A welcoming hello to some of you, and hello again to those I haven’t written to in a long time.
This is, at worst, my stream-of-consciousness typing passing for a newsletter. The unsubscribe button is at the bottom of this email if that already feels like a good idea.
At best this newsletter is an exploration of why we tell stories and how we stay connected— with our communities, with each other, with ourselves— and a portal to those who are probably doing much better thinking about this on both fronts.
When I started writing a newsletter in 2018 (ahem, ahead of the curve but couldn’t keep it up— my personal vibe), I wrote that I wanted to have ownership of my own archives, and that’s still the case. But moving to Substack feels like the middle way between remaining connected to an ecosystem of thinking, while not living in service of the great social media machine.
I’m going to try not to mull too much over these newsletters and treat them like the ephemera they are. If what I’m writing sounds like it has a glint of hyperactive madness to it, it’s because my child has kept me up from 3 am, and I’ve now surrendered to the dawn with a cup of coffee. Said child is now back asleep- so so happy for that kid.
I feel as though I’ve just moved between worlds. I left my role as an executive producer making audio documentaries about crime and injustice, to return to the work I was doing just before I had children, on Papua/Indonesia. For the most practical of reasons, the manuscript I was working on was put to one side while I survived the baby years, but I’m now clear-eyed and ready to set out to it again.
I once read an article about Zadie Smith, and the profile writer Jeffery Eugenides wrote something that has stayed with me. The metaphor is imperfect, but I think it resonates with anyone submerging deep into a project that has an element of solitary work:
Novelists are like fur trappers. They disappear into the north woods for months or years at a time, sometimes never to reemerge, giving in to despair out there, or going native (taking a real job, in other words), or catching their legs in their own traps and bleeding out, silently, into the snow. The lucky ones return, laden with pelts.
But it’s a strange thing, disappearing to do slow, deep work on a subject that feels like it has great urgency. Just a couple of days ago, a video of soldiers in Indonesia torturing a West Papuan man in a barrel made the headlines (note: the link is to a news article, not to the video). This kind of torture is unspeakable, but also a part of the fabric of life in West Papua. Similar kinds of videos have been shared by Papuans for many years, desperate to alert the international community. Scholar Budi Hernawan says that torture has been used for over half a century by the Indonesian state to control locals. What was new here was this time, the commander of the Indonesian military [in that province] offered an apology for what had happened.
At the same time, my friend Joel Carnegie interviewed me for his excellent Storymakers Institute podcast. I told him, in my usual eloquent way, that in the darkest times of my working life, I’ve asked myself: “What’s the point of all these f****g stories?… What is this actually doing?”
We go pretty meta, and I get a bit too earnest, but we do land somewhere that’s a hill I would die on, or at least get really uncomfortable for:
“Stories help us learn what to do not to destroy ourselves”
Signing off, the kids are waking up (again). Send me your links, send me your notes, send me your warm encouragement and your cold-hard criticism— I love it all.
x B