I’ve decided to start a Substack. This is an idea I’ve played with since people began to self-publish work during the initial waves of the pandemic. It immediately struck me as something I’d like to do and after three years of deliberation, I’m finally doing it.
While I’m not sure exactly what this space will be just yet, I thought I’d share some thoughts about what’s motivating me and what this might turn into.
One reason it’s taken me so long to start something is I often obsess over the words I write and the thoughts I put down. There’s a reason I’m an editor now: my writing process has often been one of endlessly drafting, tweaking and changing – being painfully pedantic with myself. In the past, I’ve needed a scaffold to break out of this oft pyrrhic approach. That scaffold has often come in the form of a commission and deadline or simply a retreat into hermetic thinking. Now I want to avoid this trap in an attempt to free my writing and challenge myself.
I want to write about the things that affect me deeply, but I don’t always have the opportunity to do. We are in a fash-sympathising dark age and the world is heating up. In the UK, we’ve had over a decade of Tory rule and we are in a cost of living crisis. This rock has become known, only half-jokingly, as Plague Island, and also TERF Island. It feels like there is crisis upon crisis, affecting things so large they’re at the edge of comprehension to those so small we barely give them thought.
Writing is how I best understand things and – maybe selfishly – I want to spend more time figuring out what I think. I want to do this while playing and experimenting. These are two activities which are so valuable but, given my obligations to wage labour, I rarely do.
I’ve also decided to fire up a Substack because I feel there is often a lack of intimacy and honesty in our – incredible yet deeply questionable – mediated public sphere. I’ve grown tired of this and I want to satiate my compulsion to share and express things in a way that doesn’t play into the logic of platforms like Instagram and Twitter.
Artist and writer Paul Chan describes technology and social media as having revolutionised communication but “at the same time compressed what we say and type to such a degree that intelligibility is sacrificed for the sake of reach, ubiquity and consumption.” Communication has become “synonymous with advertising” and is merely “expressions expressing nothing other than the desire to peddle influence and promote _______.”
Much of what we read, from confessional opinion pieces to captions, is driven to conformity in a bid for algorithmic blessing. There is a need to be likeable, correct, moral, ha-ha funny, so risk-averse as to be empty.
When I think about this, I think about a line in The Lover, where Marguerite Duras says writing often seems to be “nothing at all”. It is at a loss for a place to be written or read; its “basic unseemliness is no longer accepted.”
It needn’t be like this, nor is it always. Words, the poet Anne Boyer writes, are useful for upending the world as they are “cheap, ordinary, portable, and generous, and they don’t mess up too badly if we use them wrong”. They are a means of refusal: “Poetry’s no can protect a potential yes”.
These thoughts have, in a small way, provided me with the impetus to try and find a way to write that doesn’t feel burdened. I want to get my thoughts into a freer space, away from scaffolds and traps. I want to embrace the unseemliness, seize the no and thereby seize the potential yes.
I’m not exactly sure where this venture will lead. Maybe essays, journal entries, thoughts or lists. But whatever form it takes, I imagine it will circle around what I have written about before, including gothic environmentalism, futures, contested histories, image culture and protest.
I imagine it will be once a month, but don’t hold me to that.