Dear Reader.
If you're one of the two people who read this blog, I have an apology for you. I've written quite a few stories at this point, but I never really explained why I named this blog The Eyrie. It might seem like a random name, and if you Googled the word “eyrie,” you wouldn't easily get anything that explains my thought process. I mean, all “eyrie” refers to is the nest of a bird of prey. It's not even the primary spelling of the word these days (it usually appears as aerie, which you might recognize as the name of an American Eagle brand).
The name actually comes from the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales. If you're old or nerdy (both of which I am, at heart), you will recognize this name as one of the most influential pieces of sci-fi history. The magazine was considered a staple of early sci-fi literature in the 1920s-40s, and launched the careers of many successful and prominent sci-fi trailblazers such as H.P. Lovecraft (the Cthulu mythos), Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian), and Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451). As a pulp magazine, it published short stories that may be considered “cheap” thrills (I mean, the stories are called pulp precisely because they were originally printed on cheap, “pulpy” paper), but they also helped establish the genre’s style and presence in the zeitgeist.
Anyways, if you remember these types of publications, you might remember that there used to be such a thing as a letters column, allowing readers to write letters to the publication to share their thoughts. Due to the nature of the magazine, this means that readers (or, in this case, writers?) were bonding over strange, new, and exotic tales, forming a community that spanned across space in more ways than one. Sci-fi may not have been as commonplace at the time, but in the letters column, readers could find other people as passionate as they were. They even had a “club,” and the column had a list of members’ addresses and names. Anyways, I’m sure you can guess what that letters column was called: The Eyrie.
So I named my blog after this column. I named it not after the letters column of Weird Tales, but after the idea of people coming together from anywhere to hear new, interesting stories, and sharing their own stories. Beyond that, it’s about creating a relationship between creators (the editors of the magazine) and readers, a relationship I hope to have. Dialogue, not passive reading. That’s why I always ask what people think of my writing, or hope they have something to say. They (you, but in a non-accusatory way) have little to say, but I suppose I don’t mind or blame anyone. Everyone is too busy for my little writings to really occupy any space in one’s mind. I know because I empathize with the feeling. But it leads me to the other primary question of this article, having answered the question “why call it The Eyrie?” Why read The Eyrie?
I’m sure every blog writer has a super inflated sense of self and belief that their blog is somehow important, but we all know that they’re not actually important. Even now, counting myself among the ranks of normal blog writers feels a bit pretentious or inflationary of me as someone who runs a kinda crappy blog and has only been doing it for around 2 months. But that is what creatives do: they must believe that the things they are making are important in some way.
”There must be meaning in my roar” - Lumina, Destiny 2
I mean, it is important to me. It’s important because it lets me get thoughts out of my head and onto a page and out into the world, and because it lets me feel like I’m doing something interesting with my life. Besides, if I didn’t feel the pressure of maintaining this blog, I’m not sure how much creative writing I would do regularly. I hope it can also someday become important to you, and to other people in my life, even if they ignore all my desperate Instagram stories about it. I hope it can become important to you not because you like me, but because you like my writing and the stories I tell. I know they’ve been a bit repetitive thus far, and may make you want to shake me and yell that I’m a fool who never changes, but I hope my life will keep going and I will have new, interesting things to write about.
That’s part of why I want people to comment so much, and to share stories. I want to know that someone out there is listening and really feeling what I’m saying, and I want to hear stories to know that we’re a little less alone in this world. I want to share those stories with the rest of humanity because I hope to be the type of storyteller that inspires people. But of course, I can’t force it, so for now, it’s enough to write for myself. I do have a story to tell, even if it’s just to myself. Everyone has a story.
