The Footnote That Got Out of Hand

The post that went up today started as a footnote.

I mean that literally. A few weeks ago I published that list, things I ate this week that were better than expected, very serious journalism, and at the bottom I added a little note, almost as a joke, that said something like: 'not sure what this blog is anymore but apparently it's this now, and I think that's fine.' I almost deleted it. It felt too on the nose. Then I left it in, because I was tired and just hit publish, and then I forgot about it.

Except I didn't forget about it. I kept opening a draft I've had sitting around since the fall, titled, with zero irony, 'not for the blog', which was supposed to be a mission statement, a serious reckoning with what The Hartwells actually is two years in. It turned into something I rewrote three times and never posted because it felt too heavy, too earnest, too much like I was explaining myself to a room that hadn't asked. So tonight I took the footnote, and I turned it into a paragraph, and I hit publish before I could talk myself out of it again.

re-reading it once. just once.

Here is the whole mission statement, in full: I started this because I needed somewhere to put things. I kept going because it turned out some of those things were useful to other people, or at least recognizable. I'm in a creative writing class now, which I still find slightly hilarious, and I've been turning in work that sounds a lot like the stuff I used to save as drafts and never post. Apparently the difference between a private draft and a published piece is just whether someone else reads it. The Hartwells is the place where I practice doing the second thing. That's it. That's the whole statement.

I wrote 'not for the blog' at the top of that draft back in November and then published it anyway, footnote-first, in February. Feels right, honestly. Some things take the scenic route.