Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2014.

I felt a bit alienated from most of the other people who attended the recent National Society of Newspaper Columnists convention in Washington, D.C.

First, I felt pretty long in the tooth; most of the speakers and many of the attendees were much younger than I.

Secondly, I discovered that few of them actually wrote regular columns for newspapers, but wrote freelance offerings or blogs instead.

Blogs?

Really?

I know newspapers and newspaper content are changing all the time, and certainly I, over the years, have changed a bit myself.

But I felt completely disengaged from many of the discussions, whose emphasis was on helping the “columnists” “extend their brands.”

I think the idea was to help them gain more readers. But at my age I’m not trying to lure a new (or younger) audience: I yam what I yam, as Popeye would say. No conference is going to teach this old dog new tricks.

My column evolved to what it is, and I seem to be stuck with it.

Change now? To what?

I was first asked by my editors at the IJ to write a Herb Caen-type column — lots of names and three dots.

I struggled to comply for three columns or so, but — alas — I’m not Herb Caen. Then, one day, I wrote a first-person column on Queen Elizabeth’s visit to San Francisco, and compared her life and family to mine.

For some reason, I got lots of positive response. I think readers liked the contrast to the queen’s princely sons and my ragtag boys who had never been bowed to or worn the same sweatpants two days in a row.

Anyway, I was suddenly swept into a column style largely based on my personal experience.

Some readers liked it, commenting that what I wrote wasn’t so much about my life as about theirs.

Others shuddered, at least vocally. I remember one who begged me to stop writing about my humdrum life as a housewife — about my dead husband, our family foibles and all my dirty dishes.

Good point, reader.

But I seem to have painted myself into a corner from which I have never extricated myself.

My friend Craig WiIson, who wrote a column for USA Today for 30 years, also dealt in the personal. He wrote about his dog, his male spouse and life in his Georgetown neighborhood. He told convention-goers that he had “worked” 24 hours a day, always looking for the next column idea.

Now that he has retired from columnizing, he says he misses it: ideas come, but publication is no longer possible.

Bummer. He had become his column, and vice versa.

He was the odd man out among convention-goers, although they clearly loved what he had to say and probably wished they could have written in the same genre he did.

Emphasis at the conference, however, was to leave one’s personal comfort zone and push the envelope. Controversy, it seemed, was the name of the game. Find an extreme point of view and “own” it, becoming the go-to person for a popular (or unpopular) stance.

Jeez.

That may be the way to attract followers in this already opinion-driven world. If I could only stop being a conciliator — someone who usually sees both sides of every question.

I decided to stick to my usual stuff: about old and new husbands, dirty dishes and the issues that arise in an ordinary life.