Noah wants a blog
If I make him one I’m going to make it password protected or something. And I won’t link it here. I’d like him to have the writing practice and he’s interested in learning html.
I’ve been thinking about blogging a lot as I work on this paper I’m supposed to present. The title is: “Someone Else’s Shoes: How Dialogue On-Blog Impacted a Real Adoption†(I’m pretty sure I mentioned that here before — forgive me for repeating myself!) I’m writing it about Jerome Bruner’s theories that we make things true by putting them in narrative form. (Read more about that at that wikipedia link.) I started getting interested in this when I was writing that article on forgiveness and I started talking to one of the interview people about journaling and infertility because I’d read this study about how women who used journaling to talk about their infertility used those stories to make sense of the chaos of what was happening to them and that this changed their actual experience. And then we got to talking about journaling being a therapeutic tool. When I hung up I started thinking about how blogs don’t seem to necessarily be therapeutic for every infertility blogger and then I thought that it’s because blogs have comments and so the narrative shifts in response to those comments and this is why I think some infertility bloggers can sometimes feel more stuck in their infertility than someone who’s journaling alone.
Anyway, that made me think about how blogging has impacted my own adoption story and I know that specifically that it was hearing from first moms (then called birth moms on my blog) before and after Madison came home — particularly in that first year — that strongly influenced my story. So this week I sat down and thought hard about that and how it’s changed me and how it’s changed how this adoption has played out. My thesis is that if writing a narrative constructs reality, then having a blog invites other people to help you construct that reality. It’s been true for me anyway.
Now doesn’t that sound like it might be interesting if I actually get it written in time?
The trick I’m having is that I’m only talking about that first year because that was before I was really reading any first mom blogs (I believe that many of the first parents were blogging on LJ — I may touch on that). I want to strictly focus on how the realization that first moms were reading me changed my thinking and then to specific bloggers who challenged me a lot that first year. Since my argument is that writing narrative — not reading it — creates reality, I’m focusing only on my blog and my commenters.
(I wonder if it’s kosher that I just blogged all this? But in the interest of constructing my reality — and my paper — I needed to get it down here, too.)
Blogging thoughts before a conference paper seems totally fine to me: people in my field do that all the time in advance of our big conference.
I’m writing a bit about how reading affects narratives, so I’m suddenly feeling much more better, as Curious Girl would say, about how my paper is going to fit on this panel. Yay.
Reminds me of Narrative Therapy.
http://www.jimsparksphd.com/what_is_narrative_therapy.htm
Wow, it sounds like a great paper Dawn, I’d love to read it when it’s done - it’s sort of related to the fiction & exegesis work I am doing (or trying to do). In my outline I talked about the (reported) lack of stories and public discourse about the (sometimes difficult or indeed impossible) transition to motherhood, and wondered whether blogs and other online writing had changed the situation, or whether they still exist more in the realm of the private, and as such fail to transform experience at the level of public discourse and power structures. Something like that anyway. Have no idea how I am going to figure out an answer to that question of course - but I’m working on the fiction right now, so that’s okay.
My daughter is fascinated with blogs, too. I had her write a few entries on mine (which is password protected, and only directed to people I know in real life). Yesterday, at dinner, she said she had two stories. When I asked her what they were, she said, no I want to put them up on the computer (blog).
It’s fun. I think she’s enjoying how “published” it looks, just like everything else she reads on the internet, except their her own words.
bj
PS: daughter is six, so she’s not ready to do any html coding herself. Right now, she types in simple 4 sentence paragraphs that tell her stories. I think it’s good writing practice, though, and maybe she will have her own blog next year.