Happy anniversary to Dorothee Lang’s BluePrint blog carnival >Language >Place!

>Language >Place is a regular gathering of writers and artists from around the world whose themed blog posts are showcased on different websites about every 30 days.

In the founder’s words:
it’s a joined blog cyber journey featuring international perspectives on language and place.

>Language >Place Anniversary Edition
Carnival Theme > Streets, Signs, Directions

It’s great to be included in this special edition with my contribution: home sense memory. When you arrive at the carnival through the link above, you can access all contributions—including my own—in three different ways:

on a map / in a found poem / through an itinerary

It’s fun to try each of them. Visit the carnival itself to see how they work.
Curious, I asked Dorothee about what inspired these different approaches.
Here’s what she wrote:

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General Thoughts

when i put the call up for the anniversary issue, i hadn’t figured the layout for the edition yet – all i knew was that i wanted to do something special for the anniversary. and with the theme “Streets, Signs, Directions”, it felt that it called for an open approach. so i followed the direction / inspiration that came from the contributions.

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The Map

i really enjoyed putting the edition together, and working with different approaches. the google map is the first one i ever did – the idea for it arrived when i looked up places from the first contributions online at google maps (Pondicherry, Eilat..), and tried the “my map” option. that also would be a great way to include the previous editions, i thought.

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The Poem

that was the second step – a different and contrasting approach to the map: geographic / poetic, place/words. and again, it was induced by the first contributions, 3 of them were poems, combined with images: your “home sense memory”, buddhetat’s space, and a link from Rose Hunter, who first had another piece in mind: substitution.

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The Itinerary

what was missing yet in the layout: images. there were so many fascinating and diverse photos included in the contributions, some of them with similar elements, but all with a unique angle. and there were the notes, which provide their own entry point to each contribution. that’s how the itinerary took shape, following the sorting of the stanzas, and picking up on the quoted lines. it also worked the other way round: interesting pairings of images then formed a stanza. altogether, the edition developed its own dynamic and the contributions came to a closure without tiring tries to get the poem right.

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Cover Thoughts

there also is an alternative “cover” (below). it’s one thing that keeps fascinating me, how the same content, presented in a different way, has a different feel and context, and also probably leads to another reading approach / experience…and so interesting, to reflect on the beginning now at the ending point, and revisit the path.

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Surprise Surprise

the biggest surprise during this past year of running these >language > place blog carnivals through the BluePrint headquarters is: how each host comes up with a unique edition, be it from theme, from the layout, the atmosphere – just looking at the list of previous editions with iconized cover pages and with themes gives an idea of it.  

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Previous carnival host Parmanu wrote some notes on the carnival as it developed:

With age, the carnival begins to show its value as a concept. So much of individual writing on the Internet is buried under a tangled web that search engines can barely reach; a carnival like “Language-Place” offers a theme-based portal to navigate such writing.

The whole entry is online here.