Welcome! Connecting, Gatecrashing, Honesting
Writing for you, to you, without middlepersons, or, Beginnings are Scary Exciting
Being a poet has been at the heart of my identity for a long time—before I even recognized it. Yet some time in the summer of 2021 poetry went for a walk and has not returned. I hope it took water, has a way to find nourishment, and will find its way back. (The milk-carton people thought my plea a prank).
So I turned to prose—mostly essays so far. Travel, personal, lyric: some fit into these categories. Others scorn categorization. No surprise there. I have a long history of not fitting in. More power to them.
Enter Substack—a newsletter/blog software that circumvents the gatekeepers of 21st century writing, which are enmeshed whether they like it or not in a system that turns its back on work not reflected in the Gross (I’m not making this up) National Product. My hope is to reclaim the joy of writing and of connecting with other people through it.
Subscription is free (Substack accommodates paid subscriptions but for now, I am blessed with an income that meets my needs—if not wild dreams) and will result in a brief essay by yours truly landing in your inbox weekly, more or less.
There is an app you can download, but you won’t miss anything by reading in email and leaving it at that. If you like it, please share it. If you don’t, it’s easy to unsubscribe.
Any and all feedback is welcome (insert vulnerability emoji), especially the gentle kind, as I embark on this learning journey. My hope is to tap into the joy of human connection, scarce in these pandemic-infested years. Connection that happens when we shed the expectations of perfection and success rewarded by the marketplace (I’m looking at you, social media) and engage our true selves, even as we try to figure out who or where they are. Know that such vulnerability means that judgment, cruelty and other harmful comments will not find a home here. There’s too much space for that out there already.