Notes on Email

I started to think how long I’ve been doing this, this whole writing thing, and how it had taken until my mid-thirties before I could really conduct myself in public where I could hold two opposing ideas in my mind at the same time: 1. that I was a writer and 2. I was me.

We’re all familiar with the idea of digging through old journals or photo albums. But what about the digital detritus we leave behind? The social networks we moved on from, the notes-to-self scribbled on digital stickies, the email accounts left for dead? In this post, writer Daniel Nester decides to dig into his long abandoned Hotmail account, and finds within it a fractured, but coherent, narrative of his experiences as a fledgling, and later published, writer.

It’s a story that could only unfold now, and plays out like a contemporary update to the Bildungsroman; a numbered sequence of telling moments captured, frozen, in emails and the folders they’re nested in. It’s a tale of remembrance, but also of delayed revelation, and if you haven’t trawled your own digital missives recently, “Notes on Email” is likely to make you consider doing so.

Hip-Hopistan: Inside Greater Kurdistan’s Nascent Hip Hop Scene

Today, many of the Kurdish youth use hip-hop as an outlet and a bridge to build a community across their diaspora.  Just as MCs in America have raised consciousness on social issues, Kurdish MCs, such as Serhado’s “I am Kurdistan”, make hip-hop in order to discuss geo-political realities and provide hope to those Kurds in search of a united Kurdistan.

For a lot of us, the first thing that comes to mind when asked to picture the plight of Kurdish people probably isn’t so much rap battles as it is a history of much more direct conflict, and that’s part of the beauty of this expectation defying look into the nascent Kurdish hip hop scene. We learn that, while the odds are often stacked against the DJs and MCs of Kurdistan due to popular notions of the values attached to the musical form, their efforts to unite, express, and fight for their rights are very much in keeping with a trend toward making change through ideas, rather than conflict.

As Abdullah Occalan says, in perhaps this post’s most memorable quote, it’s “Time for the guns to fall silent and for ideas to speak.” “Hip-Hopistan: Inside Greater Kurdistan’s Nascent Hip Hop Scene“ offers an insightful look into unexpected, culturally repurposed uses of an art form that itself has roots in repurposing and empowerment of the disenfranchised.

I wish my father were a drug junkie, pathological liar, conman criminal, violent psycho or at least a loser of some kind

My father isn’t a drug junkie, pathological liar, conman criminal or violent psycho. He’s an easy-going old Jewish man from New York who definitely stops for pedestrians in the crosswalk. He’s the kind of man your mom approves of, because he’s nice and he loves you. He’s the kind of man everyone thinks is safe. But he wasn’t and now what am I to think?

Now granted, we’re suckers for a sizzling headline, but this is a post that plays with our expectations, just as it leaves the author grappling with uncertainty and unexpected feelings about a situation, a question, that has no easy out, no easy answers.

We’re used to life measuring up to expectations. The good guys do good, the bad guys, not so much. But so often life, and memory, exist outside of the dichotomies that sell newspapers or keep people coming back to movie theaters year-on-year. What happens when our past resurfaces, but we have no simple moral compass to tell us how to feel about it? “I wish my father were a drug junkie, pathological liar, conman criminal, violent psycho or at least a loser of some kind“ explores that question, and others, in a deeply personal meditation on how our rules and expectations don’t always hold up to life as lived.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Brian Castner

We’re honored that Brian Castner, Iraq War veteran and author of The Long Walk, makes his official online home right here at WordPress.com. Brian’s history and work are fascinating, as are the writing and photographs he shares on his blog.

We asked Brian a few questions about his background, his book, his blogging philosophy, and his choice of WordPress.com for his site.

Could you please tell us a bit about your unique background?

I served in the Air Force as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Officer, and deployed twice to Iraq in 2005 and 2006. EOD is the military’s bomb squad, so we defuse roadside bombs and all types of rockets and missiles and such. I got out of the military in 2007 and became a contractor teaching Army and Marine Corps EOD units before their deployments, but when the stress and post-traumatic issues finally caught up with me, I wrote a book about it. Now I’m a writer — I do magazine pieces, I’m working on another book, and I blog as well.

Your book, The Long Walk, was published last year. What’s it about? (And is it true that it’s now being turned into an opera?!)

My goal in writing the book was just to get the feeling right — what does it feel like to take apart Improvised Explosive Devices in Iraq and then come home and feel like you’re going crazy? So, the book is a mix of those two story lines — in Iraq and back home — and they are intertwined because it felt to me like everything was happening at once. When I was deployed I only thought of coming home, and once I was home for good I felt a need to go back. I needed to write the book to explain the war to myself, and I never expected it to take off like it has since it was published by Doubleday last year.

And yes, it is being turned into an opera, and I certainly didn’t expect that either! The American Lyric Theater in New York is producing it, and I have been working closely with Stephanie Fleischmann and Jeremy Howard Beck, the librettist and composer, as they construct it. They have taken the project very seriously, and have been incredibly respectful of my family and the book, and are doing a really faithful job translating it to the stage. The first performance of the music, just piano and voice, is the first weekend in June. There was a public performance of the libretto in February, and it was so emotionally intense I had trouble listening.

Did writing the book help you heal?

It did, but if healing was the only goal, I wouldn’t have needed to go through the publication process. There are a number of writing programs for veterans that focus on healing, and they are great, encouraging men and women to just get their story out. I wanted to find peace, certainly, but I also wanted to become a writer, and I did my best to create a good story too, that other people (besides my family and friends) would want to read.

What would you say if one of your four sons wanted to enlist?

The military was mostly good to me, and I wouldn’t trade any of my experiences, good or bad. I have a new family, the EOD brotherhood, and I would never give that up for my ignorant pre-war self. So I wouldn’t stop my sons from enlisting, but I know the military isn’t for everyone. It wouldn’t be a good fit for all of my boys. And because I know the bad things that may be coming, I’m not planning on walking them down to the recruiting station on their 18th birthday either.

Thank you for creating your official website at WordPress.com! Why’d you choose us?

An author in 2013 just needs to have a quality website that can serve as a hub and platform for your books and events. If a reader likes your book and wants to know more, they need a place to go. So I knew I needed a good-looking site, and I chose WordPress.com for a couple of reasons. First, I was comfortable with it. I wrote for an alternative news website in Buffalo, New York, for a couple of years before I wrote my book, and they used WordPress on the back-end. I found it easy to learn then, and since I was comfortable with it, it made sense to build my personal site with it.

Second, and this is no small thing, I could create a decent-looking site for a small amount of money. I’m no programmer, but I’m also not a famous best-selling author who can afford to pay thousands of dollars for someone to build them a site. I needed to be able to quickly and cheaply build a quality site I could maintain, and WordPress.com is good for that.

You’ve picked the premium theme Linen for your blog. What appealed to you about it?

I looked for a really clean, smooth design that fit the somber mood of the book. I was able to tweak the background color on Linen, so now it’s got a subdued grey, vaguely newspaper-like feel, but it also has a nice banner system to draw the eye to high-quality photography. I searched through a bunch of options, and Linen seemed to fit best.

Your blog covers all kinds of topics: info on your book, musings on art, stories about outdoor adventures, book reviews, interviews with other vets, to name just a few. How do you approach all this content?

I have a very strict writing schedule, with daily word count targets and deadlines. I’ve found it’s the only way to keep up with so many different kinds of projects, from blog posts that take half a day to write to a book that requires a year or two. So I try to post on the blog once a week, on Wednesday. I write about two main things: updates about book events and writing projects, and topics that are interesting to me but don’t fit into my normal book and magazine “beat.” Sometimes you just have a theme or idea you want to explore, and the words need to come out, no matter how many people end up reading them. Not every inspiration I have is topical for the news of the day — the blog is a good place for such stray thoughts.

What writing advice and tips would you give fellow bloggers?

When writing at that alt-news site, I learned the value of consistency. Readers expect regular content. If you want people to come back to your blog and read more another day, they need to know when. So I announced that I would write columns every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and then I stuck to it almost no matter what. I couldn’t post everyday, but I could keep to that three-per-week schedule, and it worked.

Now, my blog supports my book efforts, so I write less, but still consistently. If I’m going to take a week off, I say so. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the “10,000 hour rule” in his book Outliers. It basically says that it takes 10,000 hours of doing something to master it. The only way to get better at writing is to read and write. Blogging helped me get to 10,000 hours.

Thanks for your time, Brian!

Check out briancastner.com for more on Brian, his book, and his ongoing work.

Today let’s take a look at Beau and Arrow Events, a wedding inspiration blog run by Ellen and Kate, two San Diego-based event planners. You’d never know that this chic blogazine is running on Comet, one of our sparest themes.

Here’s how the bloggers behind Beau and Arrow Events transformed grayscale Comet into cursive and gold elegance. It’s nothing any intrepid blogger couldn’t try at home!

A cohesive color scheme

Like any well-planned wedding, Beau and Arrow Events picked a handful of theme colors and stuck to them. In this case, blush and gold accents temper plain black and white.

The bloggers opted for a busy backdrop with a pink-and-white arrow pattern, but keep it from commandeering the design by not repeating it anywhere else. In fact, the backdrop is the only space pink appears in the color scheme. Elsewhere, like on container borders and links, the bloggers chose gold as their sole accent. The effect is a perfectly balanced duochrome.

To learn more about personalizing your blog with custom colors, view the tutorial.

Typefaces that brim with personality

On Beau and Arrow Events, the bloggers made bold font choices that hold their own with their featured wedding photography. You’ll notice that their custom header image isn’t a logo at all, but a medley of complementary fonts. The effect is an elegant, feminine vibe that caters perfectly to the blog’s wedding-planning audience. To continue this theme throughout the page, Ellen and Kate chose flirty Fertigo Pro Script for headers, and the classic serif Skolar for a readable body text. A smaller, caps-lock version of Fertigo creates notice-me sidebar titles.

If you’re interested in reading more about how you can personalize your blog with custom typefaces, yes, there’s a tutorial for that, too!

Custom bullet points enhance the sidebar

Ellen and Kate maintain consistency in their design by carrying over the ampersand in their custom header image to the bullet points on the sidebar. They’re able to do this by setting a custom image in place of the regular black dot for bullet points that typically mark unordered lists.

You can dive into your CSS to have more control and customize your site the way you want — to make a variety of tweaks, such as setting a custom image for an unordered list, like Ellen and Kate do here. In order to edit the CSS, they use the $30 Custom Design Upgrade and a small ampersand image.

Here’s how to make your own custom bullets:

• Create and upload a small image, which we’ll call custom.jpg, to your Media Library.
• In the Customizer, navigate to the CSS button on the lower right side.
• Now, you’ll want to roll up your sleeves and do a little coding! In CSS lingo, “ul” is how we refer to an unordered, or bulleted, list. To change the icon that shows up as the bullet, we’ll want to specify a “list-style-image” property that affects that “ul.” Finally, we’ll need to specify a URL where this image lives. Since it’s in your Media Library, it lives at custom.jpg.
• Now we need to put the above information into syntax browsers can read. It’s OK if you don’t understand exactly why it’s worded this way, just know that it’s the same information we outlined above. Add a line that looks like this anywhere in the Customizer editing window:

ul { list-style-image: url(‘custom.jpg’); }

• Save and refresh, et voila! — you should see a heart, star, or whichever custom image you picked in place of the ordinary bullet point.

You can do much more with custom CSS to make these types of design tweaks — for more, check out our support page on custom CSS.

Why I Don’t Diet — An Ode to My Father

My father spent his years fighting his size, wishing he was smaller, weaker, less of a giant. He was taught to hate his body, and he was ashamed of the amount of space he took up. But he passed his strength to me, and I won’t squander my inheritance. I will not let myself be diminished.

Image from More Cabaret.com

Tiffany Kell, a contributor and dancer at More Cabaret, reflects on her father’s recent passing, and his long struggle with his weight and health. She describes him vividly — “born larger than life” and of a family made of “Viking stock” — and creates a strong, invincible man in our minds.

“But he didn’t want to be a giant,” she writes. “He wanted to be thin.”

She recounts the experimental diet programs he tried, his obsession with calorie counting, his celiac disease, and — finally — his last year: wasting away, becoming a shadow of himself. This post isn’t simply an ode to her father, but an intimate, powerful piece about who she is and where she comes from — and ultimately becoming comfortable in one’s own skin.

“Aunt”s and Other-Mothering in a Queer Household

As Queer Black women, we don’t have many role models. The connection and communication with our elders is rare. It’s important to recognize and honor the LGBTQ women in our lives who have come before us, blazing trails that we may not have ever known we’d walk.

This week, we read a number of posts celebrating Mother’s Day, from reflections on motherhood to interpretations on “mother.” Nitra at Wise Edits tells a bold and moving story about growing up in an unstable household of drugs and abuse — and finding happiness and a haven through her Aunt Dee. But this woman disappears from her life, and it’s not until Nitra is older, and comes out to her family, that she learns who Aunt Dee really was, and is.

Beautifully told, Nitra’s piece celebrates the connection between mother and child, unbreakable bonds over time, and the queer household. We appreciate her warm, honest voice and tribute to the women in her life.

The Lip Pencil of Invisibility — And a Grown-up Woman’s Request for JK Rowling

Women of a certain age.

Something happens.

No need for an invisibility cloak.

We just vanish.

Ping.

The author at Memoirs of a husk muses on a number of issues in this poignant post: Beauty. Womanhood. Aging. She writes about what happens when you “fray around the edges”: when you need a lip pencil and clear mascara to get noticed, yet no matter what you do, you’re no longer you: “You start to see just that — a woman, nothing more,” she writes. “No past, no personality, no added dimensions.” At the end, she asks JK Rowling for assistance — to invent a cloak of visibility, “not for our fraying lips and bushy eyebrows, comfy midriffs or laughter lines, but for us. Whoever we are.” We like this blogger’s voice: it’s fresh and unique, and her style is quiet yet sharp — we’re curious to read what she tackles next.

On Goodbyes

Of course there are friendships that reside far beyond geography’s lethal grasp, laughing in the face of distance. “A friendship that can be ended didn’t ever start,” wrote the French poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais. Philia, or the platonic love between friends, is perhaps not as sexy as its cousin eros – romantic love, but it’s the purest of all the loves. No sex or jealousy to muddy the waters. No mandatory filial piety. No professional incentive. Just the pure joy of voluntarily shared company, of dipping into each other’s souls every once in a while.

Nick Ashdown, the blogger at Advokat Dyavola, has lived in Russia, Turkey, and Rwanda, so he knows a thing or two about goodbyes. Yet they never get any easier. Here, he discusses the word “goodbye” (which he finds absurd, as “nothing feels good about it at all”), and its euphemisms (“see you later” and “let’s stay in touch”). In his reflections, he describes the different connections we have in our lives: people we may never see again, but also those friendships that last, despite the distance.

In a time when some of us wander the world as nomads, and many of us communicate and maintain relationships online, Nick’s thoughts on goodbyes and friendships are at once timely and timeless — and relatable to others.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think should be Freshly Pressed l? Leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Snap is a responsive, lightweight, and minimalist theme that makes it easy to feature your projects. Snap’s clean grid based blog layout and configurable page templates also make it incredibly flexible.

Snap: Home Page

Read more about Snap in the Theme Showcase, or test drive it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes in your Dashboard.

Widgets are a way to add new content (like your Twitter stream, a tag cloud, or a link to your blog archives) in the sidebar, header, or footer of your site. To see the widgets you have available to you, log in to your WordPress.com dashboard and click on Appearance » Widgets. To add a widget, simply click on it and drag it up and over to the right of the widget screen, into the Default Sidebar, Header Area, or Footer Area section of your site. Then, to control visibility, expand the widget and click the Visibility button next to the Save button.

For example, if you wanted the Archives widget to only appear on category archives and error pages, choose “Show” from the first dropdown and then add two rules: “Page is 404 Error Page” and “Category is All Category Pages.”

You can also hide widgets based on the current page. For example, if you don’t want the Archives widget to appear on search results pages, choose “Hide” and “Page is Search results.”

Visibility is controlled by five aspects: page type, category, tag, date, and author, but each visibility rule is handled separately, so there isn’t a way, for example, to only display a widget on posts that are categorized as “Summer” and also tagged with “Picnic.”

The visibility panel is available today in every widget for every user on WordPress.com; visit Appearance » Widgets in your blog’s dashboard to take control. Or, to learn more about using widgets on your blog, check out our recent Introduction to Widgets series: Widgets 101, Widgets 201, and Widgets 301.

Here are just a few of the organizations that call WordPress.com home, and some of the ways they’ve used WordPress.com to create compelling sites that tell their stories and engage their supporters — nearly all for little or no cost:

Girls’ Globe

Girls’ Globe is a Sweden-based non-profit that connects individuals and organizations dedicated to the rights, health, and empowerment of women and girls.

The site creates a space for bloggers and non-profits to share stories of their challenges and successes. Each of those stories becomes a learning experience for women’s rights advocates, giving them a new tool, suggesting an effective strategy for advancing girls’ rights, and providing international exposure.

Girls’ Globe uses the Oxygen theme, taking advantage of its post slider to create a colorful, graphic homepage that showcases the site’s most powerful stories. A custom menu guides visitors both to topical content and to pages critical for any non-profit: About, Partners, and Donate, where embedded PayPal buttons let visitors easily support the organization using either US dollars or Swedish krona.

(Oxygen is a versatile theme that’s quite popular with non-profits — check out how the Little Hippies Foundation and SimpleNeeds Georgia have made it their own.)

Turning Pages

We found many literacy organizations on WordPress.com — fitting, for a platform that’s about writing and reading great content. Among them is Turning Pages, a South Carolina non-profit offering adult literacy and math classes and tutoring:

Turning Pages relies on the Confit theme, originally designed for restaurants but perfect for creating websites with focused, easily navigable home pages. Their mission is front and center, and the home page also makes important information like address and office hours, a contact form, and a donate button accessible with no further clicking. In the sidebar, a custom menu lets potential volunteers and adults seeking assistance find relevant information easily. (If you’re interested in building a website with a home page rather than a blog, as Turning Pages has, check out our home page tutorial.)

Confit is designed for a large custom background image, and Turning Pages has chosen a panoramic shot of the Congaree River bridge, a Columbia landmark. It adds visual interest and emphasizes that this is a community-focused organization while not distracting from the important content on the page — a perfect double-duty background.

Tuning Pages isn’t the only organization that saw the potential in the Confit theme — the Vida Vegan Conference is also using it to share information about its upcoming gala, benefitting a chimpanzee sanctuary.

Invisible Children

When the world first became aware of the atrocities committed in Uganda by Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, sending footage of Kony viral, Invisible Children was one of the main drivers behind the campaign. A California-based non-profit, Invisible Children is dedicated to ending the use and abuse of child soldiers in Africa, and their online component is powered by WordPress.com VIP:

Invisible Children is packed with information, from an interactive crisis tracker that lets visitors zoom in to learn more about specific incidents across Africa to a lobbying sign-up form and Congressional calendar for would-be activists. Compelling video and data help them make the case for their work, and the site provides ample opportunity for interested visitors to get involved, from simply making a donation to attending an event to applying for a job.

The breadth of organizations using WordPress.com VIP is truly remarkable — from Invisible Children to the Partnership for a Drug Free America to the charity: water blog.

Metro Council for Teen Potential

You might not think that a theme called Fruit Shake featuring bananas in its header would be a good foundation for a non-profit website — but then, you haven’t seen the Metro Council for Teen Potential:

Based in Rochester, New York, The Metro Council is a community youth support organization offering health and skills education, mentoring, and leadership training to young people in the greater Rochester area. Using Fruit Shake, they’ve created a simple, clean site. A front-and-center mission statement and bold photos of the teens it works with give visitors an immediate sense of what the organization does, and the navigation options in the sidebar make it easy to sift through the site’s options.

From animal welfare organizations to museums and municipal organizations to scholarship funds to community groups distributing food and clothing to the homeless and beyond, non-profits use WordPress.com to get their word out about their missions, attract volunteers, fundraise, and organize events, all in the name of the greater good. We’re proud to give them a platform that helps them create change.

What kinds of awesome things do you do at Automattic?

Philip Arthur Moore

I’m currently the Premium Theme Team lead at WordPress.com. The majority of my waking hours are spent feverishly obsessing over making premium themes a world-class experience for all WordPress users. This means a lot of different things: ensuring that customers are well-supported in our premium themes forum; auditing every single line of code in every premium theme; educating the WordPress theming community on proper approaches to WordPress theme development; and with my colleagues coming up with strong, robust guidelines for developing themes the WordPress.com way.

One of the more exciting parts of my job is being able to partner and work very closely with premium WordPress theme shops like Graph Paper Press, The Theme Foundry, Press75, and Organic Themes to bring some of the best WordPress.org themes onto WordPress.com for our users’ delight. In many ways I feel like not only do I have Automatticians as coworkers but partner theme shops as well. Many a long night has been spent prepping premium themes for their launches, none of which would have been possible without solid, thriving relationships with our partners. In short, premium themes are my life right now.

Tell us about a project you’ve worked on recently.

My favorite ongoing project is _s, or Underscores. It’s a starter theme on which every single Automattic premium theme is built and it was created to both help us do our jobs better and educate the WordPress community on theming best practices. I actively contribute to the project primarily because I strongly believe in developer education and Open Source. It also doesn’t hurt that I get to play with git and GitHub, which is one of my favorite companies in existence.

It’s hard to understand the power of _s unless you see what’s built with it. Further, Ryu, A Simpler Time, and Untitled were all created using _s, but you’d never know it without being told and that’s what makes the starter theme so powerful. To date, Underscores has around 34 total contributors and it’s always open to more. I’ll continue to work on it because it provides a solid benchmark on which to grade other themes and it also gives me a chance to interact with the theming community. 

What have you learned that you can share with WordPress.com users?

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in life is that writing will take you everywhere. It doesn’t matter what occupation you hold or what you study, writing will take you far. If you are a new blogger who doesn’t know what to write about, just write; it’ll come to you. If you form the habit of blogging daily or weekly and stick to it, you’ll find your voice in no time and you’ll thank yourself for slogging through the days when writing didn’t feel so great. Keep at it and don’t stop, and a year from now you’ll be thankful your fingers kept tapping on your keyboard.

Philip with volunteers and fellow Automattician Naoko at WordCamp Seoul 2013

What do you enjoy most about your job?

Without a doubt what I appreciate most at Automattic is the level of confidence that my colleagues and I have for each other to be the best in the world at what we do. We push each other to grow and learn, rarely — if ever — accept the status quo, and always think about how to make things better. We’re managers of one who rely on trust and sound judgment to guide our collective ship; it truly is a pleasure working with a company filled with so many independent thinkers who care most about pushing the needle forward day by day.

It also feels incredible to know hundreds of other like-minded individuals spread throughout the world who are firmly united by the goal of making the web a better place. I’m not alone in my love for WordPress and an open web and being virtually surrounded by others who share the same views really is something special.

What do you love to do in your spare time?

Spare time will almost always consist of one, or any combination of the following:

1. Reading up on fellow Third Culture Kids, Third Culture Adults, and Global Nomads. I’ve lived mostly outside of my birth country (the US) for the last decade and connect best with expats and mobile souls.
2. Watching Seinfeld episodes for the umpteenth time. George is getting upset!!!
3. Digging deeper and deeper into the Spotify rabbit hole to find smooth chillout and lounge tunes.
4. Making a concerted effort to call my family and best friends on the phone to tell them that I miss them and love them very much. The art of long, rambling phone conversations must live on.
5. Finding out where the best dark chocolate is located in the world and dreaming of those places in my sleep. If it’s less than 85% dark let’s not talk.
6. Reading books on Buddhism and living a mindful life. It passes by so quickly so let’s make it a good one!
7. Figuring out how to randomly interject emoticons into online conversations.
   (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
8. Taking public transportation in large cities. Tokyo’s rail system is the tops.
9. Walking nowhere in particular.

Did you know Automattic is hiring? We want people who are willing to work hard, share their ideas, learn from their colleagues, take initiative to get things done without being told, and those who aren’t afraid to ask questions. Think you fit the bill? Work with us.

We especially want to highlight bloggers with unique perspectives and thoughtful commentary, as well as collaborative blogs with multiple contributors. So, we hope you enjoy this sampling of sites in honor of this special day.

Butterfly Mind

Illustration by Andrea Badgley.

Creative nonfiction writer Andrea Badgley lives with her husband and two children in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia. In the past, she’s caught our eye with thoughtful posts on both family and the writing life: a piece on putting food on the table, and a post on revisiting her childhood diaries. Her blog is a delight: lovely musings on motherhood and parenting, and lighthearted pieces, too (be sure to check her humor category).

On her About page, Andrea says her mother once told her to never ever stop writing — good advice, mom! — and we’re glad to see her reflections on WordPress.com. Her voice is strong, yet quiet and eloquent; follow along and read how she balances all the things that life throws at her.

The Mamafesto

On Avital Norman Nathman’s blog, The Mamafesto, motherhood and feminism collide. The writer, mother, and former high school teacher writes provoking, intelligent posts on a number of topics, from gender and media to activism and reproductive rights.

Image by Avital Norman Nathman.

In a recent response to a Huffington Post article about a mother who posted pictures of her six-year-old cross-dressing son on Facebook, she writes:

Maybe – and just hear me out – instead of suggesting that we *don’t* share these pictures over fear that it will damage our children somehow, we actually share more of them in hopes of normalizing and accepting these types of things.

Being a “pink boy” doesn’t have to mean anything beyond being a boy who happens to love pink.

We enjoy following the commentary and personal writing on her blog — and, whether you agree or disagree, you’ll appreciate that she asks questions that make her readers think. We also like that she showcases her freelance work on another WordPress.com site using the portfolio-style theme Hatch; if you dig her blog posts, be sure to poke around her other projects.

Kristen Hansen Brakeman

Musings from the mind of Kristen Hansen Brakeman.

Essayist and fiction writer Kristen Hansen Brakeman is a busy writer and mother — she’s got her hands in numerous cookie jars: a WordPress.com blog of sharp, often hilarious writing; her work as a production supervisor on TV variety shows; and her book projects — she’s currently seeking representation for an essay collection and a humorous fantasy for kids.

In addition to exploring topics of aging (check out her popular post on the dreaded word “ma’am”), family, and other subjects with her dose of humor, she writes about life in the Sandwich Generation: raising three daughters while taking care of an aging mother.

Mommy Man

Mommy Man: Adventures of a Gay Superdad

Stay-at-home dad, writer, and “mommy man” Jerry Mahoney lives with his boyfriend, Drew, and their two twins (who were conceived via gestational surrogate, with eggs provided by Drew’s sister, Susie). On his blog, he writes about issues of gay parenting and being a stay-at-home dad (consider his post on “dadscimination,” his thoughts on whether kids deserve a mom, or commentary on an episode of Modern Family).

There’s lots of stuff to read here, so if you don’t know where to start, visit his “Best O’Blog” page, or read more about his unique story in his Modern Love essay, “Mom/Not Mom/Aunt,” in the New York Times.

Spilled Milk

Spilled Milk is a collaborative blog featuring photography collections by 19 mothers around the globe. Each week, a new theme prompts one of the contributors to reflect on parenthood and “the complexity and beauty that comes with raising our kids.” The site design is minimal and elegant, and the bloggers use tiled galleries to display sets of gorgeous images.

Check out the recent contributions that interpret the themes of “Experience,” “Mess,” and “Meal.” The themes are broad, allowing each photographer to get creative with snapshots and compile personal yet cohesive collections of what it means to be a mother, wife, and observer of the fleeting, intimate, and precious moments of our lives.

Image collection by Spilled Milk.

More collaborative blogs

Mothers With Cancer is a group blog of 20 mothers with cancer. Some of these women have been in remission for years, while others are newly diagnosed or are battling a new recurrence. Off the Merry-Go-Round is a space for discussion and inspiration for six women who have chosen their families over full-time careers. Also, Peanut Butter on the Keyboard is a blog where parenting and publishing intersect, led by a group of mothers who also happen to be romance authors.

And more: a mix of moms on WordPress.com

We love the variety — and fun and fitting blog names — of sites focused on motherhood:

Doodlemum

#$&!% Mom

Adequate Mom

Divorced Mom

Original Simple Mom

Smarter Moms

Barefoot Mom

Ordinary Mom

Reluctant Mom

Honest Mom

We are all travelers here

I miss the feel of bound paper between my fingers.

At daybreak, my quiet commute, punctuated by the flipflipflip of pages, chapters, worlds.

At nightfall, crisp, cool sheets, and the sweet scent of sleep. My heavy eyelids and my frantic panic to read just one more (just one more) paragraph, before giving in to rest.

After a hectic month cut into her reading time, Vanessa at Rant and Roll succinctly and beautifully describes longing for the written word. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Occupied with our other pursuits, some of them creative, some likely not, we often find ourselves unable to carve out time to settle into a good book. Vanessa’s post will inspire you to do so. (And as an added bonus, she includes a short video of the incomparable, funny, and always charmingly self-effacing Ray Bradbury that is well worth your time.)

Rediscovering the dictionary

… as far as a conventional desk dictionary is concerned, I haven’t used one in a long time. My vocabulary is more than adequate for the kind of fiction I’m writing, and whenever I have to check a definition just to be on the safe side, there are plenty of online resources that I can consult with ease. So although I have plenty of other reference books, I just never saw the need for Webster’s.

But I was wrong.

If you’re a writer (and there’s a good chance you are, after all), this is a must-read post. Author Alec Nevala-Lee, on his blog of the same name, explores the power of dictionaries in the writing process. Using a New Yorker article by creative nonfiction pioneer John McPhee as a jumping-off point, Alec dives into his own dictionary-related history. He comes out changed, with a new appreciation for that most dependable of reference books. Check out his post and we bet the same happens to you.

Writing, Time Machines, and Memory

Our time machines can exist in many forms, the memories of others, books, video, and the landscapes in which we live. We take all of this data, and what exists within our own minds, and put these fragments together like a puzzle, negotiating the connections and determining their importance. What results is a narrative we can repeat, a story that is much less about the past than it is about the future.

We are constantly creating and recreating our narratives of identity, cultivating a sense of who we are and where we fit within our cultural contexts. We want to understand ourselves, and perhaps even more so, to be understood by others. I suspect our compulsion to record and save and archive everything arises from this keen desire to narrate our story to others, and find connection.

In this thoughtful post, Michelle from the blog Play looks at how our memories interact with and help create our art. Touching on everything from writing to psychology to pop culture, Michelle explores the hard questions that plague those trying to accurately portray their own realities. What is the absolute truth about your past? Just how reliable are those memories you’re writing about? Michelle tackles all this and more here, in an excellent example of long-form writing.

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