Naming the Blog
The spine of a book is the outer hinge where all the pages are gathered and bound together. It is one of the most crucial elements of the book. The gutter of a book is the valley that forms between the pages, only appearing when the book is open. This blog is named after these two elements – one, the spine, being more concrete and recognizable while the other, the gutter, is a transient space defined by absence – as a tribute to the technology of the book.
This is not to dismiss any other forms of reading. My love and appreciation for audiobooks and e-books have grown substantially in the past few years, and they contribute largely to the number of books I am able to read. However, the physical book is a magical form that simply cannot be bested.
This Blog’s Purpose
This blog is a tribute to all books, whether they be physical books or not.
I’ve started this blog as a concentrated effort to revitalize my love for reading. I have two degrees in English, which means I spent several years reading very intensely – several hundred pages a week most of the time (all efforts to estimate the exact number have failed for one reason or another, mostly laziness.) While I have few regrets about what I chose to study, the experience had an undeniable impact on my relationship with reading. In elementary and middle school, I was a voracious reader who read for the fun of it. By college (or maybe even by high school), it had become work, a task I had to perform, a deadline I had to meet, a long-winded process that took the joy out of it.
I can’t ever fully remove myself from that world, and I do think the habits I developed made me a better reader. However, I’m looking to repair my relationship with books and become that excited, hungry reader again. This blog will be a place where I can once again approach books with passion, joy, and love.
It will also be a space to talk about craft. For nearly as long as I have been able to read, I have also been a writer. I’ve always been fascinated by the possibilities writing presents, and I’ve always itched to be a creator. In fact, this passion is exactly what pushed me through college. I took every opportunity to learn to write better. Academic writing was one thing, and I greatly enjoyed it on its own merits. But creative writing was its own world, one that I launched myself into head first.
By the time I graduated, I had taken nearly every creative writing course I could load onto my plate and finished out with five semesters of fiction workshops (and one of poetry, which I liked, but wasn’t spectacular at.) I even did my thesis work in creative fiction. And while I’ve been on a hiatus since graduation, writing is nearly always on my mind.
One thing that every single writing professor I studied with emphasized was the need for a writer to read. It’s a necessary step to learning the craft, and it is one of the most efficient ways to do it. Therefore, one thing I hope to make a focal point on this blog is a discussion of craft – what elements I see moving around in what I’ve been reading, the clever tricks I hope to steal for my own writing, and how I would change or challenge a text if I were its author.
I’m no master of writing, nor am I the most well-read (there are a lot of books I’m “supposed” to have read but have never even read a page of.) But that’s what makes this project so exciting for me.
The future opens up as a wide and wandering path, and I am ready to embark.
Spine & Gutter 