Women Doing Literary Things: "The Womanly Art of Blogging" by Kerry Clare
Kerry Clare is an editor, fiction-writer, essayist, book reviewer, literary critic and writing instructor, and has been blogging since 2000, maintaining the literary blog Pickle Me This since 2006. Her essays, short fiction and criticism have appeared in magazines including The New Quarterly, The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, Canadian Notes & Queries, and Readers Digest. Her essay “Love is a Let-Down” was featured by the UTNE Reader, and shortlisted for a 2011 National Magazine Award. She reads and writes in Toronto where she lives with her husband and daughter.
Visit Kerry's site at www.picklemethis.com
Scott Rosenberg forgot to put women in his definitive history of blogging,Say Everything: How Blogging Began, Where It’s Going and Why It Matters except for Dooce, of course, who was infamously fired when her boss discovered her blog, and who also documented her mental breakdown following the birth of her first child a few years later. Rosenberg does permit Blogger co-founder Meg Hourihan a brief appearance in his book, running out of her office in tears, but other than these two women, the oversharing, cyber-feuding, troll-feeding history of blogs has mostly been an all-male affair.
Margaret Wente thinks so too. “It’s more of a guy thing,” she wrote in a Globe and Mail column last year. “Not many women are interested enough in spitting out an opinion on current events every 20 minutes.” Of course, Margaret Wente was also demonstrating a better understanding of bloggers than she was letting on, intentionally provoking women to link to her article in their furious response posts, thereby delivering herself an barrage of page hits.
But Wente’s point of view was still a curious one, and just as curious was Scott Rosenberg’s apparent presumption that women had had so little part in how blogging began, where it’s going, or why it matters. All this particularly curious from the vantage point of my own little blogosphere (and there are, in fact, many blogospheres, as Scott Rosenberg correctly asserts in his actually quite interesting book), in which male bloggers are ridiculously scarce.
I’m not saying there aren’t any male bloggers—I just don’t read many of them. Though I also don’t read a lot of blogs written by women too: craft blogs, parenting blogs, home renovation blogs, fashion blogs, pregnancy blogs, infertility blogs, food blogs, and blogs about vintage rocking chairs. But the blogs that interest me, the literary ones— from the perspectives of common readers, academics, novelists, poets, mothers, book fetishists, illustrators, librarians, literary gossips, and critics alike—almost all of them are written by women.
Perhaps in some blogospheres, opinions spat out every 20 minutes actually constitutes a blog, but not in mine. Instead of, “Look at me!”, the bloggers I like best use their platform to say, “Look at this!”, and point me to wondrous things in the world. On these blogs, I find book reviews and recommendations, photographs, essays, critical responses to current events literary or otherwise. I find conversations, I find art opened up. I hear stories told and retold, I hear people asking questions, I see people making connections—between each other, between the books they’re reading, and the literature they’re making.
Of course, not everything is always so profound. And there are many more terrible blogs than there are good ones, but there are good ones, so many good ones. And what I mean to say, I think, is that there is something inherently womanly about blogging as I’ve come to understand it. Not just, of course, because it’s the latest in a long line of endeavours in which women have partaken in involving unpaid labour and undervalued craft. Or because the anonymity offered by blogs also offers a spectacular forum for women at their very bitchiest, though that’s a part of it too. But rather that the community-making that’s so essential to blogging seems like the kind of thing women have always been doing, whether historians saw fit to include it in the official record or not.
This essay also appears on the Women Doing Literary Things website.
Comment
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Comment by Niranjana Iyer on July 13, 2011 at 7:16am -
@ Susan: The original site is at http://literarywomen.wordpress.com. The new post by Rosy Thornton is on She Writes at:
http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/women-doing-literary-things-6
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Comment by Helen W. Mallon on July 13, 2011 at 7:11am -
Niranjana, I can't find "women doing literary things." can you post a link? thanks much!
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Comment by Niranjana Iyer on July 13, 2011 at 6:49am
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Hi everyone,
I'm glad you enjoyed this installment of WDLT ! As a blogger, I relished your opinions about this "noisy humming octopus"; I've also emailed Kerry asking her to respond. Meanwhile, a new installment of WDLT is up, this time by novelist and Law prof. Rosy Thornton. Enjoy!
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Comment by Helen W. Mallon on July 9, 2011 at 6:43pm
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Men are sort of funny and sweet. One has to feel sympathy for anyone who has to clear his throat and beat his chest and tug his beard and pour a whiskey in front of the fire in order to have a conversation (i.e. keep a blog going). They're simply too busy adjusting their cummerbunds grasp the fact that two women can plop down and talk (i.e. make a connection/keep a blog going) in the absence of such stentorian throat-clearing.
Astute post!
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Comment by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro on July 8, 2011 at 8:23pm -
If you have a blog on your website, how do you get people to visit?
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Comment by Tania Pryputniewicz on July 8, 2011 at 12:17pm -
Kerry, you nailed it here: "...there is something inherently womanly about blogging as I’ve come to understand it. Not just, of course, because it’s the latest in a long line of endeavours in which women have partaken in involving unpaid labour and undervalued craft. Or because the anonymity offered by blogs also offers a spectacular forum for women at their very bitchiest, though that’s a part of it too. But rather that the community-making that’s so essential to blogging seems like the kind of thing women have always been doing, whether historians saw fit to include it in the official record or not..."
thanks for the post. Blogging levels the playing field in so many ways, offers so many ways to tunnel towards the central hub. I love the noisy humming octupus of it all. Just hope women figure out (myself included) to turn it into bread on the table.
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Comment by Mary T. Wagner on July 8, 2011 at 6:09am -
I'm grateful to friends who nudged me into blogging several years ago as a way to get back to creative writing. I'd actually had a novel interruptus in progress before that, but too many other real-life things got in the way to maintain a long train of thought. So from small beginnings came one essay, then another, and an outlet and a body of work. I too enjoy the literary blogs rather than the blogs where folks muse about their breakfast cereal and what the cat left in the litter box.
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Comment by AngryCat on July 7, 2011 at 11:07pm -
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on bloggin' girls - over here in Germany we've got a quite serious female blogosphere. Too serious, I sometimes think... so I started my own "cat content": Copy Cat...
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Comment by Patricia A. McGoldrick on July 7, 2011 at 7:38am -
Welcome,Kerry, to another voice from Canada!
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Comment by Patricia A. McGoldrick on July 7, 2011 at 7:37am
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Blogging was a venue that took me by surprise. I tentatively started a blog a couple of years ago. My inspiration for this venue came from a friend who forged ahead with his blog when most of us were just discovering the meaning of the term. It was, however, some of the female bloggers who inspired me to start writing my own words in a blog formate. All in all, it has been a great learning curve!
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