iswf2005 (original) (raw)

Greetings everyone!

At the Wine and Cheese reception, some teachers and students were discussing how we could keep in contact with one another during and after the festival ... and the idea of a blog was born!

So what is a blog, you might ask? It's a Web-log, or blog for short. They serve different purposes depending upon the group of people who are involved, but one way to think about this is as an online community that is an extension of the communities we formed in our workshops this summer at Iowa City. We can discuss anything here --
stuff we found useful, things we're having trouble with;
we can announce contests and awards we think people might want to know about;
get contact info for that person who slipped away without leaving an email address;
suggest exercises for various stages of the writing process
find writers in our area
hold discussions on different aspects of the craft

Perhaps one way to think of a blog is an online cocktail party, where we can all be witty behind our keyboards in the safety of our rooms or coffeeshops. It's several discussion going on at once, in different corners of the room.

The key is to use this resource.

For those of you without blogging experience, it's a painless process to join:
1. Set up an account (for free) with livejournal.com
2. Subscribe yourself to this community
3. You will have the ability to update your blog or update this blog. if you have information to share with writers, please post it to this blog.

For those of you too shy to get a free account, you can still post comments in response to the posts made by members of the ISWF2005 community

For those of you with a livejournal.com account:
Well, you've probably already subscribed yourself; if you haven't, feel free.

We intend for this to be a blog for exchange of information, or anything meant to help ourselves or each other in our craft of writing. Some of the suggestions were for people who want to find out if there are people in their geographic areas (I for one would like to talk with Dayton area people), exchange contact information, inform one another of readings, publishing opportunities, or neat literary goings-on, and for generally keeping us motivated once we leave Iowa City.

Use it wisely, use it respectfully, but by all means, use it!

And welcome to the virtual ISWF2005 :-)

Just a general comment: this is participant-moderated. The ISWF staff are allowing this to run completely independent of the summer festival office, so anything goes, although of course, respect for people, regardless of view, is assumed to be the operating standard of participation in this community.

If you can any questions, email me at arctic_twilight@hotmail.com with "Blog" in the title (I share that email address with several people).