A roundup of 3 things I’m currently paying attention to, posted every other Wednesday from the land of flux.
Dear Friend,
Today begins my first biweekly Wednesday roundup. Off we go:
Nothing says “flux” like coming to terms with the loss of a national treasure. Tributes to poet, activist, and legend Nikki Giovanni have been circulating far and wide since her death on Monday, December 9. This line, which appears in The Collected Poetry 1968-1998, is one of my favorites – I think it just slays:
I hope she died warmed by the life she lived. What gifts she gave us all, and gives us still.
Being a words person, the talent of visual artists boggles my mind, even though I live with one. Inspired by a little piece of melted wax that everyone else thought looked like a dolphin, my partner Marco Siegel-Acevedo drew this in a flash at brunch over the weekend. We joked that he should draw a series called “Sea Monsters of Lake Michigan”—perhaps someday he will:
Substack continues to explode, explode, explode. While the platform has been around since 2017, I joined on November 6, 2024 in a fog of post-election despondency. Coming on board during this flux-filled time of exponential growth reminds me of previous moments—blogging in the late 1990s.* Creating SheWrites.com in the aughts. Growing an online course business during the pandemic.
For any of you who are even newer than I am to the platform, I find it helpful to think of Substack as the love child of Medium and Patreon. Created by a journalist, a tech entrepreneur, and an engineer, Substack is where writers publish newsletters and monetize their work through subscriptions.
As writer Sarah Fay of Substack Writers at Work** said in a webinar last week, they’re flying the plane while designing the plane and we’re all on the plane. Buckle in, people. There are sure to be big changes coming to the platform in the year ahead.
Watch for another micro-essay coming your way next Wednesday!
With love from fluxlandia,
Deborah
*Fun fact; I created my first blog with my friend from graduate school Heather Hewett. Newly minted PhDs who focused on women’s literature, we took on pseudonymns: Dorothea Brooks (me) and Jane Austen (her). We titled the blog “Dottie and Jane’s Adventures Out of the Academy.” We were part of a wave of English PhDs leaving academia to pursue writing. Heather eventually went back but continues to write for audiences that span both worlds, and I’ve been straddling worlds ever since. (Read Heather’s latest, Rejecting the Siege Mentality in the Humanities, in the LA Review of Books!)
**Great source for learning about the plane, from mid-air.