opening space
i have only just made this blog (impulsively and within the last few hours) so i'm still figuring things out. who is going to be here? how will entice them to come? and so on and so forth. part of me writing this post is for aesthetics (an empty blog is an ugly blog) but i also did want to christen the space. i still have to install disqus (with the hopes that the conversations i post here will continue in the comments) and figure out logistics.
in liu of a larger more comprehensive post, here is what i've figured out so far (replicated on 'the project' page):
the project of this blog came out of a lot of things. foremost, i think, that i had fallen out of the habit of blogging (and in many ways, out of social media). in the first few months of my phd program i attended a talk by jerome mcgann where he talked, quite eloquently, about modes of pursuit of knowledge - one, where we attempt to shape what we know into a truth we understand, and the other where we recognize the sheer unknowability of many things but are not discouraged in the pursuit of truth. it seemed (at least to me) a little bit like fate that soon after i read a wonderful blog post by a colleague about discovery of compassion in the archive and how the digital world was a space where continued disruption can be seen as a source of compassion (both to ourselves and to each other).
the problem was, of course, that i was not very interested in anything i had to say to myself, or even what i could say to other people. writing and academia are often such solitary endeavors (you sit in an office, or the library, or a coffee shop and you write and read and think all by yourself) and i’ve always been so much more interested in the sort of thinking that comes out of dialogue. these sort of conversations are already happening everywhere (kate hart and sarah enni are two spectacular examples), but i wanted a space where two (of many) things that define me would always be in conversation with each other: academia and creative writing. i also want this space to be (and i think in many ways this is the academic in me screaming) a thoughtful exercise in self love. one of the prevailing reasons i fell out of blogging as practice was the pressure to write - write to a schedule, write about these things, modulate your tone in certain ways. and i want this space to be free of that kind of pressure (which is maybe bad business) and free to change form.
so then, what is narrative love? a conversation (sometimes with the same people recurring)- it will hardly (if ever) be lone posts written by just me. instead, i hope to create a space where i can archive conversations between friends and colleagues in reflections about anything and everything. as the title implies, i want this place to be deeply committed to compassion and self love, to allow me to be both kind to myself (and my guests) while also being self critical. we live in a moment, i think, where to be a marginalized body and to voice any criticism of the status quo is to be branded in a particular way (rarely positive, i think). and i want to take that kind of existence, and the dialogue that comes along with it, and create a space for joy and compassion.
