No. 268 - A New Era

Some things are changing...

maybe I have pictures now?

I’m once again back in Georgia! I decided to take a week and a half off from work to just get some rest and celebrate my mother’s birthday. In my free time, I’ve spent my hours reading incessantly, driving around the suburbs, and complaining about the brutal heat that haunts Georgia even in late August. And in between all of that, I came to the decision to move Splash from Mailchimp, where it has lived since its inception six years ago, to Substack, the platform that hosts most personal newsletters. 

To most of my readers, this won’t make much of a difference at all. The letter will still arrive at the same time every Thursday, and the content won’t change. However, the letters will look simpler, quoted text will look a little better, and it will be easier to find old letters in the archive. The archive is the part that interests me — since Mailchimp is a marketing tool, each letter was only housed in a single link, making it difficult to make an archive that was searchable or taggable. I’ve imported all of my old letters into my new Substack archive and plan on going back and tagging them.  I don’t imagine that anything close to a majority of my subscribers will spend time looking through my archives, but for the ones that are interested, I’d like to make it easier for them. 

I read Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living a few months ago and one of the lines that stood out was, “Making art is not selfish; it's for the rest of us. If you don't do your thing, you are cheating us.” On first reading, I immediately agreed with it, thinking that anyone who could make art should make art, since it allows for a deepening of experience for the creator and anyone who consumes their art. Yet, I found it difficult for me to think that this maxim necessarily applied to me. Perhaps everyone else’s art was meaningful, but who was I to demand the attention to my work? Wasn’t it very presumptuous to imagine that other people would take time out of their busy lives and choose my words to consume over the trillions of words floating around online? 

My inquisitorial self-talk didn’t win out on this point, however. I’m blessed to hear from some of the people who read my work and to learn that I can offer something resonant in my writing every now and then. It’s a strange feeling, but I’m slowly getting used to the fact that I have something to offer with my writing. And so, if there’s a chance that making my work more accessible and discoverable using this platform could lead to another person discovering something I wrote and finding it meaningful, then it’s all worth it.

In the past, I felt comforted by the fact that my work was relatively inaccessible due to the arcane nature of Mailchimp archives. It was nice to know that no matter what I wrote, there was a cap on how many people would see it. When I first started writing, I was a fledgling writer, who barely knew his way around a paragraph and benefitted from the psychological safety of being hidden from the world. In a way, it feels like I’m hopping out of the nest. I doubt that I’ll suddenly have many more subscribers or anything, but I think this psychological shift will lead me to invest more effort into Splash as a whole. 

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Earlier this week, in between reading many great books, I was scrolling through TikTok and learned about a letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote to a high school English class, which had a lovely quote:

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

I enjoy this quote a good bit, along with the rest of the letter that Vonnegut wrote, which ends with an exercise creating something that the students don’t share with anyone. For those teenagers, this may be a meaningful exercise, but I wonder if a someone can really experience becoming in a vacuum like that. In fact, I think that creating art and never showing it to anyone is inherently a limited experience. It may make sense for someone just starting out in art to learn in private at first, but sharing the work is where the magic is.

How can we, a species that came to be more than any other species through our verbal communication, become more of ourselves in isolation? Despite society’s strongest efforts to turn us into individuals, is it not clear every day that we are weaker when we are alone? Is it not clear that movies are more fun with someone to share them with, songs are more beautiful with someone to sing them with, tears are more worthwhile when someone can wipe them away? Why wouldn’t we share the work that we create with those who matter to us?

I’ve gained so much from sharing these words with you. In these letters, I have shared and continue to share my process of becoming, the growth of my soul, and it’s only possible because of those who read them. By simply opening an email, you help me become more read than most to ever live, you hold me accountable to my own commitment to write weekly, you bear witness to my life, and let me declare to the world that I am living. It’s a dramatic way to describe an email newsletter, but aren’t the best letters the ones where the author is pouring all of their emotion into it?

I’ll keep them coming. More of the same, but hopefully better.

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Drops of the Week

• PLAYLIST - august 23 - another month, another eclectic mix, including a good deal of stuff I found on TikTok

• FILM - Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023) - Karan Johar’s latest Bollywood film might be my favorite one so far! It’s not perfect but I laughed a lot and cried even more.

• POEM - “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper” by Joseph Fasano - “I know your days are precious / on this earth. / But what are you trying / to be free of?”

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