PicoBlog

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especially when they deal with subjects of life-or-death significance, for example, the effort to find justice for survivors of the Rwandan genocide, which I wrote about in The Book of Calamities. And the thing about nonfiction is that you can’t make this shit up. Would anyone believe a fictional story about a 60-something artist and college professor (she describes herself as “a demure little person”) buying a wet suit and scuba gear to dive into her basement studio, which was flooded during Superstorm Sandy, to rescue some of her paintings? Trust me, it happened. (The story figures in my forthcoming The Last Artists in New York.)

But some things can’t wait until the next book, or even the next time I sell a story or an essay. That’s part of why I’ve launched this Substack. It’s a place for things that don’t easily fit into the confines of a story. I’m thinking through a response to an Oklahoma judge’s ruling quashing a suit for reparations by three centenarian survivors of the 1921 Tulsa massacre. The question for me is not whether the ruling is bad or reflects the nation’s continually accruing legacy of racism, but what it says about how some of us view history, or even decide what history is, and how implicated we feel in it.

I’m planning conversations with writers, musicians, and visual artists I admire and reflections on works of art that inspire or provoke me. (See this week’s post “Conceived in Liberty”). Of course I’ll share that work with you, with the artists’ permission.

Finally, I visualize this Substack as a meeting place for people who feel disconnected from the prevailing narratives of our society, technology, and culture, starting with myself. It’s a lonely place to be. Most of what I write will explore the intersections between different phenomena, different eras, different fields of knowledge. If you respond to it, it will create an opportunity for me to connect with you, and you with me and with your fellow readers.

I’ll be posting once a week, sometimes more. For the rest of this month, all subscriptions will be free, but starting in August, I’ll publish additional material for paying subscribers, often longer, annotated versions of a weekly post, complete with sources. Founding subscribers will get the backstory of selected stories and essays: what drew me to them, the decisions I made while researching and writing them, the responses I got from my first readers. “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,” Whitman wrote. I only offer the origin of some, and those not really poems at all. But they’re still mine, nonetheless. Have them.

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