more attention to men. In writing and publishing—the facet of the art world I am most interested in and qualified to comment on—there is a prototypical author and a prototypical style of work that continues to be most lauded. Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers—post modern writers of the Literary Tome—are celebrated in a way that their female contemporaries are not. These men are the decendents of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, Miller.

When I think of the most decorated female authors of recent times, Joan Didion comes to mind. She is a writer of indescribable talent possessed of a clipped, surgical style highly revered in this country. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking about the time immediately following her husband’s sudden death won the 2005 National Book Award. It is a study in stark, dispassionate prose, as evidenced by her description of one of the worst moments of her life:

In outline.
It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.
Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.

Didion is a highly effective storyteller, but one cannot escape the masculine quality of her writing. If you were to compare her style to that of Mary Morris, for example, who wrote the memoir Nothing to Declare, you would be struck by Morris’s spectrum of expression. Her prose is round and full, soft and warm, but it is also strong and centered. It embodies, for this reader, the great strength of women:

Women remember. Our bodies remember. Every part of us remembers everything that has ever happened. Every touch, every feel, everything is there in our skin, ready to be awakened, revived. I swam in the sea. Salt water cradled me, washing over all I had ever felt. I swam without fear in the line of moonlight radiating on the surface of the sea. The water entered me and I could not tell where my body stopped and the sea began. My body was gone, but all the remembering was there.

Unfortunately this type of writing is not as well regarded as the lean, pragmatic prose of male authors. We tend to take the qualities of men more seriously than the qualities of women, perhaps because they fought or posed imminent threat over the course of history. But now that we are at a time when we have the luxury to honor women’s contributions, our appreciation is often misguided. When women captivate our attention in mainstream culture it is very often a prurient or dismissive attention. A feminine style of leading, like a feminine style of writing, is seen as impotent at best, and a liability at worst.

Women are not the cracks in the armor of this country, though they are often portrayed as such. They represent the possibility that perhaps we might be better off without armor in the first place, that we can value vulnerability over protection, creativity over destruction, and emotion over reason. And this possibility, this force, “has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.” And though women have begun to chip away at the glass in the ceiling they are, alas, still bound by bricks and mortar.

Starting a blog is a funny thing because you are not yet writing for anyone. You are writing for the gorgeous, brilliant, talented, well-read, thoughtful, sophisticated, inspiring people you hope will be reading your blog one day. But if and when these gorgeous, brilliant, talented, well-read, thoughtful, sophisticated, inspiring people find you, they will likely not scroll all the way back to your first entry. So in the beginning, truth be told, you are writing just for yourself.