Readers and writers blog

This weblog isn’t very old, and I haven’t been blogging very long, but I’m coming to realize that this process is just a continuation of something I’ve been doing for a very long time — going through people’s garbage.

In a metaphorical sense, that is.

I’ve been writing for a long time. I first got paid for it more than 40 years ago at the Transcript-Telegram, a daily newspaper in Holyoke, Mass., where I started by writing obituaries. Well, the old T-T is now defunct — long gone, disappeared — and as I also am approaching that status, I have written my own obituary, although you’ll have to wait to read the whole thing.

For now, let me say that I retired three years ago, but it wasn’t a new experience. I had retired once before, in the 1980s, when I sold a three-story, Federal-period brick house in a coastal city in Maine and moved into a small truck — actually, a mini-motor home — with a usable floor space of 6 by 12 feet where I planned to live until real retirement age and Social Security. Sort of surviving in a cocoon. But it didn’t work out that way.

While I didn’t exactly hit the road, the truck had to move from time to time to avoid attracting landowners, police and vandals. And as I made my way around the country in increments of only a few miles at a time, I met people and saw things that attracted me. Not famous people and monumental things, but small people and the small things they struggled with. Many of those people had come loose from the mainstream or had never been in it to begin with. And the mainstream certainly overlooked the things they struggled with.

There’s a word for loose fragments that have been worn away and left floating. Not exactly garbage or trash but leftovers. Detritus.

Some of those people and things ended up in a book I wrote before returning to the newspaper business, a book that appears in the nonfiction section of this website. And it occurs to me now that the process that led to the book is something I’ve done for a long time, certainly from the time I became a reporter — picking through our society’s detritus.

So I’m a garbage picker. And as all worthy garbage pickers know, you can find some pretty good things in there. You just have to go through a lot to get to them.

Now for this weblog. Among the millions of blogs out here, there’s a lot of garbage. You and I might not agree on what exactly the garbage is. I don’t much care for blogs that fawn on celebrities. You might not care for blogs that pontificate on writing. But there’s no disagreement on the amount of garbage. It’s a lot.

And so now I am picking through the detritus of today’s electronic landscape. Why do it? Who benefits? As David Letterman used to say, ‘Why, you, the viewer.’ No, just kidding. As with everything I’ve ever done, the chief beneficiary is me. Being a newspaper reporter was easier than cutting pulpwood or working in the woolen mill. Writing the book allowed me to write off the cost of the truck. (Alas, IRS rules on depreciation for creative enterprises have changed since then.) And living in the truck gave me a chance to sift through a lot of garbage of my own.

If you ask me, I’ll say I’m sifting through the millions of blogs out here in order to find those that I consider well-written and to bring those to the attention of readers who may offer thoughts of their own in a feedback cycle that we hope encourages all of us writers and improves our writing.

I’ve found some very good things in this littered blogosphere, and they’re all sitting over there on the right in our blogroll.

But basically, I’m just doing what comes naturally — picking through garbage, searching for the good stuff, holding these treasures up to the light for a better look. If you also find some value in this, well, so much the better.

– Sid Leavitt