Ideas, not Ideology… and side of biscuits
Years ago, I shopped around an article about the social history of biscuits, but I could never find a home for it. Editors loved it, but it didn’t fit anywhere. It wasn’t a cooking article. It wasn’t a foodie piece. It wasn’t profile. It wasn’t a news story. It was just me and the quirky connections I sometimes make when I delve into topic–and, of course, my love of biscuits.
The original concept for Targeted Tangents was as place for my orphaned stories, such as the biscuit article, and as a documentation warehouse for my occasional art pieces, most notably Natalie’s Biodegradable Gown. But writing takes motivation, time, and guts, so the site collected digital dust.
Then November 2016 hit and the haze of politics and fear that has followed. In January, I started posting long rants on FaceBook. Various friends began responding to them as if they were “writing” as opposed to just me venting. When these posts grew lengthier and more time consuming moving them on my long neglected WordPress blog seemed like the logical thing to do.
What’s taken shape is a series of researched opinion pieces, both fact-based and highly personal. They draw on who I am and the unusual times we are living in, but they’re also grounded in my training as a journalist and my years of experience as an editor.
Hopefully, in the weeks and months to come other voices will be added. Just as I found myself suddenly writing again, I’ve begun talking to people about contributing their perspective to these pages, using the same fact-based, highly personal concept.
We all have a lens through which we see the world. I’m white, a woman, a feminist, a mother, and a million other things. I spent the first half of my adult life as a costume designer for theater and film, so I’m drawn to how we relate to our clothing and what it says about our society, but I’m not particularly interested in fashion for fashion’s sake. I’ve covered film from the cultural and business angle, but I’ve never written reviews. These are the various lenses I see the world through. Hopefully, this is a wide enough angle for people to identify with and a tight enough focus to have something interesting to say.
For the time being, Targeted Tangents will continue to publish pieces focused on the almost daily fight to protect our American values, with a few other topics thrown in…and hopefully, eventually an article on the social history of biscuits.