Mike Rose on Blogging

00:08 [Mike Rose] I'm somebody who's pretty un-technologic a guy. I still write with a number 2 pencil and a big yellow pad, but about a year ago I started a blog on my Web site. And I began, and I would put little essays of mine on this blog, every other week a new post. Well, what was

00:30 interesting to me was that after a while, I found myself getting caught up in the responses. I found myself then reading back through all of these responses, I found myself thinking about the original thing that I said, and I found that these responses—in some ways they touched me, in some ways they pushed on me, in some ways they got me to think in fresh ways about the original topic that I had posted. And so those little essays, the

01:00 kind of summary essays that I would write about these various posts that people would send in, themselves became really interesting exercises, and often times that, I think, enabled me to produce some of the writing that I like the most. So the thing, I guess, that grabbed me about this whole experience was its instantaneous quality, the variety of kind of responses, the unexpectedness of kinds of responses

01:30 you get because anybody can access it. And most of all, I think what touched me and surprised me as a writer was the degree to which it engaged me and became a further source of writing, a further source of creativity, a further source of thinking how to engage the world with my writing.