Do you like books?

I'm starting a never-ending conversation.

Since 2014, I’ve been a professional writer. Whether writing scripts or articles, taking notes for a nonfiction piece or chipping away at my second novel, it is work. It is—frustratingly, rewardingly—a knot of art and commerce. The desire for this newsletter was a desire to write the way I have since childhood: for myself.

But there’s a corresponding impulse guiding this newsletter that is also about communication. During the first year of the pandemic, I wrote to friends in a way that felt like floodwaters breaching a levee. My fingers could not keep up with the texting. I ached for conversation. I am a working mother of two whose thoughts are more likely to flee than deepen if I don’t tend to them. Sharing them with you, then, is a way to collect them. I want you to see what keeps me up at night, and I want to know about your own obsessions.

2017, Passerby Mag

This will also be a space for me to talk about what I love: books, their sentences, their authors. I want to share with you what I’m working on or through, but I also want to have a conversation: What are you reading? What is missing from your reading and writing life? Can I help? Nothing about the past three years has been easy, but the discovery of and conversations around books has been an unexpected blessing.

I want more of it. I want my inner life back. I want to write. Don’t you?

For my first essay, I have something on Saint Joan (Didion, not d’Arc) coming in the next week. For paid subscribers (thank you), the first video installment will be about “The Middle Third” and go up in the next few weeks.

Xx,

Steph

For free subscribers

• Monthly essays, some critical, some personal.

• Monthly recommendation round-up: books and beyond.

For Paid Subscribers

Supporting artists should feel joyful. I’ll try to make sure it does.

• A video series called “The Middle Third.” I’ll post a video each month in which I answer reader-submitted questions. Do you wonder whether MFAs are worth it? How does anyone find an agent? Are you trying to write a memoir and nervous about the fallout? Are you trying to write a pilot and need resources? If there’s anything you want to know about writing fiction, nonfiction, anything about publishing, screenwriting, I’ll share with you craft wisdom—and blunt opinions—that I’ve picked up over the years from brilliant friends and co-workers.

• We will also have plenty of opportunities to chat in the comments.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Curious about a book I’ve loved? They’re all available at my author bookshelf.