WELCOME TO THE LIFE CURATED BLOG
I’m proud to introduce my very first blog: Life Curated. This blog will aim to cover all ranges of topics with one simple goal: to make you (yes, to force you!) to see the world differently. I’m hosting it here at the home base for my upcoming novel, Lies Curated, which you can read here, until I am careless enough with my finances to own a full stable of domain names.
Life Curated, an in-depth and selective exploration of life, captured in blog format, intends to bring an abstract and experimental coat of paint to reality articulated through myriad genres, including:
Fiction
Entertainment Reviews
Spirituality
Family & Relationships
Travelogues
Why subscribe? I believe everyone should be able to check their inbox and find something they actually like. How often does someone send you somewhere you’ve never been before? I’m confident you can make room in your day to break routine and take a short trip every once in a while.
Life Curated is also a community where you can share your own stories. Everyone is encouraged to reach out in the comment section, or contact me to submit your own original content.
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Decades ago, bored in an airport, waiting for a delayed flight, I broke my first journal in. It was less than a year after 9/11. I had just graduated high school. I tested the paper with the pen, feeling out phrases and sentences, before offhandedly attempting to transcribe my inner dialogue: that constant cocauphany of conflict, noise, and mindless meandering (which I recently learned does not pester all of the rest of you).
Curiously, it became hard to control the pen in my hand. I couldn’t stop. I soon realized, coming back to myself miles above the depths of the Atlantic ocean, this was not just a journal. I was holding a living, breathing map.
My first journal
I used it to guide me for years to come. Lost, under-ambitious, lazy, the only child of a rocky marriage, a wanderer who used the often repeated mantra that “he could be anything he wanted” as an excuse to be hardly anything at all.
I was like that ancient myth of the man who had been born in the water, raised in the water, grown up next to the water, before being taken away from the water to spend the rest of his life yearning to find and dive into the water again, obsessed only with returning back from where he came—except I didn’t even know what my water was. I only knew life was desperately dry.
A couple of years later I committed to a Bachelor’s in Writing. I aced my classes with essays on Exupéry’s exploits in Argentina; I enraptured my classmates with short stories about spiritual awakenings on the New York City subway, or blind children hiding out in the Appalachian mountains, unaware they were even blind; or a brutal, epic poem about the first woman to ever walk the cold face of the earth. One winter holiday, I penned a novella about the origin of human existence: a ceremonial writing competition set in a bizarre and abstract universe.
I explored the maze of the human mind, burning away any and all limits to my creative imagination.
I graduated and got an internship at a major magazine in the Pacific Northwest—a huge personal milestone—writing articles about hidden hot springs in the Cascade mountains, secret histories of elks lodges and underground tunnels hiding beneath the streets of downtown, and, my personal favorite, helicopter rescue missions out in the Oregon wilderness.
It was at this magazine that I found myself, quite by chance, in a photo within one of their archived issues. The photo accompanied a restaurant review published before I had even applied for the internship. I was in the background, out of focus, facing away from the photographer, sitting at the bar reading Hesse’s Demian and writing in my journal.
Those last details weren’t entirely evident to the outside observer. But I mention them now because both the book I was reading and the journal entry I was writing were about how, through magical thinking, one could consciously affect their own future by picturing themselves in whatever situation they wanted to be in. And there I was, months later, seeing another me in an old photo printed in the very magazine I was so thrilled to consider as my first “dream job.”
The journal entry I had been writing that night in the past seemed to have opened a window through time: the glass of the lens of the photographer’s camera.
As the years fell behind me, I grew my career as a technical nonfiction writer, while my experimental and creative pursuits fell, relegated to nights and weekends. And yet, all the while, the act of writing and composing ideas out of thin air continued to lead to more and more strange and unexplainable coincidences. It was this harmless sorcery (not simply writing in a journal for the sake of writing) that served as the magic key that unlocked the next chapter of my life.
It was the source of water that I had been searching for.
*****
Storytelling is my heart. I believe it is the spark of the soul of every society. It’s the river in the desert and the root system supporting the topmost leaves.
I am a writer, unable to not write, dedicated to you, the reader, and to opening windows through time, straight to your inbox, using everything from fiction to travelogues to my past finished works. I humbly invite you to take this life trip with me as your guide.
Please share your own stories here as well. Comments are always encouraged, and my inbox is ever looking for stimulation. You can email me at ArtRobin@LiesCuratedBook.com or follow me on social media @ArtRobinWrites. Join me here and help build a community intent on curating the most mysterious, bizarre and beautiful moments in life.
SHARE YOUR STORIES
Share your own stories in the comment section or via the contact form.
Writing prompts:
What’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to you after reading?
Have you ever discovered your own writing in a totally unexpected place?
Describe a time in the past where something you read or wrote ended up resounding, whether directly or indirectly, in your everyday life.