Splinters

Jeanette Winterson's site has been up for five years. After winning back her domain name in a history-making legal wrangle, she has built a nice little web presence for herself. Between books, Winterson's fans can read her journalistic output or discuss her work on the message board. But she's also made use of two other regular features: columns and poems.

Both are monthly offerings, and although the column thing can get a bit repetitive (Winterson's big on "carpe diem", it seems), the poem of the month idea is brilliant in its simplicity. By sharing a favorite poem on the site, Winterson invites her readership to share in on some inside knowledge. All she has to do is preface each (usually out-of-copyright) poem, and voil? - she has made her website that much more beguiling. I wonder why so few authors have come up with such sly stratagems?

P.S. The obligatory The Modern Word plug: take a look at Tim Conley's essay on Winterson.

(I'm firing off these blog entries now thanks to a very good Skype chat I had with Chris earlier today. For the longest time I've tried to "break the ice", stylistically speaking, and I think I've found the way how. The secret: "Information gets passed along despite grammatical errors." Wow! Amazing insight, that.)