I write in celebration of milestones!
I have been pleased to discover not only my newsletter’s consistent, steady growth since I created it this summer but also the number of strangers who subscribed to it. It always makes me curious. Who are they? And how did they find me? I do not know. It encouraged me, though, to know that people I do not know were curious enough to want to know more of my thoughts and, moreover, it also encouraged me to rewrite my “Welcome” e-mail that people receive when they subscribe to my newsletter. (Also, I never knew one existed—or I forgot that it did after being overwhelmed by the sheer content to explore and manage on here after I created my Substack.) I modified it to explore how I intend to use my newsletter and how I would like to engage with those who join me in reading what I share. I updated my welcome letter as such:
How good to have you here!
Thank you for joining me in my journey toward understanding. I would like to share what you might find arriving in your inbox as our time together unfurls.
I intend to share what I read and constellate this with my experiences and aspirations. As someone who wishes to seek and, more importantly, profess the truth, I look forward to welcoming others who find community in those who wish to know rather than those who claim to know. I learn from that which I do not yet know. You might offer me this and I might offer you that as well. Let us walk in the direction of truth and light together.
I welcome you to see my foundational beliefs about this. I wrote about freeing ourselves and others from our ignorance, our natural state. We exist for one another and must learn how to communicate our values and ideas in a civil fashion. Our world desperately needs us to learn how to do this as we careen on this little rock in an infinite chasm together. We learn and develop our ideas and beliefs by entering into dialogue, and once we muster our bravery, we share ourselves—what we think, what we feel—with the world. You will notice similar themes among those writing samples. It cycles: we read, we enter dialogue, we write, we invite others to read our work and hopefully offer civil criticism—and it happens again. I invite you to explore my other broader writings and, of course, to invite others to do the same:
It seemed like introducing readers to my core ideas for my newsletter and community would be best and offer something to explore between when they join and when I next inundate their inboxes.
Speaking of my supportive readers, I reached another milestone: I received pledges from people who offered to support my writing as patrons, should I ever activate paid subscriptions. (I also never knew this feature existed—or, once again, forgot as I navigated Substack as a fledgling.) Not only did a few people share kind words of support and offered to pay me for the words flitting around my mind, but a few of the aforementioned mysterious strangers did too. (Wow!) Moreover, as I began exploring the settings in the site, I discovered that a couple of newsletter listed me as one of their “Recommended Reads” to their audiences. (Golly!) This felt encouraging too and also motivated me to research more about how to improve my page, newsletter, and content, not to mention how I would like to interact with those who read what I write. I added a section to my welcome e-mail which addresses this topic too:
You will begin receiving updates in your inbox weekly. I write about being and meaning through the lens of literature and how I find it connects to the human condition. For those of you using the app, I will also be using the “Notes” feature to share fragments of my works-in-progress and impressionistic writing. This leads to what remains most important to me: I will also use Substack to share much of my literary writing—stories, poems, slivers from my novel. All of this will remain free.
I am heartened by the number of people who have pledged to support a paid subscription. I never knew this feature existed when I began my newsletter. It lent me perspective, though, about how I might approach creating a more thoughtfully nuanced offering. Once I activate the paid feature, I will offer unique features to those subscribers as well as a separate newsletter which will explore the following:
Digital copies of my literary writing—PDFs and ePubs—behind the paywall;
Insights into the literary origins, symbols, and allusions in my art;
A portal into my innermost thoughts, feelings, and experiences which inform my art;
Invitations to create a genuine sense of community among those who seek the truth;
Chat—exploring a weekly topic;
And more to come!
Do you value the time I devote to what I offer? Let me know if you will champion me:
I am still mulling over other ideas for patrons as I genuinely like the idea of forming a community of knowers. I am thinking that opening a chat with a weekly topic to explore and also a monthly book club to hone analytical thinking and exploring texts as a lens for life. What do you think? Let me know with a comment below or a reply to this e-mail—especially with any other ideas that you might suggest to me!
I have not yet activated paid subscriptions but eventually will. I intend to make almost everything that I write available freely. However, I also want to honor and recognize those who have been willing to pledge money toward my writing and have decided primarily to offer those people an exclusive newsletter that will explore insights into my literature. Yet I also want to open opportunities for everyone to “earn” those privileges too. This is why I like Substack. They created a feature this summer that allows me to activate referrals for my readers. I can create tiered rewards for readers who refer my newsletter to others. I decided that this would be a great opportunity to give paid subscriber features to those devoted readers who support me in that way. I will write more about that in the future when I am ready to activate paid subscriptions.
I closed my welcome e-mail as follows:
This apprises me of my readership’s beliefs in my work. It allows me to prioritize my own worth, gives me the confidence to produce better work, and reinforces the notion that my community wishes to support me and, consequently, themselves in a journey toward understanding.
The most important topic I would like to address in this welcoming letter is my curiosity about my reader. I would love to hear who you are. How did you find me, what led you to subscribe, and what do you hope to find here? Write back to me so that this feels like a community of those who seek truth.
I look forward to hearing from and sharing with you.
These sentiments remain true: I always would value hearing from my readers if you manage to finish reading one of my newsletters—I always make the effort to reply thoughtfully.
I now turn to my next milestone: This is my first newsletter to include some of my own literature.
Tales
This story serves as one story within my collection of eighteen, Tales. Each story explores one of the secondary characters who populate my bildungsroman that I am writing, offering a lens, a viewpoint, outside and sometimes within the narrative of that text. The stories fill gaps and voices that otherwise would go unheard. I wanted to share this story—and the story that led to its creation—as my way of celebrating my milestones with my readers.
I wrote this story for an elective in graduate school yet enjoy returning to tinker with my past writing, adding a phrase here, a layer there. I never know when a work feels complete. In truth, the only way I can imagine feeling as though a piece no longer invites further development is once I seemingly hate the sight of it. Then, it must be done: It feels exhausted.
Allow me to share Arete’s origin story:
In this elective course, a fiction workshop, I had been writing my satirical novel at that time in my life, my intention being to pen the funniest thing I could possibly muster, an unforgiving exploration of culture as only I saw it. Certainly, my writing and sharing this would also ensure my exile and alienation. Think of “the culture wars,” only no punditry: I wrote it in such a way to target all tribes fairly. It genuinely existed as a true egalitarianism. I and my characters were fools in the circus of my culture, poking holes in sacred values and mores. What delighted me, though, was the breadth of commentary it received from my fellow workshop classmates and, more importantly, the laughter—laughter in remembering a passage they read, laughter in reading dialogue aloud, laughter at their own beliefs. Everyone was eager to discuss it.
Except for the professor—who was more eager to interject after my third chapter, asking of me a question for the ages: “But isn’t some of this offensive?”
😨😰
Heavens to Betsy! The confines of my limited reality failed me in presenting how jokes could be crafted safely and at nobody’s expense. I neglected writing punchlines laden with politeness—you know, the enjoyable small talk and banter with which people engage while politicking at social events and in passing: this brand of humor. Another way I should have looked at the issue is that I needed to write humor in a way that someone without a sense of humor might write an unfunny joke to tell to unfunny people. All this had eluded me. I thus needed to take this wisdom and apply it to my satire generally, writing it at the expense not of people but in targeting the culture of rocks or the values of schools of fish or the hypocrisy of dilapidated refrigerators. Oops.
What bothered me—as evinced from my snarky tone above—was less the professor’s inane comment but more what I witnessed: I watched the number of classmates—the very ones whose laughter filled the room alongside their giddiness to share passages from my writing and explore it in discussion—immediately shift from smiles and mirth to a tinge of guilt and remorse. Their tone changed, heads nodding solemnly and echoing the professor’s caution.
The day’s lesson: Humor and creative voice have no place here, only safe things. Let us not rock the boat. We want status quo in our art.
Now, this commentary is less a bitter expression about the course or professor. I liked her well enough though I disagree with her view in this instance. I also cannot help but find some of her lessons to me amusing. For instance, she once expressed a wish for me to address the dimensionality of my characters in the satire, failing to see that some of them were intentionally “flat” characters and needed to be. Yet she bestowed upon me the wisdom to “go inside of my character’s mouth and down his esophagus, into his gut to look from the window there.” I did not do this, unfortunately. I also also cannot help but find difficulty in heeding her advice as I never once saw her laugh—generally, the whole semester. I say this all while appreciating that she was a kindhearted person but simply wanted to be safe.
I see no place for safety with art however.
After her commentary about the potentially offensive nature of humor, she expressed her wish for me to make an attempt at writing a short story rather than chapters to my novel, asking me to explore characters, conflict, setting, style, and timing. She said this to me by also stating that it would “help inform her of how she could justify the grade I would earn for the semester.” (I had forgotten about this element until writing about this right now—so perhaps this is where any sardonic tone originates.)
I obliged with my short story that I share here.
Arete in Greek means “excellence” and “fulfillment of purpose, full realization of potential.” I chose to write the story not only based on the Greek word but, more accurately, as inspired by the character Arete in The Odyssey: the wife and superintendent of her husband’s household and one who treats her guests, such as Odysseus, with hospitality, known as xenia in Greek and a deeply important theme in the epic poem. My bildungsroman and collection of short stories echo many facets of Homer’s Odyssey. I therefore decided to choose this character—and quality—to explore a story about my great grandparents. They were two characteristically different people with big, generous hearts and a deep work ethic and community-minded spirit. These qualities manifested in each of their personalities and actions quite differently which I did my utmost to write into being. But they each embodied xenia to such an extent that I wished to honor them with a true story about them.
As you read, I trust you to see my efforts to “explore characters, conflict, setting, style, and timing” in my attempts to earn an A in the course and demonstrate my capacity to “go inside of my character’s mouth and down his esophagus, into his gut to look from the window there.”
I hope you enjoy it.
I will share the PDF and eBook files of my short story “Arete” here:
I plan to share my literature as text on my website and in the e-mail newsletter in the future but will include these file types for paying subscribers behind a paywall.
I would encourage reading the story before proceeding with my newsletter as I will now share my explication of the story and what I attempt to do within my writing of it.
All the Ghosts Summoned from the Planes
I trust you have read the story and nothing will be spoiled below. I wrote this story based upon a story which my mother told me about attending a dinner at my paternal great grandparents’ house. The narrative culminates in my mother’s interjection and embodies my family members as characteristically as I could shape them into words on a page.
I struggle the most with choosing names. Yet I chose mine based on my great grandfather’s name being Percy, which neatly overlapped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, inviting me to name my other family members after the Romantic poets whose works I best admired, matching family members to whichever etymological origins most aligned with their nature.
My great grandmother is Elisabeth, after Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose later work explored the challenges a woman faced by a man who dominated her. My grandfather is George, after Lord Byron (George Gordon), whose writing in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage spoke to me about disillusionment and a yearning for adventure as distraction. My grandmother is Helen, after Helen Leigh, whose work did not influence or impact me but whose obscure biography best fit the character of my grandmother’s role. My father is William, after William Wordsworth, whose writing about memory deeply impacted my appreciation of poetry. My mother is Anna, named after Anna Letitia Barbauld, who championed women’s rights and advocated on behalf of education. My brother is Samuel, after Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet whose work made me wish to write poetry as beautiful as his own—with a special attention to the beauty in sounds—and whose own life left him unfulfilled in part due to his own inaction and laziness. I am the youngest in the story, observing the world around me.
I wrote firstly to address my professor’s wish to see me follow a formula that made her feel as though she had imparted important fiction writing skills upon me. This is represented by Elisabeth and her recipe card—the comfort in following a formula and not needing to think. Her yearning to create is my own in the class. The potatoes boiling in the pot, of course, represent the tension in the story, rising to a boil before it overflows, with the commentary on the potatoes and timing leaving them either too hard or too soft symbolizing the hardened tough love of my great grandfather and the soft kindhearted love of my great grandmother. The world does this to people. Yet each of them represent kinds of love that I possess.
Percy represents the domineering figure whose presence diminishes my great grandmother’s being in the same way that the professor’s commentary about offensiveness and craft felt to me. The other family members, in the same way that my paternal family members make small talk and light banter, largely do not say much at all to one another, often not even hearing what anyone has to say or often not having anything to say. These characters also represent my classmates whose tastes and expressions disappeared in the presence of an authority figure, “ghosts elsewhere in the moment, sitting.” These people invariably either had nothing to say or no commitment to say the things they wished to say. They may as well not have been present as we all sat at the table together, feasting on the art of one another’s souls.
I also explore the juxtapositional relationships among my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents—how the dynamics between husband and wife differ with each. My father, William, is found absent through much of the story as he was absent in much of my life after my parents’ divorce at an early age. We see three generations of how husband and wife connect and disconnect, act and react, in addition to the character and persona displayed, as with my great grandfather’s blasphemous expressions and my grandfather’s extreme avoidance of them. The rift between the down-to-earth tone and nature of my great grandparents contrasts with the image-seeking properness of my grandparents: a shift from working to middle class lives.
My grandfather, George in the story, is one who repairs, tinkering with the hinge on the door to fix it and make certain it works properly. I value his craftsmanship as a woodworker and as a handyman. He was very practical in life. His actions in the story in this regard is my own attention to craft and detail and ensuring elements work just right as I have visited and revisited this story many times since. The dialogue between Percy and George is my commentary on deciding on when a story, when a piece of writing, could ever be considered finished, ever considered purposefully right.
I also write of my grandmother and my beloved patchwork quilt that she made me and honor it by taking images and moments of their lives and stitching them together with threads of time and being, attempting to make a coherent display of what otherwise would be a chaos of semblances.
The story also happens on the Sabbath—the “day of rest”—and explores the extent to which my family rested on that day. It also explores the religious nature of my extended family, my nuclear family being unaffiliated and, in many ways, outsiders in this regard. This created an alienation for me in small ways in relation to my father’s family and between our family and my uncles and aunts and cousins. This was necessary for my development as an individual, however, and in finding my own voice and my own path.
This appears too in the absence of literary books on the bookshelves. Among my family members who enjoy reading, none of them read literature, only thrillers and anthologized reading collections and best sellers. This is not a criticism of them or those tastes but simply that I once again found my own taste in reading. I am now, as far as I know, the only person in my immediate family who does. But each of my family members left their own indelible impression upon me, offering me what I found to be the best in each of them that I might borrow as I constructed my own soul.
I imagine my mother, Anna, whose statement at the close of the story echoes my own need to speak forth my being into the world. I also would say that I can see my great grandfather’s spirit of waiting to find others who are willing to do this within me too. The willingness to speak the truth rather than turning a blind eye to it resonates with me and in the Christian narrative. It is why I chose the feast to center on the lambkin “crowned with rosemary” and served with asparagus spears. The reward for those willing to tell the truth is silence and turning a blind eye, often precursors to the violence undeniably acted upon those who will not relent from saying when something is wrong in the culture.
For this reason, I explore the themes of being and nothingness, light and dark, warmth and cold in the story. They feel the most ancient. I needed to explore the winter of my family and its deadwood turned to ash. The story—like all of the stories within Tales—finds the setting of my seasonal home, winter most present in my memories. The cold becomes trying. I set this story on the cusp of spring as with the story upon which it is based, with the oncoming season heralding new life to come. I am the spring of my family.
I wish to take the ghosts and piles of ash from the moments of my life and shape them into stories, breathing life into their clay. Much like Lazarus, whose name I invoked, I wished to call forth those from their tombs and unlike what happened in my fiction writing workshop, in this way and in the way that Lazarus was summoned into being, the truth could not be stopped from spreading. I also allude to Prometheus in regard to the flame not only as the gift of knowledge and the creation of humanity from clay but also the figure of defiance, a craftsman, a trickster. I wrote my story about the class and about my life and with what Homeric and Biblical allusions I could to layer and layer the story as much as I could within the narrative confines of an hour as a testament of my ability as a writer. The Promethean flame burns away the deadwood and represents the artist and represents liberty. This is what an artist is and must do.
I close the story as I wrote it, with as much liberty taken in playing with sounds, bending syntactical convention, and stretching prose rhythms as I could. I wish most deeply and intend to contribute to the canon of literature to the extent that it resides within my power to do so. This story as much pays homage to my family for offering to me what they could—all the tools and clay needed to craft a work—and my teacher and classmates for teaching me what I must do and what I must not do.
I write this into the close of my story as the ghosts filled with fear and trembling, an echo of Philippians 2:12 and a lesson imparted to me: “Do everything without complaint.” Instead of complaining and continuing to write the novel, I listened to my teacher and wrote what was asked of me yet also in a manner to prove myself.
We find a robin perched at the close of the story so full of song that it were as though a fire kindled within it warm enough that it melts away the surrounding snowfall in a sentence so long that it bends the syntactical rules of the language to the extent where it almost breaks. Yet it doesn’t.
The next piece of my literature I share will be a poem.