Blogging and the Creative Process - A short interview with Ariel Gordon

"Logged"

"Fodder"

"Lightning"

(All photos - Ariel Gordon)

Ariel Gordon is the Winnipeg-based author of three recent small press poetry chapbooks. She is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press' books section and, each September, is Blogger-in-Chief of HOT AIR, the official blog of THIN AIR (i.e. the Winnipeg International Writers Festival). Her first full collection of poetry is slated for publication with Palimpsest Press in spring 2010. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Capacious Hold-All: Can you talk about the ways in which your blog has affected your creative (writing/painting/photography) process?

Ariel Gordon: Posting first/second draft poems on my blog has become a part of my process. Which is not to say that every poem I write goes up on the blog, but I see it as another way of saying “this is what I’m doing/thinking/feeling.” A few months after starting my own blog in 2005, a friend and I started a group blog called the May Day Poetry Project. Participating poets commit to a writing and posting schedule over the month of May and, although it isn’t required of them, comment on each other’s work. It’s a fleeting but immensely satisfying community but is getting almost overwhelming in terms of the number of poets. This past year we had fourteen poets take part, which meant writing my own poems but also reading - and thinking critically on - five or six other poems a day. I will admit that I don’t get the same kind of feedback on the poems I post to my blog on a day-to-day basis as I do when May Day-ing, but I can’t seem to break the habit. Or maybe it’s that May Day reinforces my thinking around the posting of first drafts…

In terms of my photography, I don’t think I would have pursued it so doggedly if I hadn’t had a forum like the Jane Day Reader on which to post pictures. It was important to “do something” with the photos - beyond shooting/processing/saving them to my hard drive – in the same way that it’s important to publish poems here and there: to be in dialogue with other people via the work.In terms of the ways that the photos and poems have cross-pollinated each other, I’ve often wistfully thought that I should write a series of poems to “go” with the photos but have come to the conclusion that they’re separate processes. I’ve said what I need to say with the photos already, so writing poems to them feels extraneous.

But when I’m at a scheduled writing retreat or out-of-town workshop and find myself unable to likewise schedule a spurt of writing, I will often pick up my camera and go see what’s under the trees. (And work editing the material I brought with me and read, of course...)

But if I’m shooting, I somehow don’t feel like I’m wasting my time.Sometimes I’m able to do both. And then I feel full nearly to bursting with satisfaction. Ripe, even…

CH: Has blogging suggested ideas that you might not otherwise have pursued?

AG: Not that I’m aware of, but I think it would be hateful if I was able to trace all my fragmentary thoughts/ideas/feelings back to a source. I’m too self-conscious of process as it is…

Blogging has given other people ideas about me that were useful, in that they considered me for opportunities that they might not have otherwise…For instance, when I proposed to THIN AIR, The Winnipeg International Writers Festival that they should do a blog and that I should be Blogger-in-Chief of said blog, all I had to do, in terms of establishing my credentials, was provide them with a link to my site.

HOT AIR was pretty overwhelming: this past year, between myself and the four other contributors, we were responsible for 125 posts in little over a week. To make matters better/worse, I decided to I use a few more bells and whistles on HOT AIR than on my own blog: a flicker stream, group twittering, posting photos from my phone, doing a time-lapse video of opening night, etc., etc. But it was good to stretch my tech-muscles, to talk to other writers and have a good excuse to attend as much of the festival as possible.

Another possibility suggested by blogging is that I’m thinking on doing a print May Day anthology at some point…I think it would be interesting to try to translate my administrator role on that blog into that of an editor.

CH: One of the things I’m very interested in is the relationship between word and picture, image and text, and those tensions that occur between them. How do you see this playing out on your blog?

AG: I’m one of those uppity words people that has ideas about what things should look like but no skills with which to make those ideas flesh. So having a blog (and limited HTML coding ability) has allowed me to play with visuals a bit. I can change the template as often as it seems needful, I can include all kinds of images in individual posts, I can change the spacing of the posts themselves, all of which is very fiddly and very satisfying, when it works.

It occurs to me too that playing with the look of the blog is much like playing with the look of a poem on the page. All of that said, I’m vaguely suspicious of images. They’re too easy, too direct versus the imaginative leaps of images-in-text.

CH: The blog enriches the creative process in many ways, but would you say that there are any dangers or risks to blogging? Have you ever felt that maybe you revealed too much, or worked with certain elements too early in the creative process?

AG: Like most teenagers getting naked for the first time, I don’t worry about the dangers. I mean, if someone is determined to steal my work, they can do it almost as easily from lit mags and/or books.The one time someone reprinted my work without permission, he credited me, so I found out. And after I enquired as what was going on, he got barraged with similar enquiries from other writers and subsequently stopped his mostly-well-meant (I think…) thievery.

I use my blog to connect with people, to engage around aspects of my writing life and specifically to share work-in-progress. And I’ve set up the blog to reflect those aims, posting reviews I’ve written and writing news and first drafts of poems.I’m conscious, when blogging, of posting a variety of material. I think a blog that was all early poems or all photographs or all braggart-y writing news would be extremely boring.

There’s also some crabby/reverent non-fiction and photos around extra-curricular activities like mushrooming but that’s what makes the blog tick. That’s what makes my blog MY blog.

But I will note that I set boundaries for myself when I reluctantly started blogging back in 2005. The blog is a ‘work’ space. That means that I don’t ‘journal’ on my blog about “how that wretched M is making me mad” or “how nobody appreciates my writing, boo hoo,” or, specifically, post photos of my daughter.

I’m not an especially private person, but I was really firm on that: there will be no pictures of my daughter. I suppose because that’s the holiest of holies when it comes to my private life but also, isn’t it enough that my first book is mostly pregnancy and mothering poems and the second, so far, mostly about parenting?

One benefit to blogging is that I have a presence on-line if an editor or fellow writer or someone who reads my work somewhere and wants to find out a bit more about me, quick.

Also, if I’m neglecting my writer friends, they can check the blog to see what’s up, even if it’s complaining (which is probably what I’d be doing if I were corresponding with them specifically…).(I had to create a tag called ‘complaining’ because I was kvetching so much…to clarify, given my previous comments on not journaling on the blog, it was mostly during periods when I was too busy to write or blog to any great extent and I briefly noted it on the blog.)

To sum: blogging has made me more fearless but also more certain of my boundaries.