A goddamn human

Well. I’ve written myself into this corner. I suppose I’ll write myself out.

This is the first issue of my first newsletter, and I have to admit that I’m very tempted to start it off with “Welcome to my On-line E-mail News, here in 1997!” Well, everything old is new again, and blogging is cool now, and tinyletter is going away unless it’s not, and writing is still hard, and here we are. You’ve agreed to read this sucker and I’ve agreed to write it, a couple of foolish promises that I am intensely grateful for. 

I’ve begun this newsletter project because I’ve (re)begun my blog, and I’ve (re)begun my blog because I’m writing a book. The logic, I suppose, is that one begets the other begets the other; this is a series of muscle stretches. As of today, I’ve got 9,000 words of a manuscript draft, and (if you missed them) recent blog posts on repetition in our work and my (increasingly obvious) ambivalence about writing in 2018.

I don’t know what this letter project is going to be. My prose voice isn’t particularly well-developed, and there is so much I want to say and so many ways to undermine my confidence in saying them, and so your guess is as good as mine. What should it look like? Like my blog, but without redundancy; thoughtful, but somehow low-stakes (I have already damaged this); fun, but not frivolous; brief, but thorough; adept at conveying my scattered enthusiasms while coming off as focused, charming, perfect.

This is the problem: I seem to hold—in a death grip—the belief that I should be able to present myself online in a measured, consistent, singular way. That I have to iron out everything that isn’t within some kind of brand guideline, or the world will spit my contradictions back at me. 

Which is to say: I am afraid you won’t like me if you see too much of me at once. 

Which is to say: I am not over myself. 

But then, the act of writing is not objective, apolitical, neutral: it is a carving of the self into a specific representation. And that’s an odd responsibility. It’s overwhelming, just in the dark of my brain, let alone in the public of this newsletter, its lack of constraints, its open-faced opportunity to write myself any way I'd like, to friends, to strangers. What should it look like?

It is uncomfortable for me to talk about poetry to an imagined audience of strategists, and uncomfortable to talk about web strategy to an imagined audience of poets. It is uncomfortable for me to claim a topic, a theme, a focus for these letters when I don't perceive focus for myself; there are too many ways to be. If I write about Star Trek or book editing or Black Lives Matter—all of these things at once—will I create signal or noise?

So if I’m starting with no other framework, let me at least start with this one tiny, abandonable goal: to be uncomfortably multifaceted like a goddamn human.

Last week—while I worked out the first draft of this letter—Poet’s House tweeted a snippet of this untitled poem by Joanne Kyger (you can read the full poem at Poetry Foundation):

I don’t love this poem, but that’s okay: I love how it showed itself to me at the moment that it did. (Poetry is at its strongest when it answers my questions before I've asked them.)

Towards the end of the poem, Kyger admits:

So there's one possible signal.

I intend to include regular opportunities for giving in this letter, so let’s start here: South Africa is literally out of water, which is heartbreaking and mindboggling and dystopian and real. I’m giving money to Gift of the Givers, which comes recommended by my dear South African friend Kerry-Anne Gilowey. The website isn’t the smoothest, but I found the best action was to click immediately on the Contribute button at the upper right. They ask for the amount in South African Rand, and while you can look up the conversion rate on Google, I can tell you that 300 ZAR is about $25. Please give what you can.