Whenever I’ve been away from this blog for a while, something about the return always gets me pondering the nature of the whole writing enterprise.

Long abandoned has been my early aim of posting here weekly. Over the years, extended gaps between date headings usually pointed to background turbulence, in the form of personal difficulties I sometimes told you about later. 

More recently, it was the elongated Rivers project that kept me away. 

In both scenarios, as I debated whether to share with readers something of my coping or composing processes, I asked myself why you’d be interested at all. A familiar trope about writers labels them arrogant – it may apply to personal essayists above all. For my taste, those who lean too heavily into advice-giving or who obsess over minutiae tend to lose me. (An old favorite quip: “Is it solipsistic in here or is it just me?”)