A Creative Work Question

[radiantfracture]

One of the central suggestions of the Creative Work course is to write an email newsletter (update, report, e-mag, mail art project -- some sort of thing people get from you in email form at least once a month).

Do you read, or write, email newsletters? What are your thoughts about them as a genre?

The course doesn't advocate for hard-sell spammy emails -- it's newsletter as audience-building, not direct marketing. The examples we looked at were worth reading and viewing as publications in themselves, or else usefully informative about things the reader would be interested in (art classes from an artist they liked, say).

I can see how it's a good idea in many respects. You build connections, community, audience. You can showcase work and directly remind people of events, updates, etc.

I just don't see how what I do -- or rather what I want to do -- would fit into a newsletter model. The direction I want to go with poetry and images is a more difficult, challenging direction. Not very newsletterable.

So if I did an email-based -- thingy -- it would have to be -- something else. Some other sort of project. Potentially fun/creative in theory, but -- what would that be?

If I had a form I wanted to write or draw in regularly -- like reviews or essays -- then I could see the fit, but as things stand I'd have to make something up, and that really feels like a non-starter.

I have a vague idea about creating a sort of theatre lab where some friends and I try out performance games / exercises I want to develop -- I had thought of that as an in-person thing, but it could also have a long-distance component -- sort of like projects that Miranda July has done -- but the idea is so unformed that I wouldn't know how to actualize it at this point.

I won't be offering classes or workshops or events for a long time, so there's nothing to inform people about there.

Also -- while I have signed up to *receive* several newsletters -- I have a hard time focusing long enough to read them through. (I don't usually have that problem with blogs, so maybe it's something I could re-learn.)

This post, of course, shares features with a newsletter -- or anyway it's a public piece of writing -- but it's untargeted and unannounced, without the formal and content demands that a newsletter has. This fits in much better with my pathologically aggressive diffidence.

If you were going to do an email thing, or read one, what would it be?

{rf}

Comments

[contrarywise]

It's been a long time since I wrote or edited and formatted a newsletter, but there are a few I read regularly. A simple format that accommodates limited reading time, a relevant or interesting image or two, and items with links pointing elsewhere for a deeper dive into the topic at hand are common features of the few that have stuck around in my In Box. You can always start small and build up content as needed. One possibility is an annotated rec list of interesting things that reflect your tastes, interests or worldview. One newsletter I look forward to, called Three Weeks, takes this format to a bit of an extreme, but it's always interesting and includes many things I don't generally encounter in my online reading. It apparently started from a small nucleus (three things to read, watch and listen to), and grew from there.