Dear Friends and Family,

For a long time I've had an imaginary craft blog. I've composed posts, imagined photographs, but felt a little too sheepish to carry it out. Something about blogging makes me very uncomfortable. I can't really pretend it's modesty; I did write a memoir when I was twenty-three. But... let's call it a problem of audience. Who am I writing too? Well, you, you wonderful people who I don't write enough letters to, real people, and also the imaginary ones. The thing is that I'm not a good enough crafter to warrant the kind of blog I imagine, and you real people, while you always have plenty of love for me and my projects, can't really be all that interested in my adventures in mitring.

And yet, in spite of this great big objection of mine, my imaginary blog won't go away, so I decided it was time to give it life. So humor me a little. I'm sure to talk a lot about books, and My So Called Life, which I just discovered holds up remarkably well, and the feral lettuce growing in the sidewalk cracks down the street, so if buttonholes get you down, just skip that part. My mother once gave me official permission to only read the peace parts in War and Peace and to skip the whaling bits of Moby Dick. So, you know... she's a wise lady.

Oh. Some of you know (and heart) Walter Ong. For those of you who managed to escape studying Comp Rhet, he wrote an essay that most first-year writing teachers read called "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction." How I came to have a scrap of fabric with "I Heart Walter Ong" printed on it is another story.

Alternative Post Title: You Are Not A Fiction.