Journalversary

As of today I have decided to keep a diary again, just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen.

— Sylvia Plath, 1932-1963, American poet

February 13 is the anniversary of the first piece I published in what would become Markings: Days of Her Life, a concept many people in those days called “online journals,” or OLJs. It would be a while before the term “blog” (for weblog) became the standard, and for “blogging” to become a verb indicating what we as “content creators” (itself a neologism) did.

On that day in 1999 I had been “out of the classroom” (I never used “retired schoolteacher”) for less than one academic year. I was on the cusp of 53, casting about for ways to use the eight or nine hours a day that had now become available to me. I was a young retiree but a middle-aged suburban wife, mother, and homemaker. My former colleagues said, “Well, now you’ll be able to really do something with your writing,” as if free time were the only thing standing in my way of becoming a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

I powered up my computer (I cannot recall what kind of setup I was using then) and searched (not yet “googled”) for journaling and writing ideas. Thus did I fall into a community of lively and interesting people who wrote about their lives in the same way that former colleagues talked about themselves in the faculty room. Within a few days I had learned enough to buy a domain name, set up a rudimentary WordPress template, and begin. Some of those early “journallers” (we didn’t think of ourselves as “journalists”) are still among my actual friends.

My blogging activity has waxed and waned over these twenty-six years. I am in a place today much like I was in 1999, seeking fellowship, recognition, and encouragement in these strange days where we find ourselves. In that first blog post, Keeping and Holding the Rapture, I noted that Sylvia Plath had written breathlessly to her mother, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name . . . .” She would die by her own hand some four months later.

I’ll be 78 soon. I don’t know how much time I have left. But I do know that I have enough yet to make a name. I am writing the best fiction and nonfiction of my life. Come with me, won’t you?