Starting Here

Welcome, readers!

There is something to be said for the practice of blogging as a means of keeping the writing juice flowing.  I am a new blogger though not a new writer.  I have published one book (Understanding May Sarton) and several articles and poems.  Sarton is a model for me as a writer and even as a blogger; her journals are like blog posts and I wonder if she had lived into the age of blogging if she would have gone in that direction as well.  It would be fascinating to see her writing in this format!  (If you have never read Sarton, start with any of her journals; my starting place was Recovering but I would recommend any of them, especially Journal of a Solitude).

I am also interested strongly in religion and spirituality.  I am a liberal Anglican/Episcopalian--not liberal theologically (mostly) but politically, which grows out of my commitments to my faith which includes pacifism and social justice.  My faith makes a Christian socialist at heart, though I would characterize my socialism as neither of the Marxist nor Maoist varieties (although I have learned much from studying Marx).  I rather think I am a kind of agrarian socialist as the Levellers or Diggers were in Seventeenth-Century England.  As the title of my blog suggests, I am very interested in the contemplative life, and find much in ancient and medieval Christianity (and some more recent writers like Thomas Merton) that supports that life.  I have also learned a lot from Buddhism, particularly Zen, although I do not share many of their beliefs.  Finally, I am an associate professor of English, which is one of my motivations for starting this blog as a practice place for other writing I wish to do.

A few summers ago (actually 2009) I started doing writing exercises from Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend from Faraway in the process of beginning to think about a memoir.  I wrote many many pages and I will share some of these in revised form as well.  Please offer feedback and thought; no name calling please.  I like friendly, heart-felt, and intellectual discussions, something we do not see much in the public or internet sphere these days. (I have been recently called names and threatened on facebook by complete strangers and some former friends.)

One of the things I am thinking about these days is the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism, particularly in the works of Susan Sontag (I am writing a book on Sontag).  She does not like the term postmodern and considers it a mere outgrowth of the earlier form.  I have been reading A Postmodern Reader, an older book on these issues from SUNY press in the 1990s, and it is interesting to me that many claim certain essays of Sontag's and thus Sontag herself for definitions of postmodernism; something I think she herself would not have liked.  (The essays they tend to claim for postmodernism are her early essays on Camp and other new sensibilities; by the 1980s, when postmodernism seems to be on its way to being fully conceptualized, she is already writing her tributes as in Under the Sign of Saturn of her models--all male--from the past.)  If there are any avid Sontag readers out there, what do you think of connecting her with postmodernism?

Well, I think that is all I will write in the blog for today.  See you soon!