At some point in the last year or two, I lost track of how to blog, of why I would blog. My blog has gone through a few different styles and phases, following me through a couple of moves in jobs and homes. I’m not too concerned about those shifts nor necessarily about not blogging. I spend enough time on computers and the internet, and I get tired of it. If I don’t have a compelling reason to blog, I figure that (1) there are certainly enough blathering blogs in the sea and (2) this is supposed to benefit me and people I care about somehow (i.e. it should be fun to write and read; provide information that is really not getting through elsewhere; help build community, networks, or whatever else the internet can build).
Before I entered graduate school, this blog was more grounded in the happenings of the Asian Pacific Islander community writing workshops and other related nonprofit work I was doing. Now, in the thick of graduate school, sometimes it is hard for me to express an idea without tortured academic language, or to openly share ideas at all. We are pushed or self-conditioned to save our good stuff to publish, to not let others get the scoop, and not to publicize half-baked projects. I don’t think that is always bad advice but it can be a burdensome extra layer of thinking nonetheless about what you put out in public with your name attached to it- on top of other hesitations to putting things that can be close to the heart out here for friends, family, spammers, bots, and right-wing crazies to consume and comment on.
So, I have been asking myself what would make blogging worthwhile again. What work, what people and places, am I grounded in? What holes are there in e-conversations that I would like to fill, and what other conversations could I help start? I have some ideas but I realized the thing about blogging is that you can’t wait until you have the perfect tract formed, or else the momentum is gone and your blog is dusty.
There are folks whose blogs I look to often that I think have the goods- who ask good questions and get others talking and asking better questions too- in poetry world and academic-activist world. I’m grateful for their presence out here and would like to be better company myself.
Recently too, I’ve been taken with some blogs run on Tumblr, a host like WordPress, that claims to be the easiest way to blog. They make it very easy to repost items from other tumblrs, blogs, news items, whatever, just like how Facebook lets you post links to articles and videos. I like the way things look on Tumblr: photos look great, quotes are easily edited to highlight the punchiest part. And I also like that it’s quick to create posts and you don’t always need to add your commentary: it is more like you are collecting things in a shoebox. And sometimes others think what you’ve found are gems too (you can like or repost others items and they will appear as notes on the original item)- this can be an annoying echo chamber like Facebook and Twitter, but so far I’ve found the content quite good. A friend of mine keeps one at wordsandsteel, and the posts there and especially the ones at curate made me want to start one of my own.
So, I did, and you can find it at kith and koko.
More on that and on what I think can still inhabit this space soon.


Maile Arvin blogs here. She is a graduate student in Ethnic Studies living in Southern California. She likes coffee and poems.