I was recently cleaning out my basement and came across a cardboard box with stacks of dusty old junk from my elementary school era: specifically, there were stacks of grade four writing assignments. See, back then I was in an extra-curricular creative writing program where we wrote little short fiction stories and turned them into coil-bound books that other kids could borrow from the school library. A couple of my “books” were in that box.

They were pretty terrible (obviously, I suppose) and yet, despite my lack of innate skill back in my grade school days, for some reason I’ve continued to pursue writing and wordcraft for the last forty-some years.

Words are my joy, my meditation, and often my personal truths extracted through a keyboard and expressed upon a blank page.

I still write nearly every day.

I write novels.

I write short stories. 

I write essays.

I write journals.

I just write.

And now here I have been thinking for the last few months increasingly more about tech and artificial intelligence and I have been doing so in the context of my own musings on humanity, authenticity, and purpose. In the blur of it all I determined that I was beckoned by some inner passion to write something about that, too. Of Poets & Processors has been filling that niche for, as I update and repost this, nearly one hundred unique entries. One hundred topics. One hundred mini-essays on the subject of the blurry line between algorithms and humanity, the impacts upon culture and society, and the friction of yet another notch in the dehumanizing of work, art and, yes even this, wordcraft.

But why write like this? Why not write a book? Or make a Youtube channel? Or why not turn the camera in your own face and become an TikTok influencer? (Ugh!)

I chose the written word, that’s why.

I’m no stranger to the blog format. Sure, it’s been supplanted by more visual, feed-friendly forms of short media, but there is still so much value in the written word that I think the blog has long been (and remains) my favourite. In April of 2026 I passed the twenty-five year anniversary of my very first blog post ever. A quarter century prior I’d written a kind of ongoing dispatch-from-abroad website shortly after moving to a new city for work.  And while I’ve never aimed to make money or build my career around that particular hobby, I continued posting routinely and always with the intention of informing or educating my readers… even just writing about myself.

This writing project is a little more focused than most I’ve taken on in the past.

To be clear: I’ve moved away from considering it a blog. It started that way, yes, and I’ve taken measures since it started to distance myself from that term. Admittedly it lives on the internet using a simple blogging platform software system as it’s core, but too I’ve added numerous features and plugins and elements emergent in the very effort of communicating itself to make it so much more than that. This site is a kind of living document, a collection of thoughts and essays, some short and some longer, that are being iteratively and deliberately refined and improved over time with the intention of deeper and clearer understanding of what it means to be a poet in the age of processors.

I wrote this post originally as an introduction to a new project, but nearly one hundred posts along am using some of the same words to clarify where I’ve come on the topic of the project itself, too.

Particularly important is what I mean when I say this is a living document. As of this post I am introducing a new tool where I have the ability to expand, update, branch, fork and revise older essays (where appropriate) all while it is tracked in the system and transparently communicated. Fellow software people will recognize this as I kind of git-repo-for-words and a versioning system built around text and ideas. Thinking of ideas as “in development” and subject to new features and enhancements is a very technical idea but a human one, too. After all, understanding the journey is what it means to learn and grow and change.

This is a very human document, too, I fully admit. Imperfect, a little personal, rough at the edges, and evolving with a day-by-day effort to communicate through something perhaps understood loosely as a blog-not-blog format, but simultaneously much bigger than that, too.

…because ideas are not static. Knowledge is not etched in stone. Words are mutable in both expression and meaning. Reflection, change, and adjustment is just as important as writing them down in the first place.

This effort started off as a daily writing project, but it has grown after just a few short months into something bigger and (I think) more interesting: an exploration of an important and interesting subject, and worthy of thinking of as something bigger than some hum-drum old blog. Something human.