After a few days in January when I was bombarded by ideas in a very non-relaxing way, I started writing a Love Letter to my daughter who was travelling. It was the one idea I decided to act on. I let all the others fly off to fertilise someone else’s mind-garden.
By committing to a monthly letter, I could scrape open some time to do low-stakes, playful writing, record what I’d been doing, and keep a connection open that doesn’t require proximity but doesn’t start cracking from the quick-job-comms of WhatsApp.
When I told a friend about it, she said she also wanted to read the letter and so Love Letter became a public script with its own momentum.
The letter has brought old friends into my inbox and made me new friends. It’s created funny and philosophical conversations in unlikely places with unlikely people. It’s garnered me hugely valuable reading, listening and watching recommendations in exchange for the ones I give out.
My life has become larger through the Love Letter. The heartfelt reactions I get about it seems to have made others’ lives larger too.
And now the Love Letter itself is about to become Extra Large
Because of the demand for more than just one letter a month, I started thinking about how to write and connect more often. I migrated to Substack to manage subscriptions better and have explored how to use this reader-and-writer-friendly platform to run a publication that allows me the freedom to write the kind of things I like to write for the kind of people I like to write for.
How Love Letter is sprouting this month
‘Extra Large’ will arrive in your inbox on the first of every month. It will be a potluck of extra-large life, extra-large learning, extra-large living, extra-large light and extra-large lateral jumps.
My brain is a busy place and though I have a great tolerance for some kinds of repetition, I have a very low tolerance for boredom, so I’m not going to write deep dives into a niche topic. I’m going to remain stoically generalist.
Extra Large is the container for all the everything-of-everything that is about building resistance to what ails me and us and the world.
It’s random and unpredictable. It’s art and music and books and people and craft and movement and creativity and sea and writing and sky and travel and buildings and walking and joy and love and wobbling and fear and poetry and making and connecting and surviving.
Extra Large is like conversation is, and like life is: capacious and full of surprises.
There’s more than just extra though
‘Tracks’ is the other more. Tracks is my new miniature podcast.
‘Miniature’ because each podcast will be about as long as the average track on an album.
I’m a huge fan of podcasts, but most of them are long and require a time commitment or long commutes. I wanted Tracks to exist as a brief pause in the day, a moment to listen to a poem; to tune into the sound of words, instead of processing them only through your eyes.
Tracks will be recordings of me reading poems – some my own, some by others.
Extra Large and Tracks will both be published on Substack. Unlike Love Letters, only paid subscribers will be able to access them.
Chipping in
You can pay for a subscription month-by-month, for a year in advance or, if you’re feeling hearty and full of love, you can become a founder subscriber for more than the annual fee, but at any price that feels right for you.
If you and three friends sign up together, you each get a 15% discount.
Chipping in means you can chat in a safe and closed environment to other people who are imperfectionist generalists. Or just read on an ad-free platform, which is why I like reading on Substack myself.
Why would you pay?
Being a paid subscriber means that you become part of an ongoing collaborative project that works in both directions. You can tell me stuff. Or ask me questions. Or suggest topics for us to think about together, or for me to write about. Sometimes I will send out random ideas for things we can do to keep our minds fresh and firing.
Being a founding subscriber gets you an Extra-Large big fat present too: you get to join me on my January Self-Reset.
This is a month in which we think about the year that’s gone and the year that’s coming. We’ll respond to creative prompts for living alert and attuned and excited to be alive despite life’s insistent rudeness.
You’d be paying much less than usual for at the average month-long course of anything creative. And who doesn’t need a January reset and refocus?
Love Letter stays free
If you’re not inclined to pay, you won’t lose anything. Love Letter will still arrive in your inbox on the 14th of every month.
Extra Large October
The first Extra Large and the first Tracks podcast will both arrive in your inbox this Friday, 1 October 2022.
I think you’ll like them.