I don’t want to make content anymore
vibes, communities, honeybee swarms, anarchism
Today: on being too online, beekeeping, and finding smaller, weirder communities. I’m curious: do you want to be more offline too? Just hit reply and tell me yes/no and why.
This email hangs on a question: Can we not just curl up with our cozy friends and art our creative way through the apocalypse together?1
Let’s back up.
I am decidedly not a slow living kind of person. For one thing, I’m chronically online (reddit & every news site known to humankind). My phone is part of my body.
I work in digital marketing, fittingly I guess. Most of my work is strategising content, answer engine optimisation and search marketing. That kind of thing. Inbound marketing.
You’d think I’d be better at creating a successful newsletter community but…when it comes to my own projects, I’m a dreadful strategist and marketer.
[Welcome to bee-witched zines, a slow, handmade arts project and weekly-ish email with zines and sometimes revelations where you discover the ability to see the world like an insect does.]
This is a lot of internet for such a tiny person. Factor in that all my friends and family live in a different country. I really can’t shut off.
For example: yesterday I re-homed a swarm of bees, and I was lamenting the fact I hadn’t set up a tripod to film it.
It’s always spectacular and this time was no exception… but now I’m asking myself why I’d want a film of it.
Would I only do it so I could show it to people? I have so few videos or photos of myself taken by other people.
Or would it be to capture something surreal for myself?
Art making raises the same quibbles. Every time I make art I’m thinking about how I should be filming it, editing it, putting it online.
Go go go. Etc.
So I’m trying to shut everything up: to be chronically offline.
Beekeeping, weaving and book binding are my way out of cyberspace. It’s a struggle to not film myself. I love watching other people’s process videos though!
What to do with social media? Writers and artists are expected to build their own platforms these days: you feel like you have to be on Instagram or Bluesky to get anywhere.
It’s a spiky trap to fall into. Soon what I was creating felt like content: and content feeds the billionaires who own these platforms, in exchange for a few views.
I didn’t want to give these technocrats the value of my free labour.
So now what? Think smaller.
Instagram is everyone.
Communities don’t have to be everyone.
This year I’m a member of some small communities so you can share my work with others and not feel like I’m click farming.
Dans Mon Crane: a virtual space where we can explore archetypes, aesthetics, art and the tarot.
Claudette Hasenjager: creating mixed media art and art journaling. We’re working through Clover Robin’s Cut Paper Pictures book together in her collage club for the entire year.
I also dip in and out of the Cozy Art Collective, a warm, creative space They meet up most nights of the week, and every month there’s a prompt card club, which I LOVE.
We are our own people, we found each other.
Sidenote: Yes, I’m saying that all we need is each other and to live in a world without maps. Which is anarchism. Anarchism gets a bad rap but it’s the only societal system that makes any sense to me. Why do we have nations. Why are some people illegal. Why are there politicians and government cabinets and presidents and kings. All of these things are a social construct. Yes, I know anarchism would never work on a large scale, not like communism or capitalism (neither of which actually work). But that’s ok: to live in a group, with your people, in the wild world.
Another sidenote: I’ve been living for season three of Interview With The Vampire and it’s been two years and is finally airing as the Vampire Lestat. I’m sad that there’s only 7 episodes and not 8, but the pace of the first episode was so chaotically reckless and unrelenting, we’ll all need to be hospitalised when the season ends. I read all of Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles books, starting when I was probably too young to be reading that kind of stuff. Some of them are completely unhinged (replimoids???) but hey, well, it’s what I’m here for.
This week I was ready to bury the Unfolding Slowly artbook in the earth…but I decided no, actually, I’m burying an art journal I hate. I bought it, so it’s mass produced and just doesn’t sing for me. Maybe it will feel more like me if it’s buried in the earth for a few weeks. Who knows. Into the ground you go, my friend, just like the vampire Lestat.
Last night I had another adventure in loom weaving (yes, and re-homed a swarm, it was a remarkably busy day!).
I’m looking forward to sharing it all with you: doing every possible wrong thing to find out how to do the right thing, and why the wrong technique is wrong for a reason.
Bits & bobs
The July collage pack for my paid subscribers is underway. I really love making these collage packs, even though I’m probably really inefficient at doing it (they take forever to make). I’d like to open this one up for everyone to critique maybe.
I submitted fiction to 8 places today. Insert celebration gif here.
These are the two main resources I use to keep track of submissions and discover new magazines I’ve never heard of:
Chill subs provides search tools and cool details about each opportunity which makes it really easy to actually submit your work. They also promote writers’ work, which is so cool! https://www.chillsubs.com/about
Submittable aka the OG of cloud based submission services: discover opportunities.
Other substack posts that I enjoyed reading lately:
Thank you for reading. If you’d like to work on artist books and zines with me, here’s a free ‘slow art’ workbook zine for you to download and print. Print, read, create, breathe, rest. In the meantime you can buy me a coffee if you’d like check out wall altar assemblage pieces like this one: NO LOVELY WORD.
I am well aware that ‘art’ is not a verb
Right here with you considering all of this!
This same feeling has been tugging on me for ages now. I want to do allllll the things and to do so means something has to give. I'm in fewer places online (spending less time in each of them) not necessarily because I don't like them but because if I'm there I'm not making. This is fine, I suppose, but I still crave sharing in a community space. But I also find joining them comes with many (often unsaid) expectations that I can't satisfy if I want to continue creating. The loop continues. I don't have an answer or a plan for myself, so I have nothing to "offer" here other than I totally feel the beat you are dropping here.