| This week’s Substack Reads is guest edited by Katherine May, author of the books Wintering, Enchantment, and The Electricity of Every Living Thing and host of the podcast How We Live Now. Katherine writes The Clearing by Katherine May on Substack from her home in Whitstable, England, as an online place to gather and ruminate on how we live. Some of her most popular posts are “How to light the dark months,” “Why magic matters,” and “How to keep a writer’s notebook.” If you enjoy her selections today, be sure to subscribe to her Substack. When it comes to milestones, 100s just beg to be noted. Whether it’s your first 100 subscribers, a 100-year anniversary, 100 words to answer anything, or marking your 100th issue—as we are at Substack Reads this week—a good century deserves a spotlight. We hope to continue to serve up a delightful digest of ideas from the most interesting minds on Substack. So here’s to the next 100! Now, over to Katherine… For a long time, I was more of a reader than a writer on Substack. I found so many newsletters I loved on here, but my own newsletter was a sporadic rush job. I honestly couldn’t imagine ever expending the energy it would take to write a truly interesting newsletter. I suppose I got bitten by the bug in the end. It was partly because I was becoming disenchanted with social media and how much emotional labour it demanded of me as a writer, while never letting me really exercise my craft. But also, I wanted to play in this space where other people were playing. It seemed to me that this format solved a lot of the problems inherent to blogging. I’d spent years pouring the best of my work into a blog, while not even covering my expenses. At least in this place, I got a choice. And I could see how it had created an explosion of brilliant creative work—far more than I could ever manage to read—from people who were otherwise confined to the sidelines. That sheer abundance of wonderful work made picking a handful of posts for Substack Reads truly hard. I’ve spent the past week whittling down a list, while constantly adding new posts. But here are a few excellent reads that have stayed with me lately, posted in the humble acknowledgement that there are many, many more. MEDIA“There are still so many aspects of online life that I don’t understand—and many are invisible to me because my interests don’t trigger the algorithms designed for women of my age. This is mostly a lucky escape—I avoid a lot of dieting content, but it does mean that I often get served ads for livestock markets in the Middle East (I am not even joking). This essay by Lexi Merritt showed me a part of the internet that I don’t see. She explores the phenomenon of the ‘faceless accounts’ on Instagram—people who post using stock images of glamorous women living aesthetically pleasing lives, without ever showing their faces—and how it’s used to sell dreams of financial freedom. These women are known mostly through their body parts (hands, feet, artfully messy hair) and their devotion to selling you courses that will make your life just as Insta-ready. Except the courses only tell you how to sell more courses. And how to create faceless accounts of your own. It’s a masterclass in losing your identity.”—Lexi Merritt in Trying In Public The digital avatar is blonde, then brunette, then blonde and blonde and blonde again. She is almost always thin, conventionally beautiful in an “IYKYK” kind of way: You can almost never see her entire face, but you can see her perfectly blown-out hair, the sliver of skin suggesting a flat stomach, the manicured nails implying expendable income. She is disembodied, separated from her true thoughts or feelings, a stand-in for other people’s income claims. I find myself wanting to scream through the screen, to grab her by the shoulders and ask her: Is this what you really wanted?
Continue reading HISTORY“I think so many of us assume that we have to add maximum value to our Substacks by writing as much as possible, but Will Dowd is one of my absolute favourites, and he only writes once a month. That’s because he only writes about each full moon.For June’s ‘Strawberry Moon,’ he tells the story of Zora Neale Hurston’s relationship with the moon, and how it echoed through her fantastical worldview. I have been a fan of her work for a long time, but I had not realised that she was so ostracised during her lifetime. But she was also cared for by a community who understood her. She was unable to feed herself, said one woman, ‘but she was a writer.’ There’s a wonderful coda to this story—her work was saved for posterity by an ‘archival superhero’ who gets the recognition he deserves at the end of this post.” —Will Dowd in The Lunar Dispatch One evening, behind her cottage, a hired yardman dumped Hurston’s letters, photographs, unpublished manuscripts, and meager belongings into an oil drum and set them ablaze. Driving home from work, a sheriff's deputy happened to see a curl of smoke in the distance. Curiosity prevailed and he decided to investigate. Behind the small, mint-green house, he found the yardman beside the burning barrel, idly watching a dead woman’s possessions turn to ash.
Continue reading FIRST-PERSON“I usually follow Aubrey Hirsch for her comic-book-style explainers, but this essay hit me hard. In it, she explores the very personal impact of gun violence on her life. ‘This one time, a while back, I was robbed at gunpoint with my sister in Louisiana,’ she writes. But there’s so much more to say. I deeply admire the way she draws us into the experience of trauma through the same story, told multiple times. It’s a hoarse-voiced, breathless read, incredibly visceral, unforgettable. She shows how that same act of storytelling—resistant as she is to it at first—is the site of healing. It takes a long time, and a lot of telling, in many different ways.”—Aubrey Hirsch in Graphic Rage with Aubrey Hirsch You’re supposed to tell the story over and over again, because you have to tell it in a certain way. It’s not enough to just say what happened, because after a time you become adept at disassociating the trauma from the words you use to describe the event. By now I’m pretty good at saying “I was once held hostage at gunpoint during an armed home invasion” without even blinking. I can tell you “I’m a survivor of a gun crime.” I can say “I got robbed once, in my sister’s house” and nothing will happen inside my body. It’s like telling you “I’m from Cleveland” or “I played softball” or any other completely neutral fact about my life.
Continue reading LITERATURE“It’s hard not to notice the extent to which writers are obsessed with the lives of other writers. I think that’s probably because we often have to make it up as we go along—to find a method to coax out words that is sustainable and even delightful, often in the face of disapproval and impatience from our families. Elif Shafak’s piece on George Sand—the radical, cross-dressing, free-spirited 18th-century author, whose creativity seemed boundless—revels in the brilliance of this literary ancestor who could teach us so much today. As Gustave Flaubert put it: ‘What a great woman you are, and what a fine man!’”—Elif Shafak in Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak George Sand disagreed. She made both children and books. Over the years, she had multiple romantic affairs, each more shocking than the previous one. A free spirit in every way, she loved doing things that prim and proper ladies were not supposed to even think about, especially not in the 1830s. She did not attend church, she did not like the patriarchy, she did not play along. A bold feminist, a socialist, a sensualist, no wonder she rubbed some people the wrong way.
Continue reading HEALTH & NATURE“Josie George’s Substack is one of my consistent favourites. She has an extraordinary way of finding beauty in the small, the fragile, the mundane, and the insignificant. It is tempting to say that she does this despite living with a chronic illness that places so many constraints on what she can do, but, as this essay shows, that would miss the point. Josie makes a radical call here for a whole-world experience, for everything to count. ‘The trouble is,’ she writes, ‘as soon as you close your heart to one thing—to anything—you close your heart. It doesn’t work in increments.’ Despite being in constant pain, despite the railing frustration of never being able to do all that she yearns to do, Josie is ‘all in.’ That is not just life, but living. This is a life-changing read for anyone who worries they’re not enough.”—Josie George in bimblings Inside my body, pain pulses and pulls like the wind. The terrible, wonderful thing that I’ve learned is that it is made from the same stuff as the foxglove, and the sprawling bleeding heart that grows beside it, and the aphid-covered honeysuckle. It is made from the same stuff as the delighted call of a child a few gardens down the row and the throaty laugh of someone walking past the end of the alley. I am all of this, and all of this is me, and I know to close my heart to some of it—to pick and choose—is to close my heart. There was just as much life in the room with me as I stared at the ceiling, I just rejected most of it. That is a hard, hard knowing. A deep challenge.
Continue reading MYTHOLOGY“I’m a great lover of folklore, but inevitably most of my frame of reference comes from Northern Europe. I’ve been following Mythological Africans for a long time now, and it’s been an incredible education in the lore of the African nations and cultures. In this episode—recorded as a podcast—Helen Nde explores the ways that mental health and neurodivergence are addressed across different traditions. Things look very different outside the Western lens of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In indigenous cultures across the world, she points out, different stories are told to integrate divergent minds into the community. They are not necessarily better or worse, but instead offer different ways to understand ourselves and those around us. I was moved by the story of Odad, the man ‘whose singing voice made even the desert itself hold its breath in awe’ but who also loved the desert more than he loved his fellow humans.”—Helen Nde of Mythological Africans in Mythological Africans Continue listening VISUAL DIARY“Nuptials are on my mind lately: last week, my sister got married, and next week will see my own 25th wedding anniversary. So I loved weaver and illustrator Sarah Swett’s gentle visual diary of attending a wedding. What I noticed most—as I have so often lately—is the way that objects are carried from one wedding to the next. In this case, it was Sarah’s 35-year-old dress, originally made as a trial run for her own wedding gown. It’s a subtle gesture of continuity as traditions are passed down the ages. As I get older, I feel less rebellious against these things; in fact, I begin to like them a lot.”—Sarah C Swett in The Gusset Continue reading ART & SCIENCE“A couple of weeks ago, during one of my live Creative Questions sessions with Elissa Altman, a reader asked what I do for fun. I was somewhat embarrassed at first to admit that that answer is research. There is nothing I like more than chasing down an idea through multiple books, films, and websites, drinking in all the possible permutations until I am sated. That is ultimately how my own books get written; some joyful research hunts acquire a life of their own. This post by Celine Nguyen on research as a leisure activity made me feel seen. ‘It’s not about the formal credentials,’ she writes. ‘It’s fundamentally about play.’ She makes an important link to neurodivergence here: our play does not look like everyone else’s, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I, for one, am grateful for all the playful researchers out there.”— Celine Nguyen in personal canon, recommended by Anna Brones Research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary. In academia, you receive specific training in a narrow field of specialization, which creates certain opportunities for your work and forecloses others. Most notably, it discourages a certain form of dilettantism—peering into an adjacent field that you don’t have the “right” background for, using techniques you aren’t “qualified” to be doing, introducing references and sources that are nontraditional and even looked down upon in your primary field. Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms. Any discipline can offer interesting ideas, tools, techniques.
Continue reading POETRY“Sometimes, during my reading on Substack, I stumble into an unexpected moment of poetry. That is what I found here on Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Utter. It is a call into the blazing practice of life. It also offers an apt note to end on here, a call to ‘Archive. Film. Draw. Paint. Put it out whether I think it’s ready or not. Learn everything from this.’ ”—Yrsa Daley-Ward in the utter Understand time as a divine faculty, not simply a resource to be bartered. Delete those apps from the phone. Send E a long, winding voicenote. Shape the growing story; all this hot stained glass. Understand it is malleable, impressionable. Press lips hard against the windowpane. Marvel at the O shape.
Continue reading When it comes to parties you can rely on me to be one of two things: early or late - never anything in between. With regard to Substack, it appears I’m erring towards the latter and having joined the ranks at a time when everyone seems to be doing it I am, at least, in excellent company… 2 days ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · Emma Gunavardhana Hello friends, As many of you know, a little over two years ago I started my newsletter. I wanted to create a space where I could share my thoughts about life in all its glorious imperfection. (For regular readers, apologies for the longer-than-expected gap between newsletters!😢… 2 days ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Stephanie Wood Hello. I’m A.J. Jacobs, a writer, podcaster, and human guinea pig. Welcome to my new and improved (but still free of charge!) newsletter. Each week, I’ll be sending out an original short essay about my life experiments. My plan is to mix memoir, humor, science, and a dollop of self-help so you can get life-improving tips and wisdom without having to und… 3 days ago · 14 likes · 13 comments · A.J. Jacobs 3 days ago · 30 likes · 16 comments · S.G. Goodman Welcome, welcome! First and foremost, if you found yourself receiving this notice against your will, please feel free to unsubscribe. I have imported my email subscription lists from both Patreon and my personal list to announce that moving forward, I will be combining all aspects and elements here to Substack… 6 days ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Nicki Sun Gelato au citron was born out of my desire to keep up to date with what’s happening in my two countries - the one I am from, Italy, and the one I live in, France. Each week I would love to include a selection of: Main news/current affairs ⚽ Scandalzzzz 🔥… 8 days ago · Annalisa Hi all, Thanks for reading The Mixed Zone. I never take it for granted that work is read and appreciate all who take the time to do so - and to comment. It's fair to assume that you're wondering what this is all about, as it's something new. Well, first of all, let me tell you a few things about myself. I started out in journalism in 1991 in a radio statio… 10 days ago · The Mixed Zone Congratulations to the following writers celebrating publication. Lauren Bravo shares an exclusive extract of her novel Probably Nothing, out next week and available to preorder:  | | Lauren Bravo 9d My new novel, Probably Nothing, is published TWO WEEKS TODAY, which means we are entering the ‘caps lock’ phase of book promotion, I HOPE THAT’S OK. In the spirit of recycling – but also enticing – I’d love to share a little amuse bouche today in the form of an EXCLUSIVE extract. | | |
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Daisy Buchanan is offering a fiction workshop to celebrate her new novel, Pity Party, out in two weeks and available to preorder: Hello Team CCC? How are you? I hope you’re having a wonderful week! I’ve been finishing my next draft of Read Yourself Happy, and getting the first glimpse of the cover - and when it’s ready to go, you’ll be the first to see it! I’ve also been slacking off and having an absolutely lovely time lying in my hammock and reading… 2 days ago · 11 likes · Daisy Buchanan Jolene Handy reminded us that Anne Byrn’s cookbook, Baking in the American South, is out this September and available to preorder: LAST APRIL I DROVE SOUTH TO Glendora, Mississippi, to stand in the kitchen where Maggie Lean Cox once baked chocolate meringue pie for the Buford family. Lee Buford Threadgill whisked together the egg yolks and sugar just as Maggie had—with a fork—in the same green Pyrex bowl, adding cocoa, a little flour, warm milk and butter, and she baked the pie unt… 3 months ago · 44 likes · 57 comments · Anne Byrn Catherine Newman’s new novel Sandwich was published this month. Thanks to Katy O. for letting us know. Here, Catherine shares an excerpt: I have so much to tell you, honestly, what with retrieving our Birdy from her study abroad and barfing all over Valencia taking ill and all of us getting covid on the way home and this glorious green world of spring perfumed with lilacs and lilies of the valley and also the luscious cats and… a month ago · 171 likes · 118 comments · Catherine Newman A roundup of summer reading—books by Substack writers that came out this year or are being published soon:  | | Katherine May 3d There are some amazing suggestions for alternative beach reads in this thread… | | |
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| | Katherine May 22d Four times a year the members of the Clearing’s Retreat tier meet online for three hours of community. It’s a precious, sacred time where we can come together and think a little more deeply than the whirl of the world usually allows. Our next online retreat is tomorrow. If this sounds like something that resonates with you, the option to join us is here: https://katherinemay.substack.com/subscribe We meet at 4pm … | | https://katherinemay.substack.com | |  | | |
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| | Katherine May 22d Hello! I’m very excited to share with you this month’s pick for the True Stories Book Club 📚. This reading guide and video will explain why https://open.substack.com/pub/katherinemay/p/tom-newlands-only-here-only-now?r=6f2w5&utm_medium=ios | |  | | |
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| | Katherine May 1mo We did a thread last months about our most beloved essays and the recommendations have been SO good. I don’t think Brian Doyle is widely known in the UK, but where has he been all my life?! His spiritual essays are raw and gorgeous, but more than that, I share his views on Proust. (The thread is here: https://open.substack.com/pub/katherinemay/p/community-question-what-are-your) | |  | | |
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| | Katherine May 1mo Having @samantha irby on the True Stories Book Club was utterly glorious and hilarious - which will come as no surprise if you’ve read her essays. If you haven’t, you have SUCH a treat awaiting you. Listen, watch or read our conversation here. https://open.substack.com/pub/katherinemay/p/samantha-irby-on-being-a-person?r=6f2w5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true | | |
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 | | Wes Kao 8d Everything takes longer than you think. The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough--the problem is your expectations were never realistic to begin with. Why does this matter? Because every day, we have to estimate how long things will take. Tasks, errands, projects, etc. Especially if you’re doing something new, give yourself more time to figure it out. Build in buffers. Build in time to get into flow… | | |
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 | | soleil 3d it is hot tooday | |  | | |
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 | | Angela Cummings 17d When you have time to stop on the dog walk and watch the grass move for a few minutes, I recommend it. | |  | | |
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 | | Ali LaBelle 3d 8 of 400+ Ellsworth Kelly postcards, made between 1949 and 2005 | |  | | |
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 | | Jenny Ghost 7d neon loneliness | |  | | |
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 | | Georgie St Clair 2d ✍🏻🧑🏫 Fineliner drawing tip: use a pen that is running out to build subtle light and shadow. ❓Did you give it a go? I’d love to see your drawing! | |  | | |
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Inspired by the writers featured in Substack Reads? Writing on your own Substack is just a few clicks away: Start a Substack Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and this week’s edition was curated by Katherine May, who writes The Clearing by Katherine May on Substack. You can also follow Katherine on Instagram, find out information about her podcast and books on her personal website. Substack Reads is edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray. Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments. | |
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