As you may have heard, Michigan has kind of an image problem. Anthony Bourdain described Detroit as a city that’s “fucked up.” I’m sure if you’ve seen a photo essay about the city in the past six months, you’d agree with him.

Yet Michigan is as vibrant and dynamic as it’s ever been in the 26 years of my life. Admittedly, I’ve never been alive to see Detroit’s, or even Michigan’s heyday, and admittedly, I live 40 solid miles from the city of Detroit, but to me, Michigan is a playground for creative thinkers and raw talent. Rent is cheap, friendships are solid as oak, and M-75 calls you to Northern Michigan on all the weekends where you can scrounge together gas money and a carful of friends.

I live by a motto that describes this place well: we make our own fun. We make horror movies in the woods. We dance twice monthly at the Elks Club Lodge. We write incessantly, and some of us write exceptionally well (uh, hello Jeffrey Eugenides and Ernest Hemingway!). We rock and roll. Detroit is the only city that could have raised a guy like Jack White of The White Stripes, from a Polish family with nine (or so) siblings. It is also the city of Eminem, of course, and Sufjan Stevens.

Michigan is the setting for scores of recent and upcoming films; take Whip It for example. The rural roads and pathways you see in the movie’s trailer might look like anywhere else, but they are only 5 miles away from Ann Arbor, home of Google AdSense, Border’s Headquarters and one of the top public schools in the country. You can walk everywhere in Ann Arbor, but we have plenty of culture to walk to. Ann Arbor is also home to 826 Michigan, a non-profit writing center for kids.

When Silvia came, I made sure that she had a Bell’s Oberon. So did everyone else. My friend Erin attempted to describe the feeling of tasting your first Oberon of the summer. After my friend’s rehearsal dinner in Glen Arbor, we all headed over to Art’s Tavern. We drank pitchers of Oberon, all 20 or so of us.

While I hesitate to use a local (well, regional) beer as a metaphor, let’s visit the comparison: an Oberon is a wheat beer, easily drinkable, tasting of orange. Non-beer drinkers have been said to be content with this beer, but I also know die-hard beer fans who swear by an Oberon on an August evening just shy of dusk. So yeah, we’re beer drinkers here in Michigan. But we are mild and welcoming. We make our own fun. We are a vibrant community.

Over the past few years, I’ve stumbled across a lot of people who are committed to sticking with Michigan and its offerings. It would be easy to spend my whole life here and still miss something. Whether or not I stay, Michigan has really served me well. Yet I’ve mostly only lived here, and I dream of finding new homes on further shores. I feel the tug to leave and explore, but I do feel that it’s so I can one day come back.

Finally, I must say that the people of Michigan are built of solid character. We can be serious and funny, all in one sentence (think sad clown– wait, don’t). We make great lifelong friends. We also make great lovers. If you stumble across a Michigander you think is cute, I would recommend  you take him/her out on a date. As a people, we are a catch, and how could we not be with all the freshwater fish surrounding us on three sides?  …Right???

I have a formal writing education, too. In high school, I attended Interlochen Arts Academy and studied Creative Writing. I wrote a lot of poetry. They gave us pre-college career guidance for young writers: submit your work everywhere, become friends with rejection, read as much as you can, establish a routine, write as much as humanly possible, revise. And then there’s that staple piece of writing advice: write what you know.

I have kept a personal notebook of writings since I was about 12, and in 2002, I started my own website, a hand-coded personal blog (at first hosted by AngelFire). Even with papers, proficiency exams, club sports and with my time spent working for the litpub, I found time to write semi-regular updates about my life. The habits established in my early teenage years translated nicely to the Internet. I found the anonymity to be freeing (a popular concept at the time, when there was a greater lack of awareness about how easy it is to find things than there is today). I talked about my friends, my family, things that pissed me off, and my process of coming out of the closet.

My senior year of high school I co-edited an issue of The Red Wheelbarrow, the Creative Writing department’s quarterly magazine, and I got hooked. I liked formatting and layouts, learning to respect the writer’s intent as well the reader’s physical needs (white space, organization). I was comfortable with QuarkXPress, as I did all my writing for school on Quark instead of Office since my mom is a graphic designer. I came to college and did litpubs and wrote poetry regularly, but I found myself floating away from the idea of writing as a career.

There was just so much else out there for an undergraduate in college. Always a good student, I understood the world through coursework and readings. Ultimately, I selected Film and Video Studies as a major, happy to find both a goldmine of subject matter and excellent mentors. Only very close to graduation did I learn that with all the coursework I had taken I would be able to receive a dual B.A. in Creative Writing and Literature, and I was glad to have my activity documented officially on my diploma.

I continued writing poetry. My poetry always seemed too formal, even for me sometimes. Often my themes touch on subjects that morph narrative fiction and personal memories. I still write regularly, but have not pursued publication.

Over the past few years I’ve been having a hard time reconciling my personal versus my professional self. At SI, we’re encouraged to keep professional blogs. You’ll find this one is pretty spare.

Yet I’ve been building content for the past 7 or 8 years, much of which is available at my personal blog. Despite being a fairly mild-tempered and significantly un-wild person (I call my alter ego “safety mom”), I used to think that the personal was meant to remain exclusively personal.

However, just as cell phones used to exist separately from MP3 players, that perspective has changed. During the course of working with local writer and essayist Sarah Smallwood to build a site that she could feel proud of, I started to think about her professional representation. Sarah’s essays shine because she translates small personal moments into something that everyone can empathize with and, where appropriate, laugh about. I also started reading pamie.com, the site maintained by a professional writer which was almost certainly the inspiration for her first book, Why Girls are Weird, about a blogger whose online life melds in existentially confusing ways with her personal life.

When I first started working with Sarah, I thought, well, she’s a writer and I’m a computer-y person. That’s just how it is. But that isn’t really the whole truth. Right now I am devoting much of my effort in becoming fluent with current web technologies in order to become a UX/Usability/Human-Computer Interaction Specialist, which includes lots of coursework and projects, but I am always, always writing. Sarah and I have been fairly open about having blogger crushes on one another.

I talked with my friend Brian Walline, who, as a designer/illustrator with a “way with words,” also maintains a professional blog. Brian advised that I should showcase some of my older blog posts. So you can see some of those featured in upcoming weeks.

I’m not going to do the work of providing you with a link to my personal website, because the oldest stuff was written by a fairly naive 18-year-old (whereas the more recent stuff is written by an arguably somewhat less naive 26-year-old). Instead, I am going to begin looking at this blog a little differently. You can expect to see more personal essays mixed in with my updates about what I’m learning to do. I am not going to shy away from creating a text-heavy blog.

Writing has been my personal refuge for years. It is my most direct route to expressing the richness that is the human experience. It’s about damn time I took a step toward giving my professional self a more vibrant voice.

Ultimately, I submit this essay to offer my perspective on The Blogger’s Dilemma. I know this is on the minds of a lot of folks these days, as many professionals are encouraged to “keep blogs.” How much do you share, and how much do you shut up? How much of the fun parts do you let shine through?