There’s a saying of sorts in conventional blogging wisdom that every blogger has one good year’s worth of writing in them and this has been on mind in the last days of 2008. I often think about the nature of blogging, what it’s become and how it plays a role artistically. I think people know now that blogs are a ‘new’ form of writing, a digital medium in the way the typewriter ushered in well, typing, though the digital medium also seems to have some comment on form. An early commenter on my blog lectured that my entries were much too long for my blog to become ‘successful,’ by which he was referring to the phenomena of blogs becoming people’s professions. Basically, successful blogs have readerships big enough to attract paying advertisers.

This was never my goal, thankfully, and for this tiny niche of blogs about Korean related things I think all three advertisers for this audience have found places on sites like Kimchi Mamas. For me the blog was a way to explore some ideas and questions, and to share hopefully things I loved about Korean culture. It was also a freeing writing exercise (I gave myself limits as in only allowing one edit, and creating a post in one or two sittings versus the indefinitely long periods of time it can take to write a short story etc.) and at times a daunting one. The anonymity of blogging I think is attractive to artists because you can shape how much or how little you are revealed. Blogging to me is mainly nonfiction and there is always a struggle in nonfiction between the real you and the narrator you...

Which brings me finally to my point. I’ve reached a turning point with this blog, one that points in a direction more dense with some of my queries, and more revelatory. I find myself at a point in this writing discovery where I have some harder questions about myself, Korean-American culture, my family and my friends. Hard to do this when those same friends and family read this blog or can easily find this information on the Internet which is after all a public forum. Not to mention that slippery boundary between respecting other people’s privacy and at the same time being able to tell your own story that inevitably involves those you love.

But I will try. And hopefully people will continue to share their thoughts because the one great thing about this blog has been when others have responded with their own stories, however sympathetic or different they might be.

posted at 11:05 AM by jenn

Filed under: personal history