Hello, My Name Is.

Nothing is private in the younger generations anymore. When I was a child I wrote in a diary. I kept it tucked at the bottom of my nightstand, hidden beneath the weight entire "Baby-Sitters Club" series. I chose this location because I feared someone would discover it tucked between the mattress and boxspring, the traditional hiding place of deep, dark secrets. Today, we expose our innermost selves to the virtual world while our public selves remain safe behind anonymity.

The problem with raising a generation of children to believe that they are all uniquely special: we all believe we have something to say. More troublesome, we all believe someone should listen. If Twitter has exacerbated this dilemma, it has also, at least, found a way to contain it: who really needs more than one sentence at a time, anyway?

I did have a blog once in college. While I spent the spring semester of junior year in Japan, I kept a livejournal so that my mother, father, and two best friends could remain up-to-date without amassing huge telephone bills.

All my life I wanted to be a writer. I went to one of the top engineering schools in the country and majored in Creative Writing. I went to graduate school for poetry. Poetry, for God's sake! I have friends whose blogs, despite having very little actual meaning, fill pages and pages with innane detail. (Too much attention to detail? Can such a thing exist? I imagine high school English teachers taking to the streets in mass panic.)

I got my MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, a top program. I sat in workshops with people who I believed would become voices for the next generation of artists (barely audible voices, but voices nonetheless). My work was received favourably. I had hope. I lost it when the rejection letters started coming in. I wound easily and I take too long to heal. At the age of twenty-seven, my one publication is in a twenty-page journal printed on blue dollar-bill-sized cardstock. Its write-up in the 2005 edition of "The Writer's Market" boasts that it is distributed for free by a homeless man on a street corner in Seattle. I don't think that was a joke.

When I was in high school, I imagined myself winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. I envisioned the interview on Oprah, the New York book signing; I pictured teenagers scrawling my famous quotes in the margins of their notebooks. When I was in college, the fire burned out. It scared the shit out of me. I switched from fiction to poetry and fdiscovered that a few gleaming embers remained. In graduate school, I realized that my poetry was not likely to garner a Nobel Prize, so I decided that I would become a renowned poet-instructor at a top MFA program. After I graduated and settled into the real world, I began to realize that I was born into a dying breed. The glory days of the tenured English academic have passed.

I'm adjuncting as an English Comp instructor at a community college in West Virginia. My mother, a dean in the school, got me the position. Although I'm grateful for the opportunity, it isn't the writing workshop I've fantasized about, and I fear it may not lead to one. I've down-scaled my dream of a Nobel Prize to a more manageable book publication. If my situation is sink-or-swim, this blog is my attempt at swimming. Beware: I'm not a very good swimmer. I am starting this blog because I'm afraid that if I don't I'll never get to have a career as a writer. I have nothing to say. You've been warned.

My poetry comes from a deep-rooted belief that nobody really has anything to say. It keeps me humble, puts me in perspective. I have nothing more or nothing less to give to the world through my art than anyone else. Nobody has anything new to say. At the end of my MFA program, I realized that I had written the same exact poem one hundred and fourteen times. But then I realized that that was okay, because everyone else had, too. Poets are perpetually writing the same collective poem.

We repeat stories because we have to, since everything valuable there ever was to tell had already been told by the time the Book of Genesis was done. After that, there wasn't anything left to do but rehash the same thing with slightly variant details. And we had to rehash because man is the value-positing animal. We talk amongst ourselves for the same reason that swallows build nests at San Juan Capistrano. It's religious, almost.

I am a voice in the wilderness, and I am crying out. This is my message. I am only crying out: I have nothing to say. Here it is again, for those of you who haven't tired of it: (you never do).