About Me

About this blog

:

At the first BlogHer Conference in 2005 I thought of starting a blog about women and money. Small Change was going to be that blog. It was a good idea that failed to gain stock, let alone materialize. After I made a few attempts at setting up the blog, I realized that the change I cared about had little to do with cents. So I gave up on the money and continued to write about small changes in my day and in the landscape around me in a blog I had kept for years already. At some point, that old blog, alembic, was suddenly pulled by its hosting company. The warning notice about the organization's change in hosting directions somehow escaped my attention. (So much for noticing small changes....) And so Small Change eventually became the new home of alembic, a virtual place for distilling the world into words.

About the blogger:

My name is Maria Benet.

I have been blogging in various forms ever since I read Rebecca Mead's piece on Meg Hourihan and Jason Kottke in The New Yorker in 2000, when I was already old compared to the newly sworn in net denizens, who kept arriving through the multiplying portals of the online world. Blogging beckoned to me, presenting itself as an other forum for communication, and so I came to stake my ground, with my old baggage and all.

My love for words was seeded in Hungarian, germinated in Romanian and French, then blossomed in English, as I moved from Transylvania, to Hungary, to Canada, to Northern California, where I have spent the better part of my life. And yes, that also means the better of the experiences that went into the making of my life so far.

My formal education, like my travels, covers a wide patchy terrain. I graduated with a BA in Theatre from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), then some years later I acquired an MA in Communication Studies from Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, Canada), from where I moved on into the graduate program in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, from where I dropped out to tend to family. My last venture into formal education was to obtain an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College (Asheville, NC).

Throughout the years, as I pursued my formal education, I also signed up for college courses that ranged from Italian to Computing Science to Accounting. Some of these courses I took to acquire skills for work, and some for the pure pleasure of learning. Accounting, I can say without doubt, was not in the learning-for-pleasure category.

At various times in my life I worked as a college instructor, a technical writer, a database consultant, a web designer, a non-profit fundraiser, a copywriter and copyeditor, a free-lance journalist, a bookkeeper, an office gofer, as well as a waitress, sometimes in diners, sometimes in nightclubs, and at times even in upscale restaurants.

My wordy achievements include poems published in Poetry, Prairiefire, Qarrtsiluni and other literary magazines. A collection of poems, Mapmaker of Absences, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2005.

I have presented papers with others at academic conferences in Canada during my graduate student days. My work on aboriginal rights and land claim settlements was published in the Berkeley Planning Journal, much too long ago to be of any relevance today.