Long thread 🧵 alert! Ruth Gaskovski recently wrote an essential essay on the relationship between trust and creativity, and how establishing that trust is more vital than it’s ever been. As writers and artists, we must show our work in order to prove its human foundation. Work that begins in the analogue world is inherently more trustworthy.

In that spirit, here’s what I’ve been doing today: distilling an entire issue of Sidetracked magazine down into a few core ideas that will become the issue’s blurb. I’ve been working on the issue for months, and therefore am intensely familiar with every single story. But writing the blurb still requires further deep thought.

I do this three times a year. It isn't easy, even though the final result is only a few hundred words. It always begins on paper because thinking on paper is better thinking. I'm sure if I wanted to outsource this work to AI I could do so with much less effort, crunching the stories into data and using the machine to look for patterns. But the result would be entirely dead, all meaning crushed out of it, and therefore devoid of value.

Meaning isn't about finding patterns or making things easier. It's about presence, connection, essence, and – yes – work, even if the only person who actually notices that work is you.

Will the reader know the difference? Maybe, maybe not. But I know the difference, and I pour a huge amount of myself into the magazine. As do everyone in our team and all our contributors. And the reader does notice that.

The whole point of a magazine like Sidetracked is to communicate analogue experience (adventure is inherently analogue) between writer/photographer and reader. We are in the business of translating and packaging human meaning, and that depends fundamentally on trust. For this reason I also believe it’s highly resistant to automation. Remove the humanity from this process and trust evaporates. In other words, writers/photographers trust us to treat their work with the care and respect it deserves, and readers trust us to bring them the stories that truly matter.

One of the themes that has bubbled to the surface of Sidetracked Volume 33 is ‘care over ambition’ (quote from a story by Danni Pollock). That's certainly not a coincidence. Proof of work is, to me, proof of care.

So, writers and photographers and artists – show your work!