Writers on the Internet: Big Bright Brash World

Farren Stanley
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My very first website was a geocities page with an electric green background and blue writing, a shrine to my tween crush, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, just your standard early-nineties horrorshow complete with moving “under construction” gifs, a real artifact of the times and my age. Then as I entered my angsty early teens, the background turned black with a pattern of constellations and the script became silver italics and the space became a repository for the dozens of center-justified poems I was furiously writing.

Ohhhh yeeeeeaaahh.

I was too young to participate in the Third Wave in any meaningful way, but I was a direct beneficiary of its culture. I felt free to be loud and difficult and messy and pretty, saw that those traits are very much mutually inclusive, that complicated and skeptical is good, and plumbed the depths of those latent features of my personality both in a geocities address I regarded as my space in the world, where I published rapturous essays about Shirley Manson alongside unrequited-love poems and long letters to girlfriends and block quotes from whatever I was reading. The internet as archive for public and private writing seemed to me the most exciting cultural advancement for my generation.

I would not have couched it in those abstractions then, but I knew in my gut that I was a part of something big and meaningful.

It was in this way that I also made my first friends-on-the-internet, girls my age who were also curating their own juvenilia in real time, and oftentimes writing journals and letters alongside their poems and drawings, publishing them all in their own blogs. These friends did not play volleyball or collect charms for their bracelets and they also did not set things on fire or steal their parents’ tequila and get drunk in the woods. Like me, they were sensitive. Curious. A little socially maladjusted.  Readers. Even then, a little intense. We were becoming artists, though I don’t think any of us really understood it at the time, and we integrated into each others’ lives with an immediacy and intensity I rarely see now that I am twice as old as I was then.

I am still in daily contact with most of them.

The writer Kate Zambreno ruminated in her own blog this year about the presumption many have that the internet requires discretion—being discrete—maintaining fully animate, completely isolated selves—an idea with which I am certainly acquainted after years of fighting with exes and bosses and hostile strangers over what I write on the internet, but one that does not make intuitive sense to me because I became who I am—a writer, a woman, a brash and magnetic presence, a fiercely loyal friend— by writing and writing and writing and reading and reading and reading and loving and loving and loving on the internet.

I simply do not see the point in withholding any expression of Self on the internet because it is the internet. It is a limitless place that invites endless variations on infinite themes. Today I feel outraged and disenfranchised and I will blog about it and probably also fire off a slightly drunk 3am email and, in a few weeks, I’ll realize it’s really not that big of a deal, and I’ll feel sheepish about it, and I’ll apologize and blog about that, too. A few years down the line, some scrap of the whole extended interaction will wriggle into a poem and I will think, you look good, girl. I do not represent anything—my Self, least of all—as fixed and permanent.

In the 17 years I have been writing on the internet, my blogs have undergone at least 6-7 different iterations. They are all still there and I will from time to time return to them to mine information for my writing. Much of my writing springs from preliminary mulling on the blog, and much of my finished writing finds its way to institutionalized online lit journals. It’s a comfort to me that it’s all still there, the minutiae and the end-product, the art itself. And finding kindred spirits by striving for all variations of the purest expressions of self (even if this morning’s purest expression of self is I HAD A TERRIBLE FIRST DATE THIS WEEK FROM WHICH I HAVE STILL NOT RECOVERED AND I AM INCREDIBLY CONSTIPATED) is one of blogging’s greatest rewards.

My favorite people on the internet are daring enough to be as pedestrian as often as they are arch and pithy.

The concept of discreteness—a world of fixed gender, sexual preference, an unwavering stance on a political issue, a seminar paper that mustn’t contain the pronoun “I”, a blog in which talking about my work or my love, about which I am wildly passionate, is verboten—a private self, a public self—seems un-navigable and hopelessly outdated to me. The internet is—or can be, if we allow it— a fluid space, in which we can reach past the prescribed expectations/behaviors/conceptions that being physically embodied forces upon us and exist instead in a state of constant re-generation. This is the best place I can think of to write from; this is the best way I know how to love. It is my big bright brash  New World.

Farren Stanley's body is en route back to Santa Fe, NM from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She is bringing two dogs, two goldfish and seven orchids. You can find her work in Handsome, elimae, RealPoetik, Caketrain, H_NGM_N, and at Greying Ghost Press. If you can find her heart, mail it to Collected Works.