Subscriber Writing Roundup

Edition III

Oct 02, 2023

Greetings, my fellow bookworms!

Today is the first Monday of October, which means it’s time for our monthly Subscriber Writing Roundup!

But, before we get stuck into the links, last week we featured a stunning essay from

on Umberto Eco’s The Name of Rose — which, judging from the comments, was one of the favourite guest posts we’ve hosted so far. We also featured a genre-colliding short story from

Terry Freedman

- a detective noir twist on the Cinderella fairytale.

This week we are recommending:

Booklove
by
Benjamin Day
— a newsletter about stories.
The Bacon Beacon by Laurel Cummings
by
Laurel 🥓 Cummings
— a great newsletter from a network ex-pat writing about Television & Comedy.
Before I forget
by
James Ron
— James’ stories from adventures, misadventures, and memories. Some of which he makes up!

Now onto the subscriber writing. What follows are 31 links to great pieces of writing from BTMU subscribers. From reflections on love and loss to what we can learn from a video game, from a vindictive toaster to elegiac poetry, there’s something for everyone.

Dive in!

Long Life

Magical Words: Inspiration

Welcome to Magical Words, where I dig into the metaphors buried in everyday language. Inspiration Walking from the beach with a foam board balanced on my head, I couldn’t stop chattering, dancing, wet and barefooted like…

a year ago · 15 likes · 16 comments · Miles Kim

Miles Kim

meditates on the meaning of "Inspiration" through scenes from nature, art, and life.

Sparks from Culture by David Roberts

We Don’t Mean To But We Do: What Parents Say and What Children Hear

Fifty years ago, my parents and I were at my grandparents’ home on the New Jersey shore, near the golf club. My grandparent’s house was made of stone, with many rooms mysterious to my ten year old mind, including a “music” room with instruments on its walls. We were in the den that had giant gumdrops in candy dishes with perilously heavy covers…

a year ago · 41 likes · 32 comments · david roberts

david roberts

shares stories of parental comments that misfire.

Talking to Myself

Who are you no longer willing to be?

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more. - Carl Jung I have an acquaintance, Seb, who is an astro…

a year ago · 21 likes · 35 comments · Caroline

Caroline shares a reflection on who she’s no longer willing to be.

Practice Space

No. 21 - YOU DIED. So What?

Hey all. You might have seen my note about taking a break from Substack. I’m technically still on that break, but the keyboard beckoned me back quicker than expected. This is the essay I was supposed to publish last week, when a wave of nausea and self-doubt hit me. I’d been working hard on it for the better part of two weeks, feeling more dissatisfied wi…

a year ago · 21 likes · 25 comments · Andrei Atanasov

Andrei Atanasov

shares a valuable lesson he learned while getting his butt kicked playing Dark Souls.

June's Writing

It's just a headache, come on...

What do Miguel de Cervantes, Oliver Sacks, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzche, Joan Didion and Hilary Mantel have in common? Great writers? Interesting people? Curiosity? All of these and more, but the shared experience I’m referring to is that they all operated under the shadow of migraine headaches. It is somewhat comforting to know that in headache …

a year ago · 21 likes · 23 comments · June Girvin

June Girvin

discusses the reality of migraine and wonders why some people trivialise it.

Spelling Letters with Ben Monaco

Book Breakdown: Where The Crawdads Sing

I read rather often. This is not to boast, as I know there are those that can, and do double that in 6 months. It’s just to tell you that there is truly nothing quite like Delia Owens’ Where The Crawdads Sing. In her first fiction novel, her prose is poetic and filled with harmonies of nature. Species of insects and mammals most people never see come to…

a year ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Ben Monaco

Ben Monaco

breaks down the first chapter of Where The Crawdads Sing and explores the author's beautiful prose.

Lindsey Writes Books

If Walls Could Talk

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher." -Abraham Lincoln…

2 years ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · lindsey lamar

lindsey lamar

writes a fiction autobiography from the perspective of the historical Ford's Theatre building.

A Stylist Submits

The Forever-Reformation

Has discussion of personal progress always been so much sturm und drang? It clouds the digital air wherever two or more writers gather in its name, clotted with the terms consistency, subscribers, iterate, revenue, niche, and that so-wrongly-purloined-me…

a year ago · 9 likes · 6 comments · Kevin LaTorre

Kevin LaTorre

writes about the pursuit of literary and Christian perfection—with a digression into the novelist Eugene Volodazkin—to find only that it is endless and regenerating.

Personal Canon Formation

Poetry Will Change You

Dear reader, when last we left you (in last Wednesday’s post), Socrates was about to ostracize the poor poets from all good company in Book X of Plato’s Republic. Socrates, however, concluded by inviting reasoned arguments for the value of poetry, and we have j…

a year ago · 9 likes · 19 comments · John Halbrooks

John Halbrooks

thinks that the best arguments for the importance of poetry are over two thousand years old.

The Uses of Art

Shivering Memory

Dear Friends, I am continuing to think through the relation of experience and memory. How is it that what we see, feel, taste eventually becomes a deep part of us? Most of what we experience settles below consciousness, becoming something like a flavor that infuses the whole mixture of our lives. Art wor…

a year ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Sal Randolph

Sal Randolph

considers the slow paintings of new.shiver and how the experience of art transmutes into memory.

Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

Experiments in Style: Another point of view

Greetings! If you’re new here then you can find out all about this project of mine here: But in a nutshell it’s this: I’ve been taking a short and very bland story and rewriting it in different styles. This time I’ve chosen to write it from the standpoint of a different person. Let’s see how it goes…

a year ago · 15 likes · 37 comments · Terry Freedman

Terry Freedman

is running a project in which he writes the same story in a multitude of ways, and this is one of the most recent essays.

Not That You Asked

Croatia Diaries: The Toaster of Vindication

If this week hasn’t been your week, just remember, as the old saying goes, things could always be worse. You could for instance be in Zagreb in March 2020. Being anywhere in March 2020 wasn’t much fun, but it was particularly galling for the residents of Croatia’s capital…

a year ago · 15 likes · 4 comments · Tom Fish

Tom Fish

encounters earthquakes, downpours, and a particularly vindictive toaster in Zagreb.

Kindness Boomerang Newsletter

Discovering serendipity

“Sometimes life drops blessings in your lap without you lifting a finger. Serendipity, they call it.” — Charlton Heston Usually in the fall, you can find me outside riding our lawn mower and picking up leaves. It is one of my favorite activities this time of year. But during this rainy week, I found myself doing more indoor activities than normal. I did …

a year ago · Sheila Dembowski

Sheila Dembowski

discovers serendipity through a chance encounter with a former student in a most unlikely setting.

Subverse

The Curator No. 25: The Secret History

My obsession with dark academia as an aesthetic and as a genre started, as many things do, with Harry Potter. Harry Potter movies five through seven are dark academia to the core: boarding schools with moody architecture, prep school fashion choices, dark neutral color palettes, candlelight, a perpetual look of boredom, mortal danger…

a year ago · 9 likes · 15 comments · Natalie McGlocklin

Natalie McGlocklin

argues why there will never, ever be another The Secret History and all your dark academia reading recommendations are garbage.

Building Hope

🌲 Talking Back to Walden

Welcome to Talking Back to Walden. This is where we’ll consider only the best passages of Thoreau’s 1854 classic for what they might tell us about our present-day environmental woes and hopes. Every second Sunday of the month, I will reconsider Thoreau’s left-brained observation with intuitive participation…

a year ago · 21 likes · 28 comments · Julie Gabrielli

In the first of a yearlong monthly series, "Talking Back to Walden,"

Julie Gabrielli

explores a beloved classic to argue for more ecstatic immersion in the world.

Caro’s Writing Perspectives

Daughter’s Lament

2 years ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Caro Henry

Caro Henry

’s elegiac poem about her mother’s death.

Reading the Western Canon

At the End of the Valley of the Giants Northward

In this newsletter, I am reading the approx. 850 authors and works of Harold Bloom's Western canon, from cover to cover, from the Epic of Gilgamesh of ca. 1200 B.C. to Tony Kushner's 1991 play Angels in America. For today I’ve continued the third item on Bloom’s list, the Holy Bible…

a year ago · Joe Steakley

In his project to read and comment upon the approx. 850 works and authors of the Western canon as enumerated by Harold Bloom,

Joe Steakley

looks at how the rhetorical tropes of literature influence the Israelites' Canaan campaign in the Book of Joshua.

Subconscious Fat

Implanted Memories

A training client reminded me how memory works. It’s like playing the telephone game (aka Broken Telephone or Pass the Message.) As a child in nursery school, I was placed in a circle of kids, and a message was written down. The teacher would whisper that message in one student’s ear with instructions to whisper that message around the circle. By the ti…

a year ago · 1 like · Hermann J. Diehl

Hermann J. Diehl

writes about the dreadful possibility of being influenced into creating a false memory.

And Now, This

One thing I'll never get over

I’ve heard it said that we shouldn’t expect to “get over” truly tragic or truly heartbreaking events. Instead, we find ways to get through them. I’m pretty good at that. I’ve managed to find my way through my parents’ deaths, deaths of friends, deaths of my cats. Because I can still bring up both joyful and sorrowful feelings about these loved ones, I wo…

a year ago · 4 likes · Robin Reardon

Robin Reardon

reflects on the inspiration that comes from the profound tragedy of Flight 93, the fourth plan on 9-11.

From The Future

You've Got That Infinite Feeling

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” - William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) What do we do when we feel and can do almost anything with our minds? What happens …

2 years ago · 14 likes · 4 comments · Edward Rooster

Edward Rooster

answers the question "What do we do when we feel and can do almost anything with our minds?", through the lens of William Blake and the James Webb Space Telescope, Daguerreotypes and Da Vinci, and the Lumiere Brothers and Large Language Models.

Electrotonic Letters

The Trouble with Defining Energy

“Energy was not out there in the world waiting to be found, a fact of nature finally revealed to human consciousness” – Cara Daggett; The Birth of Energy When I want to draw out the capaciousness of the term, energy, I ask my students to turn to one another and define it. What…

a year ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Kameron Sanzo

Kameron Sanzo

discusses why "energy" is so difficult to define, and explains how the classical Western concept of energy developed.

Stomp Roams

Stomp Robs a Cloudbrew Beer Truck

a year ago · 2 likes · Jonathan Delp

A smuggler Sasquatch fuelled by Cookie Crisp and a chain-smoking turtle must escape a trio of endangered Pacific Mottled Unicorn kids out of downtown Seattle in a heisted beer truck in 1993. By

Jonathan Delp