@nonabiding @change
When I started this Substack I imagined it as a place for conversation and exchange — about books, about reading, about film, about art. I imagined conversations developing. I imagined I would find time and energy for engaging here, for playing, for interacting. I imagined I wouldn’t want to use the site for promoting my own work, that sort of promoting I have always been not very good at anyhow, and mostly hate to do.
But none of this really came to pass.
I was happy to write a bit from conversations with my friend Deborah Attwood Morris about her paintings (and please see those now old posts if you haven’t already). But we never did get around to finishing those conversations, and I never got around to writing about the books I was reading and would have liked to write about (most especially Gabriel Blackwell’s brilliant Doom Town).
Instead, I have only occasionally posted at all, and then often just a link to a new review or a repost of an old one. Conversation, minimal.
As a user of Substack I am often overwhelmed by the amount of online content here, and find myself now unsubscribing from perfectly lovely accounts simply because I can’t keep up and don’t want to encounter encouragements to read all that I’m not keeping up with in my inbox every day.
So I’m changing direction and from now on will use
only as a newsletter, a place to share information about publications, events, readings, and reviews of my work. It will be very quiet here, for the most part.
To mark the shift I’ve been sharing — and this, too, belatedly — a few photos from a recent reading at the Castle Shannon library —
— with great appreciation to Barbara Edelman, Sheila Squillante, and Varun Ravindran for joining me there on a hot Saturday afternoon at the tail end of Pittsburgh’s eight-day heat wave —
… and with special gratitude to Karen Lizon for inviting us and organizing.
Meanwhile … available for pre-order from great weather for MEDIA …
And that’s all the news there is from me for now.
