As a first post, this piece is probably meant to try doubly hard to draw you in and subscribe and all the rest of it, but at time of writing it’s 6:37pm, the office is messy (see the pic below), this web interface is prompting me to put subscription buttons and pictures everywhere, etc. etc. Here’s a bit of information about where things are headed. If you want to know more about me, here’s some extra info.
What it’s about
I’ve wanted to have some version of a newsletter (/space to share things) for a while now—I had a soft crack at blogging earlier in the year, and after a bit of testing this (Substack) seems like a good option for sharing work going forward.
The appeal of a newsletter is in the opportunity to write longer pieces that develop ideas. The point of this one is to write about creative practice—that is, to explore what is in the doing and making of creative things.
I’ll note that I tend to exercise a fairly liberal interpretation of the term creative: The basic premise is to take a view of creative work as regular rather than rare. This opens up a rich menu of possibilities for exploring how things are made, performances rendered, and work done. That’s the business of this newsletter.
As a complement to this newsletter I’m also launching a notebook that approaches the same territory in a different way (more on that soon). The focus for now is on writing (if you came looking for music, you’ll usually find me doing that with Jo Davie). Depending on how things go, I might move into other territory later.
Who’s it for?
This newsletter is for anyone interested in creating or making things, and how creative acts work. It’s not exactly going to be a casual read, but if you’re here that might not bother you anyway.
At the time of writing I myself enamoured with the essay genre, I think because essays thread something of a line between the academic and the practical. The writing I do here will, I hope, follow a similar trajectory.
How sharing work helps, and the point of the paywall
Having an opportunity to share formative work with a community is exceptionally helpful in developing and honing new ideas. It’s also an important opportunity to share potentially useful things that would otherwise gather digital dust on a hard drive.
Some of the material in this newsletter will be free, and some of it will require a subscription. Subscriptions and other forms of patronage are amazingly valuable to those of us working on things outside of the mainstream, since they support creative autonomy. If you find some value in these pieces or in other work that I do, I hope you’ll consider subscribing, to help it continue. If you want to know more about the ways in which I plan to use subscription revenue, you can read about that here.