Postcards, Part 2

In case you missed it last week, I'm on a postcard-writing kick with paid subscribers of this newsletter. Sign up at any tier, billed monthly or annually, and I'll personally hand write a postcard to you. I'll then transcribe it, and the other postcards I write that week, and send all of them to all of the paid subscribers of this newsletter. If you're a paid subscriber, you can find a link to submit your mailing address at the bottom of this issue.

Writing this way has been pretty interesting; it encourages me to try things that I wouldn't otherwise, and allows me to develop ideas further than I might otherwise. As you'll see, a given idea might pop up multiple times and be refined, developed, or described from a new angle. You may also notice a few inconsistencies, and I certainly noticed a few sentences that could be rewritten. But as with last week, I made only minuscule edits while translating from ink on paper to what you're reading now, leaving the grammatical warts and emotional vulnerabilities that I was only semi-conscious of while writing. There were also a few postcards whose narrative direction surprised me when I transcribed them. Again I'll leave them here unaltered, but if Members of SOW bother me about it on Slack (or if Supporters bother me about it on the comments) then I'll be happy to expand upon and explain them there 🫡

Oh, also! In case you missed it from Monday, we published what quickly became our most-viewed article of the past twelve months: My profile of industrial photographer Christopher Payne. Finishing it was a pretty great way to end 2024; publishing it, and receiving your feedback, was a pretty great way to start 2025.

Friday, 2025-01-03

I'm sitting in a coffee shop near Union Square, waiting for an appointment nearby and attempting to be productive. In about fifteen minutes, the first batch of seventeen postcards (which I wrote over the holidays, then transcribed & reformatted last night) will be sent out via email to about fourteen thousand readers. The readers who pay SOW's bills will get the whole batch; everyone else gets the first one only (it's about fir trees) and then a call-to-action.

While on vacation, walking around Seattle, I kept seeing grassy corners that had been torn up, a few square meters partially denuded, little clumps of grass and moss tossed onto the adjacent curb and sidewalk. At first I thought it might have been caused by some obscure landscaping practice, but then it struck me that the cause could be avian—crows, looking for beetle grubs, are known to peck at lawns, leaving them brown and barren.