newsletter – Lucy Bellwood

I haven’t historically been someone who reads a lot of books simultaneously, but I won’t lie: it’s doing a lot for me right now. My brain is scattered and anxious and burnt out and overwhelmed and uncertain, but allowing pattern recognition to come into play as I’m reading across genres and timescales…that I can manage. It helps things feel as if they make sense.

Of course, sometimes the patterns I recognize are massively uncomfortable. Here’s three about habit, practice, belief, and enthusiasm:

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way:

A photo of a book that reads: As artists, grounding our self-image in military discipline is dangerous. In the short run, discipline may work, but it will work only for a while. By its very nature, discipline is rooted in self-admiration. (Think of discipline as a battery, useful but short-lived.) We admire ourselves for being so wonderful. The discipline itself, not the creative outflow, becomes the point. That part of us that creates best is not a driven, disciplined automaton, functioning from willpower, with a booster of pride to back it up. This is operating out of self-will. You know the image: rising at dawn with military precision, saluting the desk, the easel, the drawing board...

Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline. Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us. Enthusiasm (from the Greek, "filled with God") is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself. Enthusiasm is grounded in play, not work. Far from being a brain-numbed soldier, our artist is actually our child within, our inner playmate. As with all playmates, it is joy, not duty, that makes for a lasting bond.

An annotation in the margin reads "Jesus fucking christ, OKAY."

Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods:

"Right," said Om. "Now...listen. Do you know how gods get power?"
"By people believing in them," said Brutha. "Millions of people believe in you."
Om hesitated.
All right, all right. We are here and it is now. Sooner or later he'll find out for himself...
"They don't believe," said Om.
"But—"
"It's happened before," said the tortoise. "Dozens of times. D'you know Abraxas found the lost city of Ee? Very strange carvings, he says. Belief, he says. Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure."

Fenton Johnson’s At the Center of All Beauty:

The thing about living alone is that—exactly like living as a couple—after a long time it becomes either a habit or a practice. A habit is a way of living that you follow because it's what you did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. A practice is a way of living that you create and renew every day. A habit is a way of being that controls you. A practice is a way of being that you control—a deliberate (ad)venture into the unknown.

I think I’ve listed these in the order I encountered them, but I can’t be sure. I just know I read the Cameron passage and felt personally attacked in that good, awful way that means something true is surfacing. I love daily drawing challenges. Arguably I’ve built a whole career on them. But I also, deep down, know that they can become a kind of ego trap. Fortunately there are all these other rhyming passages that offer alternative paths and approaches. Johnson underlines a truth I’ve already folded into large parts of my brain: that there’s a fundamental difference between a habit and a practice.

Bonus Kicker: I read Zina that passage from Cameron and she immediately latched onto the etymology of enthusiasm. “Did you know?” she asked. And I had to reply that I did, because there’s a phrase rattling around in my brain:

“The Greeks said that to be enthusiastic was to be filled with God.”

Why do I know this? Why do I know it with this specific wording? It feels like something I know through repetition, like I’ve heard it read aloud many times or included in a talk. I dig around in the filing cabinets of surface memory and find nothing.

At 11:30 that night I finally find it: a single quote pulled from a series of small stories written by Frank Chimero in, as far as I can tell, 2010. I’d written it down in 2016 in an old notes document where I kept links and things to include in my newsletter. A quick spin through the archives suggests that I never actually wove it into an update, but every time I went to write one I’d skim through that list of quotes and links and there it would be: a phrase.

I suppose this is how we learn.

Legend has it that I’ve been maintaining a newsletter for several years, although given that I last sent one in May of this year, I’d started to believe that the rumors weren’t true.

When I don’t write in a particular channel for a long time, my anxiety about saying something worthwhile gets amplified. This is extra true with the newsletter, which feels like a sacred space because I’m barging directly into people’s inboxes rather than waving to them across the crowded halls of social media (or muttering to myself in the whispering gallery of my own website).

There’s also the fact that when I sent my last newsletter in May, after changing service providers, my previously deliverable messages got sent to most people’s Spam folders. The newsletter went from having a whopping 90% open rate to something like…27%. Why did this happen?! I have a couple hunches, but I’m not certain. The truth is I don’t fully understand email. Then again, I don’t fully understand the algorithms on Twitter and Instagram either. I simply don’t want to spend my time learning those systems. I have other things to do. I just fling things out into the ether (very irregularly these days) and hope for the best.

But I still worry about making sure people have a smooth experience when they sign up to hear from me in their inboxes, because I want it to be an easy, enjoyable thing.

It is certifiably silly to worry many of these worries. These are people who’ve opted in! Maybe I worry that if I write to them, but the messages go to Spam, they will somehow figure out what’s happening and then be mad? At me?? For not delivering the things they want more effectively???

Wow I’m really on one here.

But this story has a happy ending because I did the only thing that ever seems to get me over the hump in these circumstances and enlisted help from my friends. Danielle (blessèd saint that she is) sat down with me on FaceTime because she also had a long-neglected newsletter to write, and we both tapped away at our keyboards until we’d managed to draft what we meant to say to our respective subscribers. It worked great. I love friendship.

A newsletter can be anything. The ones I like the most are very simple, either in content or delivery. Pome is just a brief poem—no frills, no discernible cadence, just seasons that stop and start as if by magic. Robin Sloan’s Society of the Double Dagger is wide-ranging in the extreme, but the newsletters themselves just contain a brief blurb and a link to a static webpage, which is where all the riches reside. He’s got channels, too. The man is onto something.

When I send mine so infrequently, they become repositories of news and status updates on my various creative projects which is…not bad, per se, but weighty in a way that isn’t always what I want. Still: it gives me a chance to sit back and look over the last six months and say to myself:

“Yes, this’ll do.”