The accidental blogger

That, perhaps, is what I should have named this site. I have been an accidental librettist and an accidental curator, so there is a precedent for the moniker.

My name is Anna Camara and I am a Toronto-based writer and communicator.

In November 2007, I wound up the last of the half-dozen assignments I had taken on after leaving my long-time position as director of communications for a small arts organization. Contract work found me, unbidden, but neither my CV nor my professional network were generating job interviews for full-time positions. I tend to stick with people and projects for a long time and was in search of the next place to land, possibly for five to ten years.

There was a hole in my resume under ‘education’ – great as it was, theatre school in the 1970s did not confer credibility on a 25-year career in communications. During the pre-Christmas panic, I rifled through my teenage son’s college brochures and rushed to meet the Humber and Centennial College application deadlines.

So here I am, into the second and final term of the post-graduate Corporate Communications and Public Relations program at Centennial College’s Centre for Creative Communications, a few city blocks north of my home in Riverdale. (Not exactly by accident.) Our online PR instructor, Melanie McBride, has provided a context for this foray into social media and I am happy to explore its possibilities.

That said, I have always been a bibliophile. I visit my local public library three or four times a month, read three or four books a week and try to make 25 per cent of my reading non-fiction. No amount of blogging, tweeting, or e-mailing will replace my passion for writing and reading – on paper, from paper.

As a learner, I am a curious and skeptical autodidact – a lifer. I learn by reading, observing, questioning, listening and talking. This forum offers the opportunity to learn in the way that suits me best: dialectically. If I can have an evocative exchange – or share a good joke – with only one person here, I will have learned something valuable.

For me, process is almost everything – there is no part of my personal and artistic life that does not inform my writing craft, so this blog will be open-ended and, if it evolves, will do so organically.

I’ll end this post with a quote from an essay called The Art of Immemorability by American poet and critic Charles Bernstein, found in a favourite book, A Book of Books:

“I want to reiterate that one medium does not conquer another. It is not a question of progress but rather of a series of overlays, creating the web in which our language is enmeshed. Technology determines neither art nor politics and art is never free from the effects of technology. Technology informs, but it does not determine.”

What do you think?