My inbox is where I work, and feel obliged to delete, reply and mark as unread in my never-ending quest to ‘get the number down’. It’s not the place I wish to read deeply, slowly, carefully, and this includes reading newsletters, even beautifully written ones. I still receive Substack and Tinyletters but honestly most of the time I don’t read them, as much as I tell myself I'd like to. Printing the newsletters and reading them on my sofa would be my preference.
Right now I’m going through a period of throwing things at the wall and playing around, prompted by a pretty big mental health wobble at the start of 2023. I’ve been collaging; printing phrases, jokes and ideas from my Canon printer; recording interviews with family; listening to one or two podcasts a day; lots of iPhone notes while walking, learning the vocabulary of arts funding bids; emailing people whose work I admire and asking if they’d like to chat about it; starting to describe my work as ‘my creative practice’ and thinking about how it might exist beyond just writing. Essentially, I’ve started putting my work (and myself) ‘back out there’ again after a good few years of being too scared to. Without being too dramatic the other option seemed to be death. A long, slow, spark-dulling death.
One big question hanging over everything has been where to put this work? Twitter is broken. Email is for work. LinkedIn… (ew). Instagram captions can seem desperate wedged between sponsored adverts for handsome but cheaply made bags designed in Spain (made in China) and that reel of the woman massaging her toddler’s lymph nodes. The work has existed quietly in Google Docs and box files, so I’m hoisting a blog up over my website, a bit like a washing line. I’ll peg the works to air them out, and we’ll go from there. Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind.
