Cascadia Inspired is written by Tracy Durnell. I’m an educator and designer working in the environmental field, and a fiction writer and photographer in my personal time. I live in the Seattle area, having moved to Washington in 2008.
I use this blog to explore productivity, consider my philosophy about creative work, search for balance between my creative work and the rest of my life, serve as an accountability tool and record of what work I do, and give back to the creative community.
- Start here to see my articles most likely to help you.
- See my favorite tools and services I use.
- Use my Craft Your Life Planner to help you holistically set goals.
- My most popular article is how to complete a creative annual review.
You can follow along with what I’m thinking about and exploring at tracydurnell.com. Cascadia Inspired is home to my original articles and deeper content.
Why I Started This Blog
In 2012, about to get married and buy our home, I decided that I wanted to be more intentional about getting to know my adopted home – the Pacific Northwest – and started writing at Cascadia Inspired. That was also the year I started writing fiction again after many years off, and I became more serious about my creative work.
I ascribe to the thought that the place where we live does shape us and inform our work, so to me it feels natural to write about both the creative work that I am doing as well as the outdoors, even when my work is not directly related to my experiences in nature. As artists, we are not separate from the world, our work not divorced from the context in which it was created. Humans are complicated and multi-faceted, and I believe that bridging connections between our seemingly disparate interests and activities can serve to deepen our understanding and experiences of them all.
I hope that sharing my creative journey at Cascadia Inspired also helps other creatives complete their best work by offering productivity tools and examples and inspiration from the natural world.
My Website Philosophy
This website is not monetized, intentionally. There are no affiliate links in this blog. Profit is not one of my goals for this website.
I do not track visitors to this website, intentionally. I believe that your privacy is more important than my curiosity about whether anyone is reading my work, especially since I am not trying to make money off of this website. That means I really do appreciate your comments, because that’s the only way I know if anyone is out there!
I’m incorporating some Indie Web elements because I believe in an independent, decentralized web.
Read more about my manifesto for this website.
Land Acknowledgment
I started this website specifically to deepen my connection with the land where I live — which is the traditional land of the Coast Salish peoples, in particular the Duwamish and Stillaguamish Peoples. I honor the land itself, and the Coast Salish people past, present, and future. (Learn about land acknowledgment and the First Nations peoples who live in your area.)
I support the Duwamish Tribe’s application for federal recognition. I call on elected officials and government at all levels to honor treaty obligations with all tribes. I call for the return of public land to tribal control or joint management wherever feasible. (Learn more about the Land Back movement.)
Contact Me
I love connecting with other creatives and outdoor folks! You can email me at tracy.durnell@gmail.com. No solicitations, thanks.
Last updated December2022.
Stumbled on a 2012 blip of your’s “The Joy of Backpacking”. I am an old boomer leaving the business I’ve built over several decades to return to my ’70’s roots of personal freedom. I call it a sabbatical, other’s insanity. I know I can’t go back in time but I was far more at peace possessing nothing in the ’70’s than I am as a successful business owner today. I’ve surfed camping and backpacking sites for months but your writing style and personal reflections clicked with me on several levels. I intend to continue to follow your adventures, review your archives and encourage my 28 y.o. daughter to do the same. Thank you for sharing your thoughts…
Joe Babin, Central Tx
Thank you Joe, that’s very kind!
I’m doing a consumer research project on floral design, trying to learn about people who are interested in flowers and arranging them — their motivations, the kinds of things they like learning, and the kinds of experiences that might be useful to them.
I saw one of your reviews on GoodReads and it led me to your lovely website. If interested, just drop me a note and I can share some detail.
If not interested, no worries. Best.
We discussed syndicating notes from your website to Twitter at yesterday’s Homebrew Website Club in light of the upcoming Twitter ownership transfer, as a way to demonstrate existing POSSE technology and encourage more people to adopt IndieWeb approaches. I expressed that I struggle with *whether* I want to do this rather than *how*. What seems like it should be a simple step — posting to Twitter from my website — reveals itself as a complex decision rooted in how I want to present myself online.
Tl;dr: having one place to host all my content is simplest, but means being ok with uniting all aspects of my identity.
What I’m doing now
Dividing my writing across four platforms
I consider each platform to have a distinct purpose, so I silo where information belongs in my mind,* even when I own the silos.
* I also have this struggle with notebooks, and can’t write the wrong info in the wrong notebook. It’s a problem 😂
The platforms where I post now and their purpose
I started my blog Cascadia Inspired in 2011 as a way to help me adopt the Pacific Northwest as my home, and over the years my focus has shifted to creative work. My blog hosts long-form articles, photo collections, and personal accountability — in short, anything about making things.
articles about creative work
personal accountability
nature photos and excursions / trip reports
In 2020, I transformed tracydurnell.com from a dead portfolio website to a digital garden, a place to save information and start to think about it, without having high expectations of myself for producing high quality writing or original insights. My intention for this site, up to this point, has been to track and process my intake.
bookmarks and replies
personal data, like tracking my reading and listening
Wanting to reduce my use of Instagram and Twitter, I joined micro.blog in 2021. I use the microblogging service to post (mostly boring) things from my daily life. What I post on my micro blog is personal, rooted in connection.
day-to-day fluff (e.g. what I baked)
And I still have my Twitter account, which I created in 2014 and have used sporadically since, finding it addictive. I knew it was a problem when I started composing tweet commentary in my head as I walked around during the day. Periodically, I go through my past tweets and purge most, granting myself a clean slate from past opinions. I have to resist falling back into the habit of commentary, which I in particular needed to be careful of when I worked in local government. I hold onto this silo because I get very little interaction on my blog or this website, so Twitter remains in my communication stack for promotion.
anything I want people to actually see (e.g. IndieWeb events, friends’ accomplishments, personal promotion)
social and political commentary, when I can’t restrain myself 😎(preferably in my drafts folder here)
What writing belongs where?
The boundaries blur as I write more online…and add platforms
Now that I have more channels, I’m struggling with where exactly other content I want to make should live:
Personal accountability posts (like quarterly reviews) currently go on my blog, with the reasoning being that it’s about creative work and work-life balance…but it’s also very personal information, so maybe it makes sense to live here, where my other “currently doing” info lives? As I experimented with weeknotes this fall, I also posted those on my blog.
I’ve transferred my listening reports and reading reports here from my blog, where I used to post them before this incarnation of tracydurnell.com. I’ve been tracking listening and reading here, so it made sense to bring over the analysis of that too.
Sometimes I want to post personal posts about my life that don’t quite fit on my blog. I have tried posting those on micro.blog, but it doesn’t feel quite right. It also doesn’t necessarily feel right to mix them in with my feed of intake, here.
How long need commentary be to “count” as a blog post? Should some articles I post here instead live on my blog, if they are related to creativity or nature?
I recently started to add recipes to this website, which makes sense as basically another reference. But I’ve been thinking about developing more pages about specific topics that would be more original content — reference for other people, but thinking for me. Should those live on my blog?
How about a collection of photos? I’ve thus far limited Cascadia Inspired to PNW nature content, so I haven’t had a place to post non-nature shots or from outside the northwest — but photography clearly falls into the blog wheelhouse of “things I made.”
What is the best way to present my writing online?
As I juggle this increasing number of decisions, and want to add more varieties of content, it’s raising bigger questions, namely:
Should all of my writing and information live in one spot? I’ve been writing at Cascadia Inspired for ten years*, so I don’t want to erase that history. Yet this site bears my name. Does it make sense that the website under my name — likely the first impression people get about me — hosts my arguably shittiest work, while my highest quality work is off on another site? 🤔 *Dramatic music plays*
* And apparently I posted about my ten year blogiversary on Twitter but not on my website 🤦♀️
Am I comfortable having my full identity represented in one place?
It comes down to identity: I have faceted elements of my online identity onto different platforms, but the boundaries are mutable.
If you only read my micro.blog, you’d think all I care about is reading and baking. My Twitter account is mixed content-wise, but overall with the intent of demonstrating I’m thoughtful and enthusiastic. My blog presents a clearer picture of my interests and personality since it hosts my accountability posts, but paints me perhaps more philosophical and reflective. And this digital garden is the most unfiltered of my writing, covering the broadest range of my interests, but in slapdash quality.
Having only one platform would certainly make the decision-making process about where to post things easier. But even here on tracydurnell.com, I segment info by having a separate RSS feed for my read posts, which I exclude from my main digital garden RSS feed — in a way, filtering what identity is shared by different feeds.
The questions I need to answer before POSSEing my tweets
Do I want to post the kinds of things I’d post to Twitter here on my digital garden, or on my blog? Self-promotion might make sense to post from my blog, and promotion of others or events from here. Is the tone similar enough, or would it be jarring? Could it even be beneficial to mix in some more professional tone posts here? Would having some posts of a different tone impact my comfort in continuing to write freely and naturally on this site? Can I handle writing (briefly) about things I make here and not on my blog?
Do I want to expand this site beyond ‘intake’? Is it even expanding what I post here, considering I write enough commentary that it’s hard to say I’m not ‘making’ anything here 😉 Can adding tweets here also make me feel more comfortable adding the other things I want to add, like photos?
Is it too weird to post a note about an article on the same website? Tantek pointed out this could be addressed by excluding notes from the main feed, so readers could subscribe to notes separately.
Would I feel comfortable with my daily life posts from micro.blog also appearing on Twitter? Maybe. I use a chattier voice on micro.blog and try to be somewhat more professional on Twitter. It feels more vulnerable to share real life things to the broad and sometimes hostile audience of Twitter.
Generally, am I also comfortable expanding the range of what I share on Twitter? Posting more would probably be beneficial, but also means engaging with the site more often, which is dangerous to me.
How about posting what I would post on Twitter on micro.blog and syndicating from there? Yeah, this I’d be ok with.
Are there things that I post to Twitter that I would not want to lose? Generally no, though perhaps my framing when I share articles adds value — an editor’s note, if you will.
In thinking all this through, my instinctive balking at combining my writing streams may be more resistance to change than reasoned refusal — there are a number of potential benefits I’ve raised in this exploration. Instead, the problem is more in feeling comfortable freely expressing myself everywhere I am online, and letting go of my ‘work voice.’ As an anxious person who struggles with caring too much about what others think of me, this is rooted in fear of rejection. How much do these platform personas benefit me, and how much do they hold me back?
Also posted on IndieNews
We discussed syndicating notes from your website to Twitter at yesterday’s Homebrew Website Club in light of the upcoming Twitter ownership transfer, as a way to demonstrate existing POSSE technology and encourage more people to adopt IndieWeb approaches. I expressed that I struggle with *whether* I want to do this rather than *how*. What seems like it should be a simple step — posting to Twitter from my website — reveals itself as a complex decision rooted in how I want to present myself online.
Tl;dr: having one place to host all my content is simplest, but means being ok with uniting all aspects of my identity.
What I’m doing now
Dividing my writing across four platforms
I consider each platform to have a distinct purpose, so I silo where information belongs in my mind,* even when I own the silos.
* I also have this struggle with notebooks, and can’t write the wrong info in the wrong notebook. It’s a problem 😂
The platforms where I post now and their purpose
I started my blog Cascadia Inspired in 2011 as a way to help me adopt the Pacific Northwest as my home, and over the years my focus has shifted to creative work. My blog hosts long-form articles, photo collections, and personal accountability — in short, anything about making things.
articles about creative work
personal accountability
nature photos and excursions / trip reports
In 2020, I transformed tracydurnell.com from a dead portfolio website to a digital garden, a place to save information and start to think about it, without having high expectations of myself for producing high quality writing or original insights. My intention for this site, up to this point, has been to track and process my intake.
bookmarks and replies
personal data, like tracking my reading and listening
Wanting to reduce my use of Instagram and Twitter, I joined micro.blog in 2021. I use the microblogging service to post (mostly boring) things from my daily life. What I post on my micro blog is personal, rooted in connection.
day-to-day fluff (e.g. what I baked)
And I still have my Twitter account, which I created in 2014 and have used sporadically since, finding it addictive. I knew it was a problem when I started composing tweet commentary in my head as I walked around during the day. Periodically, I go through my past tweets and purge most, granting myself a clean slate from past opinions. I have to resist falling back into the habit of commentary, which I in particular needed to be careful of when I worked in local government. I hold onto this silo because I get very little interaction on my blog or this website, so Twitter remains in my communication stack for promotion.
anything I want people to actually see (e.g. IndieWeb events, friends’ accomplishments, personal promotion)
social and political commentary, when I can’t restrain myself 😎(preferably in my drafts folder here)
What writing belongs where?
The boundaries blur as I write more online…and add platforms
Now that I have more channels, I’m struggling with where exactly other content I want to make should live:
Personal accountability posts (like quarterly reviews) currently go on my blog, with the reasoning being that it’s about creative work and work-life balance…but it’s also very personal information, so maybe it makes sense to live here, where my other “currently doing” info lives? As I experimented with weeknotes this fall, I also posted those on my blog.
I’ve transferred my listening reports and reading reports here from my blog, where I used to post them before this incarnation of tracydurnell.com. I’ve been tracking listening and reading here, so it made sense to bring over the analysis of that too.
Sometimes I want to post personal posts about my life that don’t quite fit on my blog. I have tried posting those on micro.blog, but it doesn’t feel quite right. It also doesn’t necessarily feel right to mix them in with my feed of intake, here.
How long need commentary be to “count” as a blog post? Should some articles I post here instead live on my blog, if they are related to creativity or nature?
I recently started to add recipes to this website, which makes sense as basically another reference. But I’ve been thinking about developing more pages about specific topics that would be more original content — reference for other people, but thinking for me. Should those live on my blog?
How about a collection of photos? I’ve thus far limited Cascadia Inspired to PNW nature content, so I haven’t had a place to post non-nature shots or from outside the northwest — but photography clearly falls into the blog wheelhouse of “things I made.”
What is the best way to present my writing online?
As I juggle this increasing number of decisions, and want to add more varieties of content, it’s raising bigger questions, namely:
Should all of my writing and information live in one spot? I’ve been writing at Cascadia Inspired for ten years*, so I don’t want to erase that history. Yet this site bears my name. Does it make sense that the website under my name — likely the first impression people get about me — hosts my arguably shittiest work, while my highest quality work is off on another site? 🤔 *Dramatic music plays*
* And apparently I posted about my ten year blogiversary on Twitter but not on my website 🤦♀️
Am I comfortable having my full identity represented in one place?
It comes down to identity: I have faceted elements of my online identity onto different platforms, but the boundaries are mutable.
If you only read my micro.blog, you’d think all I care about is reading and baking. My Twitter account is mixed content-wise, but overall with the intent of demonstrating I’m thoughtful and enthusiastic. My blog presents a clearer picture of my interests and personality since it hosts my accountability posts, but paints me perhaps more philosophical and reflective. And this digital garden is the most unfiltered of my writing, covering the broadest range of my interests, but in slapdash quality.
Having only one platform would certainly make the decision-making process about where to post things easier. But even here on tracydurnell.com, I segment info by having a separate RSS feed for my read posts, which I exclude from my main digital garden RSS feed — in a way, filtering what identity is shared by different feeds.
The questions I need to answer before POSSEing my tweets
Do I want to post the kinds of things I’d post to Twitter here on my digital garden, or on my blog? Self-promotion might make sense to post from my blog, and promotion of others or events from here. Is the tone similar enough, or would it be jarring? Could it even be beneficial to mix in some more professional tone posts here? Would having some posts of a different tone impact my comfort in continuing to write freely and naturally on this site? Can I handle writing (briefly) about things I make here and not on my blog?
Do I want to expand this site beyond ‘intake’? Is it even expanding what I post here, considering I write enough commentary that it’s hard to say I’m not ‘making’ anything here 😉 Can adding tweets here also make me feel more comfortable adding the other things I want to add, like photos?
Is it too weird to post a note about an article on the same website? Tantek pointed out this could be addressed by excluding notes from the main feed, so readers could subscribe to notes separately.
Would I feel comfortable with my daily life posts from micro.blog also appearing on Twitter? Maybe. I use a chattier voice on micro.blog and try to be somewhat more professional on Twitter. It feels more vulnerable to share real life things to the broad and sometimes hostile audience of Twitter.
Generally, am I also comfortable expanding the range of what I share on Twitter? Posting more would probably be beneficial, but also means engaging with the site more often, which is dangerous to me.
How about posting what I would post on Twitter on micro.blog and syndicating from there? Yeah, this I’d be ok with.
Are there things that I post to Twitter that I would not want to lose? Generally no, though perhaps my framing when I share articles adds value — an editor’s note, if you will.
In thinking all this through, my instinctive balking at combining my writing streams may be more resistance to change than reasoned refusal — there are a number of potential benefits I’ve raised in this exploration. Instead, the problem is more in feeling comfortable freely expressing myself everywhere I am online, and letting go of my ‘work voice.’ As an anxious person who struggles with caring too much about what others think of me, this is rooted in fear of rejection. How much do these platform personas benefit me, and how much do they hold me back?
Also posted on IndieNews
Replied to Some books that mean a lot to me, taking another run at a blogging meme from 2005 by Matt Webb (Interconnected)
I’m a joiner! I’ll answer book questions any day!
How many books do you own?
Physical books: one bookcase + two boxes of overflow comics – mostly art books, comics, and reference – I used the single bookcase as my limit for years, aggressively donating books to make room for new, but started buying a lot more books during the pandemic and really need to get a second bookcase…
Ebooks: I’ve tagged 267 books as “owned” on my Kindle
What is the last book you bought?
Fiction: Illuminations by T. Kingfisher (in e-book), who is an auto-buy for me
Non-fiction: pre-ordered Chris Bailey’s How to Calm Your Mind – I liked his first two books a lot
Art book: There and Back by Jimmy Chin – he takes great photos and I’ve also been enjoying the interesting adventure stories interspersed through the book
What is the last book you read?
Fiction: re-read His at Night by Sherry Thomas
Non-fiction: re-read the writing book 2k to 10k by Rachel Aaron
Art book: Justina Blakeney’s Jungalow
What are 5 books that mean a lot to you?
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell – this book inspired me to start a year long art project/ business
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach – I would never reread this and expect I would have problems with it today, but seventeen year old me was quite taken by the idea of creating a new world that valued ecology – I’m still into bioregional thinking, with my blog even called Cascadia Inspired
Any Duchess Will Do by Tessa Dare – this is the first romance novel I tried reading, which made me realize I’d been blindered by prejudice about the romance genre and opened up an entire new world of stories centered on emotional growth and connection — and now I write romance!
Meaningful is not quite the right word for some other books that have had an impact on me, so I’m pivoting to another variation on this question:
What books have been especially influential to your thinking?
Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin – this influenced my perspective on money and work and was my entre into the world of FIRE (along with Mr. Money Mustache)
Story Genius by Lisa Cron – this helped me understand storytelling much better than any writing book I’d read before, and brought my storytelling to another level
Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong – I read this in my freshman year of college and still come back to this concept of oral and written culture constantly, nearly twenty years later
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com
Replied to The personal brand paradox (wepresent.wetransfer.com)
I think it’s interesting to look at personal brands through the lens of insecurity. I imagine many people think of it as “positioning” or storytelling, but underneath, those are needed if you’re afraid you won’t be enough on your own.
I think it can be helpful to consider personal branding as a form of self discovery, a tool to help determine what you want to do, but there can be a risk of self containment.
I think of my other blog, Cascadia Inspired, which I started ten years ago as a way to get to know the Pacific Northwest better. I bought into the idea that blogs need to focus on a particular subject area or no one will read it. While I’ve enjoyed writing there, to some extent it created a constraint around what I felt appropriate to write about. For example, I didn’t publish photos from anywhere outside the northwest, so I have all these southwest trip photos I’ve never shared but on Instagram maybe.
Likewise, I had created a portfolio website at tracydurnell.com, and felt obliged to leave it serving solely a professional purpose. When I let go of that and transitioned to this blog-like format, allowing myself to write about whatever I wanted, I started writing so much more. I hadn’t realized how much I was holding back.
I still don’t expose my entire self here, but I’m much more open and vocal about my opinions, and more willing to risk publishing imperfect posts that show my incomplete thoughts in progress. I’ve held myself back and quiet for too much of my life already.
I’ve also realized I’m more interested in following people as people — while I might have been drawn to certain blogs in the past because of the topic, the reason I keep reading many of them is having gotten to know the writer. For example, I used to read Get Rich Slowly, but stopped when J.D. sold it (he’s since bought it back). I lost a lot of interest in Design*Sponge when my favorite writers there moved on to other things, and looked mostly to Grace Bonney‘s articles. Even though she’s moved on from writing about design, I’m still interested in her work.
I find myself drawn more to what individuals are writing than publications; if others are like me, all the publications who treat their staff as disposable and interchangeable will be in for a rough ride when they try to replace them all with AI churn content. Sure, you’ll pick up some SEO shit clicks, but that actively breeds distrust instead of long-term readership. I read my first Ed Yong article because I was interested in COVID; his thoughtful writing and reporting earned my trust, so I started following *him* on Twitter — not The Atlantic. I read Annalee Newitz back on io9, last year I read their non-fiction book, this year I’m looking forward to their next fiction work.
This is what makes self publishing viable for journalists and writers: people following them for them, not for their title or brand. When writing for a brand constrains these writers, good for them to split off and start their own thing where they can write about what they want, how they want.
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com
Twenty years ago today, I wrote my first blog post! (I stopped blogging from about 2009-2011, so I haven’t technically been blogging for twenty years yet — guess I get to celebrate twenty years twice 😂)
My old blogs
In the intervening years, I’ve blogged at:
a college blog,
a daily photo blog,
an original art blog I ran briefly with a friend,
a post-college blog,
another original art blog I ran slightly longer with my sister,
two blogs through office jobs,
my fiction pen name,
my ongoing Cascadia Inspired blog,
and this site (which I call a mind garden but is basically a blog heavily focused on links).
My college blog as it existed in 2007 — redesigning it was a hobby in its own right
My sister’s and my art blog from 2008
My art blog with a friend, circa 2004/5
An archive.org capture of my post college blog with some broken layout — I am not sure what possessed me to choose that taupe-y drab green background 🤔 I guess something to tone down the hot pink?
What I’ve gotten out of blogging
Blogging — regularly writing and self-publishing in public — is one of the most rewarding things I’ve chosen to do, and I plan to keep at it for… ever. I set up shop on the web when I was seventeen and I’ve had at least one website, usually more, active ever since. Blogging has taught me to think and write better; my blog is one of my favorite tools for thinking.
Blogging gave me an outlet for creativity during my early writing and drawing years, when everything I made was pretty rough; having a place to publish pushed me to write and draw and photograph more than I might have otherwise. I find it hard to do things without purpose — tutorials really don’t work for me because I’d rather figure out how to do things in the pursuit of making something I want to make, even if it’s harder to learn out of order — so having a place to publish made me want to make things worth publishing.
I’ve seen others blog about how publicly publishing isn’t that important to them, but it’s been valuable to me. In the past I struggled with self confidence and taking up space and feeling unheard — but the Internet is somewhere I always felt there was room for me. A personal website granted me permission to share what I made, since that was what everyone else was doing with their websites; joining a culture with self-publishing as an established norm was huge. Knowing my words are out there for others, whether or not anyone reads them, makes me feel like I’m part of the online community.
As social media collapses, a blogging renaissance?
I think we could be at the start of a blogging renaissance. Social media is crumbling — it’s not fun anymore, and no one place is where everyone is anymore. As people pull away from dying platforms, they will create or fall into new reading and posting habits. Many are mired in the autopilot morass of consumption, but as they are forced to consider what they actually want out of social media so they can choose where to go next, I’m betting a fair few will seize their opportunity to flee a toxic relationship.
Some people will find new spaces on BlueSky or Mastodon or Discord servers, but others may seek something quieter. People are recognizing that social media plays to shallowness and ever-shortening hype cycles, which the real-time speed of these alternatives might still reward. Personally, I’m not looking for somewhere to hang out all day, but to listen to what interesting, thoughtful, creative people are thinking about; blogs and newsletters are where folks have room to go deep.
Blogs provide a different kind — a different pace — of community than social media. It’s great to have a place to hang out together, but not everyone wants to go to the bar every night or share an open work space with a bunch of talkative colleagues. A better analogue for blogs might be a monthly club or lecture series; not everyone comes to every meeting, not everyone participates in every meeting, but they still become part of the group. When we read each others’ blogs, we’re not cubicle buddies — we do our work on our own — but we do share it with each other when we’re ready.
Mandy Brown recently wrote about the difference between how writers and talkers approach problems, which I find has some resonance with online communication preferences; some of us don’t like to be put on the spot, but need more time to think things through. More quiet. People who haven’t been enjoying social media might find a better fit for themselves in the blogosphere.
A blog is a much nicer place to publish than social media, sparking fewer but more meaningful interactions. Blogging allows writers a more forgiving pace with slower conversation. On their blog, people can be themselves instead of playing to an audience and feeling judged — a place to escape the pressures of one-upmanship and signaling, the noise of the ever-demanding attention economy, and the stress of hustle culture.
People are looking for other people, not performances of personas, and a personal blog is a more likely place to find that than social media these days. A Twitter quip takes a particular skill to write, but most people can’t say much of substance in a single sentence. Some folks disparage the classic blog ramble, but that can be a feature — yes, I do want to read Cat Valente ranting for 2000 words about capitalism actually thank you very much. Brevity has its place, but asides and conversational style and inconclusive ponderings all have their value too. At the very least, they feel like they are written by humans for other humans, instead of by influencers for the algorithm or sponsors.
So send your friends the blog posts that make you think of them — remind them that the corporate web of social media silos isn’t the only way to be online — show them there are still people blogging. Help more people make the leap to a people-centered internet.
Also posted on IndieNews
Replied to Books I’m Reading at the Moment by Pablo Morales (lifeofpablo.com)
I like to have a bunch of books going at once, and keep a rotating sampler of library books that I can dip into for variety. I prefer reading fiction on my Kindle where I can bump the type size up and read in dark mode before bed, but I’ve been gradually switching to hard copy for nonfiction. I’m totally an out of sight out of mind person so I forget about titles I have on my Kindle — having the physical book either by my bed or next to my hangout rocking chair is a visual cue reminding me to read it. I’ve also been buying more physical books so I can underline and take notes in them, and to support authors more directly.
Right now I’m trying to switch my before work reading time from screen to paper. I don’t usually like reading fiction in the morning so my current collection is trying to give myself a range of not too intense nonfiction that I can read in half hour chunks. It’s so easy to default to reading on my phone, but I want to be more intentional about what I’m reading. There’s a place for reading articles and staying in tune with culture, but I want to shift a greater amount of my reading time to long form works and digging deeper into topics.
Books I own and am actively reading
Here’s which books I own I’m currently reading and why I picked them:
The Care Manifesto by the Care Collective — I want to learn more about mutual aid and community building, and this is nice and short 😂
No Meat Required by Alicia Kennedy — love her email newsletter about decolonizing food — also I’m pescetarian, and was vegetarian for like ten years (and still think of myself mostly as a vegetarian who occasionally also eats fish), so I’m interested to hear a vegetarian food writer’s take on plant-based diets as well as the movement’s history in the US
The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul — I’ve seen this recommended tons in the commonplace book / digital garden realm — I’ve totally dug what I’ve read so far
Saving Time by Jenny Odell — I love love loved her previous book How to Do Nothing so this was an instabuy
I’m about 20-70 pages in on all of these. Also sitting out is Jimmy Chin’s coffee table book There and Back, which I assumed would just be awesome outdoor and climbing photos, but I’ve also been enjoying his tales of past adventures.
Current library book selection
I have only started one of these so far, so I may ultimately read some, all, or none of them 😄
Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan — I, ahem, have made my feelings about AI pretty clear 😂
belonging by bell hooks — I’m really interested in land and how we relate to it — I started my other blog Cascadia Inspired to explore my relationship with my new home state of Washington after growing up in California
Keeping Two by Jordan Crane — never heard of this graphic novel but it caught my eye on the shelf when I was looking for something else
Start More Than You Can Finish by Becky Blades — I have a problem with too many ideas and not enough time and energy to do them, so am curious about this philosophy
The 99% Invisible City by Mars Kohlstedt — I previously borrowed this in digital format and it clearly needed to be read on paper — Seattle (and some other NW cities) has small purple glass grids embedded in the sidewalks, letting light through to the (now defunct) Underground, and I’m curious about more of these kind of hidden things in the built environment
Creature by Shaun Tan — I am a fan of Tan’s surrealist art and imaginative worlds — originally I thought I’d just look at the pictures, but then I read the first essay and liked it so I’ve actually been reading it 😄 — I’m about halfway through
On hold but not yet picked up from the library are three more comics:
Flamer by Mike Curato — this has faced a lot of book ban attempts
Pilu of the Woods by Mai K. Nguyen — it looks cute
Newsprints by Ru Xu — cover art looks cute
Blogger İsmail Şevik interviewed me about my creative habits — thanks! The interview is posted in Turkish on İsmail’s website, so I thought I’d also post the English version here:
1) Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I’m a writer, designer, and blogger from the United States. I grew up in California near San Francisco, but now live about 800 miles north in Seattle — from one coastal tech hub to another. I work in the sustainability field as a freelance consultant, helping cities share environmental information with their communities. I studied to be an ecologist, and have turned my yard into a wildlife garden — we get so many dragonflies darting overhead in the summers! My main hobbies are reading, baking, and gardening.
I’ve been blogging at TracyDurnell.com since 2020. Before that, I blogged about nature and the creative process at CascadiaInspired.com for a decade (Cascadia is a “bioregion” encompassing the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia). I use my website as a commonplace book, a place to track what I’ve read and write reviews, a portal for thinking, and generally a playground to indulge my whims and curiosities.
2) What is the story behind your creating/designing journey?
I initially planned to be a scientist, and was offended when a science professor glanced at my notebook and commented that I wanted to be an artist. But… he wasn’t wrong. I drew in Photoshop and Illustrator constantly. After spending a field season studying lizards, I realized I wanted a more stable lifestyle. I joined an environmental consulting firm as their in-house marketing person / graphic designer, originally thinking it was my “in” for a future science job, but I discovered I really enjoyed the work. At the consulting firm, my main job was to design packets describing the firm’s qualifications. I also got to assist on client projects: posters for public meetings and interpretive signs. I spent six years there before joining local government, where I did recycling outreach that involved lots of design and writing.
I took a few community college design classes to bolster my design skills but otherwise am “self-taught.” My parents were supportive of the arts, so I always had access to a full suite of art materials. In high school a friend encouraged me to make a website, and that drove me down the rabbit hole of learning how to present information and write HTML and CSS. Redesigning my website became a hobby during college. I was really into photography, too; I had an awesome photography teacher who devoted one class a week to looking at photographers’ work and discussing aesthetic principles like leading lines and the rule of thirds, which can also apply to graphic design. Unfortunately, it took me a long time to overcome the imposter syndrome from my lack of formal training and gain confidence in my work. I don’t believe any work “runs in our veins,” but I was delighted to learn that my grandfather and great-grandmother both worked in print shops!
Fiction writing is another area I’ve figured out mostly on my own. I wrote stories in my free time as a kid and worked on a couple novels in high school. In 2003, I participated in National Novel Writing Month and wrote my longest work yet, but found it exhausting. College and transitioning to the workforce monopolized my energy for years after that, but I felt something was missing and decided to try writing again in 2011. I fell in with a local group of writers and started going to cons and workshops. In that circle, short stories were “where writers get their start,” so I spent several years writing short stories. But my heart wasn’t in short fiction — I like novels. Once I realized this, I turned my focus back to long form fiction. I have several trunk novels under my belt, and am currently working on revisions to a sci-fi novel I intend to self-publish.
3) How does your day usually go?
Since I started freelancing, I’ve gotten much more control over my day. I’m not a morning person, so now I can let myself have a slow morning. I wake up most days without an alarm, read for a while before getting up, and linger over breakfast and tea before diving into email around 10 and starting a focus session at 10:30. I do a three-hour focused work block — if I have a consulting project going, I’ll work on that, otherwise I’ll write fiction — then have lunch. Depending on my energy levels and how much I need to get done, I’ll work another one to three hours in the afternoon. Sometimes that’s more design work or writing, and sometimes administrative tasks. If I don’t have social activities planned after dinner, I’ll usually read a book or work on my website.
4) What do you enjoy most about your job?
I appreciate the flexibility and variety of working for clients instead of in-house, as I was for the previous fifteen years. (I got to work on a lot of types of projects as an in-house designer, but it got boring after a while sticking to the same design style.) Since I’ve only been consulting for about a year and a half, I’m staying open to whatever type of work comes my way — but I’m also able to turn down projects that aren’t interesting.
5) What advice do you have for those who want to become writers?
Finish stories. I think I would have learned to write much faster if I’d focused on writing complete drafts and revising them, instead of skipping over the toughest parts and telling myself I’d come back to them later. I’d suggest that new fiction writers focus their attention on novellas, which are long enough to translate the same storytelling skills to novels but are shorter and less complicated. (I was advised to learn to write novels by writing short stories, but I’ve since become convinced these require fundamentally different storytelling skills.) Most writers, myself included, tend to overcomplicate stories and add in too many elements; focusing on writing novellas instead of novels could help nip this tendency in the bud. It’s this overcomplication that leads new writers to spend years wallowing through writing and revising 150,000 word tomes (which are frankly unpublishable in the traditional market). Write shorter so you can finish more; finishing teaches you more than any other aspect of writing practice.
My other suggestion is to read a ton, both deeply within your genre and broadly across the fiction spectrum. Reading stories embeds story structure into you; it’s one thing to read a craft book describing something with samples a few pages long, and another to consider how all the pieces fit together into a complete, full-length story. Figuring out what you like builds your sensibility as a writer. Quit books early and often; there are plenty enough that you don’t need to waste time on books you don’t enjoy. Read sometimes as a reader, immersing yourself in the experience, and sometimes as a student, looking for examples of what you’ve seen in craft books; writing short critiques about what worked and what didn’t helped me build up my storytelling instincts and think more deeply about what I’ve read.
For anyone who’d like to write non-fiction, I’d encourage blogging. Blog about whatever you like; it’s low-stakes practice that can help you adjust to writing in public and find your voice. When you want to challenge yourself, try writing a longer piece. Pay attention to articles you enjoy, and follow those authors. Who are your writing role models? What do you admire about their work?
6) What is the hardest part of creating something new?
Figuring out the heart of the work and determining what’s superfluous. That’s core to any piece of writing, from editing a blog post to revising a novel. Deciding what you want something to be, and letting go of other possibilities, is very hard but essential to good work.
7) Doing what you love? Or is it loving what you do?
I suppose more “doing what I love.” I’ve stopped writing in the past — both blogging and fiction — and missed it. Part of why I quit my last job was that I’d somewhat run out of new things to design, and I was getting bored without design being a regular part of my work. Design is where I fall into flow state (writing a bit less often).
8) As far as I see, you have removed your website from the search results. What is the reason for this? The impact of artificial intelligence? Or is it something pre-planned? What are your views on artificial intelligence? Why do you not have a presence on social media?
Last summer, I decided to remove my website from Google in response to their announcement that they were using all websites they crawled to train their LLMs. I don’t look at my traffic often (I don’t have proper analytics, just server logs), but as far as I can tell I get very little traffic from search anyway (like less than 10% of traffic). As a hobbyist, my goals and approach can be much different than someone who needs to make money from their website; what I value is connection, while search primarily is for providing answers. I’d rather write for a much smaller group of interested folks than focus on writing quick answers for people who’ll never visit my website again. I now put my faith in word of mouth; if I write something worth reading, people will share it.
I see generative AI as an intensification of existing forces, and yet another attempt to strip value from individuals and transfer it to corporations. Corporations have already been harvesting data about us for years, but now they’re becoming shameless about harvesting our work, too. Surveillance capitalism is rooted in an advertising model; over the past decade, algorithms have become central to the corporate Internet environment because their profit model requires users to spend more time on platforms where they can be served ads. Now corporations are hitting the limit of people’s time, attention, and money, so the advertising model is crumbling under the toxic corporate growth imperative and they’re casting about for new, free sources of value. I think we’re seeing a lot of corporate desperation, and that’s why they’re pushing generative AI so hard; they’ve gotten bloated on stolen data, too used to simply sucking things dry to invent and invest in their own ideas. Too many modern corporations are merely parasites of value.
In the field of generative AI, this mindset leads corporations to claim that training models on an artist’s oeuvre, to the extent it can reproduce their style and compete with them for work, is somehow fair use and that they need not compensate creators or give them the option to opt out of training data. Our copyright law is not built to deal with theft of this nature or scale, and I have no faith in our institutions to protect individual creators in the face of corporate power. At its core, generative AI is a labor issue: corporations want to profit from people’s labor without paying for it, and seek to devalue people’s labor through deskilling and automation. Solidarity with workers ✊
I have withdrawn from the corporate social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and X — in part because I noticed how using them influenced my behavior and choices over what to share, and because I object to my identity and relationships being commodified. The corporate silo model is antithetical to the open web. I’m a proponent of the IndieWeb; while there are many hurdles to making the indie web a true alternative for the majority of internet users, I’m planting my flag on the open web and working to address the social barriers to participation (I’ll have to leave the technical issues to others 😉). My one social presence is on micro.blog, which is federated, so people on Mastodon can follow me.
9) What is your dream in this process?
I want to keep designing materials for cities throughout my region — and beyond — so I can use my skills to support sustainability in many communities, not just one. I also hope to spend more time helping cities plan and prioritize for climate change; I see a lot of time and energy devoted to feel-good measures that don’t make much of an impact, or taking approaches that reach the wrong people. There are so many actions communities can take that will make them better places to live at the same time as helping on climate, but will require some political will and vision.
10) Last question, what is your vision?
Everything I create is about empowering people and building a better future. My fiction writing centers on resistance to forces of oppression. My design work helps people make good choices for themselves and the planet. My blogging explores the politics of everyday life and what a better world could look like. I dream of a just society where all people can live comfortable lives of dignity, pursue meaningful work, and choose their own path rather than be coerced through debt, discrimination and desperation.
11) Is there anything to add?
I encourage everyone to have their own website, even if you don’t want to blog! It’s empowering to own a place of your own online; you know you have a platform where you could publish anything you wanted.
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com