In Our Own Words (Tuesday July 5, 2pm EDT)
Dear friends,
Thank you to everyone who joined us for our recent discussion on Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. We brought together many threads from past sessions, focusing on the many valences of “nothing”—and particularly how the term nearly always signifies not something absent, but something imbued with meaning. Odell is not actually encouraging us to do nothing, she notes. Rather, by focusing our attention differently, by pushing back on narratives of efficiency and productivity, we make space for so much more.
Next Session
Our next session is scheduled for Tuesday, July 5, at 2pm EDT. (Right after a holiday weekend for U.S. folks—I hope the timing works for at least some of us! Summer is tricky.) Since many of us use summer as a writing-intensive time, we agreed to share works in progress that we would like to discuss or get feedback on.
If you have something you would like to share in this context, please let me know by June 24ish so that I can circulate before the session. If we have a lot of folks interested, we can spread this over a couple of months.
As one text for the session, I’m sharing a very rough project outline and intro that I would love to talk about. You’ll recognize some of the themes from our discussions, but I’m trying something unusual with the structure and would really like to hear how it lands, whether it feels like it could work. Please don’t share it for now, as it’s super rough. Comments are welcome even if you can’t attend the discussion.
Odds and Ends
Speaking of summer writing, our friends at Hikma Collective are offering a discount on their summer writing club to readers of this newsletter. I’ve been participating in the June session and can confirm that it is helping me to stay focused and motivated in a way that has felt good and sustainable. I don’t have the discount code just yet, so watch for it in an upcoming newsletter.
Finally, Inkcap stickers have arrived! They’re pretty cute. If you want one, just send me your mailing address and I’ll drop it in the mail. You know you want mushrooms on your laptop.
Wishing you all the perfect tempo and balance for what you need in this moment,
Katina
