Newsletters Are the New Blogging

I’m pretty sure I read this somewhere else already, but it seems like newsletters have kept some of the intimacy that blogging lost when it died or at least became strangled. I don’t subscribe to a lot of newsletters, finding most of them to be clutter, but here are three I like: Maud Newton’s, Sean Bonner’s, and California Sun. When I read each one of them, I feel that sweet sense of connection that I used to feel reading blogs when blogs were a thing. Maud doesn’t send hers a lot, but they’re worth it. In her last one, she wrote about going to Yaddo and concluded: “Whatever you create or most like to do, in 2019 I wish you stillness to do it in the way that’s most satisfying to you.” Who’s wished stillness for you lately? Sean’s is always an eclectic, punkish mix, starting off with a bunch of weird images, and in a recent one he talked about a health thing, and life in Japan v. life in LA, and “‘being a woman in blockchain.’” California Sun is a bit different—one could say commercial—and it’s, you know, about California, so maybe there’s no point in reading it if you’re from some state that just wants to be California—because, let’s face it, what state doesn’t—or maybe there is. Anyway, being a Californian (born and bred, not imported), it is maybe a thing of love or a daily dose of obsession. To read it is to remember what it is to like someone or something that’s better than yourself.

Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."