The Realm of the Possible

It’s been a very hard time. Nearly three months of a devastating pandemic, and now the murderous realities of anti-Black racism laid bare yet again, and I’ve got “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke running through my head, but the question is when? (The answer, for all of us, must be: NOW.)

As our June blogging course kicks off this month, however, I am also feeling inspired and excited, because as I read through everybody’s introductions and visions for their blogs, I see so much possibility for a better kind of world, both online and off it. I see approaches blending the personal and professional, writers wanting a space to weave their different passions together, writers desiring to learn to be more comfortable with being uncomfortable and brave enough to share unpolished work with the world. Writers who are in transition, moving toward something new, challenging the blog itself to be capacious enough to hold it all.

And here’s the thing about the blog: it will. If you push it. If you let it.

A blog is inherently a hybrid form—digital with textual and visual elements, and born of pre-digital influences including letters, diaries, even the soapbox. And being a hybrid in form, it’s well-suited to a hybrid of content, even though this might not seem entirely sensible at the outset. “Why AM I blogging about my twin passions for gymnastics and ceramic arts?” one might be asking, and the way to answer this question (and any question about blogging, for that matter) is to write one’s way there.

Because it’s in the blogging itself that the connections between these disparate ideas and others become illuminated, and the project begins to make a certain kind of sense, things that seem unalike becoming linked and the realm of what’s possible expanding.

And this is part of what the world needs right now.