Vancouver Blogger Profile: Barbara Doduk

Continuing the Vancouver Blogger Profile series of bloggers who don’t necessarily have to be from Vancouver, I contacted Barbara Doduk (Flickr) (Website) who has been publishing content online for the last decade and is responsible for numerous projects around the web.

Barbara Doduk on Flickr

Barbara first came on my radar a few years ago and more specifically during Blogathon 2006, who along with my friend Alanah, inpired me to take on Blogathon in 2007. Here’s more info about Barbara:

Who are you? The question of all questions. Unfortunately the answer is a life-long ever-evolving answer. At the most basic level, the answer is I am human. This means I was born, do live and will die, and during my life I will experience all that life has to teach me. On the complicated end of things, the answer is I am B, and everything that comes along with being uniquely me.

Where do you blog (which sites)? I started a web site in 1997 originally called Gator Jaw (I like alligators, and like to talk) but not long after I came up with the title wiredSecret, and own the URL for it. I used the site to house my creative writing, poetry, photography and my journal, but now it is primarily my poetry blog.

Over the years I evolved with the currents of the web, and came up with the idea of The Love Blog as my personal blog in 2005, moving all my journal content there. However in 2006 I did a massive Spring cleaning of The Love Blog as I began a new life.

In 2006 I finally launched a project I brainstormed in 2001, called The Unity Project. Which in conjunction with a Flickr group showcases photos of Unity from around the world.

More recently I was asked to join the United World Bloggers, and I have been a blogging member of a lovely local web site called Wet Coast Women, and we are planning a little gathering in the next month. Finally just this month I have joined the Vancouver Metblogs.

Lips of Unity – by Barbara Doduk on Flickr

Why do you blog? Since I could put a pen to paper, I have been writing. I have diaries and journals going back to my teens collecting dust in my closet. I have been writing short stories and poetry since I was in elementary school. I had a computer in the 80s and used it to print out binders full of my words. In 1996 I took I a creative writing class with a local writer and was a part of a group of writers (from the class) that would met every month. I was banging my head against the wall attempting to get my stories published in local lit magazines like Event, Prism and Grain. Since I had been online since 1995, being a total geek, I dug into the idea of how to host a free site to showcase my creative work that way. I snatched up a free geocities web site in 1997, taught myself web coding, and so began my journey into the wild web (read more of my web history).

What’s your favourite thing to write about? Life. Humanity provides everything one needs to be inspired to write. My life has been a fairly open book in that regard. I have taken many a criticism from various people over the years for being too open and personal, but that is just who I am and I will not stop being that way. I know my family and friends have often cringed about topics I have revealed that they themselves may have felt shouldn’t be talked about publicly.

Yet I stand by my statement, I am human. We all are human, and we should always be allowed to fail and to be able to revel in that failure and then rejoice over the lessons we obtained from our faults and failures and our spectacular mistakes, just the same as we would and should revel in our successes, and boast about our accomplishments.

What is the BEST part of blogging… or if you prefer, the worst? The best part of blogging is the connections it allows me to make with other people all over the world. I have some fantastic friends from all my years being online, many of them I have met in person and I love them dearly. I love it when someone I don’t even know is “touched” by something I have shared about my life, and can relate and reaches out to me to express how much I unknowingly helped them in a time when they needed a little restoration. There is a great sense of satisfaction from knowing I have spread love.

The worst part would have to be that people think they know me because of what I write and share, and they psychologically analyze me thinking that they have any idea of who I am in reality. The pieces of me you see online, are exactly just that, pieces, just parts of a much larger puzzle that most people will never see.

Do you write for yourself, your readers, for Google, for a living? As I explained in the previous question, I have always been writing, so first and foremost I write for myself. Secondly, of course, I write for my readers. I think about what I feel like typing about, I write it, and then I think would people find what I just wrote interesting too. Sometimes I don’t even think about the readers, and just hit publish. Sometimes I don’t hit the publish button, sometimes something will sit for a while and I will come back to it a few times to polish my thoughts. It all really depends on the subject.

I don’t write for a living, but one day I know I will publish a book (or more than one). It is a goal of mine, but I don’t want to force it to happen, when the story is ripened to perfection within me, it will come out and it will be. Until that time, I am content to keep doing this, and see where it leads me.

Would you ever censor yourself/Do you feel the need to censor yourself? I do censored myself. I think in life we all do, as a form of self protection, or to protect those we love. I have lived through a great many things that have never been written about in the journals over the last 11 years. It may have been eluded to, or written about in a removed way, through poems or stories, but there is so much that I actually do keep private. I know a lot of people might find that hard to believe because I am so open about so much of my life, but I have kept a lot off the web.

PC, Mac or Speak n’ Spell? As I said I’ve had a computer since the 80s. I switched to Mac in 2000, and haven’t looked back, but I do use Windows too. To me, Apple is just more high end, and so far virus-free, where as with Windows I was always fighting problems using it online. If you keep Windows offline, the system is good. I still use pen and paper too.

Mimzie’s blog theme by Barbara Doduk

Blogs you read or would recommend: There are so many great blogs out there, and surely I haven’t even seen them all, but some of the ones I like best are: 1MillionLoveMessages – Mauro has taken on a massive project to collect 1 Million Messages of Love… I had the privilege of being 1st, and have added many more and continue to, but I think everyone out there could send one in.

My friend Mimzie in NY always has something on her blog that makes me laugh. She has a fab sense of humour which shines through in her “Ask Mimzie” posts.

Mimi Lenox has a great project called Peace Globes that everyone can get behind. This woman is unstoppable. Olga the Traveling Bra – is priceless. Pearlz of Creativity – This lovely lady June has a great blog, but she also does a project which I would like people to support called Gumboots4Peace. Finally, of course I recommend you read all of mine!