Praeterita

  A few weeks ago I was invited onto The Art Biz podcast to talk to host Alyson Stanfield about my past and current work as an artist and an art writer. We talked about this blog, too, and how I started it in 2009, posted almost daily for a few years, and then leveraged the blog into paid writing assignments for art magazines. Here is the link to the page . The podcast recording is about halfway down the page.

Occasionally I teach classes to artists and writers about creating and maintaining a blog. I just checked in on a few blogs created by people who took one of these classes, to see how they are progressing. The answer is: very well! Here is an entry from Jessica Baldanzi's Commons Comics , dedicated to reviewing graphic novels. In the post I link to, Jessica talks about Fatherland, which seems to be a serious exploration in graphic form of a person's family roots in the former Yugoslavia. Jessica's writing is extremely clear and engaging. On Common Pages , the writer talks about something close to my heart -- music -- in a blog post reviewing a book about the history of the Cleveland Orchestra. And on The Barefoot Norwegian, Connie Geissel has a blog post with the title Almost Eaten by a Bear . Which gets full marks for grabbing your attention and forcing you to read it. Nice work, everyone!

Last weekend, I taught a class about crafting blog content to eight participants at the Interlochen College of Creative Arts in northern Michigan. One of the participants, Brita, has spent much of the last couple of years sailing a 40 foot boat around the Caribbean. I gathered that her presence as a land-lubber at the class is only a temporary hiatus from sailing the high seas. Anyway, I asked people who took the class to send me links to any blog or blog posts they were willing to share, and Brita sent me this one, about a near miss at sea . Photo by Brita Siepker The article also contains more photos similar to this gorgeous shot of a full moon near Tobago.

Another person who took my introduction to blogging and blogging content classes in the summer has contacted me to say that her new blog is up and running. (Previous posts about this here and here .) This time it's an artist, Linda Gardiner, whose blog is devoted to her practice of textile art. The blog has a great name, too: Pulp, Paper, and Pigment . She's a good writer, and her blog is full of beautiful images, so I recommend that you go ahead and check it out some time.

The Barefoot Norwegian, by Connie Geissel As I have discussed in previous blog posts on the subject, for the last few years I have taught classes in setting up a blog, and in creating and crafting content for existing blogs. One of the participants in a workshop I ran earlier this year just emailed me to say that she's pressing on full steam ahead with her blog. It's called The Barefoot Norwegian (a great, great title), and here is the link to the blog: http://thebarefootnorwegian.blogspot.com/

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the two blogging classes that I taught at the Interlochen College of Creative Arts in northern Michigan. More news has reached me from one of the people who took the class, Carol Ivkovich. She came to the class having already started one blog, but in the course of the sessions, she experimented with writing about more difficult subject matter, relating to her aging parents, one of whom has "the three As: alchololism, addiction, and Alzheimer's." The difficulty of engaging in this sort of writing, not just for the writer but for the writer's other relatives, kicked off a serious discussion about self-censorship and the limits of revelations. In the end, Carol took the brave step of starting that blog. Oh, and one important thing: she was one of the best writers in the class, too. Here is a link to Carol's blog, Finding Mrs. Poppins .

This is the photo that I always project before the class. Nine days ago I taught two classes about the mechanics and craft of blogging to twelve adults at the Interlochen College of Creative Arts. The first class, which I've taught several times before, was a day long session exploring the ins and outs of creating a blog, playing with the layout and template, establishing a preliminary design, using Google's Blogger app. The second class was a new one called Crafting Great Content, in which I took my years of blogging and put them together with the creative writing and process classes that I have taught at Columbia College and elsewhere. I hope the result was satisfying to the participants. I think that the combination of direct advice and the sort of generative, in-class writing that I've learned to use at Columbia led them to explore some new ways of writing in a blog. I will be very interested in getting feedback from their evaluations, so that I can tweak the class ...

I was having dinner with a friend who follows this blog regularly. He said he really enjoys reading it, but he felt that he had to ask: “What do you get out of it?” Specifically he meant, what reward do I get out of it in terms of my career? It’s true that when I started this blog, at the end of 2009, I did so as part of an overhaul of how I marketed myself and my art. I had bought a book by art consultant Alyson Stanfield, ‘I’d Rather Be In the Studio’, and one of the many useful things she included in her book was a lot of convincing advice on why artists should start a blog, and use other social media such as Facebook and Twitter. So, after reading blogs online for years but somewhat disdaining the idea of the personal artist’s blog, I dipped a toe in the water, setting up this blog and vowing to write just a few posts a week. After a couple of months, I decided that if I was going to do this, I might as well put some effort into it. So I started posting daily. I bought a book abo...