Introduction: Why?
For the past couple of years I have watched in amazement as friends with full-time writing careers take up blogging. See, for example, my ex Eleanor’s blog, www.opinionatedlesbian.com. Wow. How does she do it? (Well, now she’s doing it less since she’s the newly appointed editor of the Sherbrooke Record, but still. ) In addition to the "how" question, I’ve also wondered "why?" And yet, here I am. I am still not sure about the "how" part but here is my answer to the "why" question.
I write a lot for work. Not as much as I ought to. "Publish or perish" is less dreadful post-tenure. But I don’t always, or even often, get to write about things I want to write about. Now I’m a philosopher and one of the great joys of being a philosopher is that one can roam freely across areas turning all sorts of life’s concerns into philosophical fodder. It would be crazy to deny that my interest in the ethics of parenting, for example, is unrelated to the amont of time I spend thinking about my role a a parent. But that only goes so far. Specifically, I don’t talk about my own experiences in my academic writing even when there is plausible autobiographical story of how I got interested in that topic. And then there are interests of mine which it would just be too much work to write serious academic papers about. As much as I love biking and thinking about biking, for instance, you won’t see papers on biking on my academic cv anytime soon. And some musings I’d like to commit to print may be quasi-philosophical but they lack the structure and depth of full blown philosophical arguments. Philosophy sets the bar pretty high.
I thought for a time I might return to my first career choice, my first love, journalism. I would do some non-academic writing that I could publish. Back page of the Globe looks good. Some popular book reviews. I thought that, I did, I really did. But it felt too much like work. Word counts, spell check, and a real readership. Blogging seems like it might be a happy middle, something in between a letter to a friend and an opinion piece in the paper. My goal is fairly modest–once a week. Let’s see how I do. And starting as I mean to continue–good advice always–I plan not to edit, fuss or bother. A more relaxed style and a wider range of topics, no footnotes. My weekly escape from the ivory tower.
