Edification – Newsletter #88 – September 19, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
First, some housekeeping/transparency/window-washing: I’m giving Substack a try as a platform for my newsletter, which is why it looks different this week. I’ve been working through Mailchimp until now, and may end up sticking with that, but I’ve had a case of the grass-is-greener for a while, given how everyone and their brother seems to be mailing through Substack with no complaints. It looks nice, the interface is bloggy. I’m a simple gal.
Besides Mailchimp being a little clunky (just for me? a distinct possibility), I got a special celebratory email from the company this week tooting a twelve-billion-dollar party-favor about being acquired by tech behemoth Intuit. Now I’m getting messages saying how great it would be to integrate QuickBooks and TurboTax stuff into my Mailchimp account. And, y’know what? It doesn’t make me feel super. I just have an aversion to the business-world tundra, where everyone is frozen smiling up through the ice sheet – oops, I mean LinkedIn profile pics. I thought I had managed to escape that place.
Anyhow. If for whatever reason you feel weird about having your email imported to this new platform and you’d like to opt out, please do. And/or (if you want to) please let me know?
Let me know if you think I’ve made a dumb decision? I assure you, that does happen.
Okay, a tiny writing update:
I’ve had two of my small garden poems published this week: “Weeding the Garden” in Grand Little Things, and “Bee Grief” in Minnow Literary Magazine.
Other than that, I’ve been writing poetry, reading my second novel draft out loud, and diddling around on the guitars with my husband.
We’ve written a few more songs in the past week, which is exciting and fun and making us more sleep-deprived than we already were. It seems to me that the wonder of art is partly in allowing yourself to be vulnerable. Allowing others in.
The process of songwriting for us has been coming up with a groove and singing a lot of la-la-las; finding the “shape” of a verse (which I think of as the combination of rhythm patterns and melody) is often bound up with discovering meaning. We come up with a riff or chord progression and then ask ourselves a few questions: what other songs does it remind us of? What other bands? What would they do with this? And then, how would that band or artist deal with some topic we’d like to write about? It’s fun.
I suppose I think similarly when I’m writing poems. I like to think about shape, rhythm, melody of the written word. And for me, my favorite poems do surprise me with meaning as the words come out.
I don’t always understand what it’s trying to do until I get it onto the page. (A poem may be “about” weeding the garden but really about the significance of human language and classification of the world, for example. Order both in linguistic meaning-making and in weeding, you know?) It’s fun.
Talk soon,
Edie
Edie, I've been writing on Substack for six months and am quite content. Some day, I might even try to make money at it.