Blogger gets the final say

I mentioned a week or so ago that my partner, Briggs Nisbet, was discovered by the story editor of the New York Times magazine on the basis of the garden-related weblog, True Dirt that she cowrites with Richard Frankel.
We were visiting Rich and Martha over the weekend and Briggs flipped through the Sunday Magazine while we were there and noticed that there were two letters to the editor about her piece in the Lives column the week before.
One was very positive, but the other interpreted her issues with Oakland’s landscaping regulations as a form of callous disregard for the victims of the horrendous hills fire of 1991.
(We found this ironic, since close friends lost a hand-built home in that fire and with it many momentoes of a shared past – they lived with us in the first few weeks after the disaster, so the idea that Briggs would be ignorant of the history of fire and trees in the area is somewhat ludicrous.)
The holiday yesterday gave B the chance to reflect a bit about being discovered, but perhaps more salient to this weblog, it also gave her a chance to reply to her critic. She has so much to say on the subject that so far she’s written a first installment outlining the issues implied in the critical letter and she plans to follow up with a discussion of how trees have been scapegoated for the fires instead of our building practices.
I am by nature somewhat protective and when I heard the critical letter read aloud for the first time I was indignant, but then I realized that as a weblogger, Briggs has no time or space constraints and could get the last word in, no problem.