Consider this my sketchbook.
I believe the best way to be creative is to play. With my photography, that often means shooting with expired film and old cameras and double exposures, trying to throw myself off-balance and break my own perfectionism. When I recently took up painting and drawing, I found the flexibility of making art in a sketchbook allowed me the freedom to mess up.
This blog is the sketchbook for my writing, the place where I can play, and be messy, and experiment. It’s somewhere between a private journal and my public journalism. It’s a constant draft.
When I started this blog back in the beginning of 2013, I thought it might lead to some sort of career in travel or in writing or in blogging; at the very least, it would be a way to keep track of the great adventure I was about to embark on: a move to Istanbul, Turkey.
Over the years, this blog did turn out to be a stepping-stone to a career in writing, with a long emphasis on travel. And yet, I came to the conclusion fairly quickly (in 2015) that I didn’t want to be a blogger, I didn’t want to monetize, I didn’t really care about SEO. I cared about writing and photographing in a way that expressed my own particular sensibility, and not that of the Google machine. I wanted a little space to be weird. I wanted a space to be me.
I also became more focused on my writing career, reporting for respected publications on all kinds of topics, not only travel. I found, though, that as my writing became more of a profession, I held back posting on my blog. And also, life is messy and complex and not always fodder for public journaling, and I wasn’t really sure how to fit my little blog into the greater universe of my life. This blog started as one thing. Over the years, to me, it’s become quite another.
So despite a name that is held over from its initial travel blog focus (though one that is still technically true: I am still Katrinka, and I still live abroad), this is not really a travel blog. It’s a personal workshop, a wall of graffiti, an improvised dance. It’s a place where I can dream out loud.
Welcome to my sketchbook, my darling reader. I hope you enjoy it.