Welcome + Thank You augustkline
A Fond Farewell to My Instagram Text Post Era
This website has been several weeks in the making and planned, I guess, since I was a kid. At least in my head. From the time I was old enough to write at all, I have been looking for a place to share my writing. Its realization is the work of one woman: August Kline of augustkline.com.
I first gave fiction writing a shot when I was ten years old, and I've been an obsessive diarist since around the same age. More recently, I spent the majority of my adult life (twenty-one to twenty-six) researching and writing about local history in my hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Writing is my one truly consistent creative outlet, and usually it's the one I'm most inclined to share.
Sharing writing when you're a young person is an exhilarating thing. I've sought out the feeling from an early age, first on subreddits and forums, then Facebook, then the Instagram story feature, which (unfortunately) I still use a lot to this day. Most of the time, nobody gives a shit. Some of the time, people give way too much of a shit and absolutely tear my writing apart, which is its own kind of exhilaration. Generally though, the size and engagement of my audience doesn’t matter nearly so much as the fact it exists at all. Having someone to show my writing, even if it’s only one person, even if they’re only half-interested, gives me a reason to put a thing into words which was only in my head.
Social media is the place where I tend to put my thoughts into words, but it makes me angry constantly, and sometimes very silly. It’s the exhilaration factor that comes with publishing a thought: having an ever-present audience to see what I’ve published, knowing exactly who sees it and when, who gives me a little heart and who does not. It can cause a person to say any old thing that comes to her head. Lately, I feel it has hijacked my drive for public expression and turned it stupid. I love having an audience, and I love having ideas to share, but there’s such a thing as too much of something good. I have the same strong and un-acted-upon belief as a lot of folks do about social media, I guess, which is that it turns the things we say into little bite-size symbols that, by their sheer volume, only matter on the shallowest level to the people who perceive them. That’s content, baby!
It was through conversations with my sister Kline about this topic that she, who is not addicted to social media (flex, whatever🙄), first offered to make me a blog. I told her that I had recently made a Medium account and was about to start posting my thoughts there. Meta Corporation had seen enough of my ass; now it was time to take it to a different, smaller corporation. Kline told me she could do me one better. She would just make me a freestanding website.
My God, what a website she made. I was looking for an intuitive, to-the-point, minimalist platform where people could read and share the things I write without having to make an account. She made that, for sure, but not just on the user-end. Kline also designed a whole back-end text editor from scratch, customized to my preferences and fully operable by me with no oversight from her as the architect. I was prepared for a Wordpress or something. What I got was a slow-baked artisanal website made just the way I want.
To anyone thinking of making a blog: Do it, and hire August Kline if you’re able. I would tell you this even if she wasn’t my sister and best friend, because I’m already having way more fun here than on social media (where I have no fun at all, but also can’t leave because it got to me at a formative age and now I’m indoctrinated). This website is my out. This is a place where my words can come out as writing, and be engaged with in a way that might be called reading, rather than content, produced on one end and consumed on the other.
It’s not elevated art. It’s not that serious. My posts here are still posts, they’re not articles or musings. But I believe a blog will be different, as a place where both myself and you: the viewer can engage ideas with more nuance than the algorithm allows.
If you ever have any thoughts on what I write, the email is eviewrites@duck.com. Or make your own blog and hyperlink to my blog, and we can talk that way. I look forward to blogging and leave you with this absolutely chilling video from Grammy award winning country music star Garth Brooks.
love,evergreen <3
P.S. I tried to make a blog once before and failed. It was earlier this year and I was learning HTML and CSS at the time. I derived the color scheme from Marcus Pfister's The Rainbow Fish and wrote all the headings in comic sans. Ambitious project. Ultimately a swing and a miss. Here’s what the main page looked like:
