Greetings from the Small Blue Room
(The blue walls are hard to see, but they’re there.)
I used to have a blog. Technically, I still do, but now it’s just a place where I occasionally post interviews with and essays by writers with kids. But I used to have a blog where I would write regularly. It began in 2002 as a knitting blog (yes, a knitting blog) called Dogs Steal Yarn, but quickly became about more than yarn. It was a place to share pieces of my life with what grew to be, for a time, a surprisingly large readership.
The convention within the knitting-blog community back in those early days was to reply to comments by email rather than responding with another public comment. This meant that you didn’t have open conversation in the comments section, but what did happen, more often than not, was a more valuable personal connection. I met some of my closest friends through those email conversations that would follow comments they left on my blog, or that I left on theirs. (For anyone who’s wondered how Rachael Herron and I came to be so close, it happened in the knit-blog comments.)
When Billy and I had our first child and we left Brooklyn for Portland, that old blog became Dispatches from Utopia. I wrote about writing, and parenting, and finding my place in a new city. I wrote about failing to sell my first novel (may it rest in peace in The Drawer), about breaking up with my longtime agent, and about finally selling The Revolution of Every Day to Tin House. The blog was still there, but something had changed. I mean...I had, for sure. The blog was ten years old by that point; that’s a lot of life. And the culture had moved on. Comments were way down, overall blog readership was down. The feed readers we all used to keep track of our favorite blogs went away. It was hard to tell if anyone was even out there listening anymore. And increasingly I found that newer forms of social media—especially Twitter—were taking the place of what I’d used the blog for. I enjoyed sharing small pieces of my life with others on Twitter, and getting to see small pieces of their lives... It stole a lot of my urge to blog.
But what about when I want to share something longer than 140 characters? And include photos? And maybe even start a conversation? (Yeah, yeah, yeah...Facebook. Not so much.)
And so...this Tiny Letter series. The idea is to write to you—a group of willing readers who’ve agreed to let me into your inboxes periodically. I have things to tell you. I’m honored that you want to read them. If you’re moved to respond, I’d be even more honored. But no pressure on your end! It’s great just to know you’ve chosen to sign on for this, and that you’re out there listening.
This will be fun, yeah? I’m looking forward to it.
Yours,
Cari