This blog is about an experiment in farming on one level and an experiment in writing on another. Or both on the same level, but I’ve kept them very much either/or. I suppose this is schizophrenic. The storytelling about the farm is comfortable, and I like nesting there. There are other things to tackle, though, for this online experiment to work. My hope is that writing about writing, especially posts about blogging, don’t scare you away.

I’ve been asked how this blog is art, how is it literature. One can graduate with a master of fine arts in creative writing with a collection of fiction, poems, essays, or go for the full novel. So where does a blog fit into this, and how is it art the way that a university might define a novel or collection to be art?

A few weeks ago, Susan M. Schultz wrote about the question of blog literature:

So what is blog lit? In order to get to the answer, we need to think about what a blog makes possible. Rather than defining blogs by what people have done with them (written diaries, outed racist politicians), why not think of them as a kind of genre? Just as “the novel” or “non-fiction” or “book” contain multiple generic possibilities, so does the blog. It’s simply a container for writing, but a container that is limited and enabled by its rules and those of the software that helps the non-computer literate to create one.

This idea of blogging as a container intrigues me, because it keeps all the possibility I associate with other genres. Within the framework, the container, of what we think of a novel, can be a narrative written forward in time, backwards or spliced together. It can be a series of letters, from multiple points of view, as chapters or not. These are just structural variances, “allowed” by readers if the novel is well written, if it is an artful work. A blog be a container with such variation, too.

This is a fundamental question. I typically think of blog posts as having an arc, of telling a story, whether by word or image or both, but I also am drawn to blogs that are mere snippets of thoughts and information. I have resisted writing the latter here, for concern that it is not artful enough. If I go off on tangents or write unedited, on impulse, unimpeded by these rules I have made up for art in the thesis sense, what would I create? This means letting go of the idea that if it isn’t artful enough, then perhaps it doesn’t count as the art of an MFA thesis. I haven’t given myself the permission to do anything outside of what I think is acceptable for a thesis. Time to break that rule.

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