Writing a Substack is like sending an email to people you don’t know. I wrote a lot of letters as a kid, and I still write paper letters now. When I exchange annual or quarterly email-letters with certain friends, our response pace is often slow, as if the emails were traveling between two underfunded and sluggish international postal systems. Several writers I admire (Gaitskill, Greenwell) send Substacks that feel like long letters; I relish them on weekend afternoons.
But what if I used this Substack to send you postcards? The limit of a postcard is part of its appeal, as I’ve long carried a special jealousy of all the limits that poets could learn within: sonnets, villanelles, haikus. And why shouldn’t letters or essays enjoy limits too? Like the number 144 has a name, a gross, we could give names to these unnamed forms.
The above two paragraphs and these two paragraphs total exactly 144 words each. I’ve been writing 144 word essays lately, taking random thought shards and paragraphs from the cutting room floor and forming them into something simple and direct. I may try to write 144 of them for symmetry’s sake, but in the meantime I’ll be sending them out, every three weeks or so, here on the free side of this untitled thought project.
To write an essay in 144 words is nowhere near as precise a form as a sonnet, sure, but I’ve still felt liberated and focused by the oddly specific (and arbitrary) word count, and so far it’s given a home to a bunch of ideas and anecdotes that simply don’t fit anywhere else— reducing the unusable into the complete. Form as refuge. Substack as postcard. As always, thanks for reading.
I am so in.
Short Talks, Catherine Lacey style.