Nurturing counterpoints in 2024 & Substack as mini-press
my longing for 'art' | staying 'Peak You' | the affordances of being your own indie publisher
In 2024, I want to lean into the art within my work. It’s not easy to define what I mean by this - after all what is art? - but for me it’s a feeling. A knowing. Or perhaps a core intention. There is something for me about art that is integrity. And mission. When I think of art, I feel enlarged, engulfed, a bit sick, envious of those who stay true to it. I want it because, to me at least, it represents truth*. And I always want truth. I am always trying to stay close to some sort of veracity in (and about) my work.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently as the release of Weathering approaches, bringing both excitement and fear. Almost all of what may lie ahead is fun to imagine, but the spectre of public opinion (and introvert burn-out) frightens me. Penguin gave this a long lead time, which is great, but it’s also a long time to ruminate. We live in violent and brutal times it would seem, and this makes angry critics of us all. There is very little in my book that is controversial (to my eyes) but still I worry about the soft parts of me that aren’t designed for review. I mean, who is?
When your book is out on submission, you steel yourself for the incoming rejections, but nothing really prepares you for socially-designated taste-makers saying they don’t connect with your voice, or don’t care about the subject, or don’t think it has a place ‘in the market’. You say all the right things about this feedback, but it also feels personal. You go from being a person who couldn’t care less about ‘the market’ or what a stranger on a different continent thinks, to someone that desperately wants to win back favour. I know, I have been there. Wobbling, oscillating.
But as soon as you start going down the route of pleasing others, tricky feelings emerge, and things seem to drift from your core. The dubious metaphor that arises for me here is stringy cheese. When you try to court and pursue the commercial favour of one and all, it’s like you become that bendy yellow stuff that you can tear strings from until you are but a mere tasteless thread in the middle.
And this starts to creep into all sorts of stuff. First you are trying to satisfy the desire of home publishers, then US publishers, Broadsheets, Amazon reviewers. Then it’s not only your book but you’re trying to make your Substack demonstrate ‘consistent value’, then you are trying to maintain followers, neutralising the rest of your work so that it’s easy, palatable and pleasing for all. You stop saying what you care about because it might offend. And before you know it, you become a bit bland. You realise you’re really saying nothing at all. You have wandered from yourself and feel it. It starts with wanting to write a book, and it ends with you wanting to hide in a hole of your own digging.
Suffice to say, I don’t want this for me!
I want to write books I like. I want to do work I am pleased with. Anything else is a race to a thankless bottom. I have my audiobook producer, James, to thank for pulling me out of a gyre last week, when I had a sudden attack of the fears around people hearing my silly voice, hating it, and leaving me reviews to say that I am completely the wrong voice for my own work. His rejoinder: please yourself. The alternative is impossible.
I suppose until I started writing this post, I worried that the desire for more artistic endeavour in my life was simply a contrary spanner that conjured from nowhere I was throwing back into the works. That maybe it was a way of running away and protecting myself (in ways too complicated to elaborate here, but something like this: “From now one I will bury myself in art by myself”).
But then I remembered that I always do this. I am always nurturing the counterpoints. Always pre-empting a sort of ‘wander’ that can happen when one line of attention (for example, the publishing trade and its concomitant requirement for PR) threatens to take you away from other important things. Nurturing the counterpoints is about rebalancing my priorities, restoring nuance into my practices, and maintaining the interdisciplinary core of my work, which I cherish. Checks and balances. Moves and countermoves.
What I really want in 2024, is to keep moving with my own artistic imperative. That may sound incredibly wanky, but it’s true. Because art is important. It has its own vigour that speaks uniquely in a world of fake news, propaganda and polarity. It prevents a nefarious scientism from taking over, and prevents commercialism from getting its claws too deeply into your psyche and soul. It holds you accountable to what you really believe. It tests whether you really care at all, because it takes time and effort. And can be entirely thankless (if you can maintain anything without thanks then you are on to something).
I am ending the year then, committing to not wandering away from myself in 2024.
What does this look like? Well, besides self-compassion and regular pep-talks, in early January with my friend and collaborator Rob St John, we will be submitting an application for an Arts Council Grant to develop an idea we began at the end of Weathering; for a sound-work installation and therapeutic, contemplative ‘album’ conceived around the idea of learning to listen better to ourselves, each other and the landscape. It’s cultural, ecological and quietly political. Intensely local, but with a globally-relevant output. I won’t say too much because I don’t want to jinx it, but I am hoping to all the small gods of hope, that we’ll be successful in our application.
Right now, this project is Peak Me. Outside of therapy, and alongside my writing mentoring and movement work, it’s how I want to be showing up. When I consider all the threads of work I want to work on next year, this gives one of the loudest resonances through my whole body; a visceral longing. I really want this. If we don’t get it, I have at least learnt something through the ache.
A couple of weekends ago, I visited Re/Sisters at the Barbican, which was the most inspiring exhibition I have visited in a long time. Offering a global lens on the intersection of gender and ecology, this was a showcase of activism and art at its most planetary and resistive. All of it brought vitalisation to my heavy body that has been missing travel so much. Walking the halls slack-jawed, I felt embryonic urges as I gazed on large format photos of open-cast mines mirroring the openings of the human body, or on photos of naked women lying on rocks, or watching a video on the rights of ice to be cold. Oh, the stirrings to be back once more in the mud of production. By embryonic I mean, I could see my own small work in emergence. My own mutterings. My own dipping-toe. Their work was not so far from mine in intention, only they have confidence in their conviction, and I’m still working on that.
What counterpoints in your life might you want or need to nurture next year? Where are you wandering from yourself, and what might help you return? I would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.
Last week, I declared that December on Breccia would have a focus on writing-related stuff, so moving from the abstract to the concrete, ‘not wandering from myself’, also means remembering that Substack is my mini-press, and I am its small indie publisher.
Let’s unpack this in a way that might be helpful to readers who want a Substack but don’t know where to begin, or who keep stopping and starting for various reasons.
First up, it has taken me 18 months to realise that this is not a newsletter. I mean, who has that much news? Once you have binned that idea, you can get a lot more creative.
Secondly, It doesn’t need to deliver updates on your various successes (though it might occasionally if this is important to you) or have the clarity and concision that one expert topic provides, providing the reader with a consistency and ‘value offer’ (vomit) that is unfathomable for the vast majority of us who are in a constant cycle of figuring things out.
Substack is now full of ouroboros-style posts on ‘how to be successful on Substack’ (it’s no different to any other platform in that regard-and these posts pull in the crowds) but truthfully I feel this is a shame. Because what Substack provides so well is a space to be entirely yourself. And while this may ‘only’ lead to slow, organic growth, you will at least ensure the people who come along with you are there for you. They are not there in expectation you will make them rich in some way or another.
OK, what else does viewing Substack as a mini-press and yourself as a small, indie publisher, afford you?
It means you can publish whatever on earth you want, braiding together all of your preoccupations and passions. Or some of them. Or an ever-changing mix. Whatever! Be weird. Because this is your magazine space; your zine. You don’t have to stick to one thing. You don’t need to apologise for not sticking to one thing. You are free to revel in your niche. I called my Substack Breccia for a reason. It is a journal of fragments. I intend to keep taking it that way. It’s not nearly as idiosyncratic as it could and should be, yet.
ACTION
To begin list all the things you care about. Start populating that list with specific threads and topics, let your body response show you which things you really care about the most. Make this wild-flower mix the basis of your new online zine. There is a lot that’s weird about you and you are going to tell people about it.
Put putting everything into sections from the outset. This helped me see clearly what my threads are, which I was nurturing and which I wasn’t. I wouldn’t say I have achieved my vision for breccia yet (far from it - give me another year!) but I am on my way. Ordering your weirdness is a fine pursuit.
You are liberated from the pressure to deliver what will give most direct and blunt value to those seeking what you don’t want to provide. I have always been much clearer on what Breccia isn’t, than what it is. I have resisted weekly advice on therapy, embodiment, outdoor practice etc not because those things don’t matter to me hugely (they do!) but because I share that work in other ways. This would have been an easy way to grow my subscriber list (I should think it would have been great for getting paid) but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I can’t put it more simply than that. I know that’s disappointing to some people (they have told me as much) but I can’t live sustainably by satisfying the needs of others as the core ethic. We all need spaces to nurture our own stuff. I am in service to something bigger. Besides, don’t be fooled into thinking that ‘value’ has any particular look or feel. There are plenty of us who like a long-form ramble with no clear end point. Value for me is finding even one line of a gem in an essay. I am prepared to work for it.
ACTION:
Make a list of things you don’t want to do, and don’t do them. Simple. Powerful.
When you decide to be a small, indie press you prioritise niche pleasures and fascinations over mass appeal. It may turn out that loads of people love your niche and jump on board. They may do that because you already have a name for yourself elsewhere. But for most, this will mean you grow more modestly, and it means you may not make enough for a full-time income. Reading Substack notes you would be forgiven for thinking that making a salary from Substack was the only goal (let’s not forget Substack is still a platform with their own income in mind) but this is not the only way. Perhaps you don’t want to charge. Perhaps you will let people support you but offer everyone the same thing. Perhaps you will seek to make something more like ‘pocket money’ from your press that will contribute to your rent money, or be put away into savings for future things. It doesn’t matter what you choose, because it’s what is right for you. At the moment, I see a lot of writers with huge audiences taking the paywall off their Substacks because they feel too much pressure to write for maintenance of income. They feel the paid imperative is taking them in the wrong direction, creatively. I get it. We could all spare ourselves from this if paid subscription was not the first thought, but perhaps the third, fourth or fifth.
ACTION
Decide everything else above and then decide about pay structure. Dare to make it your final consideration, and see what becomes your first instead.
You can take risks. If you box yourself into one thing, you are encumbered with it forever and this leaves less space for exploration and experimentation. See above point. The agility in a small press is that you will probably have followers and readers that like you and therefore extend a patience as you work things out, and are as interested in your experimenting as they are in your output. I have no evidence of this, but I suspect a large chunk of people who kindly and generously stay with me in all aspects of my work, is because they are as interested in my process as anything else. This means I can try things, abandon things, cast doubt, be random. When people leave - which they do - it’s really fine. This is the risk you took. But risk-taking is the life blood of, well, life! When we take risks we expand ourselves and improve our craft, whatever the craft is. Let your little press be a place for you to learn. Be fugitive.
ACTION:
What would be edgy for you to explore in a Substack. Would it be a topic, a new area of interest, or a format? Make a list of ‘edges’ to explore and then explore them right there in your new indie press. Don’t be held captive.
You can be lead by joy. It doesn’t matter if the subject matter or serious or silly. If it’s niche or mainstream. It doesn’t matter if you are weird or not. Hey, it doesn’t even matter if you love a 5 point plan. (And look! I just wrote one! Oh, fickle me.) If it brings you joy then do it. Joy is not superfluous, it is what makes things sustainable. It is what regulates the nervous system in this brutal and violent world I already mentioned. It is just a really nice feeling to nurture. Perhaps it’s your counterpoint for 2024. Being a small, indie publisher of a micro-press means you can be lead by putting ideas into words that bring you joy. Not main-line. Not bottom-line. Not party-line. Fill your press with words that you can’t wait to wake up and write. Make this an ethic for everything that you possible can. Writing is but an expression of the live you are living.
ACTION:
In this moment of your life, today, what brings you joy to spend time with and talk about. If you sit down to write it and it doesn’t, then step away. Alternatively, connect with the joy that lives somewhere in you, even if the thing you want to write isn’t inherently joyful. Joy is a process, you can conjure it. It’s related to gratitude more than it is happiness. It is an inflection of the heart’s orientation. It beats alongside suffering and sadness too. Get to it all.
*perhaps art also rises above truth into some other space? I don’t know. I am wary of expanding into footnotes though ;)
I think I'm on the fourth reading of this post. It's important - and also lush and delicious. I'm walking toward something - what, I don't know exactly - that won't be pushed or prodded by algorithm or something else outside of myself. An anthropological dig to the heart of me. I am thankful I found you here.
I love everything about this Ruth. It spoke to me in all the right ways, not wandering away from myself in 2024, exploring edges, and being lead by joy. You wrote this for me, it feels like. Thank you for all you do.