In the chaos of the last three years, my blog got very neglected. So much so that my hosting contract lapsed and all of my content was deleted. At one point, I had four different blogs, most of which were inactive, but had years worth of content, so it was a bit of a shock to realize that my neglect had had such dire consequences.
Luckily, the consequences were not actually that dire. In 2020, I had made backups of three of the biggest blogs where most of my writing lived. And I’m slowly starting the process of restoring it, though it will not be in quite the same form as before. And I did lose a handful of posts that I wrote between 2020 and 2022, though I’m not sure what a loss that actually was.
I keep saying that I want to come back to blogging, because I need a place to start putting some of my thoughts and ideas together, to get them out in words and get (hopefully) some feedback. I’m working on a book and on a book chapter right now, and I’d like to use this space to work through some of the things that still feel inchoate in my mind. I never feel like I have enough time to write anything that’s not an email or a report. But I want to make the time again.
I also changed the name of this site, which is partially why my hosting contract expired: I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to rename it. For whatever reason, lauraek.net wasn’t feeling right anymore. It took me a while to hit on something that I liked. Riot Librarian came to me as I was reading a book (Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus) about the history of the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s. While I was not in any way part of the original Olympia or DC Riot Grrrl groups, and was really only tangentially part of the tail end when the original energy of the movement was being exploited by the media, Riot Grrrl meant everything to me when I was 15. It helped me to put words to the feminism that was emerging in my thoughts, and demonstrated that there was space in the world to be a different kind of girl, and a different kind of woman. I have never been punk rock and I still have to battle the white supremacist, patriarchal constructs that have shaped my worldview every day. I am under no illusions that Riot Grrrl was an ideal feminist movement, but in some ways its flaws mean a lot to me, too.
Now, in 2023, the idea of riot grrrl means striving to make change and to create a different kind of world, knowing you’re going to make mistakes and get it wrong. It means speaking up, claiming your power and your voice, and being willing to be vulnerable, especially when that means saying “I don’t know, I was wrong, and I want to do better.” And I want to bring that ethos into the way I approach my work as a librarian and an educator. I want to bring that energy into the way I research and write about how to create better organizations, better libraries, and better universities. I want to acknowledge the failures and mistakes, in order to learn from them and do better, and to demonstrate a feminist, anti-racist way to work and to relate to the people we work with. So, I’m going to be a Riot Librarian. And maybe try to reclaim a little bit of my youthful optimism for a better future in the process.