Haunted houses and big updates

In which I sat down to write one thing, and something else entirely came out

Before I jump into this letter—which itself holds a few big announcements!—I wanted to share that I’ve officially re-opened my books for client work! If you’re looking for compassionate, intuitive, and ADHD-friendly support with a project or idea, you can learn more about what I offer here.

You can also jump to the TL;DR at the end of this letter for a summary of how I’m shifting things with Substack (and what I’m adding to the mix!).

Before I sat down to write, this letter was slated to be about ghosts and haunted houses. That was in honor of Halloween, but it was also a way of letting myself bring some ideas I’ve been working with behind the scenes into this little Substack. For many months I’ve been slowly forming an essay about houses and homes. In it, I’m teasing apart (and tying together) the optimism I feel around nesting/home-making, the many ridiculous living situations that promise has fed (cue a montage of punk house absurdity), and the years my little brother, who has schizophrenia, spent living on the street. This essay is tender and personal, as well as a little heady—the unsettling presence of global and local catastrophe is its backdrop—and I’m still figuring out the ratio of memoir to criticism—how to tie these intimate questions to collective concerns. The concept of a haunted house keeps flitting around at the edges of vignettes I’ve drafted; it feels like a way to talk about living alongside an unwanted or absent presence—our unsettling proximity to violence and its aftermath. (What is this world, if not haunted?) On a personal level, the notion of a haunted house also echoes the residues of my own past (and traces of family) that I’ve carried with me into my home now.

Usually I start writing these letters frighteningly close to when I send them—frightening mainly because what comes out in my first draft is almost always different from what I expected to write. It feels like some seed of a question or idea itches at me and then I get sucked in for as many days or hours as I have available. In the end, I usually do figure out how to name that seed and why it matters to me. Then I hit send, hoping there aren’t too many typos. That is the composition process—an accelerated absorption that I come out of feeling exhausted but usually also with clarity and relief about whatever I wrote about. When I wrote the rough draft of this letter the idea of haunting came out in a different form than I expected (I ended up writing something about the election and the eerie sense of revisiting the life I lived in 2016), but something I didn’t expect to write about at all also came out: my questions about whether the way I’m showing up to this Substack is standing in the way of some other writing-related goals.

I had recently read, and felt inspired by, something my friend Kate Henry wrote about shifting her approach to Substack in order to open up space in her writing practice. (You can read it here; her Substack as a whole is also really lovely!) It has been actual years since I’ve actively been sending out things I write to literary magazines, a fact I feel a lot of embarrassment and shame around. This month in particular I’ve been trying to work into/untease, that holding pattern. It’s a complicated issue for me, one I’ve talked about in these letters (especially June’s). Not sending things out feels like emotional avoidance, but it also reflects the shortage of energy/motivation I have for the secretarial parts of creative writing—packaging up submissions and marking them down in a spreadsheet somewhere. I love the immediacy and intimacy of writing these letters, and I don’t want to close that down or lose that. At the same time, I do tend to absorb myself in the present-tense of writing and thinking, so much so that I don’t often pause to cast my art out beyond my immediate radius. When I started writing this letter, it felt obvious that I really can’t do it all—pour so much of my creative energy into Substack and still have time and motivation left to, for example, edit scraps of my house essay into something that might be at home in a literary magazine. Like, what else would I have space to do this month if I didn’t get sucked into the essay vortex I was about to enter?

This introspection is happening alongside some big shifts in my life, and follows months of deliberation around where Substack fits into other projects. I just opened my books again for client work—which I’m so excited about, and you can learn more about here. Putting myself out there again as someone who teaches and offers services terrifies me, especially as my life keeps feeling more financially high-stakes and expensive. This summer, I channeled some of my anxiety about taking this risk—and its accompanying possibility of failure—into perfectionist fidgeting over different possible email newsletter arrangements. I switched from Mailchimp to Substack at the end of 2022 because it felt like a simpler, easier way to share my writing. That has definitely proven to be true—for better or worse!—but Substack has also come to feel like more and more of a social media platform. I’ve long felt lukewarm (at best) about how it can feel like a place I’m supposed to show up to with a “hot take.” I don’t really have or want hot takes—I want honesty and thoughtfulness; I want the specific texture of voice and language. But in addition to wanting a space to share art/ideas, I also have kind of missed having a regular newsletter. I miss the way Mailchimp, as annoying as it was, kind of felt like making little zines. I’ve craved a similarly low-stakes place to share updates about classes I’m teaching, things I’m offering, and little toolkits of ideas and resources.

A zine from 2015

So—that’s what I’m doing! Somehow the pressurized container of drafting this newsletter broke my trance around starting a separate newsletter. Instead of frantically drafting my haunted house/election essay, I started a new email list for chill announcements and updates that will run on a parallel track next to this Substack.

I’m excited to have another creative outlet—one that’s more closely tied to what I offer through my business as a teacher and coach, but with the same vulnerability and goofball nerdiness you’ll find here in Substack. :) You can sign up for this list here.

Alongside that, I’m going to give myself more flexibility around how often I send things through Substack. I’m hoping this will help me devote more energy/time to finishing other essays (and someday, the book I’m slowly writing!). I also could see Substack serving as an outlet for the excess of that work. (I like the idea of gathering up little scraps of research and ideas-in-process, and also exploring little pockets of curiosities that might be totally separate from clear-cut projects I’m working on.) That probably means I’ll send fewer long essays, but either way I want to treat Substack as a place where I get to play as a writer and artist; I show up best to those roles the less pressure and expectations I place on myself, so I’m curious to see what happens when I let myself engage with this place as the spirit moves me.

It makes me so happy whenever I get feedback about one of these letters resonating with one of you or being helpful in some way. And the fact that sitting down to write this one also helped me straighten out my own relationship with this project feels like evidence of the benefit I get from it, too. It feels bittersweet to change things up, but I’m also excited to see what happens as I let the project shift and grow with me.

Even though I didn’t write you a haunted house letter this time, I hope you have a very fun, sweet, and playful Halloween! (Here is my one of my favorite ghost-related bits of pop culture—a stop-motion animated Mr. Toad of The Wind in the Willows singing an earworm of a ghostly tune.)

Take care til next time (and maybe see you on my new list)!

Yours,
Siloh

In summary (TL;DR)

• NEW NEWSLETTER: Sign up for my new email list to get updates about classes, and other business offerings, as well as resources for navigating the creative process.

• A SHIFT IN FOCUS HERE: I’m going to give myself more flexibility in what and how often I share things on Substack. This will be an experiment in preserving Substack as an outlet for my creative work—a way I think through something in my life—while relaxing expectations I place on how (and how often) I use it.

• NOW BOOKING NEW CLIENTS: If you’re looking for compassionate, intuitive support with a creative project or idea, you can learn more about my business offerings here.

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• Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters