First, a bit of context

This shift has been a long time coming

In early 2005, I started a blog called Here in the Bonny Glen. My kids were pretty little (some weren’t even born yet) and I wrote a lot—a lot!—about our tidal-learning adventures, our book and game obsessions, our medical ups and downs, our cross-country road trips, our art-supply obsessions, our creative practice. Bonny Glen was a place for me to learn in public and think out loud. It still is! Even though I’ve hardly written there at all this year. 2023 has been, well, a lot. A lot.

Blogging has been part and parcel of my experience as a mother, a novelist, a poet, an artist, a freelancer, a homeschooler, a medical mama, a disability rights advocate, an enthusiast. I’ve blogged for joy and I’ve blogged for income; for a goodish while I wrote for Club Mom, and later on I wrote quite a lot for GeekMom when it was under the Wired umbrella.

In 2017, recovering from radiation treatment (early catch breast cancer), I started a Patreon to help knock back some of the medical bills. I’ve loved having that more private space for talking frankly about challenges.

But from the day I launched that project, I have found myself in a muddle with every post: what post should go where? Blog—newsletter—Patreon—Instagram? As my Astoria landlord used to say, with emphatic hand gestures: It’s too much, it’s too much!

So I’m pulling the strands together. Here.

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I love my blog. It isn’t going anywhere: there’s gold in them there archives. But one of the best things about blogs in their heyday was that chummy feeling of being able to drop by people’s houses. With the help of feed readers (yes, I’m still in mourning for Google Reader) and blog-rings, we made the rounds of each other’s sites and chatted it up in the comment boxes.

Today (especially in the ongoing Twitter diaspora) I think we all agree that it can be exhausting to flit around to umpteen platforms. No one has time for that. Weirdly, email has become an easier way to keep up with the writing you genuinely want to read.

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It feels a bit strange to be starting with an empty slate here, considering I’ve published hundreds of thousands of words on other sites. Along with brand-new posts here, I’ll be gradually updating some older posts from Bonny Glen and Patreon and giving them a new life in this fresh space. For now, here’s a handful of topics I’ve written a lot about:

• Creative practice

• Books, so many books

• Nature study and habitat gardening

• TV (my Downton Abbey recaps drew a lot of readers, back in the day)

• Tidal homeschooling

All right. There’s so much more to say. And I will, quite soon. I’m really glad you’re here.