zero: an unexpected letter

Last year, I took a month-long break from social media. Everything felt much too much like a barrage, and the light outside was new and clean, and I wanted to start some things new, in relative silence.

The response of a friend to this was to send me a handwritten letter.

If you're not a handwritten letters person, it's hard to describe the effect of suddenly receiving one. It's an incredibly intentional act. There's very little automation in a letter, and every step of it has to be chosen, with real resources used up--time, paper, ink, money for stamps. Receiving a letter is receiving a series of choices to reach out to you and connect--and that's before cracking the envelope open and seeing a familiar personality on paper: the splotches, the familiar lines of thought or turns of phrase, the tilt of their hand, where it crabs up when they get tired.

Despite, yes, the fact that this is more automated? I wanted to capture some of that intentionality. It made me want less a business newsletter and more a series of letters. I wanted to form a correspondence.

(Which is a body of letters stacked up like wheat. But also, in art, the relationship between a prototype and its finished work. And in mathematics, the relation that gets you from X to Y--the process, the road you travel. Correspondence is the middle land; everything between and on the way.)

That's what I'm hoping this irregular collection of letters will be about: yes, professional news, but also what we're reading, canning, growing, baking, playing, watching, working for, pushing along the way, and celebrating; sources of joy, reflection, or that moment when you feel your brain light up. Digressions. Little tributaries of brain. Publishing can feel like a series of milestones. This is about the middle land; all the things that happen along the way.

So, well: thank you for coming along.