Introduction

How do I start this blog? I've run, and continue to run, a number of blogs around the various interwebs, mostly on soccer. I'm familiar with the blogger's routine of shuffling through the daily news sources to find those few gems worth expanding on, but this is different. This is about me. So, I guess I start with an introduction to me. My name is Ian, and I'm a displaced east coaster, living now in the moist and cloudy confines of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. My formal training is as a scientist, a biologist to be exact, and I have spent the past four years working in northwestern Alaska studying seabirds and the little sea creatures they eat. After that project lost its federal funding, and after a few unwelcome changes in my personal life, I decided to seek therapy in an old habit, my writing. I've always been a huge reader and consumer of both poetry and prose, and wrote a lot for my self, but never thought I could write for the public. Mostly I was just lacking confidence in my work, and thinking that 28 was a little late to start a second (or more accurately, fourth) career. But, in the meantime, I was writing more than ever - pages and pages every day, notebooks every month, and some of it seemed to be better than before. It seemed as if the events of my life in recent years had focused me a little, and made me a little bit more interesting of a person, which I think of as an absolute prerequisite for being a good writer. I don't think I'm a good writer, not yet, but I think I'm getting better, and I'm happy to say that I have recently gotten my first acceptance! A poem of mine, called "You Are" was accepted by the online magazine Chantarelle's Notebook, a small but pretty well-known little website which has published some pieces I've really liked. That will be coming out in August, by the way, and I'll certainly blog about that here. This is my semi-public journal, where I'll talk about my writing, my life, traveling (I'll be in the UK for a good bit of the summer), etc. I hope it's enjoyable to read, or at least, if it's not, that it doesn't take too terribly long. Thanks for coming.

In addition, I am in the process, with a few friends, of putting together an online journal of our own. It will be called 1097 magazine, and will be exclusively dedicated to showing off the talents of new and emerging artists, authors and musicians. I'll be talking about 1097 a lot on here, and the site will eventually have a link to this blog.