Today’s prompt for Linda’s Just Jot It January is “family,” contributed by Kim of Twisted Trunk Travels. Check out their blogs!
Over these last ten-ish years of writing poetry and blogging here at Top of JC’s Mind, I have written way more often about my family than I thought I would. Of course, it made perfect sense to blog about visiting daughter E and son-in-law L in Hawai’i, as folks often blog about their travels, but as time and circumstances changed and I faced the challenges of caregiving for various generations of the family, posts about family became more frequent. I also used poetry as a way to process things that were going on with my family, most notably about my mother’s experiences living with and dying from heart disease, which became my first published chapbook, Hearts (Kelsay Books, 2023).
I do try to protect my family members by referring to them with initials or nicknames rather than their given names. Nearly all of them use a different surname so only people who know us in real life are likely to recognize them from posts. Currently, spouse B and daughter T are most likely to appear as we are living in the same house, although we will soon be going to visit daughter E, son-in-law L, and granddaughters ABC and JG in London. which may generate some posts. My daughters’ grandparents were called on the blog by the names they used for them, Nana and Paco for my parents and Grandma for B’s mom. (Sadly, B’s dad, known as Grandpa, passed away in 2005, before I was blogging and writing poetry, although his death was the subject of one of my earliest published poems.) If you are perusing the archives of Top of JC’s Mind, you’ll come across posts dealing with their final years and the grief following their deaths.
One thing that strikes me about my family posts and poems is how often they spark comments and conversations about people’s own experiences. Knowing that I offer that space for people to reflect on themselves and their own families is a big part of why I continue to write about my family.
What about you? Do you find it helpful to write about your family, either privately in a journal or in more public ways?
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Joanne Corey 
It’s one of the reasons your poems resonate. You make the personal universal and the universal personal.
I have a private journal where I write a good deal about family issues. I touch on a few in the blog, sometimes, but keep a lot of my private life private. Not because there’s anything particularly scandalous about it (especially not right now), but because it’s mine. At the same time, if something comes up and I think my experience can help someone feel less alone, I am likely to post about it. It’s a difficult balance.
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Thanks, Devon.
I can appreciate your keeping your writing about family mostly private. I would guess that it’s also helpful that most of your professional writing is fiction. Your family members or relationships could inform or underpin a character or situation in your story or play and no one would know that except you.
It’s one of the odd things about poetry that, even with poetic license and, sometimes, persona poems, the poet is often assumed to also be the speaker. We often make the mistake in workshop of referring to “you” rather than “the speaker.” Poetry seeks to express truth, which is only sometimes actual fact. Granted, my poems tend to be more fact than poetic license. Often, the spark of a poem is a coincidence or parallel that appears before me and lodges in my brain.
Blog posts are different in that they are, for me, non-fiction. Then, it is a matter of how much of the story is appropriate to tell with precautions to protect family from repercussions.
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