This is just a brief note to introduce myself and this blog. My name is Brian Staker; I live in Salt Lake City, Utah and write fairly regularly for City Weekly newspaper and irregularly for other outlets. I want this blog to be about writing in those contexts as well as others, like poetry. Writing is a lot of different things, but one of my favorite quotes is "I write to find out what I have to say;" will have to look up the source. To me writing is a couple things: 'thinking out loud,' a method of organizing your thoughts, a memory device. It seems to me that each of us is constantly evolving or identities or persona in the world. Writing is a feedback process in which you de-scribe or define yourself, then that description echoes back and shapes the writer whose voice shaped those words. Who is the author? Whose words are these anyway? I am open to other things writing can be, other writer's processes, and process in itself is what I am most interested in.
Anyway, this blog will be a catch-all for the thoughts that don't fit into the strictly journalistic or poetic (will have a separate blog just for my poetry) and I don't exactly consider myself a journalist anyway. I didn't go to J-school; I took a degree in creative writing. Isn't a 'journalist' just somebody who keeps a 'journal,' anyway? In the broadest sense of the term. A witness, a testament to experience. It's always after the fact, though, and because of that I don't completely trust that definition; I maintain that you experience is conditioned by the description of it. I'm not very interested in what I call 'facticity;' the journalistic fiction of objectivity. That's why I'm a poet to begin with; I'm more interested in the 'fictive' than the factile. I'm only interested in facts for what they 'signify,' what's the deeper meaning? Facts always exist in an interpretative context, 'media-ted' to throw in another postmodern cliche'. The fictive is the story we tell, and as much as 'news' outlets have started to portray themselves as 'storytellers,' I find that disingenuous. It's fine for journalists to have an agenda, as long as it's out on the table. But then don't pretend objectivity; you can't have it both ways. Enough critique of journalism for now.
Once again, there's the crack in between which the uncategorizable will tend to fall, and that's what I usually find most interesting. The 'definitive' seeks to arrest the experience, freeze it and locate a resolution so that no more thinking is needed. So much thinking seeks to 'problem solve' and arrive at a terminus that, paradoxically, means the end of thinking. This blog is a place for thoughts to live and to use the 'memetic' cliche', reproduce; that goes for comments too. Here lies everything from the personal to parts of the writing that don't end up on the page. Notes on my other venues of expression, like my podcast & music.
Gawd, that all sounded so serious and self-important; I get that way at times. But I try not to make anything into an idol to worship, least of all poetry, part of whose purpose is to get beyond the tunnel vision of the ego, to 'keep an open mind,' etc. All of this is subject to revision. Oh well, this note is already not 'brief' any more.
And far too factile.
Good luck, Brian
