Blog Anxiety

There is a point early in each year where I invariably experience a crisis of confidence about this blog.  "Have I run out of new things to say?" I wonder.  Every time I write a blog post, I'm never sure where the next one will come from, or even if it will come. Often I experience a bit of blog anxiety. Will it resonate with anyone? If so, then how do I follow it with another that will also? Just as with paintings, not everything is a masterpiece and in the interest of timeliness, blog entries often are not our most polished work. 

I think it is about more than just writing, for writing is merely an expression of our thoughts and experiences. The past eight years of this blog have been fertile, a time of exploration and discovery in my life that in turn has fed this blog. The core of my unease is perhaps less will I have interesting things to write, more will I have interesting things to live? Exploration and discovery presuppose a path that is unknown.  And it is that very unknown, that is the root of unease, that also gives birth to the surprises that delight us with their unexpected nature.

* Photo credit

So let's leave those more existential concerns aside and consider blogging itself. I've been thinking about it recently as a friend announced she was considering starting a blog. I advised her to choose a broad topic and be prepared to expand it over time. Don't hesitate to knock down the walls of your house and add on rooms. Living in one space can get tiresome. Meaningful content is one of the challenges, but even a meaningful topic can begin to feel confining over a long period of time.

In writing classes we are given prompts, ideas that inspire us to write. I've learned that prompts are all around us. Sometimes an event is a prompt or a question that is posed that perhaps stumped me at the time and lingers. This post was started by something as basic as a friend saying she was thinking of starting a blog. If you're someone who ponders ideas, you will find that you can riff off just about anything. When you write a blog, you need to learn to pay attention to those curious thoughts that make you wonder. They usually contain a prompt.

Then there is the commitment to consistently write. The most important thing for any blogger is a love of writing, otherwise it is a lot of work. Well it's a lot of work even if you do love to write, but it's the difference between a labor of love and just plain labor.Writing can be magical. Metaphors appear as if out of air, cicadas and nesting dolls and tectonic plates. "Where did those come from?" I wonder. It is as if the experience of a lifetime is blended together and unexpected elements emerge. It is the magic that enthralls me the most, how ideas and images take shape through the mere act of writing.

There are annoyances as well. For me the most annoying aspect of writing a blog is finding photos and correcting formatting that somehow alters in the cybersphere. I swat at these impatiently, obstacles to metaphors and magic.

This is my ninth year of blogging. I began when I was heading off to the Vilnius Yiddish Institute to spend six weeks in Eastern Europe. I hoped to keep a record of my explorations. I knew nothing about blogging and frankly didn't care if anyone read it, in fact I wasn't sure I wanted them to. My objective was not to embarrass myself. The bar was set pretty low, good writing and proper grammar was all that was required (perhaps not so low after all). I spent time every evening writing and drafted my travel companion into the effort as well. There was no shortage of material given our surroundings. Each evening we explored the events of our day, something I found oddly satisfying.

When I returned from my travels I realized I wasn't quite ready to quit. My writing began to focus on my genealogy research and the artwork that grew out of my explorations. I was still protecting a zone of privacy. I got married upon my return and we headed off to Paris for our honeymoon, but I wrote very little about it. I hadn't yet deemed that in scope.  I was a private person writing publicly and rather shy about it.

Over time I wrote about travels in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, meetings with distant cousins who I tracked down through my research and of course my evolving artwork. My interview project with Jewish elders and the artwork that followed occupied a lot of blog real estate as well as a lot of my energy. For a time I wrote about the Artist Lab until I was invited to write a dedicated blog for it. Now I had two blogs to maintain. Later when I was a long distance caregiver for my mother, I began to veer into the personal, sharing my perspective as her memory faded. 

A funny thing happened. Readers seemed to like the personal, that stuff I'd avoided as private. My artwork began to move into the personal too as I explored memory and with the death of my parents in the past few years, my blog became a place to process who they were as people and who they were to me. My original title Layers of the Onion: A Family History Exploration still seemed oddly appropriate, but I had moved from ancestors to those who raised me. I began to let myself into my blog and gradually found my voice, sharing personal stories that shaped my perspective.

It dawns on me occasionally that I have gone public. Friends read my blog as well as friends of friends and many people I don't know. I am often surprised when people mention it in social gatherings and seem to know a lot about me. I've met new people through my blog so in many ways it has expanded my world. My greatest "ah ha" out of writing this blog is that authenticity is found by sharing who we are. Life gets easier when we do that. People connect and respond to us when we let them see the real person. All that hesitance to let people in, to preserve a zone of privacy, is distancing and I don't need that as much now as I once did. 

It is a risk to let people see who we are, to tell our story. Maybe they won't like what they see, but the benefit of getting older is we care less about that. Part of our journey as people is to find and share our authentic selves, the stories and observations that define us. It is from that effort that we begin to recognize the common threads between us and others. At its best a blog can be a path to our common humanity.



*Photo by Matthew Hull at Morguefile.com

The Collective You

I am always intrigued by which of my blog entries get the most readership and response. I write on the subjects that interest me and presumably some of them interest you as well. By classifying my blogs by topics and looking at hits and likes I get a sense of who you are. I often find myself having a conversation with the collective you as I write what has become in many respects an on-line journal. Now an on-line journal has some rules that a private one may not such as don't say something that you don't want a family member, friend or future employer to read. Even with that caveat, people know some things about me and that is a bit eerie for a one-time private person. I was once introduced at a talk and was surprised at how much the introducer knew about me. Midway through his introduction it dawned on me that he had read this blog. Kudos for research, but I must admit it threw me. Fortunately I try to calibrate what I put out there to my personal level of comfort with exposure.

GenealogyOver the past year it looks like one of the heavy hitters was a blog entry I wrote on a session at the International Jewish Genealogy Conference titled Making Sense of Genealogical Clutter, Another session on Informing Your Search Through Literature also received many hits. Genealogy blogger Emily Garber reported on bloggers at the conference making it easy for those with interest to follow up.

Personal ReflectionI wrote a number of blogs that I would put in the category of personal reflection that also received a substantial number of hits. One was on My Intergenerational Self, a theme that supports my quest to explore the stories of elders. In short it claims that knowing your history strengthens your ability to deal with the world. I first learned of this concept in a New York Times article by Bruce Feiler and that spurred my ruminations. Another one within the category of reflection was titled A Declaration of Being about the act of saying, "I am an artist or a writer" or whatever identity you may be reaching towards.

I also periodically write about family, especially my mother, now in her late 80s and dealing with the challenges of aging. While these get a middling number of hits, they get a lot of likes. I suspect many readers have dealt with similar experiences and find them easy to relate to. Some of those are Shared Memories, Blowing Kisses and Unveiling.

TravelStories, Observations and a Few Odd Facts, a synopsis of exactly that from my time traveling in Israel, received many hits.

I frequently write about discoveries when I travel and while in Boston this year I discovered amazing artwork both in and out of typical venues and wrote about it in Unexpected Finds.

HolocaustI attended a workshop on the Holocaust this summer and wrote about it in Creating Collective Memory. In the workshop we explored how memory is created and preserved and the different stages the world went through in fully acknowledging what had occurred. Also on this topic, I wrote of the book Sky Tinged Red, the memoir by Isaiah Eiger. My friend translated her father's memoir from Yiddish and it was published with the aid of her grandsons. The book explores Eiger's two and a half years in Auschwitz. The story of its discovery is also compelling.

Art RelatedLast year I wrote about the Artists' Lab in which I am participating and the blog on Endings received considerable readership. This year I am writing about those in a separate blog, but will periodically report on it here as well. I wrote a blog entry quite recently in my Artists' Lab blog that surpassed all of these in hits.You never know when you are going to strike a chord. This blog, Look to the Skies, touched on topics relevant to this year's Artists' Lab theme of light and explored sundogs, reflections in the sky from ice crystals, as they have been addressed in the Bible and art.

Sometimes a blog seems to speak to a more targeted readership, but they respond strongly with likes. I am always happy to see that happen with ones on my artwork as it helps me gauge how successfully I reach my audience. Beneath the Stairs was one such blog, telling one of my friend's Holocaust stories.

All of these topics seem to have their fans. How do I decide what to write about? I write about my life and the things that I come in contact with. That means genealogy, artwork, travel, classes, books and the Artists' Lab. Sometimes a blog is spurred by an outside stimulus, a public radio story, a lecture or a news article. I'm a reflective person so you also get my thoughts woven in. The reflection blogs are actually the easiest to write. They tend to spill out of me, but they are the hardest ones when it comes to pressing "publish". "Have I shared too much?" "Is it too self-absorbed?" "Will anyone care?" All questions I wrestle with before hitting "publish". So please let me know if you like something and share your comments. It makes blogging so much more satisfying.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Blogging From The Other Side of the Keyboard II

Two years ago I wrote a blog about blogging from the blogger's perspective. It dawned on me that today is the four year anniversary of my first blog entry and that invites some further retrospection.

At the time I last wrote about blogging, I wasn't sure where I was going next. Over ninety blogs later I've written about interviews, artwork and reinvention. I've begun to write on more personal subjects as well, elderly parents, my father's death, my mother's adjustment to being on her own. Jewish identity has begun to play more of a role also.

The scope of this blog has grown with me, expanding with each new exploration. The conventional blog wisdom is that one should carve out a niche and explore it thoroughly, attracting a clearly defined audience with a particular interest. I soon learned that didn't work for me. What I've discovered is that my niche in life is a broad one and so is this blog. Many things interest me and one interest soon leads to another. I write about many of them.

One option to allow for focus would be to compartmentalize into different blogs, one on art, one on family history, perhaps one on the personal, addressing the precious and often difficult time with aging parents. Much too complicated for me, the thought alone brings on a severe case of writer's block. I need to just let it flow as I live my life and respond to it.

I find that this period in my life is about breaking down the walls between my various pursuits, finding the common threads that feed them all. We spend much of our work life creating separate compartments, labeling ourselves by our career and separating work and play. This time for me is about merging interests, combining work and play, rejecting labels as limiting in their definition. Instead it is about discovering wholeness and learning to live an integrated life. Hence a blog that comes from the whole person.

While multiple topics allow me to write with greater frequency, they do make it more challenging to define an audience. I am hopeful that many of my readers have a broad range of interests and are open to exploring with me. The growth in readership seems to support that.

When this blog began, I was three years into the process of personal reinvention. I had left a career in finance to explore the things I was passionate about. With less of a focus on income, I had the flexibility to follow directions that intrigued me to see where they led. For me it has often been a process of personal discovery, an exploration of how life unfolds in interesting ways if you can give it the room to breathe. And yet, sharing the personal is often difficult as there is always the sense of being exposed, a challenge for a private person. I still sometimes swallow hard before I press publish, but I find that those are the blogs that receive the greatest response.

I began my blog when I was heading off to the Vilnius Yiddish Institute and beginning an exploration of my family ancestral towns. Over the past several years I've documented travels to Belarus, the Ukraine and Poland, home to my ancestors, as well as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and even France, all with a perspective on Jewish heritage. While I was not writing in the early stage of my family history research, those giddy days of new discoveries, there were still many discoveries that got documented in these pages.

My family history exploration soon morphed into an artistic exploration. I first exhibited a series on family history shortly before I began this blog. That in turn took me into a series on how Lithuania deals with its Holocaust history and the prewar Jewish community of the Polish town from which my grandfather came. More recently I have written of the interview series with Jewish elders that fueled my current body of work. I began to tell the stories of these explorations, both the stories within the artwork and the story of the creation of the artwork.

As I explored family history it took me into the topic of Jewish identity, something that wasn't a part of my life for many years. I became interested in learning more and have found my recent involvement in the Jewish Artists' Lab a valuable resource in this exploration. And of course, I write about it.

I find myself reflecting on the broad range of activities in my daily life that are the engine for this blog. They are as varied as what I write about. Within a recent week I spent an afternoon with my friend Dora. Dora grew up in the same Polish town as my grandfather and I am currently painting some of her stories from the Holocaust. I think of her as a guide of sorts in life as well as a second mom. I attended an Artist Lab, spent a day at the studio painting and a day at the archives researching Jewish history in Minnesota. In between I read an amazing book by a former attendee of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute on how Lithuania is coming to terms with its history. This stew of friends, artwork, research and reading finds its way into what I write.

Story is central to everything I do and write about. That is driven home to me when I consider the activities that I didn't mention above. I spent a day advising on an investor presentation for a new business venture and many hours in nonprofit meetings. Surprisingly these activities use many of the same "story " skills that I use in the spheres of which I write. When I was advising on the investor presentation, part of my role was to help craft a technical subject into a story. How did this part of the industry evolve? What were the impacts that led to this product? How does the story of the entrepreneur weave into the broader story? When I presented financials at a board meeting, I told the story behind the financials rather than make it just about numbers. This is how I integrate my life, by finding the story in everything that I do. And at its heart that is what writing a blog is about, finding the story and sharing it with you.

Blogging from the Other Side of the Keyboard

Have you ever wondered when you read a blog what it is like on the other side of the keyboard?  I’ve been thinking about that lately as I realized that I have passed the two year anniversary of this blog.  I was originally introduced to the idea of blogging by an artist friend who pointed out a variety of arts blogs designed to share one’s latest work with a community of artists.  A blog solely on artwork seemed too limiting to me and as I had been painting family and cultural history it soon morphed into a family history blog with an arts component.  Over the last several years I have traveled widely in Eastern Europe with trips to my ancestral towns in Belarus, Poland and the Ukraine.  Soon I was writing about travel as well.  As I am a voracious reader, the occasional book review also finds its way into the blog if related to family and cultural history.  It’s a broad swath, but I write about what I care about and hopefully attract readers who share some of the same interests.

So a few observations…  I’ve learned that blogging requires deep commitment to sustain the effort.  A compulsive personality is an asset when it comes to consistently blogging.  I began this blog when I was traveling to Lithuania to study Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute.  While time is often limited when traveling, material is not.  Seeing a new region through fresh eyes offers a wealth of new material.  The challenge arises when one isn’t traveling.  There have been times when my life was quite full, but not specifically related to genealogy or family history travel or artwork so little blogging occurred.   And then there are times when new material overflows and I seek to capture it as fast as I can.

One of the things that I struggle with is how much personal information to put out there.  Juxtaposing being a fairly private person with a web presence is challenging. A private blogger is a bit of an oxymoron.  Of course I share family history information, ever hopeful that someone related will stumble across my blog and uncover an entirely unknown new branch.  One can always hope.  When I was writing about my oral history project on Jewish Identity & Legacy, I debated how much of my own background and thoughts on Jewish identity to include.  I’ve since concluded that if it is relevant to the topic, then it is appropriate.  My cultural Jewish identity was relevant to my interest in exploring the topic of identity and thus made its way into the blog.

People blog for many reasons.  For me it is much the same reason that I create Shtetlinks (now Kehila links), websites for those searching family from a particular town.  I’ve learned a lot in the course of my search and I hope that others find it useful.  I’ve had many people reach out to assist me as I did my research and this is a way that I give back to that community.  And of course, I like to write.  I doubt most people write blogs if they don’t.  I often find that writing is a way that I organize my thinking.  Many times I have started to write about a discovery and in the process of writing I think of an important new direction to explore.

I always appreciate those who send me comments as it gives me some flavor for who is reading the blog.  I also make use of the statistics available through Google on the blog.  It is reassuring to realize that even if I never wrote another blog entry a significant number of people around the world will continue to find my existing entries.  Google provides statistics on the number of hits, which blog entries and from where they were referred.  It also tells me geographically the number of people who are reading the blog from around the world.   I must confess to some fascination with these statistics.  This week I had readers from the US. the UK and Germany leading the pack, but also hits from Canada, the Czech Republic, Belize, the Ukraine, Chile, Austria and Russia.   Blog entries on Prague and Cracow seem to be most in demand, usually a blip that corresponds to travelers to those regions.

Over the period Google has tracked these results, the US accounted for about two-thirds of the hits with the balance largely composed of Canada, Germany, the UK, Russia and Israel.  Of the almost 120 blog entries that I’ve done there are three blog entries that have generated the most interest.  Stalking the Shtetl Stork is the all-time leader with a focus on a shtetl visit to Pilvishok.  I can only guess that there is a devoted group searching family from that particular shtetl.  Tied for second place is Principles for Basic Genealogy Searches and Archive Day.  Principles is very appropriately named which may account for its hits.  As I was doing research for others, I detailed out my process and the basic principles that guided my search.  It is a good primer for anyone beginning genealogy research.   Archive Day describes my time at the Radom archives doing research.

Two years ago I didn’t imagine that I would still be writing the blog after my Lithuanian travels.  It is quite possible that it will morph over time as I’ve completed most of my Eastern European travels and uncovered many of my family history mysteries.  So keep reading and together we’ll see how this evolves.