Lament for Wegglywoo

"Lament" is too strong a word -- Wegg hasn't died. But she suddenly and without warning pulled her blogs ( on the beach at the end of the world and pillowbook) off the web. To find any of her writing now, one has to do a Google search and hope the various archives are still intact; to find any news of Wegg herself one has to sleuth with some determination, which I haven't done, not wanting to give off a stalkerly vibe. I found a note, from someone who seemed to know, to the effect that she'd pulled her blogs down for personal reasons and might return to the blogsphere when certain issues were resolved.

I speculate that someone at her job, where the suits seem to have suddenly discovered Weblogging (tm), found her blogs and blew her cover; to keep her job, she would have had to pull them (pillowbook was definitely x-rated, and the other, while more decorous, was not be what you'd read to a child). But that's only speculation.

Could also be that she's doing some serious navel-gazing in the wake of some recent personal turmoil (I'm not going to describe it beyond that). A writer's persona is never exactly the writer herself, no matter how authentic the writer tries to be; craft always gets in the way; and the relationship between self and persona can be uneasy. The persona, though only a creature of the writer, can have more influence than one might like -- sometimes for good, sometimes not. Sometimes a persona is like a shell -- to grow, you have to break out of it. In any case, if the relationship gets too uncomfortable, the writer can and will dismiss the persona, and off it goes like a dream. Some of its traits will probably emerge in subsequent personas, but essentially a persona owes its existence to the writer's willingness to keep it up.

Whatever the cause, I'm feeling two things: concern for Wegg -- her writing portrays an intelligent and unconventional young woman dealing with more than her share of childhood trauma; and an unexpectedly big hole in my reading life. Wegg's writing was always fresh, always interesting. Her little spelling quirks -- reversals and reduplications in certain words, like "hopspital" and "aksked" -- were not the kind of thing I'd encourage in a writer of any age, but the rest of her style made up for them. Indeed, they seemed integral and necessary after a while. And she portrayed her emotions with a combination of deftness and openness that covered a multitude of sins.

So if you happen to read this, Wegg, know that I hope to read your stuff again.