I need to learn
Many, many years ago I wrote another newsletter. Technically I still have that newsletter. Technically alot of things are true.
In that newsletter I would sometimes be able to feature my particular universe of talented friends, who are writers and poets and photographers and musicians and dancers and architects and academics and artists. Some of them are many of those things at once; they are impressively chill about it, considering.
The universe is bigger now, but I still have roughly the same number of friends.
I am committed to supporting my friends’ creative pursuits; I will buy their work, support their shows, edit the marketing blurb, make the helpful introduction. And I am committed to supporting creative work in general, and especially when the people making that work come from the kinds of backgrounds that lead people to recommend them, but not to want to pay them.
So, I’m inviting you to The After Party. Catalyzed by Ann Friedman, inspired by the long shadow of that revenant newsletter, and funded by a co-conspirator with a gift for showing up, once a month I’ll hand over the keys to this newsletter to a person from an underrepresented background making creative work. This is a paid gig - a flat $450. Folks will retain all rights to their work. I will ask my excellent lawyer to make sure of that.
What might this look like? Pitch me and let’s find out.
Attribution
What about the lives
I might have lived?
As who? And who
will be accountable
for this regret I see
no way to avoid? A core,
or a husk, I need to learn
not how to speak, but from where.
Do you understand? I say
name, but I mean a conduit
from me to me, I mean a net,
I mean an awning of stars.
— from Song by Charif Shanahan in Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing