Three Weeks for Dreamwidth

[jenett]

In keeping with several other people, I am taking the opportunity to ask: what stuff would you love me to write more about? Could be work-related, could be Paganism related, could be "Why do you have such a hard time talking about what you've read" related. The only stuff I won't consider is stuff that affects other people's private info, that breaks commitments of confidentiality in other ways, or that I just can't cope with right now.

(For example, if you were to ask me how I felt about my father's death when I was 15, I have written about that in the past, and likely will again, but I'm fairly sure I've not got the emotional energy to cope with doing it right now.)

I am making no promises, given the health issues, that I'll manage it in the next three weeks. However, writing rambly but apparently interesting-to-others posts is one of the skills that has come back more reliably than others, so your chances are not nil, either.

Comments

[alphaviolet]

Favorite books, maybe.

[jenett]

I feel reasonably sure this will happen sometime in the next couple of weeks. Though "Books which were singularly important" and "Books I keep coming back to rereading" are not always the same list. (There's some overlap, of course.)

[alphaviolet]

Those two lists are different for me, too.

I'm looking forward to seeing your posts.

[walk_of_the_fallen]

I spent a great deal of my younger life writing to highly specific purposes. So, finally, at last, I am much more about writing for me alone.

I think I will maintain that, too. If I start thinking about other readers, I find it entirely too easy to fall into self-censoring, or limiting myself in an effort to be more acceptable, more accessible and I feel like a propagandist. I am not saying that writing for others is always propaganda, of course; only that my personal experience is that I tend to work too hard at CONVINCING. It was my job, once, to convince.

Now, I prefer to simply say it. If it convinces, good and well....if not, saying it aloud will suffice.

[jenett]

Thing is - there *are* readers. If I am writing for just me, alone, I go do that elsewhere. I write about the stuff that's important to me, but I recognise the power of the audience.

(I do also write about stuff - like the State of the Jen posts - where I'm pretty sure most people skim the details. But it's handy for me to have it in one place with date info, along with other stuff going on in my head, and it's handy when people want to catch up.)

Given that there are usually tons of things I would be perfectly cheerful writing about, I'm happy to snag the ones people have a particular interest in. And sometimes in previous versions of this, people have asked really great questions that got me thinking in new ways (which is, to me, one of the points of a communal journal setting.)

[walk_of_the_fallen]

Of course there are readers! For me, writing to severe limits as a profession, atop a childhood of "shut up, nobody cares what you think"....that means I need to write for me where there IS an audience. It may be an uneasy balance at times, but it fights the tendency to fall silent at the moments when I most need to hear myself AND let others hear me.

And then, for me, there is the intense sensation of not daring speak from any authority except my own on certain topics. So, even public posts have to hold the personal too or I feel inauthentic. I fully recognize this is something I need to work through, but the journal is how I do that presently.

[walk_of_the_fallen]

But to the question precisely...I am fascinated by the books. MORE on books.

I SUCK at writing about the books I love, I stutter in the face of authors I adore. So seeing you, so very competent at this enthralls me.

[redbird]

I've done a similar "ask me stuff/to write about things" post, and credited you for the idea.

[finch]

Things you would tell someone applying to library school.

[crystalpyramid]

I'm curious about the intersection of work and religion for you. This is probably something you've blogged about before, in which case you could just show me where, I guess. But I know that you're openly pagan at work — were you from the start, or is this something that came out later? What kinds of effects (if any) do you think it has on how people approach you? Do you think it would be at all different if you were a classroom teacher?

[jenett]

This is a great question - and actually, a really good one as I'm going to be doing the comparative religions discussions sometime in May. Will also take some writing up to be clear about.

(The short answer, incidentally, is 'No, I wasn't always out, and it's only in the last two school years I have been'.)

[elisem]

There are particular colors that you really like. Could you talk about them a bit? What do you like about them, what do they mean to you, how do they make you feel? That sort of thing would be really interesting to hear about, since it's often stuff that gets past the organized sentence-making mind and into some of the other mind places (well, for me, anyway; your mind may vary).

[jenett]

This is an excellent question, and I will cheerfully ponder how to answer it.