Creating Community
This week, more than ever, I'm excited by our efforts to both organize politically and in our social networks.
Hi new subscribers! I’m so happy so many of you joined the newsletter this week. For those of you who don’t know me but found me on the swiftly sinking deck of the Titanic that is Twitter, I’m Sarah—an author, filmmaker, illustrator and for my day job, I build websites for other artists.
For all the new subscribers, in this newsletter, I’ll talk about my projects, inspirations, what I’m watching and reading, and get into things that are going on in life and in the world. I’m going to talk about hope a lot, but not some cheesy type of Hallmark hope, but real, actual resiliency in the face of a lot of hard things going on in our world. I’ll talk about TV shows I love and video games and book I’m reading. I’m all over the place, really, but I’m happy you’re here and I’ll try not to bore you.
I’ve got a chat feature you can access on the app (and pro tip for those of you subscribing to a billion of these right now, if you download the app you can pause emails and just read updates in the like an old school newsreader. You’re welcome.)
So let’s get down to it.
What am I reading this week?
I just began N.K. Jemisin’s The World We Make—a sequel to The City We Became, in which people become the avatars for the collective soul of their city. In my last newsletter, I linked to an interview she gave in Rolling Stone about the sequel. In this, I wanted to link the short story that inspired this current trilogy, “The City, Born Great” from Tor.com, September 2016. If you haven’t read her short fiction, dive into her collection How Long 'Til Black Future Month? It’s one of my all-time favorite short fiction collections.
Online, I’ve been reading this interview from director George Miller on his new film Three Thousand Years of Longing. This quote, in particular, stood out to me:
“MILLER: Look, there’s no doubt you need curiosity. In fact, it’s probably the first thing you need. It goes to the question of whether it’s worth it to go through the challenge of making any film, and it’s only happened to me a couple times where you lose your curiosity for the film. For the film, and for life in general. You retreat into a smaller life. You must have a relentless curiosity as a filmmaker because you’re riding a very wild beast when you’re making films.
If you look at the history of cinema, it’s always changing. And with more technology, it’s changing much more quickly than ever before. You can never really comprehend it all, but you’ve got to try, and the thing that leads you into it is the curiosity you carry.”
What am I listening to?
I am listening to The Good Life by Sammy Rae and the Friends. I’m a sucker for a good horn section, and my goodness, the jazz, funk, folk, and rock is really hitting now that it’s cold sweater weather. Listening to this EP started out with me appreciating the cozy coffee house vibes and then literally swearing out loud as I drove down a yellow and orange big-leaf maple-lined country backroad, because the horn section and vocalizations were draw dropping in places.
Podcast-wise, I’ve been listening to Ethan Hawke talk about creativity. He’s done a bunch of interviews, as most actors/directors/authors do, but his are really something else. A friend told me if I needed to be recharged, to go in search of them, so I have. In one particular one, he said “(Creativity) is vital. It’s the way we heal each other. In singing our song, in telling our story, in inviting you to say ‘hey listen to me, i’ll listen to you’—we start a dialogue.” - Ethan Hawke TED Talk
What am I watching?
I’m in the midst of launching four websites this week, and pulling a few all-nighters to make my deadlines. I’m rewatching Mythic Quest on Apple+ and Sort Of on HBO Max in anticipation of each of their upcoming seasons. Both are the right blend of funny, sad, and intelligent I want to watch right now. I’ll never get over the Doc + Beans bottle episode in Season 1 of MQ and Sort Of is honestly helping me process all that went on with my Dad in the hospital earlier this year.
New shows include: Andor (Disney+) which, and I know I’m a nerd so this may not hold water with non-nerds, continues to be the most poignant political show that’s been on TV in years. Tony Gilroy is creating a series of films every three episodes between, Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgård, and Andy Serkis, we’re getting incredible performances that defy genre or medium. It’s acting and writing at its finest and I can’t say enough about it.
Film-wise: Vasant and I are going to be watching both Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and The Fablemans this weekend, and I’m ridiculously excited to see both. If you haven’t watched the Steven Spielberg documentary on HBO Max yet, I recommend watching that before or after The Fablemans. It’s a great documentary for creatives, and The Fablemans explores a lot of the childhood Spielberg’s spent a lifetime telling stories around the edges of, and I’m so excited to see him tackle the story in the most direct way yet. Plus, I’m a sucker for movies and books about people falling in love with storytelling.
Not that all my tastes are so elevated, mind you. I do have the new Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie queued up. It’s the season for those movies and I’m ready for it.
What’s inspiring?
Fascists did not take over the country this week, despite all the gerrymandering they did over the last several years. Pundits have been predicting that the GOP would seize power across the board, from federal and local seats to school boards, and that we’d descend (further) into a dystopian hellscape. But because of organizing (primarily done by GenZ and women of color), that did not happen. We’ll most likely keep the Senate and there’s still a narrow road to victory in the House, and even if we lose that, it’ll be by only a few seats as opposed to the 30-40 that was predicted. Abortion rights were protected in blue and red states. Progressives had a great night. Green New Deal GenZ politicians are headed to Congress. Trans politicians were elected around the country. With Fetterman in the Senate, we have someone with a disability representing Americans. 2024 organizing has already begun, and we’re going to need to be on it supporting LGBTQ and minority communities who have to exist under draconian policies in gerrymandered red states over the next few years (there’s a list here of mutual aid you can begin investing in).
Tuesday was encouraging. It wasn’t a fix or a solution, but a sign. It’s a glimmer of hope that we are not doomed to some apocalyptic fate where organizing no longer matters, where progress can no longer happen. This was supposed to be a bloodbath and we didn’t just hold our own. In many places, we took back ground. It should motivate all of us to double and triple down on our efforts to get involved and support the work of activists who make progress their entire lives. In my next newsletter, I’ll follow up on that with a list of places to check out.
In other inspiring news: many of you found me because of threads going around Twitter where we’re trying to preserve community. There’s something lovely about how intense we’ve all been about that this last week. I’m an elder millennial—I’ve been on social media since the feral days of Livejournal. That was my first internet community, and in a lot of ways, one of the reasons I started really writing. I had been writing for myself since I was a kid, but I didn’t know how to externalize that voice until I got on LJ and began exploring writing as a form of connection. My voice evolved, I made good friends (I even introduced my best friend to her future husband through Livejournal), but that all went away when the site was sold to a Russian company. There was little warning, and while the site still technically exists, so much changed overnight and most of the people who had been there just stopped using it. The same thing happened with Tumblr when Yahoo bought it. I suspect Twitter will function that way too—it’ll exist, but something will eventually come along that does all the things we loved about it, but without the drama of a narcissistic billionaire trying to drive it off a cliff so he can renegotiate his debt in bankruptcy proceedings (one of the many theories out there about why he’s make the inane choices this week).
But with every digital migration I’ve been a part of—Livejournal, Myspace, Tumblr ect—friends made on past platforms found each other on new platforms. Through sheer dumb luck, usually, and there is always this joy of discovering that someone you had connected with in the past is also in this new digital space. But throughout all the past migrations, I’ve never seen anything like what’s going on now.
Yes, there’s a fear of how this will impact our careers. We’re writers, freelancers, filmmakers, etc and we’re not sure how we’ll share our work as Twitter goes away. But it’s more than that. We’re all coming off of COVID, and for so many of us, Twitter had become the neighborhood fence that we leaned over, our water cooler that we gathered around, a digital kitchen table where we talked over our frustrations and fears, our victories and dreams. We lifted each other’s wins and commiserated with each other’s failures. And now, a lot of you are here and on other newsletters (and trying to figure out Mastodon) because we’re not being passive about the way we connect and the ways it may or may not exist in the future.
That’s inspiring. After all we went through with COVID, we’re still seeking out and prizing community like this. And when someone builds the next great app, so many of us will be able to find each other there because we’re taking these steps now. I know the loss of Twitter is heartbreaking, but friendships and community has survived digital migration before and with much less organizing than this. I wrote some tips for how to prepare for the loss of the network, on the off chance his royal stonkness deletes it because he doesn’t like the memes.
What am I working on?
I am a little more than halfway through my fantasy novel and my revision of my literary novel is on deck as soon as I am done with that. I’m finishing a few essays and art pieces too, and slating two new film projects as well as a project with Clarion West that I’ll talk about in future letters. That’s not too different from last week’s newsletter, but there will be more updates next week.
This week was all about getting websites launched and out the door. Once I have these sites launched, I’ll be catching up on writing. Next week, I’ll go into the strategies I’ve cobbled together to help me juggle running a business and my creative goals.
Final update: I have a speculative CNF essay coming out in Identity Theory next month, just in time to honor the 9th anniversary of losing my grandmother. I’ll be sharing a few recipes she taught to go along with that essay. It’s an emotional piece and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you all.
I hope you all have a good weekend. More soon.