The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

sailing the wine dark sea, walking along the beach, listening to sirens, and joining the great conversation...

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

The Wine Dark Sea

Twenty five years ago I started a blog called The Wine Dark Sea. I was a young, unmarried adjunct, teaching composition and literature at a state university, and my boyfriend, soon to be fiancé, built a blog for me to replace the lonely LiveJournal which no one but my sister ever read. Reader, I married him not long after that. And we quickly had five kids and I started homeschooling them…. and I chronicled it all on my blog.

But children grow up and life gets complicated and the internet gradually moved away from blogs and toward the much less civil society of “social” media. Commenters became more scarce— though there was always a core cadre of loyal readers who reassured me that someone was out there who cared. And somehow the blog felt heavier and heavier and I wrote less and less. It had become a barnacle-encrusted shell and I a weary hermit crab not consciously aware that I was in need of a new home. And the cost to maintain 25 years of archives increased… until my husband and I gave up and agreed it was time to stop paying to host a pair of ancient blogs that we hardly ever maintained.

And yet, the writing bug doesn’t just go away just like that, does it? Once a writer, always a writer. I thought maybe my little poetry page on Facebook, and some other literary pages, would do the trick, but again the algorithm doesn’t boost the content to the people who actually wanted to read and only a tiny handful of people even saw my posts. And though I am a very reluctant adopter of new technology and formats, I have found myself drawn more and more to good conversations and writing happening at Substack. So here we are. A new name. A new start. Maybe new life?

What I Write About

Astute readers will recognize in the title of this page a quotation from The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock. Let that stand as a warning to all comers that I love T.S. Eliot and modern poetry and free verse. But I also love formalist poetry. All I ask from a poem is that it sings to my heart and echoes in my head and pulls deeply like the tides of the sea. My favorite poets include Seamus Heaney, A.E. Stallings, Ted Kooser, Gerard Manly Hopkins, and Malcolm Guite.

I’m sure I’ll also end up talking about other kinds of literature as well— and not only literary literature but good old genre fiction too. I’m as likely to write about Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld as I am about Rumer Godden or Sigrid Undset, Jane Austen or Herman Melville or Charles Dickens.

My old blog talked a lot about family and homeschooling but I don’t think this substack will do as much of that. That’s not the phase of life I’m in. But I always wrote about literature, ideas, poetry, and faith. And those topics abide.

This isn’t going to be a religious blog by any means; but I will hardly be able to keep that part of me sequestered, so it will likely flame out, like shining from shook foil.

Heart Speaks, or Sings, to Heart

At least one friend has already noticed in my choice of title an echo of John Henry Newman’s cor ad cor loquitur, heart speaks to heart. That is also intentional. What I love most about poetry is that experience of one heart singing to another. Unlike poor Prufrock, I do think the sirens will sing to me. And to you too. Let’s all sing together.

What I’m looking for in this space, even more than a place to write the thoughts that must be written, is good conversation. A friendly chat. A symposium, a salon, a long, late-night confabulation… call it what you will. The part of the party where you and friends, old and new, all get a little drunk on ideas and the heady brew that is the meeting of the minds.

Pull up a chair. Grab the tasty beverage of your choice. Bring your opinions and ideas and the beautiful things that sing to your heart and come share them all. I want to listen and learn more than I want to stand on my soap box and teach. I’m all too often full of my own opinions and stuck in my own head, but what I truly long for is the chance to read good poetry and good literature in community with fellow enthusiasts and lovers of beautiful things.

Come, linger with me in the chambers of the sea.