Call asynchronous method in constructor?

Summary: I would like to call an asynchronous method in a constructor. Is this possible?

Details: I have a method called getwritings() that parses JSON data. Everything works fine if I just call getwritings() in an async method and put await to left of it. However , when I create a LongListView in my page and try to populate it I’m finding that getWritings() is surprisingly returning null and the LongListView is empty.

To address this problem, I tried changing the return type of getWritings() to Task<List<Writing>> and then retrieving the result in the constructor via getWritings().Result. However, doing that ends up blocking the UI thread.

public partial class Page2 : PhoneApplicationPage
{
    List<Writing> writings;

    public Page2()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        getWritings();
    }

    private async void getWritings()
    {
        string jsonData = await JsonDataManager.GetJsonAsync("1");
        JObject obj = JObject.Parse(jsonData);
        JArray array = (JArray)obj["posts"];

        for (int i = 0; i < array.Count; i++)
        {
            Writing writing = new Writing();
            writing.content = JsonDataManager.JsonParse(array, i, "content");
            writing.date = JsonDataManager.JsonParse(array, i, "date");
            writing.image = JsonDataManager.JsonParse(array, i, "url");
            writing.summary = JsonDataManager.JsonParse(array, i, "excerpt");
            writing.title = JsonDataManager.JsonParse(array, i, "title");

            writings.Add(writing);
        }

        myLongList.ItemsSource = writings;
    }
}