About:

Hello Friends,

If you’ve stumbled onto this blog, I assume that you know me and so we won’t need to bother with too much of an introduction. But in the event that we aren’t acquainted, my name is Natalie, I’m a Floridian in my mid-twenties, and I currently teach High School English Lit and Rhetoric.

I’ve long put off blogging because I hesitate to add to the internet’s clatter and noise with another blog. But perhaps more truthfully, I’m stubborn, fearful, and simply put, I don’t want to write anything bad.

There is comfort in the knowledge that I’m not the only one who has felt this way. In a letter George Eliot wrote describing her late start to writing, she confessed that, “I was too proud and ambitious to write: I did not believe that I could do anything fine, and I did not choose to do anything of that mediocre sort which I despised when it was done by others.” 

Listen, I’ll never claim to be a fraction of the writer Eliot is, but I do want to learn from her. I don’t want to be the perfectionist cliche. And speaking of writers I have claimed fealty to: I also want to approach writing like Sylvia Plath, who wrote:

You ask me why I spend my life writing?  

Do I find entertainment?  

Is it worthwhile?  

Above all, does it pay?  

If not, then, is there a reason?  

I write only because  

There is a voice within me  

That will not be still.

So this will be a blog of two parts. The first part is the Florilegia, and you can learn more about what that is here. The other part is admittedly not very specific, so it’s merely titled Other Writings. Reflections, reviews, etc. Hopefully nothing too self-indulgent :)

My prayer is that I might point people towards goodness, beauty, and truth through what I share, and that instead of creating noise I might encourage a life of, as Lewis writes, “listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.”

Hope you enjoy!

Click here to read about where this blog gets its name.