Pivoting ... back?

Reflections after failing fast

Photo by David Kristianto on Unsplash

Earlier this year I tried relaunching this newsletter. Instead of using it as a quarterly update on my writing career, I posted a couple of times a week about healthcare. If you missed it, I explained why here.

My new approach lasted less than a month. It was not a fit for the kind of writer I am. I felt mounting stress as I pushed to research and write posts of substance on that schedule without a team. What did I learn — or rather, remember — during this intense period of failing fast?

I thought I could follow in the footsteps of Noah Smith and pump out a high volume of writing to attract subscribers. My idea was to focus on analysis and commentary for an underserved niche. I still think healthcare is a niche ripe for the picking in this way by someone, but not by me.¹

Smith, who writes about economics, came up as an economist. His writing process, which includes decades of reading, a community of practice with other experts, and a large network of sources, aligns with and enables his product. By his own admission, he broke out as a voice by essentially being snarky.

My first professional publication, over twenty-five years ago, was a poem. The writing process I developed — rooted more in remembering through journalling than in researching external subjects — eventually led me to memoir. I made hard choices over the years to protect my time, while still remaining open to deep immersion in sensations and ideas. My voice has always been rather sincere. And I have yet to break out in any way.

One of the best expressions for the kind of writing I want to prioritize in my career comes from Patricia Hampl in I Could Tell You Stories:

This remembering, in its rigorous search, is the work of the imagination, closer to poetry than fiction, in spite of the apparent narrative affinity of the novel and autobiography, and in spite of the autobiographical nature of much modern fiction. In the lyric poem and the memoir, a self speaks, renders the world, or is recast in its image. In both lyric poetry and the memoir the real subject is consciousness in the light of history. The ability to transmit the impulses of the age, the immediacy of a human life moving through a changing world, is common to both genres. To be personal and impersonal all at once is the goal of both. To be witness, rather than story-teller. The essential human utterance, proper to lyric poetry, comes from the personal voice, the first person. And that same voice, not the particular nature of its story, is also what distinguishes memoir.

Blogging, which is what people like Smith are mostly doing on Substack, is indeed voicy — Substack wants to be “the app for independent voices” — but more in the comedic or dramatic or on occasion the journalistic mode than the lyric one.

What does that mean?

A Substack that comes out multiple times a week can make you laugh or make you angry or occasionally inform you, but reflecting awareness of the human condition just takes more time.

Why?

We need the distance of time to make the material of life mean something. As Annie Ernaux writes in translation through Alison L. Strayer at the end of A Girl’s Story: “It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing.”

If I’ve lost you, no worries. But I think everybody can parse these distinctions on some level. Providing analysis and commentary is indeed a form of making meaning with a voice, but it’s one that’s open to change with the next news cycle. It’s not as lasting as what’s going on in those moments when you have an insight and there’s no one around, or everyone’s around, and you realize the insight is a truth so pat it’s a cliché or a proverb — yet you’re experiencing it fresh and embodied, but when you try to put it into words ...

Well, gesturing towards these kinds of insights with words that are more like music is the job of lyric poetry; and, in my understanding, what I’ll call literary memoir.

I feel I could be giving a commencement speech here. Process is more valuable than product. Product has to align with process. Meaningful insights take time. Am I recommending everyone, or at least every writer, what, like write poems?

No.

I’m just being myself. And bringing that self to or even finding that self through the proverbial page, even in a sped up digital age.

I do have some news to share. I had two stories reach wide audiences this quarter: an article on band merch for Exclaim! and a story about a new peace museum for Broadview. Both went to print across Canada, in addition to going online. I also did another piece for Exclaim! about Spotify, AI, and indie artists.

And my big news is I’ve signed on with agent Tom Cull of Cull & Co in the UK to represent my memoir, Ghost Tones.

My sincere thanks to the handful of readers who paid to subscribe to my failed healthcare Substack. You should see pro-rated refunds in your credit card statements.

I’ll be back with a quarterly update on my writing career in June.

1. I also still think the editorial environment for freelance journalists is unsustainable, but I don’t know the answer. Repealing Section 230 in the U.S., which enabled the growth of the tech platforms that took over media outlets’ revenue streams, is back in the conversation. Could that help at this stage?