It's All Greek to Me

June 7, 2021

I've always wanted to have a blog website, a place I could call home.

I was determined to do this thing, and began shelling out stupid amounts of money for domain names, website developers, website launchers, and website platforms knowing full well I didn't have a clue what the hell I was doing! Quickly, I would frustratingly come to realize I simply could not make heads-nor-tails of how to go about getting the damn thing up and running.

So, with a head full of angry confusion, I would put the project on hold only to be shocked 10 months later that I got charged for a domain name I didn't know I had paid for, and another charge for my "website" that never got off the ground. UGH

The urge to create a website reared its ugly head yet again. And again I tried - going to various blog sites; spending money once again, and within two days, I knew I was fucked!

Enter my daughter, Jacklyn. She is very tech savvy, and knew precisely where to go for the most user-friendly layout - a place even I could learn quite easily. The cost to me for having her spend 7 hours setting up the website was doing her laundry and cleaning the house. It was a very good barter.

Bottom line, the basic framework for the new website is up and running and I'm totally in love with it!

As a writer who has zero hopes of ever being "published", I simply wanted a place of my own where I could publish my own poems, and perhaps some of my friend's' poetry.

I have new poems, written in the past couple of years, but also have boxes of older poems I wrote in the 1960's and 1970's, when I was still searching for my identity in a world gone crazy.

I spent years and years being totally confused about my 'writing-self". I took many writing classes at the University of Minnesota from short-story-writing, screen-plays, writing-the-great-American-novel, writing as a journalist, reporting on real-time events, but none of them fit me.

From the time I was a very small girl, I loved to tell stories. When I began to write out these stories, they came out as poems.

I can't call my poems 'narrative' or 'soliloquy' because they are often just not true to that style. As a writer, I will inject a free verse style, or rhymed style, or even a haiku within a poem if it lends itself to the story being told. My poems are fraught with true grammatical and punctuation errors, all of them on purpose because they serve to move the poem along in the direction I want it to go.

I call the type of poetry I write "storytelling" poetry.

As I grew, morphed, and learned, I loved trying on different styles of writing poetry, all of which I will include.

My hopes are to have new doorways (a.k.a. sections) where I can encourage other poets to write using various prompts, then post their work on the website for others to enjoy.

That's my dream!