a personal note of truthful expression | must reads

non-fiction

Dear Word Lover,

Happy new year, may it be a fruitful one full of health and happiness.

I thought I’d send a personal newsletter and share a little of who I am, how it came to be that I post a newsletter. I am approaching three years on Substack now and other than the fiction and poetry—which is why you subscribe, one assumes, I don’t tend to share much of myself on the platform.

And if honest, I prefer it that way. Social media is over exposure by participation, and having a presence online was never really me. There’s something freeing about moving through the world solely in the human form. Because it requires the presence of self to get to know someone else. Plus posting online takes time and I’d rather commit those hours to the work. As lovers of words, I am sure this resonates with you. The downside of course is that it makes it harder to know a person from another place. So, here I am, introvert and all—sharing some of self with yourself after three good years.

When I was sixteen, I took a bus from a small town to a big city in the UK. I had been reading a biography that had spoken of a book that inspired the main protagonist of the biography to write: On the Road. I had an urge to read this book, so hopped a bus to a bookstore and spent my paper round money on a paperback.

Well, this book means something different to me now than it did then, of course. But the impact at the time was profound. Firstly, it birthed a self-belief I could write myself. The stream of consciousness prose, the realness of the people, the fact that it was literary fiction—all of that resonated with a sixteen-year-old who needed more than their social environment could offer. The words bounced off the page, they weren’t heavy or classic, nor did they belong to the bourgeois. Classics at the time were too much about class for my taste, a certain type. Secondly, that book made me read, read, read. I read everything after finding that book: modernist poets, international literature, the giants, the outsiders—all of it. Bus shelters and park benches were replaced by bookstores and libraries as my go to hang outs. I began to spend blissful time alone with new friends.   

This love of words continued to grow and never really ceased. By my twenties, I was well travelled round Europe, writing regularly (if not always well) and reading a book every few days. A period of life that cumulated with a trip to Paris to meet George Whitman at the Shakespeare and Company Bookstore. A chance to be moved by his journey and sleep among books with the other tumbleweeds. And there was also City Lights Bookstore in San Fran—Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s place, one full of beatnik literature and the beautiful oddities of the world. Ferlinghetti was in the store one day and this felt about as close as I would get to On the Road in real life. Until I visited SF MOMA and read the displayed and original teletype scroll of On the Road.

I was twenty-one when I made it to America, a country full of great immigrant stories that I became quite obsessed by: Baldwin, Fante, Sontag—the list goes on and on. In Paris I had found Verlaine, Baudelaire, Genet, Camus, and many more. At Shakespeare and Co I got stuck into Hemingway, Stein and Lessing—it was an inspiring time to be alive.