Recently, WordPress was kind enough to inform me that this month is my 10th aniversary of writing this blog. As I looked back, I noticed the very first first post was July 24, 2009. What a long, fun, and a little crazy trip it’s been.
I started blogging mostly as a dare to myself. I’m a poet, and writing a blog seemed like a good way to give myself some writing goals that didn’t have to be poems. I didn’t expect to write daily or even weekly, as most blogging advice tells you to do. I also decided that I wouldn’t stick to just one subject, though that is also good advice.
What I wanted was an author’s website and blog, and I wanted to write about all aspects of my life, including poetry and teaching. Writers are people, too, and I wanted my blog to reflect that. So I went along for quite awhile, quietly blogging about poetry, teaching, food, etc., and I was getting a few people viewing and even following the blog now and then. My stats were modest, and I was fine with that. It was a good outlet for my thoughts, and that was enough.
One of the first posts that took off unexpectedly was one I wrote about my father’s 1946 Motorette motor scooter. I wrote it mostly as memoir and to chronicle something from my childhood that my mother was thinking of getting rid of. I didn’t really expect to sell it, but someone contacted me, one thing led to another, and we sold it — not for a lot of money, but to a new home where it would actually run again (and my brother even got to ride in it once, since he lived not too far away). That’s a post (along with its follow-up about the sale) that still gets a hit now and then, and it may be the post that has gotten the most comments over the years. People want to know where to buy one or where they can sell one. When I can, I try to point them in the direction of a group who may know.
But the biggest surprise post I ever wrote was the rant about my DSL modem from ATT. This is a post I wrote in May of 2013. It got a few hits at the time, but eventually started picking up steam, probably because someone linked to it. For awhile, it, along with a series of follow-up posts, was driving over a hundred visitors to my blog every day. Following on this popularity, I wrote more about technology for awhile, including some posts about my trackpad and our smart TV that still get the occasional hit.
But after awhile, I wanted to bring the blog back closer to its original focus and began posting more about poetry again, especially with the launch of my third collection, Barrier Island Suite. The publication of my textbook, A Writer’s Craft, and the beginning of The W’s MFA in Creative Writing led me to post more about creative writing pedagogy. And yet, some of my other most popular posts are on cooking or buying and selling a car. Sometimes it’s hard to predict what will resonnate.
Over the years, I’ve had periods when I didn’t have time to blog much and times when I posted fairly regularly. I’ve written a lot about food, and have always been suprised at the popularity of buttermilk, which I first wrote about feeding to our dog when she was very sick, but later included in many of the recipes I’ve shared. It’s one of my standard ingredients for which I’ve found a lot of uses. As a cook, I’m as eclectic as I am as a blogger. I rarely follow recipes and use the blog write down what I did for myself as much as for anyone else, but the recipes I post tend to get a fair number of hits every now and then.
I’ve also used the blog to memorialize some of the teachers and friends who have passed away over the years. As long as I have a public forum, it seems right to use it to pay tribute to those who have contributed to who I am, both as a writer and as a person.
Book reviews are another category I’ve tried to come back to fairly regularly. I read a lot for class, and usually don’t review those books, but I try to write at least a few reviews of the best books I read for the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium: expect a few more of those in the coming weeks as I’m very excited about the current slate of writers. Still, I probably won’t find time to review them all because there’s lots of planning to do just to pull off the event!
I’m glad to see that writing is still the category I’m most prolific in, even though technology has certainly brought more people to my blog, and MFA advice is another category that is taking off, thanks to some outside links to my posts. Recently one reader commented that she first came to get help with her modem, but has kept coming back for the writing. I hope that’s true for some of you, but whatever brings you here, if you find something that’s useful or just entertaining, then I’m happy. I plan to keep writing, keep cooking, and occasionally keep ranting about technology or posting about a fix I’ve uncovered for a problem that I’m having. I’d like the blog to be moslty about poetry and creative writing pedagogy, but as an occasional blogger, I know I’ll probably write about whatever’s on my mind when the mood strikes me and I can carve out a few minutes from my day to write it down.
Thanks for reading this, and for following my blog if you do. It’s been a great ten years; here’s to the next decade!
Kendall Dunkelberg 