I have a lovely treat for you today! Kiersten from She is Fierce is here answering a few questions that I posed to her on topics ranging from blogging to introversion to feminism. Settle in and take a peek!
1. What motivated you to start blogging?
I actually started blogging with my best friend in my senior year of high school, as a way to document our last year of high school. We would just take turns posting whenever we felt like it, and for a while we even tried out a photo-a-day project where we took a self-portrait each day.
Once we each started college in the fall, we kind of lost touch with each other and the blog kind of got forgotten about. But I’d really loved blogging, and so I’ve had a few of my own blogs since then. She is Fierce is the first one I’ve really stuck with, and I just love being able to share my opinions, start conversations, and get to know other bloggers!
2. What’s the one thing that really surprised you about blogging?
How much work it is!! When I started, it was just this easy thing we did whenever we felt like it, talked about whatever we felt like (I recall there being at least two separate posts about prom, probably more than that). It wasn’t until a couple years later that I realized people actually made money from blogging, and that there are people reading each other’s blogs. We had three followers on that first blog, and two of them were our boyfriends. It’s crazy to see how big this community is and how much goes into it!
3. What inspires you personally?
Seeing people write about controversial or difficult topics, or just things that are really important to them. A lot of my inspiration comes from blogs I read!
4. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Oh gosh I have no idea! I just graduated in the spring, so I’m working at my first full-time job now and I love it! I do have a personal goal of getting out of Pennsylvania by the time I’m 25 though, and that’s in two years. I’d like to move to California or Florida – somewhere warm. So hopefully in five years that’s happened.
5. How is being an introvert part of your identity?
It affects nearly everything I do. In college, when most of my friends were going out Thursday through Saturday night, I was happier to hang out in my dorm or apartment watching Doctor Who or reading. It’s the same now – I don’t go out much, and so I only have a few friends.
A lot of times, my introversion bothers me. I wish I wanted to go out to parties and stuff. But at the same time, I think my introversion has a lot to do with why I love writing and am good at it. I think it has a lot to do with how much I love blogging and put so much into it, so I have it to thank for that.
6. When did you first identify as a feminist?
It sounds bad, but I can’t remember the time when I realized it. I do know it was in college though. I’m sure that if asked, I’d probably have said, “sure, I’m a feminist” before then, but it wasn’t something I ever thought about. It didn’t occur to me to wonder about the difficulties women still face and things like the pay gap. It wasn’t until college when I started to encounter so many different people and different opinions, and was asked to have and share opinions of my own, that I started to realize how important feminism is and how important it is to me personally.
7. What’s the one preconceived notion about feminism that you would change, if you could?
The idea that it’s about women being better than or more than men! That’s not what feminism is at all – it’s about equality – and it makes me crazy when I see women saying they don’t need feminism because they don’t need to be better than their husbands or something like that. There are so many inequalities women still face and while I realize that we’ve gained a lot – like the right to vote and work outside the home – and that women in other countries are facing much worse, that doesn’t make what we’re fighting for here at home less important.
8. What’s your favorite form of social media? (Instagram, pinterest, twitter, facebook, etc)
Definitely Twitter!! I love how easy it is to share articles I find, to ask questions and get answers, and just to connect with other bloggers and blog readers!
9. What are your top 5 favorite novels?
I’m so glad you didn’t ask me to pick just one! I don’t think this is in any real order, because I definitely couldn’t pick any one book and say, “this is my favorite!” But these are five books I’ve really loved.
- The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
- The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
5. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
10. Would you ever want to publish your own novel one day?
I’ve thought about this a lot, and I honestly don’t know. I’m not very good at writing long-form, but I’ve recently fallen in love with creative non-fiction, and have thought about the possibility of writing a book that’s a compilation of that – short creative non-fiction pieces. So I guess we’ll see what happens.
