Many of our local writers have found blogging to be a great way to reach their audience. Some of them use blogging as a way to journal their creative processes and some use it as a professional platform. However, all of these blogs feature distinct, unique voices that contribute to our understanding of ourselves as creative people and the world around us.
Check out these wonderful blogs by writers in the Western Pennsylvania Wilds (which are in no particular order). Are you a blogger in our region? Contact us to have your site added here!
Happy You Are Here
Craig Inzana is a mental wellness advocate, media creator, and mindfulness practitioner. His perspective is to constantly seek to make healing modalities accessible to those that might otherwise be blocked off from them. He is a recovering addict obsessed with self-development. wellbeing, and self-compassion. Craig owns a marketing agency that focuses on marketing and selling through relationships. He was previously a commission painter, a filmmaker, and generally a multi-disciplinary artist. His goal is to some day own land and form an intentional community based on the concept of universal compassion and intense belief in rehabilitation.
Laurel Rising
Brookville writer Laurie Barrett approaches topics dealing with family traditions, nature, marriage, and social injustice with sensitivity and eloquence in her blog, Laurel Rising. Laurie has a poet’s sensibilities even in her prose and often uses metaphor or other figurative language to tell her story. Her photography also enhances many of her posts with images from the natural world to enhance the effect of the imagery in her writing. Laurel Rising is the perfect blog for someone who wants to take the time to contemplate moments that ordinarily might pass you by and feel more deeply the impact of the world around you.
BiPolar Mama
Lauren Kocher, also from Brookville, has cultivated an online following with her social media account and online blog called The BiPolar Mama. In this blog, Lauren explores her unique experiences as a woman with a mental illness and her very relatable experiences a “mom” to two young boys. The BiPolar Mama has humor, heartbreak and razor-sharp rebuke for social norms that treat others as anything less than complex, fallible and, ultimately, lovable human beings.
Diana Lynn Author
Diana Lynn Farley is the author of The Road Back to Hell, a memoir that tells the story of her upbringing with a family who “weathered the traumas of alcoholism, instability, violence, molestation, and attempted suicide.” Diana’s blog focuses on her life as a writer, mother, grandmother and active member of her community who is always looking for ways to help others. This blog is very relatable for authors who hope to publish or who have published and are wondering what to do next, however it is also relatable for anyone who has experience love, loss and is searching for purpose in their lives.
PanicButton Productions
Holly Button is a juried photographer at the Winkler Art Gallery and a poet who has previously worked as an editor for Tobeco at Clarion University. Her blog delves deep into how her personal life either helps or hinders her ability to create art. Her prose, like her poetry and photography, is focused, sharp and gives you an unflinching glimpse of the truth as Holly sees it, however difficult it might be to see. Holly’s posts are at times deeply personal while still being highly relatable to anyone who has a creative passion.
Patricia Thrushart – Author & Poet
I am a writer and poet living in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains just outside of award-winning Cook Forest State Park in the Wilds of Pennsylvania. The beauty of Northern Appalachia and its forests informs my poetry. A poet writes to satisfy a need to express emotion or document life; having readers actually interested in sharing those moments is both exhilarating and humbling. If reading any of these poems creates in you a sense of gratitude, awareness or an appreciation of the beauty of our natural world, then I can consider my effort to be worthwhile. Beyond my poetry, I write narrative nonfiction books that explore the lives of historical women whose stories have been lost to time.
Jess Weible Author
A critical element of storytelling—one that no writer or artist can control—is timing. It’s my opinion that the beauty of a story is only unlocked when it interacts with someone at the right time, a time when the experiences of their own lives have accumulated in such a way that the purpose of the story, its meaning and message, connect with a spark of inspiration. Suddenly, we understand something we hadn’t before. We see possibilities that weren’t previously there. We are fundamentally changed, even slightly, but with renewed momentum forward.
Girard Tournesol: Author, Poet, Mischief-Maker
I have written almost daily for 45 years and published a book series called Psalms of Fern, in two volumes: Little Whittlings of Soul and Time Travelers. My poetry has appeared in regional and national literary magazines including The Watershed Journal, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Clarion University’s Tobeco Literary Journal and The Pennsylvania Poetry Society’s PENNESSENCE. I present at workshops, participate in poetry readings, write blogs for online literary journals and performed at art festivals as a street poet.
Hoot’n’Howl Poetry
Byron Hoot is a poet who lives “far from the madding crowd.” He’s hunted since his mid-twenties and fished for the last handful of years. Is as comfortable in the woods as he is reading poetry, sitting at a bar, sitting in church. The woods have shaped him as much as anything else. His discipline is daily writing and reading for over forty years. And now he offers Hoot’n’Howl Poetry: an extension of himself.
