six months of curiosity + questions

how starting a newsletter changed my life

Hi friends,

In January I started a newsletter, promising to send a biweekly essay that would ‘dig beneath the topsoil of everyday life’. In order to convince myself to hit send each week I treated it as an experiment: if nobody read the first few I would quietly mothball the project and never mention it again.

But six months in and I am still here, writing to you, so something must be working. In the space of half a year we’ve considered what it means to exist outside of capitalism and viewed the climate crisis through lenses of both doomerism and hope. We’ve discussed mortality, recovery and what it means to have and pursue a vocation. One week we meditated on the life of Brianna Ghey, a transgender teenager brutally murdered as she walked through her local park. Most recently I wrote about grief and the strange guises it can take. You’ve shared your memories of protest and concerns about our wounded world with our community of readers. Thank you.

In amongst these pieces I’ve tried to give you some sense of what my life looks like right now, writing about the sweet highs and desolate lows of being a new parent. I’ve argued for a reframing of the way we understand the ‘postpartum’ period and tried to capture what it feels like to have post-natal depression. Some of my weirder and more wonderful thoughts reach paid subscribers through my Golden Hour newsletter, which I send out on Sundays: they have read about the creative process, my thoughts on what the renegade author Deborah Levy might have to do with the resurrection, and occasionally get to enjoy my ‘film meditations’ (yes, you read that right).

When I sit down at my laptop each week I try to excavate something of the relationship between our interior life and the world at large. Some days I read my work back and think I might be close to achieving that. Starting this newsletter has been an affirming and life-changing process. It has made me feel less alone, and helped me understand more deeply the person I feel called to be in the world.

The Murmuration is partly a response to a culture which seems to revel in shallow forms of media; from banal soundbites to pithy hot takes. Instead, I want this newsletter to offer readers depth, questioning the narratives which seem so firmly embedded in our collective psyches and, in it’s place, capture something of what it means to be alive today.

It has been a privilege to get to know so many of you since its genesis; I love seeing which subjects seem to generate a conversation between us. But I also want to be clear that there is labour involved in producing The Murmuration. I know we’ve grown used consuming media for free, but in an effort to write words worth reading I now spend many hours reading and writing and staring into the distance, thinking about stuff.

And so I’m immensely grateful that around 8% of you are helping to sustain this work financially. My paid subscribers keep this show on the road, primarily by forcing me to have some skin in the game. In exchange, these folks feel their heart’s strangely warmed and enjoy the additional Golden Hour newsletter which is sent out on Sundays (because Sundays are special).

If you find yourself consistently opening up my newsletters, then do consider financially supporting this work. There are three payment options to choose from.

·      £5 per month (£1.25 per article) (warm fuzzy feeling + Golden Hour)

·      £50 per year (£1 per article) (warm fuzzy feeling + Golden Hour)

·      £200 per year *FOUNDING SUPPORTERS* (warm fuzzy feeling + Golden Hour + 1:1 creative coaching session)

All these tiers receive the same benefits, apart from founding supporters who, alongside God-tier status, are also entitled to a 1 x 60 minute creative coaching session where we can talk about a project you are working on, or perhaps some creative challenges/blocks you are experiencing.

Money is tight for all of us right now, so I entirely understand that some of you are not in a position to become paid subscribers. If this is the case for you then another way to support my work is by forwarding The Murmuration on to a friend who might enjoy it.

Thank you so much for reading. I can’t wait to see where the next six months takes us - onwards!