Subscriber Writing Roundup
Edition IV
Greetings, my fellow bookworms!
We’re a week late, but better late than never — it’s time for our monthly Subscriber Writing Roundup!
But, before we get stuck into links, last week we featured an excellent essay from Henry Oliver on the writer who made him — Samuel Johnson.
Also, we are recommending:
John Halbrooks’s Personal Canon Formation — A newsletter about how we read and listen to enrich our lives.
Jim Cummings’s All Day Long — Short fiction from a seasoned observer of humans.
Justin McCullough’s The GSD Way — Mindset, toolset, skillset expertise to help modern leaders drive growth, scale, and strategic results through high performing teams that collaborate, trust, and have a bias to act.
Now onto the subscriber writing. What follows are 24 links to great pieces of writing from BTMU subscribers. From explorations of wealth and class to reflections on ambition , there’s something for everyone.
Dive in!
david roberts explores the Death of The Leisure Class and what it means for wealth and class in modern day America.
Zoe Carada meets and greets chaos in a cross-cultural crash course in self-adjustment.
Terry Freedman has been writing the same story each week, but in a completely different style. In this post he wrote it as a soul song:
Kameron Sanzo discusses energy language, "sensitive" female mediums, and the flow of data in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Kevin LaTorre celebrates two years of his newsletter by weighing the ambition of writing against the its temptation to vanity, foremost (of course) by close-reading G.M. Hopkins:
Sheila Dembowski discusses her thoughts on how we can start to heal the world through compassion, one hug at a time...
Ramona Grigg looks at hate—eternal, ever-present hate—and once again attempts to make sense of it.
Author Robin Reardon, a het/cis woman, writes convincingly about gay characters; ask her how.
Latham Turner explores his relationship to food and health and discusses how we could evolve to a more realistic vision of health.
Edward Rooster has written a meditation on Art & Science, that when new strange tools offer spontaneity, they free the artist in everyone.
Mikhail Skoptsov analyzes how the picture's narrative rationalizes superhuman powers as the products of self-belief inside The Matrix, illustrating this concept though the emotional journey of its main protagonist from a skeptic to a believer:
In his project to read and comment upon the 850-odd works and authors of the Western canon as enumerated by Harold Bloom, Joe Steakley discusses King David's detached, almost relativistic morality, and Bible's first hints of a dualistic soteriology, in the the Second Book of Samuel otherwise called, The Second Book of the Kings chapters 15-24.
Suzanne Taylor, in her Evolution Revolution, where she looks to what we-the-people can do to help this hurting world, posted "A digestible 'Green Dragon.' Oh joy!," to introduce readers to "The Universe is a Green Dragon," a book she's bought more than 2,000 copies of, where physicist Brian Swimme turned mystic to teach what we most need to learn, which is that we are interlinked as one humanity, here to help the earth and not to destroy it.
Eric Goebelbecker writes about Walmart setting aside a "workspace" for local police in one of their stores:
John Halbrooks explains why Tolstoy was so wrong about Shakespeare while being so right about so much else:
A real story of the worst possible offense, deliberate and repeated torture, that required decades and determination to find a deep and almost incomprehensible level of forgiveness … what can only be called “extreme forgiveness.” By Joyce Wycoff.
Ann Gauger explores the richness and trials of long-term marriage, and the foibles of communication between any two people.
Hermann J. Diehl writes how dogs could’ve saved thousands of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and after reading, I thought: but of course.
S Peter Davis talks about losing a good writing career, picking himself, and starting again from scratch at 40.
In the second installment of "Talking Back to Walden," Julie Gabrielli discovers that trees love our attention and in turn, teach us how to let go.
Sutee Dee shares the story about how food transformed Lima from just a layover to home for him.
James Ron tells tales from the Sauna.
In a near-future city haunted by its own dark history, evil lurks beneath the surface in Marredbury, a chilling serial anthology that weaves together a tapestry of haunting tales from the past and a contemporary digital nightmare.
Sue Ferrera uses Norah Jones' beautiful rendition of "Humble Me" to serenade her writing as she reaches back in time weaving a story about the ability to heal even late in the game.
Thanks for the shout out! Very kind of you.
Thanks so much for including my work in this awesome list of writers. Can't wait to read the rest!