This is a blog now.

I’ve been rethinking my newsletter, which is hosted on Substack, and shifting how I want to write in free and public formats. 

This largely came about because of my own capacity as a parent caring for two young children, one of whom is under the age of five, and as a person with a day job, and a working writer who is starting two new longer projects, one of which might be a short story (or a novel? I can never tell!) the other which will hopefully turn into a book-length memoir-in-essays. Also, I listened to this great conversation between Amelia Hruby and Seth Werkheiser on the Off The Grid podcast, and became terribly nostalgic for the way we used to keep blogs, the way other people feel nostalgic about vinyl or print photo albums.

I started my Substack at the tail-end writing of a novella manuscript. Finishing a long writing project is never easy. It’s like being a groundhog digging in a tunnel of burrows. You quickly forget what the above ground looks like, you constantly feel a wall around you, and it can be stuffy and hard to breathe, even if you’re the kind of animal that likes a subterranean home. Substack felt, to me, like a way to poke my head out of the hole to see what else was going on around me. To get some fresh air and a snack. 

One of my favorite things about Substack was finding other spiritually-inclined readers and writers who had passions and interests outside of spirituality, and who, like me, find reverence without humor and silliness to be a bit suffocating. I found other dharma practitioners who also like frothy podcasts and peonies in June and Mary Oliver and art at the Getty and the raunchy stand-up of Ally Wong. 

The best part of Substack, as I’ve seen it, is having a supportive community of other writers and readers. It feels like you can have a kind of pen-pal communication style relationship with people, a low-key sangha created through reading and commenting and sharing posts. I always love knowing that my work has touched someone in some way. It’s a huge reason why I write. Posting a short essay each month on Substack gave me a productive, creative break from the marathon pace of finishing a novella, and it felt rewarding to have my work immediately seen and engaged with. 

Also: My inner bookseller loves championing the work of writers I admire on Substack. I think this comes from being a writer in a supportive literary community like Chicago, where there is a feeling that when the tide rises, we all float up together. I’ve had way more in-depth, meaningful conversations on Substack than I ever have had on Twitter (I got off in 2020) or Instagram. I’ve met people on Substack who I genuinely think are cool and who I would have coffee with if we lived in the same place. 

I felt FOMO occasionally on Substack, and I felt downright envy occasionally, but I could deal with those. I wanted subscribers but I didn’t want to woo subscribers, so I didn’t let metrics drive my writing. Losing and gaining subscribers was a test of equanimity, one always forced me to get in touch with my own sense of truth. I had, after all, set out to write about subjects the dharma world often ignores or dismisses. Sexuality, love, art, family life, creativity, and the frivolous shit that makes life enjoyable in the ever continuing pile-on of casualties of war, genocide, political chaos, and environmental catastrophe, and not to mention, the personal tragedies and hardships and petty meanesss that so many people quietly endure. 

I was pretty sure I had found the internet that my Gen-X husband had so innocently enjoyed in 1998, when I was a high school student, a burgeoning Gen-Yer, at a time before we insisted on categorizing each generation with these sticky labels. The best of Substack reminds me of my teenage days lurking on the Tori Amos listserv I signed up for when I was sixteen. It was a world filled with weirdos and rebels and people who dared to trust enough their own experience of the world. 

It’s an important human need: to feel seen by others, and to have the pleasure of also seeing others. 

I think that this is a very natural desire that often gets lost in the way that feeling seen has been driven to online spaces, where we are both rewarded through a gamefied system of “followers,” when so many people would just like to feel seen and see others in a way that is human. More than any other platform, I think Substack has given me the pleasure of seeing others in a way that is far more genuine than most social media. That being said, I think it’s very telling that the people who read your Substack are not “readers” but labeled as “subscribers.” 

Because Substack doesn’t want the experience to be about reading. 

Substack is not a list-serv from the glorious wild days of the 1998 World Wide Web. It’s propelled by an algorithm, propelled by our engagement not only on how often we post a newsletter, but how often we comment on others work, how often we restack work, and how often we post on Notes. I was sort of okay with all of that. 

What I wasn’t prepared to deal with was losing my attention span for actual, real, honest-to-god books and long-form essays. 

As a parent of young children, reading on your phone can feel like an adult conversation at a park; you’re desperate to talk with someone who doesn’t need you to open their yogurt pouch. I read newsletters on my phone while my four-year-old daughter played in the bath, and in the car parking lot while I waited for my ten-year-old son to get out of piano lessons, and on the couch after a long day while my daughter would ask for a new kind of snack every ten minutes. The medium allowed to pause whatever I was reading, rinse the blueberries, put them in a bowl, wipe down the counter, and then continue on to an 800 word newsletter topic that usually focused on a timely but ephemeral topic that has, like art critic Dave Hickey once said, “the expiration date of a gallon milk.” 

I found that I wasn’t reading as much anymore, and I couldn’t blame it on having young children. I am a reader. Fast, note-taking, ravenous. Even in the fatigue of parenting an infant (before I ever got onto Substack) I could summon up the attention to read books that will give you carpal tunnel syndrome. I read Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism when my daughter was six months old (a feat which astonishes me, I don’t know what that woman was thinking). I read the door-stopper of a book, The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow when she was a year-old, and before bed, because I’m the sort of nutty person who finds arguments about Hobbes vs. Rousseau and civilization to be kind of relaxing when they’re written for a popular audience. 

Substack made me feel like I was reading, but it wasn’t wholesome, real reading. It was sugar, a high-glycemic index kind of stuff, not a well-prepared, three course, rich meal. My Goodreads list fell to the wayside. I scrolled on my phone, reading in the spared moments of parents and work, but not in the diligent way that all writers know how to read--with a pen or pencil in hand, to teach yourself how to create from what you are taking in. There’s enough research out there (Google it) which demonstrates that we don’t read as well on screens. I started noticing that when I picked up a book, I simply didn’t have the will or attention to wade in fully.

Substack likes to claim that it’s the maverick of the publishing industry, an outlet for independent voices. And this is true. Many people have discovered that--yes--they have it in them to write to an audience that wants to hear them, and this inspires them to write books. But the medium of Substack--a tiny screen in your hand--does not lend itself to the cognitive work of reading a really damn good essay with an air-tight argument, one that has been reviewed by an editor who won’t let you be lazy about transitions or sources on hearsay. It’s definitely not the medium for a literary short story that will reward you handsomely, fulsomely, but only if you pay attention. 

It is a fancy blog. And that’s cool, because I like fancy blogs. But this isn’t the kind of reading I want to spend my life doing, and it’s not the kind of writing I want to spend my life doing either. 

I’m not an extremist about much of anything, so I’m not deactivating my account or moving to Ghost, but I am, going to blog here more, and less there, and focus the hours I put into writing and also formatting my newsletter’s short essays into a book of fully developed essays, because that is what I’m hungry for as a reader, and that’s what makes me feel full. 

What we ingest eventually becomes us--the tallow of our bones, the quantity of red blood cells, the luster of our hair. 

And I want to feel mostly made from books, not newsletter posts.