Introducing Yonder.ist
So I decided to start an old-school WordPress blog, again. I had one for the longest time, but it was really more of a notebook, and while it got a fair amount of attention for the (Python) code posts, its lack of focus eventually made me give it up. I didn’t feel write not being able to offer readers a clear sense of what it was about.
And, yes, I should have continued, readers [of that blog] be damned, but I do care about readers. I want them to anticipate, with hope and happiness, reading what I have published, and I don’t want them feeling like they have to wade too much of what they don’t care about.
I eventually decided to start keeping a more personal blog here on Medium and posting a variety of more professional / informational pieces on a website I maintained via GitHub pages. I had imagined I would re-start the tradition of an everything-book on GitHub, but the truth is, as others have found out, the friction of posting to a GitHub pages blog makes it feel less spontaneous, and there’s no handy smartphone app that lets you post from anywhere.
Wordpress offers all those possibilities, and I remembered the last time I had difficulties with my hosting provider, the good folks at CynderHost encouraged me to give them a try. And so I did. And, yes, they make it easy and affordable to spin up a WordPress site. And so that is what I have done.
For those curious, Yonder.ist bubbles out of some personal history: it has its origins in some of my earliest childhood memories. Growing up in the small town of Franklin, Louisiana, I spent a lot of time with my paternal grandparents, who lived out of town, on a road that followed a curve in the Bayou Teche known as “Irish Bend.” In the middle of the curve, and across the bayou, was the White Gold sugar mill, where both my grandparents worked. They lived in a six-room house that belonged to the company which was flanked by a horse field on one side and my grandfather’s garden on the other. Behind the house, behind the slowly collapsing chicken coop and horse shed, there was a sugar cane field that stretched all the way to the bayou.
Across the road there was a set of even larger fields, at the edge of which there was a band of trees that defined the horizon. When my grandfather told stories, he would often situate them “over yonder,” and when he said that he would wave his index finger in the direction of the tree line. As a child, I understood that yonder was a place just past that tree line. It may even have been called Yonder.
My grandfather had only a fifth-grade education, and he was by all accounts a difficult man. He was, when I knew him, already a bit bent by age. He and my grandmother fussed, as we like to say in Louisiana, at each other, but they also seemed to share an unexpected tenderness for each other. She always made him coffee the way he liked it every morning, and he always sat quietly while she watched her “stories” in the afternoon (aka television soap operas).
Both of them were patient with me, my grandmother teaching me checkers and pinochle (and letting me win more times than I can count even now, decades later), and my grandfather listening to the stories I told. They had a box of toys just for us grandkids out on the back porch, and there, after a Sunday lunch with the family drawn together for a few hours, my grandfather would follow the grandkids out onto the back porch, sit in a lawn chair, and listen to a series of stories as we lined up to tell him. How carefully he listened I do not know, but I know he stayed in that chair, nodded his head, and gave us the audience we wanted and, perhaps, needed.
Yonder.ist is my attempt to focus on stories and storytelling beyond an academic audience, in hopes of bringing insights from narratology and cognitive science to more people.
For those curious about the .ist domain name, it’s for/from Istanbul, but it is more widely available for purchase/rent via providers like Hover.com. (Like CynderHost, I cannot say enough good things about the folks at Hover, who have troubleshot more errors made by me than I care to think about.)
