Dopp Juice Archive

Tomorrow morning I’m climbing into a bumper-sticker-covered car with Liz Henry and Cindy Emch and driving to Portland, Oregon by way of the redwood forests. Once we arrive we’ll jump out of the car, run around the city, party like we’ve joined the circus, sleep like rocks, wake up like birds, jump back into the car, and keep driving until we’ve made it to Seattle.

Then we’ll all scramble onto a stage with some other fantastic writers and read stories about childhood trauma to an eager paying audience of “Can I Sit With You?” fans. If you’ll be anywhere near Seattle on Friday night (April 25), you seriously need to get a ticket and come to this. It’s going to be amazing. (And you can see my story here.)

Several days, a whole lot of partying, and a decent number of hours in a hot tub later, I’ll catch a red eye flight to Boston and then grab a bus up to New Hampshire, where I’ll hang out with my family for a few days. During this time, I’ll turn 25. This will be celebrated in a manner that will rival Christmas.

After I revel in the legitimacy of my new age bracket for a day, I’ll head over to the UNH region for the Annual Writ Summit with the rest of the site‘s core staff. It will be a loosely-organized weekend of meetings, arts events, reconnecting, and brainstorming about what to do next with this brilliant grassroots website monster that refuses to die. I’ve heard rumors about a reunion poetry slam and open mic that Friday night, which would be crazy fun. If you’re in the area and you want to join in on the festivities, ping me and I’ll send you more details.

I’ll fly back to San Francisco on Tuesday, May 6th, where I will promptly find a large rock and hide under it for a week. I’ll come out from under that rock only for a few hours on Friday, May 9th, to celebrate my birthday at the Queer Open Mic and with a drinks outing afterward. You’re all invited.

The best way to keep track of me right now is by watching my Twitter feed. The best way to contact me is through telepathy (if that doesn’t work, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to settle for less reliable alternatives).

Any questions?

This is the first in (what I hope will become) a series of video blogs about this year’s revitalization of TheWrit.org. In this five minute video, I give a brief overview of the tumultuous history of the site and its vision to be a resource for emerging writers.

WRITvlog1: Beginnings and Vision from Sarah Dopp on Vimeo.

(Sidenote: This is my first ever video production project. My biggest complaint is the quality of the audio, and I think I need to go buy an external microphone. Other tips welcome.)

I wrote a few weeks ago about The Writ — my baby project that turned into a teenager and ran away from home. It’s had more than few near-death experiences out there in the big scary world, but it has relentlessly refused to die. At the time of this writing, The Writ has been alive for four and a half year and has 5,783 member accounts. People contribute to its workshop and use it to support each others’ writing every day. I haven’t touched the site in two years.

It hasn’t been without leadership, though. Julián Esteban Torres did an exceptional job of organizing an editorial staff, keeping promises, cranking out journal issues, and trudging through a hacked-together half-broken content management system on a mission to do something beautiful.

He and I have been passing the baton back and forth for the life of The Writ. He organizes people and I organize systems. I think our tandem leadership is the reason The Writ has survived. Both of us have invested our time, energy, and personal money into The Writ to the point of burnout more than once, and neither of us has ever made a dime.

The baton is back at my feet now, and I think I’m ready to pick it up again.

I don’t usually write publicly about my projects while they’re in their early stages; critique can kill a dream. But this one’s been already through the firing range and it ain’t dying anytime soon. Moreover, this isn’t about a website; it’s about a community. The only way I can do it justice is by listening and being transparent.

I want the community to have something more stable to stand on. They are a passionate group and they’ve proven they can take care of themselves if they have the tools to do so. I want to open up a line of communication for group discussion, self-organization, and collaborate planning (I’m still trying to figure out the best way to do this). I want to migrate the site to a stable and widely-used open-source CMS so it has a chance at evolving as technology changes. I want to make the website pretty again. I want to add features that put more control in the hands of each individual user. I want to honor the community’s organic growth over the last four and a half years and let whatever passion has fueled that growth to guide this process.

And I think that if the community also wants these things to happen, these things will happen.