
Welcome!

I’m a New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and writer who draws. To stay in touch, subscribe to my newsletter.
On nemeses

I used this poem at the top of my letter, “Everything you can see.”
See also: “Do you have a nemesis?”
Typewriter interview with Lisa Hanawalt
The latest typewriter interview is with artist Lisa Hanawalt.
On baseball

I love to (mostly) ignore baseball all year and then follow the playoffs religiously. A few weeks ago I wrote a whole newsletter about the game called “Baseball on the brain.” It begins:
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” That’s the opening of “The Green Fields of the Mind,” collected in the slim, wonderful volume A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti. Highly recommended if you like thinking about America, baseball, and The Odyssey.
Read the rest here.
Archival issues

I have been writing a special Tuesday newsletter for paid subscribers for five years now, which means there’s a bunch of really good stuff just kind of hiding in the archives over there. I’ve tagged a lot of of it on the newsletter homepage in categories like “notebooks,” “mixtapes,” “tutorials,” “zines,” “typewriter interviews,” etc.

But it’s hard to know how to point people back at stuff.
A few weeks ago I had a sale on paid subscriptions, so I used it as an excuse to gather some of the more popular letters, like:
a look inside of my notebooks, a tour of my studio, my guide to block printing, how I make color brush pens, motivational posters for your studio, and the 7 questions I ask myself when I don’t know what to do next. Get it!
The week after that, I gathered up the letters regarding what I know about writing books:
All good things must begin, there’s an abyss between researching and writing and a gulp between when you finish and publish, coming up with a good title matters, there are many tricks for self-editing and the best is “just cut stuff,” you have to love your work long enough to see it through, and it often helps to think of your book (and everything else you write) as a letter to a friend.
I need to spend more time in the newsletter archives doing this kind of work: figuring out what I have and how I can bundle it together. Because honestly, that’s how most of the books were written!
But then again, I’d rather, you know, actually be writing.
Are we a teardown or a fixer-upper?

Last week’s newsletter began:
An out-of-town developer tore a house down at the end of my street and cut down every single tree on the lot. As I watched the big T-Rex excavator claw down the walls, a thought ran through my head: If it can be built, it can be torn down. True of houses, relationships, and civilizations. What got me the most was the smell of the big pile of demolished house. A smell of rot and death. And then the oxblood and rain lilies came up.

Related: “Normal is what you can successfully ignore”
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 655
- Older posts→
