Contemplating the future of this blog, part 2 - thieving monkey robs women and children; Chicago basks in the winter sun
Friday, January 28, 2011 at 2:02PM 
The cat.
As you can see, a sunbeam found its way into our house yesterday. Chicago found her way into the sunbeam.
Now, I will return to the discussion that I started two days ago, but left hanging. I will carry out this discussion against the backdrop of a thieving monkey that I met at the Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens in Bangalore during my first trip to India, after the wedding of Vivek and Khena.
The monkey.
First, to clarify, my contemplation does not include any contemplation of shutting this blog down. No. No contemplation of that, whatsoever! At times, I wonder what madness it was that ever possessed me to start this thing in the first place, but I did start it, and I did set some goals and I intend to reach those goals.
Times have changed, I have changed and I do not see any kind of future for me in paper publications. Paper publications are my past. Plus, electronic, digital media seems to me to have been developed especially for people like myself, people who like to work independent and solo, in both words and images.
So I will keep blogging, but is clear to me that if I am going to survive in the short term, I must scale back a little bit. I will still post every day that it is reasonably possible, but maybe I will make three to five of the posts that I put up each week very short, involving one to four images, possibly as many as five and if I get carried away, perhaps six or seven.
Then, maybe two to three times a week I can do posts with a dozen or more images, plus narrative. Maybe one post a week could be a true work of exporation.
Even as I scale back, my goal will be to soon come roaring back, after I figure things out and come up with the means and time to make this blog into what I have envisioned to make of it.
So far, I am falling very short.
The monkey eats a bag of peanuts that he had just stolen from a small child.
My goals are stated both in the sidebar and in the title and subtitle, but I will restate them:
I started this blog because I had lived in Wasilla for 28 years. In my own home and among my own family, I was very comfortable and felt very much at home, but out in the community of Wasilla, I felt myself a stranger.
My photographic and journalistic work had all been done outside of Wasilla. All I did in Wasilla was to assemble the photos, interviews and information that I had gathered while traveling to other places into whatever paper publication I was working on at the time.
This was an all-consuming, exhaustive, pursuit, one that left me no energy or time to get involved with Wasilla life itself - although I did manage to go to (and photograph) quite a few of the baseball, football, track, figure skating, drama and other events that my children involved themselves in as they grew.
As I do now, I would walk a lot, ride my mountain bike, and cross-country ski - but this happened at a time when the woods and hills were still open to me and so these were solitary exercises. I would often put in days, weeks, or even months of walking, biking, and skiing through the woods without running into a single other person. When I did, it would most often be Patty Stoll, The Fit Lady, who recently died of cancer.
So I started this blog in part to get to know Wasilla better, to explore the community, to meet and photograph the people, learn what they do and think, and make a record of it.
I did not want to lose my connections to Rural Alaska, and so the other part would be to keep going out there, perhaps for shorter periods of time than I had before.
And because I am a person who must - SIMPLY MUST - get up and go somewhere new and far away sometimes, I left room in the blog for this, too.
So I planned to use this blog to tell stories about people here in Wasilla, elsewhere in Alaska and anywhere else in the world - hence, my title:
Wasilla, Alaska by 300 and then some
After I had been at for awhile, I suddenly realized that I, an Alaskan born into exile in the state of Utah, had spent my entire career looking for my home, my community, and my family - and that is ironic because in doing so, I so often left my family behind as I journeyed off to other places without them.
Hence, my subtitle:
One photographer's search for community, home and family
As the monkey finishes his peanuts, a nice Muslim woman gives it a cookie. Surely, the monkey will appreciate this and be grateful.
But I find that I am still doing pretty much the same thing. I have not really explored Wasilla and the people of Wasilla at all. Although at a less intense level than before, I still go off to other places to take photos and gather information with which to put paper publications together.
When I am in Wasilla, I continue to have little interaction with the larger community. I spend my days, right here, in my office, attached to my house and garage, sitting at this computer, struggling both to make sense out of the work that I have gathered in other places for a paper publication, to get a blog post together everyday.
I still do not have the time to go out and track Wasilla people down in their environs, photograph them, find out about their lives and then put together a piece of work that describes this town.
When I go out for a walk, or bike ride, my ski trails having been taken away from me, I take my camera and I photograph the dogs that come barking at me, the ravens that pass overhead, this and that, an occassional person. I take my camera to Metro Cafe on my coffee break, to places where I eat.
I photograph what catches my eye. I then put the pictures in the blog and then write. I never know what I am going to write until I write it. I am not seeking out and gathering stories in the way that had intended. It is true that little stories pop up and reveal themselves, sometimes over time and I do like this aspect of what I am currently doing, but it is not enough.
When I get together with my family, I include that as well. I never intended this. I did not mean to create a family blog. I planned to include my family, from time to time, but to a much lesser degree. I had planned to explore my community - but I have barely touched it.
Hell. I have lived in Wasilla for 28 years and I don't even know Sarah Palin! If we crossed paths, she would not even recognize me.
I don't really feel too bad about that, though.
Kalib and Jobe recognize me.
But still I need to better get to know the people of Wasilla.
The monkey does not appreciate it. The monkey is not grateful. The monkey wants it all and so goes for the women's picnic basket.
There, see - I ramble again, wander from the main point - this blog and its evolution I want to create a real publication, one that I use to do meaningful work and to truly explore the world around me, beginning right here in Wasilla but never limiting myself to Wasilla.
I do not have the means and time right now. When I get out there, I still do a better job of exploring the communities that I go to than I do of Wasilla. When I go out, I actually do go into people's environs, I do photograph them, I do learn and hear their stories, what they think of life.
It then becomes a bit of a balancing act as to how much of that work I save exclusively for the project that I am working on and how much I allow to go in this blog.
I spent much of the summer of 2009 on the Arctic Slope, working on Uiñiq magazine. I blogged throughout, but put very little of what I saw, photographed, and learned ever got into the blog. Yet, when people commented, I was amazed both to see that people from outside the Slope thought that I was really bringing them into the life and that people of the Slope were appreciating what I did, too.
Yet, I had shown only the tiniest sliver of the work that I had accumulated.
I decided that once the Uiñiq came out, I would take each story and redo it here - so that I could actually take readers on a caribou hunt, a seal hunt, that I could introduce my readers to the family in Wainwright who had taken me in and made me a part of them, through both happiness and grief. This was the kind of thing I was going to do.
And all of these stories were larger than what I had been able to fit into the Uiñiq, so I was going to expand and expound upon them, to tell the stories in greater depth - to share them not only with the readers of Uiñiq but with my blog readers, who may not number than many but are spread around the world.
But guess what? That Uiñiq has been out for a long time now and I have not reworked a single story from it into this blog - not a single story!
The monkey snatches a bag of grapes from the picnic basket and runs off with it.
Damn! Look at this! I am rambling on and on and creating so many words that nobody but the most dedicated of readers will ever read them all. I am probably talking more to myself than to anyone else. What I need to do is to rewrite this - edit it, shorten and condense it - to seek out and destroy all the typos, replace the dropped words, correct the spellings. But that would require time that I can not take.
I cannot meet my goals for this blog exclusively with this blog, nor can I achieve them pursuing it as I now pursue it - trying to keep up with the daily flow of mundane life just overwhelms everything else.
So I can't achieve my goals in this blog alone. I must add my electronic magazine to it. Once I do that, I can take stories like those that I did in the Uiñiq magazine and rework them there. I can even go back to my really old work - Alaska's Village Voices, Tundra Times, the Fort Apache Scout, find good images and stories, then find out what has become of the people in them and update it.
I can do new stories that I seek out and create specifically for that publication. I can go back deeper into my own past and heritage and tell the stories that I want to tell from there.
This will mean that I must streamline and restrain the blog a bit - in order to grow the electronic magazine.
It will mean that I must generate the funds to go at this full time - as I can not achieve this goal if I must work for someone else to make a living and putter at this on the edges. This MUST become my full-time work.
Well, I have more than used up my time and space for today.
I guess that I will have to post a part 3. I will dedicate part 3 to my thoughts on how I might shape that new electronic magazine and what I might do to raise the funds to accomplish all this.
I had meant to include all this today, but I rambled too much. This is too long right now and I have no more time for it.
To be continued.
Reader Comments (5)
Looking forward to part 3!
Bill - There is something to be said for the "mundane." Think Garrison Keillor. Anyway, I read your blog pretty regularly and you have inspired me to start an E-Diary with pictures. It will be very mundane. I'm hoping it will get me out of the house and maybe inspire me to do something else.
Bill, I must be a dedicated reader for I read every word. Putting all these thoughts you have concerning your blog, work and life may be therapeutic for you, so never apologize to us for "rambling". You've become part of my family and we've never met. What concerns you concerns me. Your blog is one of my first reads in my everyday life. I rarely miss a day, and if I do, I immediately catch up with you the next day.
Rebecca
"A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour"
Perhaps you already know about the "crowdsourcing" approach to fundraising for projects? One such site is: http://www.kickstarter.com/
It might be worth browsing around that site to see what people are doing to raise funds for ideas they have. You might consider also posting a "wish list" on your blog somewhere. People may not have much money but they might be willing to chip in a little toward some particular effort or need, since you have a great eye and a unique voice. You might have to set up an easy way for people to do this, though.
Of course some blogs carry advertising. I don't know much about it, but you could ask Ms. Mudflats how that works. I appreciate your blog and your mix of outward- and inward-directed writing and fine photography, and I wish you well.
I am so glad that you have so many readers - dedicating their time to read your blog. This really means you have to add that electronic magazine . I am sure many dedicated readers like me would do their best to help you achieve your goals...at least I will. Yes. I will.
-Suji