A Different Kind of Writing

And, yeah, it's been a minute.

Photo by me, from the train station in Pennsylvania, in the black-and-white theme I’ve established and now feel irrevocably bound to.

Hello, friends.

I think I might need to reevaluate my cadence on here a little bit. For accountability: initially I said I’d aim for something approximately every two weeks. It has been more than a month since my previous post. (Though, to my mixed delight and shame, the subscriber ticker has continued to go up despite my absence.)

My reasons are good, I swear—March was full of work-related travel. I was in Vancouver for a couple events at UBC, including a class visit where I got to walk into the room and see, across the entire wall-length whiteboard, notes that the students had taken on my book. Then, I was in Selinsgrove, PA to give the annual lecture for Susquehanna University’s Publishing and Editing program, where I got to meet a cohort of sharp, savvy undergraduates who are thinking critically about the future of publishing in ways I found very inspiring—and also very humbling, because I had no sense of what “the publishing industry” was when I was in undergrad (and, let’s be real, I sometimes still don’t). Finally, I think I also needed a breather from being online in the wake of the weird parasocial relationships some folks develop with you when news about your professional life breaks in the trades. Boundaries, people.

But I’m back, and I’m gonna aim for semi-regularity without committing to too much (because committing to too much has also been a throughline of the past month and a bit). Some okay stuff has even happened since then! A former colleague of mine from The Walrus, where I was on staff between 2018–2021, reached out letting me know that the website was bringing on contributing writers. Along with the brilliant Michelle Cyca, I’ve since come on board. Over the next six months, I’ll be contributing occasional pieces on (mostly) culture, publishing, arts, tech, books, and, really, whatever else tickles my fancy. My first piece was published this week—it’s a look at how AI is encroaching on the world of voice acting, a field I’ve worked in for more than twenty years. My next piece is about the Internet Archive lawsuit; stay tuned.

It’s a different kind of writing from any I’ve done before—swifter, nimbler, more responsive to the news cycle. (From any, I guess, except this newsletter.) It feels like a new intellectual challenge to balance that fleet-footedness with factual density and argumentation, and all of that in like 1200 words max. I appreciate the chance to experiment, and I’m grateful too that the experimentation is mutual, as this isn’t something The Walrus has necessarily done before either and there’s something freeing in the freshness of the exercise.

That’s mostly it for now; I’ll keep this one short. There’s just one other thing I wanted to mention: My friend and mentor Nicole Chung released a stunning new memoir, A Living Remedy, which is one of the most emotionally intelligent books I’ve ever read; smart and sensitive and generous in its portrait of grief while simultaneously pulling no punches in its indictment of how our systems—namely capitalism and health care—fail us. She and I will be in conversation about her book for a virtual event with the Mark Twain House; details and registration for our event are here, and here’s a link to Nicole’s full tour calendar.

Oh, also—my favorite thing that happened over the past month was being in conversation with students. It’s something I am seeking more opportunities to do. If you’re looking for someone to visit your writing/literature/humanities/etc. classroom, drop me a line.