Blogging, metablogging, and Patreon
This is the only pic that came up in my media library for the word “garage.” It isn’t my garage, but it is one of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken because it exactly captures the mood of my first spring in Portland.
Whew! How is it possible that February is peering around the corner. I had a heavy workload last week & had to give every morsel of writing energy to the work, so no posts actually made it to the finish line here. But the energy was still there, that good blog mojo I used to love.
And so I loved stumbling across this quote by Robin Sloan:
Back in the 2000s, a lot of blogs were about blogs, about blogging. If that sounds exhaustingly meta, well, yes — but it was also SUPER generative. When the thing can describe itself, when it becomes the natural place to discuss and debate itself, I am telling you: some flywheel gets spinning, and powerful things start to happen.
This is related to my opinion that the very best movies are about movies, the very best books about books.
I was mentally hollering: yes! exactly! That spinning flywheel! It’s what I was talking about a few weeks ago when I recommitted to posting here, right? The way our 2005-2010ish blog conversations generated meaningful experiences, reexaminations, and new lines of thought. And yes, often arguments—but they were (this is just striking me now) more personal arguments than today’s social media pile-ons. You may have been in a fierce debate with someone you’d never met in person, but you knew the ages of her kids, what their current read-aloud was, what their kitchens or gardens looked like.
I’m thinking this through, even though it was a tangent—you can now see those details of people’s lives on Instagram, but something was different during that particular blog era, at least in the book and homeschooling corners I inhabited. There were fewer of us writing, I suppose; but maybe also it was the sense of visiting each other’s personal spaces? I remember around 2009 explaining to a friend that my blog felt like having friends over to my home, whereas Facebook (the Facebook of that time) felt like meeting people in a public space. (Not realizing, then, that it was a data-harvesting space.)
I know this sense of home is why I never did let the blog lapse completely, despite some long silences. I remember an in-person writers’ gathering around 2012—I was vigorously arguing in favor of maintaining one’s own website (and blog) no matter where else you were actively posting. Platforms change, or they disappear. This space has always been mine. An internet home base.
Ah, okay, this wasn’t what I was going to write about at all! (Though related, in a way.) I realize that much of what I’ve posted here since waking the site back up a month ago has been meta. But that’s because I’ve been developing a thought about the role of Bonny Glen in my present life, and what it has meant to me at different touchpoints.
Which is related to the news I wanted to share about Patreon:
After several months on hiatus, my Patreon is reopening to new members. (Current members, this means billing is resuming tomorrow, Feb. 1st, so please check today’s update for details about tier changes.)
Why Patreon? Two reasons. One: the income I earn over there helps keep the lights on over here. Two: I’ve got some things I want to write about in a less public space, and Patreon is a good place for me to do that. In the past I sometimes found it difficult to figure out what posts belonged here on Bonny Glen and which ones belonged on my Patreon, but the distinction is quite easy now because of Circumstances.
If Bonny Glen is my living room, full of bookpiles and notebooks and puzzles and a jumble of items in active use, then my reinvented Patreon is…my garage, in a way? It’s seen by fewer visitors, and only the ones who really want to be there. Ah, I’m losing hold of the metaphor. What I mean is more literal. Of course I want visitors to keep coming to Bonny Glen. But I also literally want to write about my garage and all it contains.
I want to grapple in a very frank and personal way with a topic that has been a throughline of my entire adult existence: the ups and downs of dealing with—well, I don’t like the word clutter, because it always seems to me to devalue the objects we care about. So: just Stuff. As I wrote on Patreon earlier today:
I want to write about Stuff. Possessions. A lifetime’s accumulation of objects. The stories they hold, the feelings they spark, the challenges they present.
Our garage right now is like an archaeological dig through the layers of my family’s history and all our interests—the enduring, the recurring, or the only briefly alluring. (Ha, there, that’s the organizational structure I’ve been looking for. I want to write about the incessant necessity of figuring out what goes where, and what got forgotten about, and what should really be gotten rid of.)
I feel like I’ve been struggling with finding balance in this area since the day I arrived at my grad-school apartment with a U-Haul stuffed to the gills, and my wonderful program director, Jim Clark, waggled his impressive eyebrows at me and said wryly, “Thought you said you didn’t have much stuff.” And I was surprised—I mean, it was the smallest size of U-Haul! In that moment my understanding of what “not much stuff” meant was dramatically recalibrated. But, you know, the shift in vision didn’t keep me out of used bookstores or plant nurseries. And then I went on to have six kids.
So I’ve been wanting to do some really focused writing about this topic for YEARS—and to do it in tandem with the process of sorting and sifting and saving and shucking. And now (not a minute later) is the right time.
And Patreon, because it is a just a bit more secluded, is the right space. I keep the subscription fees low in hopes of making the content affordable for those who wish to see it. (There are $1, $3, and $5 monthly tiers. All three give access to my posts—as well as to a personal RSS feed for all the audio recordings of my Bonny Glen posts—and the $5 tier includes access to a weekly live coworking session.) I would love to have you join me for this exploration.
Either way, I’ll still be over here on Bonny Glen, writing about what I’ve always written about here: my family’s reading life, our homeschooling adventures, my current enthusiasms, of which there are many.
P.S. I agree with Robin Sloan that the best kind of books are books about books.
KC says:
If you can get access to a copy of Ruth Quibell’s “The Promise of Things” you may find it interesting. I’d note that it doesn’t solve anything, but it’s good [and not indigestible] food for thought!
(I specifically don’t have a Patreon account to cut down on the number of decisions I need to make – a different sort of clutter – but I would be all-in on Stuff Conversations. I miss a lot by not being on facebook and instagram et al, too [but there I definitely miss more soul-sucking things than good things].)
On February 1, 2023 at 9:40 am
Melissa Wiley says:
I totally hear you on needing to limit platforms to cut down on the endless decision-making. When the big Twitter exodus was in full force recently, and the kidlit community was dispersing to three or four other platforms, I decided to just wait it out and see where the dust settled. We can’t be active *everywhere*.
On February 1, 2023 at 11:19 am
Lesley says:
Melissa dear, I’ve just come by for a visit and am so glad to have found this post! I remember us having blogging conversations about blogging and deeply enjoying them (tho’ no fierce debates! : ) I miss everything about those days and have been sifting and sorting my life and work all this new year to find the best rhythms and vessels for it all to feel more like it did back then. Simpler…more homey.
So I understand what you’re seeking with your online spaces. You know Wisteria & Sunshine was born out of a long season I had of dealing with Stuff? That season has never really ended. There is always more to consider as we become more and more ourselves, don’t you feel? Definitely less stuff to sort through now, tho’, I’m happy to say.
Happy for your new pursuits and vision and sending so much love, lesley xo
On February 3, 2023 at 8:41 am
Karen Edmisten says:
Yes to the STUFF conversations. There are so many things to sort and sift through, and so much to think about. We moved 11 times in our first twenty years together. For the last twenty, though, we’ve lived in the same house and, even though I think of myself as constantly cycling stuff out of this small house, we’ve accumulated and kept *so much stuff.* Well, perhaps more specifically, *so many books.* 🙂 Now, with only one college-aged kiddo living here at home, it’s time to sift in a new way.
I remember writing about how blogs felt like friends getting together at the park and then Facebook came along and ruined it because now everyone had their own swing set in the backyard. (Of course, some people disagreed with that analogy because they thought blogs had ruined e-groups/the park, etc.) But the point, of course, is that the ways we communicate online have changed so much and there’s a constant need to change, which I’m not very good at. 🙂
On February 7, 2023 at 6:47 am