I already spend too much time on my laptop — way too much on some days. And now I’ve gone and opened a Tumblr blog.
I can only guess what this will do to my free time. Whatever that is.
What got into me? Good question. I took a look at the Tumblr blogs of Hearts Asunder, Megan Branch and Ann Fernald, clicked on the archive link of each, and I was hooked. It just looks so cool.
My new Tumblr blog, Woolfwriter, will give me a place to post small bits about Woolf, as well as miscellaneous stuff I come across that I want to share.
Besides what I post on Facebook and Twitter, I mean.
The beauty of the world, which is soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
A new collaborative online writing project called Hearts Asunder launches tomorrow.
It will use 400-word blog posts to illustrate the Woolf quote above by “smashing ideas from her writing against items from today’s pop culture to help yank her charm and relevance into the 21st Century,” according to creator Brianna Goldberg.
The self-described “lit-loving Canadian writer and radio producer” will curate the project, which will run from March 1-28, the 70th anniversary of Woolf’s death. It is conceived of as a commemoration of her death as well as a celebration of her unique way of seeing the world as a double-edged sword that can incite both pain and laughter.
Goldberg’s aim is to overcome a tendency many Woolf scholars deplore. That is the public’s proclivity to focus on Woolf’s sad, serious side — including her final walk to the River Ouse — to the exclusion of her witty, humorous side, including her incredibly productive life.
Steven Daldry’s popular 2002 filmThe Hours‘ helped reinvigorate interest in Woolf and her writing. But it also reinforced the view of Woolf as a tragic figure, one reason why some Woolf fans and scholars panned the film. However, the film won a multitude of awards, including Nicole Kidman’s Oscar for best actress, the Golden Globes award for best drama and the best adapted screenplay honor from the Writers Guild of America.
Since then, online interest in Woolf has grown. And while I have my doubts that Woolf’s charm and relevance need to be “yanked” into the 21st century, no one has launched a project that inserts Woolf into mainstream media and pop culture the way that The Hours did. As a result, the public impression of Woolf remains a serious one.
Goldberg agrees, and she hopes her project will change that.
“I believe Woolf has been absorbed into our culture as an overly dour, overly serious character. By pairing her work with items of today’s pop culture in this blog project, I hope we can help show the author and her work in a new light—one that celebrates her sense of humour AND her gravitas. And her relevance to the 21st Century,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Goldberg says Hearts Asunderwill feature a series of blog posts that take ideas, characters, and/or themes from Woolf’s work and “smash them against items of contemporary pop culture, resulting in brief and unique bits of creative writing in a variety of styles. In short, it’s a VW culture-jam.”
Blog contributors include a Canadian Stratford Festival actor, a baseball historian, a music critic, the star of a viral video comedy team, a mommy blogger and others. Goldberg says the writers have an interesting mix of perspectives and various levels of familiarity with Woolf’s work.
“But they’re all excited and eager to learn more about VW’s work through this project—and really, that’s a main goal of the concept for me, too,” she wrote.
Hearts Asunderis live now, and the full version of the Tumblr blog will launch tomorrow. See the RSS feed at the top of the right sidebar for links to the site’s most recent posts.
Flo, the blogger at “Thoughts of the Common Reader,” has posted a fascinating entry, complete with beautiful photos, about her eight-mile walk from Monk’s House in Rodmell to Charleston Farmhouse in Firle.
Blithe Spirit and I have something in common. I share her self-described “abiding (nay, obsessive) interest in Virginia Woolf.”
Blithe is the creator of the blog Julia Hedge’s Laces, and this week she e-mailed Blogging Woolf to share her post about a recent visit to the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta.
While there, Blithe was awed by their exhibitof Hogarth Press books. She praises the exhibit itself, which is titled “Woolf’s Head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press” and is available until May 28. But she also praises the exhibit’s catalogue and recommends contacting the exhibit site to enquire about purchasing one.
You can read her interesting and detailed post, “An Exhibit of Woolf’s Own,” here.
Artistic creation is a voyage into the unknown, says creative writing teacher and fiction writer Peter Turchi.
Turchi operates from the premise that writers and other artists are explorers — mapmakers who try to show their readers and viewers where they are and how to get to where they want to go, according to Geeta Sharma-Jensen’s review in the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel.
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer is Turchi’s meditation on human creativity. In it, Turchi enlists various figures from the ancient Greeks to the Road Runner to show how writers such as Woolf guide readers through their imaginary worlds.
Turchi focuses on Mrs. Dalloway, discussing Clarissa’s “neural shimmer” and the “mental map” that Clarissa’s thoughts illustrate in Woolf’s novel.
