This blog has taken many forms over the years. When I first started it in 2008, it was a sex advice blog. Like I knew what the fuck I was talking about. In the following year, it served as a place for me to post academic papers and responses I was writing for various women & gender studies-type courses I’d been taking, then subsequently a blog for sharing music by independent female artists I like (which got the original URL banned), then, upon respawn, it became what it is now — a collection of my political thoughts, most often feminist, and always engaging in whatever was happening around me.
This blog also changed when I started my career in professional writing. It served as a profile of my work, and helped me get a couple of awesome gigs. Through working in professional writing, I gleaned an education about how to successfully run a blog, and for a while, I utilized SEO and other ways of promoting this blog to promote myself. When I stopped doing paid blog gigs and ghostwriting, this blog seems to have lost its way a little bit.
I was 18 then. I’m 22 now. So much has happened in that time that has caused me to grow up, a lot of which has been written about here. At its final stage, this blog became a healing tool for me. I’d grown up to experience many of the issues that I so vehemently had already formed opinions about — abortion, rape, misogynistic jerks, and so on and so forth. The best part of all of this is the fact that I’ve been able to reach so many people, strangers or otherwise, who were helped by what I’d recorded here. Problem is not so much that I don’t know what the fuck I’m trying to do here (I don’t), but I’ve been trying to use this blog for things it isn’t actually good for — part-diary, part-self promotion, part-release from being a cog in a capitalist machine — you get the picture. I don’t feel like I’ve ever been able to reconcile what I wanted this blog to be with what it actually is.
My friend Amelia has an awesome blog that I love to read. She’s also a feminist, but unlike this blog here, hers is not restricted to just feminism — it’s about her life in general. And it just so happens that, like me, she tends to take a stance a lot too, and she doesn’t keep her mouth shut about it. I also have somewhat of an artistic envy of her, because she treats her blogging (and all her writing in general) like literature. It’s an indescribable quality, and probably is rooted in her over-all awesomeness and ingenuity that I will never match, but I can’t help but want, right?
Anyway, point being, since this is a blog post and they’re always supposed to have points, I’ve decided to stop updating Fires Underground. It’s something I’ve considered for a long time, and my last post being what it is, I feel I’ve said all I have to say here. That’s not to say that I don’t have anything left to say about feminism, or poetry, or even any of the specific issues I’ve written about here. But something about this blog, after four years, seems very contained, and I’d like to be able to broaden my horizons to write about other things. When and if I start a new blog, I will definitely post about it here. But for now I’m going to continue to attempt to observe, to focus on my poetry, as well as my personal health, and see if something new can emerge from that.
In the past year, I’ve learned that speaking out is no form of inaction, as what I’ve written about my experience here or shared publicly or organized around has helped many people (while simultaneously offending perhaps just as many). But I do feel that blogging can be a form of slacktivism, can cause us to neglect ourselves, to merely “speak into the void” about issues we should be taking to the classrooms, the streets, the round tables and our work places. It’s easier to take a stance while sitting in front of your computer and to shred the faceless opposition apart. More horrifyingly, facebook, twitter, and tumblr have made it so that you barely even have to share your own opinions rather than just co-opt those of others.
As a writer, I do feel that writing, art, and self-expression in general can be both very tangible and very effective tools of implementing political change. However, now it seems silly to expect this blog to grow into anything other than what it already is — a collection of second- and first-hand knowledge, opinions and experiences. A facsimile of myself. I’m a firm believer of “the personal is political” when it’s done well, but somehow it seems like what I want to do conflicts with how this specific blog presents itself. I’m not in school anymore, so I’m not actively writing 500 reading responses. I’m still organizing, but for the time being it’s related entirely to my poetry career. I’m no longer sucking metaphorical dicks in the professional writing field, so I no longer turn to this blog for release after spending days hacking away at some mind-numbing assignment. I work in a used bookstore now. And I teach. Those things are great! But I have a whole nother life outside of the incredibly politicized one I’ve recorded here. The shoe doesn’t quite fit anymore.
So, I hope you enjoy the work that’s already up here, if it’s new to you. I’m quite proud of a lot of the things I’ve written here, most of which were a labor of love. If you know me, I hope you’ll keep in touch, and hope that when I start this new blog, it will interest you. Until then, you can keep up with my portfolio blog and my art collective’s blog. See you around!
