My blogroll has been updated to include Omnidawn Publishing, CM Mayo, The Happy Booker, Leslie Pietrzyk and Peter Gloviczki.

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I’m on a high today! This Saturday, I spent the day with writers. These were folks who could understand why a comment like the following is funny about the New Yorker not publishing much fiction:

“These are the dark days for The New Yorker since they only publish fiction when they have a John Updike story.”

Ah, writers!

For the conference, I presented on literary blogging with Wendi Kaufmann , C.M. Mayo, Pietrzyk and Shawn Westfall, who also teaches improvisational theatre.

I was hoping for what that the fiction writers would accept me, a poet, into their group. After all, what would they think of a writer whose lines don’t make it all the way over to the right side of the page?

Madam Mayo kicked off our panel with outstanding and glorious introductions, including one for me that made me think I should run for President…of something.

Wendi — aka The Happy Booker — discussed how she started blogging after she saw her 8-year-old get in touch with hundreds of people after having a blog for only 24 hours. She thought she’d give it a try. After a while, she started to notice visits from CBS and publishing houses in NYC and wondered what was going on. Now, she gets enormous packages from FedEx with books from publishers and more offers to write articles from the Post (after they noticed how much traffic her articles would receive).

She’s written for the Washington Post for 10 years. She’d post a link to her article on her blog and send loads of traffic towards her article. The Post editors noticed and started to give her more assignments.

Madam Mayo emphasized that a blog is what you make it. In other words, you don’t have to write about your cat or what you ate for lunch. That is a good point for new bloggers, as well as those considering blogging, to note. I originally thought this blog would have a different focus. That focus was boring, so I moved on.

Leslie Pietrzyk sets a blogging schedule. I’m not much of a schedule person, so that in itself is impressive to me. If you visit her blog, you can pretty much count on posts Monday through Thursday. Thursday is reserved for a longer essay.

The three blogs above also include a number of posts about events in and near DC.

Shawn Westfall, writer and improv teacher, writes for DCIST.com. That group of blogs attracts 1.8 million visits per year. He posed some intriguing questions:

1. Are blogs literary?
2. Will blogs last?

He observed that we read books of letters and so on, yet we’re not likely to see an entire blog published and offered up as a book to future scholars. He also mentioned that the value of a diary is writing candidly and blogs don’t allow us to do that.

What did I talk about? It’s a secret!

I’ll share what I talked about in another post soon.