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This week’s issue of Substack Reads is guest edited by , the singer and songwriter of the band The Decemberists and an author of picture books, children’s books, and novels. Last week, The Decemberists released their ninth album, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again. Colin writes on Substack, and some of his more popular posts include “Kill Your Shuffle Button” and “I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song.” If you are into his selections here, do go ahead and subscribe to his publication.

I’ve been contributing to this platform for just over two years now; I write a thing called The Machine Shop. It’s mostly about my creative life, about the process of making work (I write songs and play in a band and I write books). My relationship to the platform, to Substack, tends to be a little one-sided—but this has been the case with me and other social media platforms in the past. I broadcast more than I consume. Because of this, I occasionally entertain the notion that I’m doing it wrong. So when the benevolent overlords at Substack came to me and suggested that I put together a digest of favorite Substack posts, I saw this as an opportunity to right my wrong. Here are a bunch of things that I’ve loved over the past little bit—and a couple things that the community has suggested that I’ve also dug.

ART

“Full disclosure: I am married to the person who wrote this post. But I like to think that, first and foremost, I am a fan of Carson’s work. I also think she’s a great writer and observer-of-life. She was recently called upon to help design and install a mural on the wall of the gym at our kid’s school. I was the one who volunteered her. I tend to volunteer her for a lot of stuff, much to her chagrin. She worked with fellow school-parent Betsy Walton (who also has a Substack) and they really did a fantastic job. This post is a meditation on the act of creating communal art but also a how-to guide should you be so inspired to volunteer (or volunteer someone else) to make a mural on your kids’ school gym wall”

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I’m especially reluctant when Colin is gone. I rely on that time alone making art to preserve my precarious mental health as I parent two kids on my own and attempt to meet deadlines. But over this month, for the first time in eighteen years, I began to question this. Is the strict way I guard my time and space a vestige of my earlier days, when my kids were little? It’s hard to be an artist and the mother of babies. Two powerful forces pull you in two opposite directions every day. It was really hard when I had to do it alone. How have those early parenting years shaped the way that I move through the world today? And do they still have to?

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FIELD RECORDING

“Chad is the owner and operator of Hush Records, the Portland, Oregon–based record label that put out The Decemberists’ first record, Castaways and Cutouts. He’s an old friend and confidant. He started this Substack last year as a reliquary for his found-sound/ambient music creations that he makes while on various hikes around the Portland area. It’s as much a music post as it is a trail guide. The music is great—quiet, meditative instrumental stuff—underpinned by the sound of Chad’s own feet as he marches along the trail, while the copy in the post gives you a short history of the region of the hike and the flora and fauna you might encounter along the way. Ideally, I suppose, you’d listen to the music while on a Larch Mountain hike of your own, which would be way meta”

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It was an interesting confluence of events that drew me out to Larch Mountain on Oct. 31, 2023. It was the last day to drive the road up there before it closed for the season. Also, I was peripherally aware that Grey-crowned Rosy Finches were spotted in the area; a rarity for the county. Mind you, I’d never heard of Grey-crowned Rosy Finches until a couple days prior, and I’m not usually a rare-bird chaser, but the time and space opened up, so I drove up there.

It was a beautiful partly cloudy day. There were patches of snow on the ground; a crunch crunch underfoot. So quiet!

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THE CRAFT OF WRITING

“Emily is one of my favorite Portland writers. She’s a novelist and a writer of middle-grade books; she also co-writes and ghost writes middle-grade novels for James Patterson (which I find super-fascinating on its own). She has this Substack, Good Ideas, which I read pretty religiously. She treats Good Ideas as a kind of weekly creative writing seminar, serving up writing exercises and prompts; she also writes these lovely observations about the writing life that I find really illuminating. I think Substack is chockablock with people aspiring to be an online seminar coach; Emily’s one of the very best at that stuff. Here she is thinking about the labor of writing, the banality of the labor of writing, as told by Philip Roth and Zadie Smith. Emily is refreshingly candid and self-effacing as a seminar leader— something I appreciate” 

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If we had, say, 18% of Roth’s focus and dedication, we’d wind up with five books. Five! (I did the math.) Even with 5% of his focus, we’re still putting out a book and a half, which is a lot better than a kick in the pants.

Dumb as it is, this comforts me somehow. You don’t have to climb mountains; the foothills turn out to be quite lovely.

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PLAYLIST

“Substack seems to be, first and foremost, a medium for writing. Prose writing—usually nonfiction. So it’s always nice to see someone doing something different with their feed. KLOF (formerly Folk Radio) has been using its Substack as a way to disseminate its superb mixtapes and playlists. I’ve learned about most of the music I’ve loved over the past couple years from the fine people at this publication. The mixes skew mainly toward folk music—and folk music from the British Isles in particular—but Alex Gallacher, who built this playlist, clearly has a healthy record collection and an unwavering curiosity about all kinds of music. Listen in and you’ll find yourself discovering some new young thing interpreting a 19th-century Child Ballad alongside some fusty old ’60s psych-folk weirdo singing about stone circles and tarot cards. Fertile stuff!”

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Flowery Noontide is a psych-folk playlist (nearly five hours) that primarily explores the underground folk scene of the past, although there are few modern offerings as well. It’s a very chilled playlist … Enjoy.

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CARTOON

“Liana’s a cartoonist and graphic novelist. She shows up in The New Yorker pretty regularly. She posts these weekly cartoons on her Substack that are so good—they appear to be detritus from her sketchbook, the sort of thing you might imagine she jots off in the span of a moment. I actually don’t know this—she might slave over these things for hours and hours. Their apparent spontaneity, though, just adds to the layers of brilliance inside them. Sometimes they’re cutting, sometimes insightful, sometimes just plain funny. But all of her comics offer an unapologetic insight into the more difficult aspects of human relationships, both incidental and intimate. Her stuff seems so uncensored, so frank in its assessment of her own day-to-day interactions, I’m kind of glad I’m not one of her close friends”

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Some cartoons, mostly about meeting for coffee (I️ would never presume to make a cartoon about the substance of coffee, which is holy and mysterious and often tastes, to me, like a mustache looks).

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HISTORY

“If you’re not reading Sam Kriss on Substack, I don’t know what you’re even doing here. I discovered Sam pretty randomly, back when Substack first introduced Notes. A lot of people were dipping in their toes, trying to assess whether or not Notes would be the Twitter analog we’d all been hoping for. In the midst of that, Sam equated Twitter culture and the desire to re-create it somewhere else to the evolutionary phenomenon of carcinization. I was hooked. This post, ostensibly about the origin of Santa Claus, is a perfect example of his work. It’s long, discursive, bitingly funny, and somehow very informative. I loved this post so much, I read it aloud to the whole family. You might do the same now if you have a willing audience, or—better yet—save it for December and make it part of your holiday tradition. Let’s put Bakbakwalanooksiwae back in Christmas”

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Maybe Santa possesses human bodies, blotting out their weaker brain waves with his own. Or maybe he can build a body for himself. Maybe there are nights near the solstice when the solar wind roars against Santa’s planet-size face, dense with charged particles, heavy ions blasted out of the burning Sun and channelled through the eddies of the magnetosphere to coagulate: nights when he can take his gruesome shape to float through the world above. Maybe he will visit your house tonight, because you have spent your entire life in his.

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CULTURE

“Last spring, in the midst of all the prep for my band’s new album and upcoming tour, Carson and I spent our idle evenings (or at least one a week) watching the new TV adaptation of Shogun. I remember when the first adaptation of James Clavell’s novel came out in the early ’80s, all the adults in my life being all abuzz about it. I think us kids were all abuzz about it as well, even though we were not allowed to watch it. There was some hushed talk among my friends about someone being boiled alive that stuck with me into adulthood like a barbed hook in my psyche. In this new adaptation, I was half-expecting some kind of modern-day melodrama; I was surprised to find that it was very thoughtfully done. I appreciated its sometimes snail-like pace, its largely Japanese dialogue, and its apparent attention to detail. I assumed that I’d only picked up a fraction of that detail and I was not wrong in that—Hiroko Yoda’s Substack here shines some light on some of the detail that I, a 21st-century American, would not have picked up in a million years. And yes, someone does get boiled alive”

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I’ve seen Japanese katana used in so many Hollywood movies. Actors are often seen carrying them on their backs, or swishing them around casually, as if dancing or waving a magic wand. I’m no swordswoman, but these scenes always struck me as “off.” Swords are never treated lightly in Japan—they’re seen as divine tools made for a singular purpose: taking of life. There’s even a saying that “a good sword is one that has never been drawn.” It’s good to see an American production get it right. Hiromatsu radiates a “killer aura” without ever pulling his sword from its scabbard. 

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Welcoming

Congratulations to the following writer celebrating publication. 

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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 of . 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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