Tracy Durnell

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I'm a writer and graphic designer in the Seattle area. I can't get enough writing; on top of blogging, I also write speculative fiction. I love reading, mostly fiction, and use my website as an alternative to Goodreads to write reviews and track reads. Over the past several years, I've added more and more things to my site: listens, playlists, recipes, follows, accountability tracking, big questions.

I work in sustainability, previously in local government and now as a consultant. My background is in ecology; I thought I wanted to be a wildlife biologist, but after one field season studying lizards in the Los Angeles suburbs, I realized the itinerant research biologist lifestyle was not for me.

Now I stay connected to nature through my wildlife garden. My yard backs up to a greenbelt, so on top of ripping out our lawn and planting native plants, we also restored the natural area adjacent. (I ran a blog devoted to Pacific Northwest nature for ten years!)

This probably makes it sound like I blog a lot about the environment, but I get enough of that in my work life, so not much actually! I'll keep notes from webinars and bookmark articles related to work on my website since they're related to learning, but I try to preserve my blog as a non-work thinking space for me to play.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started my current blog at tracydurnell.com when I encountered the idea of a digital garden* in 2021. The concept appealed to me for its looseness and built-in acceptance of incompleteness and imperfection. On my previous blog, Cascadia Inspired, I'd locked myself into a narrow pool of topics that no longer matched my life, and felt constrained. Releasing myself upon a boundless format with lower expectations unleashed a deluge of thoughts I hadn't realized had no outlet before (or that I hadn't really given myself space to think).

*(Having learned more about digital gardens, the blog itself is more of a commonplace book, but I feel it's fine to trick our brains however we need to to grant ourselves permission to create. Some people write in all lowercase, I tell myself my blog is a garden.)

I'd had a handmade HTML portfolio site parked on the domain for years because I felt obliged to have one, but it was a huge pain to update without a content management system. Letting go of that was a great relief in itself, and then reinless blogging was joyfully liberating. (Ironically, this means that one of the last things I now rely on a third party site to host is my design portfolio 😂)

That switch from professional portfolio to blog is why I've done so little to personalize the design of my website: I used the base theme from the year I launched the blog and tweaked the colors slightly, but otherwise only add CSS to solve specific layout or display issues. For too long, I'd been paralyzed by the need to design and code a fully customized site that "represented me as a designer," so I decided to completely release myself from that burden and use the absolute simplest design option. I chose to not care whether people judge me for using a generic template because the purpose of the site is the information on it, not its aesthetics. As long as the styling works to convey the info I want, I'm happy to leave the default. (This prioritization is a design decision in itself, which I suppose represents my practicality when it comes to design 🤷‍♀️)

I first started blogging twenty years ago, when I went to college, to share what I was doing with my family. In that initial blogging phase, I focused on writing about "mini adventures" I took -- but after college I found I didn't do enough to warrant writing about because I was too exhausted after work. I half-heartedly tried some commentary style blogging, but it didn't stick.

In 2012, missing that creative outlet, I started writing at Cascadia Inspired as a way to connect more deeply with Washington nature and explore creative processes. I hoped that having the site would prompt me to go on more hikes, which worked for a while, then became an albatross.

When I started blogging at TracyDurnell.com, I then faced the conundrum of what writing belonged on which blog. More and more, I shifted my writing over to the new site. Now that I was letting myself write about anything, I wanted to. Finally, I put the Cascadia Inspired blog on hiatus last fall.

Since going freelance, I've also been posting weeknotes to help me recognize the progress I'm making on long term projects and keep myself honest about how much I can do in a week. My website is a toolbox in itself: a tool for thinking, a place for storing information, a non-corporate means of tracking my intake, a method of self-kindness and personal growth, an outlet for reflection. It's endlessly adaptable and expandable to my needs. Part of the fun is that it's always evolving.

As an adult, I learned my grandpa had been a letterpress printer, as had his mother; it tickles me that I have wound up in design and (digital) publishing too.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Most of my blogging is reactive, prompted by something I've read. (I've written about choosing between ideas for posts.) I especially enjoy finding connections between pieces and seeing whether pairing articles reveals something more than either alone; Tom Critchlow described this, or something like it, as digital bricolage.

Because lots of my blogging is interspersed with online reading, it happens where I read... which is primarily on my phone. I blog most often in my phone's browser window, which is not ergonomic. For pieces over a certain length and complexity, I do try to move to my desktop, where I still write directly in the browser. (I've written at length about my process for crafting long blog posts -- tl;dr many (too many) rounds of revisions.)

I've been paying attention to what I admire on other blogs, and one of my goals this year is to write more self-prompted articles. Right now I'm experimenting with writing a longer piece in Scrivener, the writing software I use for fiction. Switching to Scrivener for fiction writing made a massive difference, helping me organize my thoughts better, so I'm curious how it will affect blogging. I've also read a couple books specifically for this article -- a fun return to purpose-driven research, which I've rarely had cause for since college. We'll see whether it comes together or I've gathered too much material and overwhelmed myself!

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Ideas aren't a limiting factor for me; I can be creative anywhere, but the question for me is whether I can work in a space. Physical comfort is the most important aspect of a work space for me: decent ergonomics, enough light, not too loud, not too cold. I find not having enough space to spread out to be limiting -- I prefer to have enough room for both my computer and a notebook for brainstorming on paper.

Before the pandemic, I used to work in coffee shops regularly as a commitment device, but it was never that productive because I'd get distracted by friends or noise, be crammed into small tables with my laptop perched precariously, or feel anxious whether I'd bought enough food and drinks. Now I much prefer working at my wide desk with a large monitor and ergonomic keyboard.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

My webhosting is through HostGator, and my domain registrar is NameCheap. I'm on shared hosting, which is sufficient to host all of my websites.

I self-host WordPress as my content management system with these plugins. I use the IndieWeb plugin to enable Webmentions, so I can send and receive comments from other websites.

I also have a notes blog on a subdomain, powered by micro.blog, which is federated.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

While I've run most of my sites on WordPress since 2012, if I was starting today I might explore other options. There's a lot that's great about WordPress, but I find the block structure poorly suited to blogging; fortunately, I can use a plugin to restore the classic editor (for now).

I've chosen to blog under my real name for a number of reasons, but I also can see the value and freedom in anonymity. There are some subjects I'd like to write about that are too personally revealing. (When I first blogged, I wrote openly about some things I now keep private; were the times simpler or was I more naive?)

From a content perspective, I'd try to be more social with my website earlier. Discovering the IndieWeb and meeting other people who think keeping websites is rad has totally enlivened my blogging. I feel much more connected to the online community than I ever did during my first decade and a half of blogging.

Back in the day I followed mostly big name bloggers and topic-focused blogs, which fostered more parasocial relationships between writer and audience; now I follow a lot of other 'normal people' with personal websites who are sharing their ponderings and slices of life. It's easier for me to engage in a bloggy conversation with people who feel like peers, and fun to join in with what I see others writing about. (How much do our follows reveal our interests versus shape them?)

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

Webhosting costs me about $200 a year, and my domain about $15. (Of course, like many people with websites, I have way too many domains so they add up 😉) I begrudgingly subscribe to Google Drive, where I have automatic website backups stored, for $20 a year. Micro.blog is another $5 a month. As a hobby, I consider blogging reasonably affordable at about $25 a month.

I don't mind other people monetizing their blogs, especially with affiliate links, membership programs, and donations. It totally makes sense for people who need more expensive hosting than I can get away with -- but I also think it's fine for people to charge for their work even if they don't "need the money" -- creators shouldn't be ashamed for earning money from their work. The only aspect that troubles me is when content is paywalled, which then removes it from the open web, but I understand that people need to make money and people come first.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Blog recommendations:

• Mandy Brown's A Working Library, with reading notes and reflections, and Everything Changes, with business-adjacent life musings, are both insightful
• Anna Havron writes thoughtfully about a meaningful life at annahavron.com and practically about getting work done at Analog Office
• At Going Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega writes hilariously (and informatively) about medieval history, gender roles, and how these all tie in to our lives today

It'd be interesting to hear from Reimena Yee, a comic artist who has a fun website and interesting blog. I'd also love to hear from Erin Kissane, and if we're going big, Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen!

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I'd encourage anyone who wants to meet other bloggers and website makers to check out an IndieWeb online event like Homebrew Website Club, which is held regularly in European and North American timezones. It's not just for technical folks!