Blog Description:
[skeyn]
-noun
1. a length of yarn or thread wound on a reel.
2. anything wound in or resembling such a coil.
3. a flock of geese, ducks, or the like, in flight.
4. a succession or series of similar or interrelated things.
The Skein was created in early 2011 as a way to give a written form to my never ending commentary on the political and social constructs inherent in American culture. Since that initial inception, and after a four month hiatus, The Skein has been re-imagined as a place to more fully explore the world as “a succession or series of similar or interrelated things,” not just through the complementary lenses of political and sociological study, but from a more humanistic and holistic perspective. The primary “goal” – if something like this project has a goal, and is actually anything more than a wind-lofted seed driven by the order of chaos – is to incorporate more personal and emotional content. I want to move closer toward an accurate reflection of who I am and what I think as a woman, a liberal, a feminist, and a writer, without the filters of assumed and arbitrary propriety behind which I have spent a long, long time…well, if not hiding, certainly poking around in some pretty dark corners.
The original version of The Skein was set at a remove I deemed necessary for appropriate interaction with the subject material (political, liberal, humanist, etc.), a distance that managed to convey very distinctly about one-third of what I wanted to say about given subject at any given time and managed to obscure far more than just the remaining sixty-six percent. The blog worked to the extent that it provided a forum for analytical discourse, but failed in its desire – my desire – to get to the source: to jump in, to delve deeper, to wind and unwind that braided tree-root of interrelated things that creates both our individual perspectives and shared commonalities.
The entries posted from January to July comprise a reasoned, reasonable discourse about issues facing my corner of society today, and it functions fine for what it is, and serves as a useful historical record of this developing project. The idea going forward is to compose a less reasoned, less reasonable set of narratives about how I perceive the world not just through filtered words but through the lens of my actual self.
I hope to continue publishing analytical essays, but also to publish non-narrative ones, to share fictional works in progress, to explore not just social constructs but writing and literature from both creative and critical perspectives, to sometimes wax long and to other times write short, to shed some of the buttoned-up baggage of analysis and stray more into the realms of imagination and interaction vs. observation and commentary. It will work best when you, the reader, participate and comment in whatever way you want: with words, with thoughts, with pictures, with songs, with poems, with joy, with anger, with heart. The Skein aims to have less holding back, more holding forth; less prevarication, more bald honesty; to be more bold, to be bigger than itself.
Welcome.