About Me.
Hello, I'm Emily. I know this is annoying, but I’d rather that you get to know me through my work instead of through a list of interests and identity labels. It’s not that labels don’t matter, but they undermine the point of the space I want to create here. This is an entire digital garden for my stuff, not a sidebar with an avatar pic where I only have enough space to give you an elevator pitch about who I am. If you look enough around on this website, you will start to put together a sense of my identities, life history, and politics.
Years ago, everyone was encouraged to ditch their old anonymous internet handles and use their real name to create a personal brand. Being in academia at the time, I hopped on the Personal Brand bandwagon quickly and tried unsuccessfully to craft an effective brand over the next several years.
Nowadays, I’m just kind of done with it. I don’t want to hide behind an avatar (no shade on people who do), but I’m not a brand, I don’t have anything to sell, and I don’t care about my SEO. Everything on this site was made by one person in order to share with others, but it’s the sharing that’s important, not the person who made it.
The most I’ll say about myself here is this: the three identities that have the biggest effect on shaping my everyday experience are that I am white, a U.S. citizen, and queer. On the balance, I consider myself to be a very privileged person, although not in every aspect of life.
If you want to know more, I invite you to read around a little bit. I hope the writings here bring you some entertainment, edification, or joy. Thank you for being here.
Now that you've sat through that long-winded non-introduction, you can find more about me and what I'm up to on my /now page.
About This Site.
This site is, and will always be, under construction.
About the Site
As I build this site, I find that two sets of values are coming to the fore:
Accessibility & Sustainability
These are features that I have built in or plan to build in as my skills grow:
- mobile responsiveness
- high-contrast text
- lightweight, fast-loading pages and images
- dark mode capability
- semantic tags and alt text for screen readers
A website is a place for connection, a place to transmit ideas, experiences, and feelings from human to human. Building a website is simultaneously an act of creativity and service. My website is full of content that I have created because I’m me, but if I don’t design it in such a way that it’s widely accessible, I am failing to use it as a tool of communication.
Progress over Perfection
That being said, even a small website takes a lot of time to build by hand. I appreciate your patience as I learn and I don’t expect to get everything right the first time.
I am also an incremental builder. You may come one day and see that the background color is different than a week before or that some pages have been shuffled around. I’m not the kind of person who can keep a website the same and then completely redesign when I want to change it. I do see a complete redesign in this site’s future, but until then I will be fiddling with things on and off. It’s just my way.
I am not a developer or coder; I have no background in computer science, UI/UX, or graphic design. I’m just a person who for some reason enjoys messing with HTML and CSS to make things functional and attractive. I appreciate this site as a container for imperfection and messiness.
About the Content
My main goal in creating this website has been to share my writing. I had a backlog of poems and prose pieces that I was just tired of keeping hidden so I wanted to post them here. I also want to use it as a place to store and share various interests. The rest of the content will probably come and go, but you can expect the writing page to always be populated with something.
What is a Bone Folder?
A bone folder is a bookbinding implement used to crease, score, smooth, burnish, and shape paper, book cloth, and book board. It is a very useful implement, being relevant to almost every stage of making a book. It is called a bone folder because it is traditionally made out of bone, although you can now get them made out of plastic and teflon. My bone folder is my favorite tool I own, always ready to help assorted flat materials transform into something three-dimensional, useful, and meaningful: a book.
