Writing Place

I admit it: I should have done more homework before I wrote that last post about blogs of place. As Lisa Williams, creator of www.placeblogger.com, has now told me, placeblogging has been the subject of sustained attention over the last few years. This has especially been the case for Tim Lindgren, an American PhD candidate, and some of the bloggers he knows.

Lindgren’s website has a blurb about his upcoming PhD thesis on the subject of placeblogging (http://www.timlindgren.com/research/placeblogging/dissertation). Interesting, although written in too jargonesque terms for my liking (‘using genre theory as a methodology for studying language use as a form of situated social action, I will argue that identity construction is the cultural work of place blogging’).

More compelling is Lindgren's archive of a great project called Ecotone. Created by a group of placebloggers, those involved in Ecotone used to pick a place-related topic twice a week, and hold a discussion of it by posting their thoughts onto a wiki. Here’s a link to their discussion of how they came to write about place, if you’re interested: http://www.timlindgren.com/ecotone/discussion_on_coming_to_write_about_place.

Again, if you’re interested, Lindgren’s site has links to the blogs of other Ecotoners: the Bowen Island Journal, Fragments From Floyd, the Cassandra Pages, the Middlewesterner and others (the links are below). There is some highly self-conscious diaristic-cum-nature writing on some of these, but also some great reflections on sense of place and blogging’s potential as a way of exploring it. See, for example: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/comments/comments.html.

And here is the Ecotoners’ definition of a placeblog:

‘Place bloggers write, on one level, about the place where they live: its ecology, its beauty, the particular quality of nature in that place, and their relation to it. On another level, place bloggers are concerned with larger questions of ecology and land use, the future of the environment, and human beings' relation to (or alienation from) the world we inhabit and share. And on a still deeper level, many place bloggers are exploring the whole notion of "place" itself: where and what is this elusive idea of "place", in its broadest sense, and what does it mean to us as spiritual beings in perpetual search of something called "home"?’.

http://www.roundrockjournal.com/
http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/blogger.html
http://www.cassandrapages.com/
http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/
http://middlewesterner.typepad.com/