Bear Witness

Hello friends! You might notice a few things have changed on my website.  Actually, all the decor has changed, but the content really hasn’t.  It still has all the articles I’ve written before.

As I got closer to the release of my first collection, I thought my website could use a makeover, so I chose a new easier to read design.  The former white text on a slate blue background hurt my eyes—and was too small to read, so I’ve enlarged the font a bit (perhaps that a sign I’m getting old) and streamlined it, and put it on white.

It has a new title too, which I think you’ll notice first.  It used to say Yukon Science Fiction Writer and now it says Bearing Witness.  Quite simply I wanted to give the blog its own title, and not just reflect myself.  I’m a Yukon Science Fiction Writer, but the blog is not.

I lived in the Yukon for nearly 10 years and a part of me is still there and I will return many times and hopefully even stay one day soon.  I will always be a Yukoner.  I became a Canadian citizen there.  I climbed those hills and mountains and swam naked in those lakes (okay, in one lake–but it was very very cold).  I went on Moose hunts and sheep hunts and I laid on the dirt and collected low bush cranberries with friends.  I sang on cold cold nights with people who love the north, sometimes while sitting in a hot tub, watching our hair freeze, and I still have their songs in my heart.  But I needed a title for the page that said something about my whole work, not just about me, and I felt, too, like Science Fiction was only part of it.  My interest in faith and spirituality in both fiction and nonfiction should be in there too.

The former title of the page never really captured all that I was doing.  It didn’t tell you I’m gay, or that I write about faith sometimes, or that I’m an American transplant in the Yukon who went over the mountain back to Ohio.  It doesn’t tell you I’m a Navy brat, a Texas Tech grad, or adopted.  So I thought–instead of saying all the stuff I am, why not give the blog an identity?

So I did.  Bearing Witness is something you do for those who need to be seen.  It’s also a term used in faith, to bear witness to the things God has done, or to bear witness to each other through hard times.  It is about keeping our eyes open.  It’s also got “bear” in it, which winks to my love of the gay bear subculture, and the colours are pretty… cheerful, if you think about it.  The glass from the Chihuly exhibit feels like a nebula in space—and so it has a science fiction feel to it too.

Now the blog becomes it’s own collection of work, bearing witness to what I’m trying to do and what others are trying to do too.

So get ready, I’m about to start writing much more on this blog and the Wrestling with Gods blog too.  There are good things happening out there! We need to see them.