I’ve been thinking a lot about the destructive power of nature. Like everyone else, I have loved ones who’ve been displaced and distressed by the fires in Los Angeles, and not a day goes by that I don’t worry about the devastating losses suffered by so many out there. Meanwhile, on the East Coast, we’ve been in a deep freeze. It’s been so cold we had a pipe burst right through a wall in a particularly poorly-insulated part of our house. Luckily the damage was minimal but still…
I’ve been in my own sort of deep freeze. This time of year is always a complicated one. On the one hand there are so many things to celebrate: the holidays, the new year, my birthday. And on the other hand I feel an overwhelming desire to hibernate – to just curl up and rest for a while. Maybe until spring, maybe until 2028.
And then, last week, I hosted the year's first Hudson Valley Media Makers meetup – a small, in-person community gathering I’ve been organizing for a little while. (I wrote about the importance of community in this post, and this one.) There, in a little upstairs room in a funky bar in Kingston, NY, I reconnected with some old friends and made a few new ones.
One of them is a documentary filmmaker who happened to go to my same college. And as sometimes happens when you meet someone from the cult of Wesleyan, we fell into an easy and familiar conversation. We talked about all the things I’ve been writing about in this substack: the power of collaboration, the need for indie creators to work together to fight against corporate greed and bad decision making. We talked about the similarities and differences between indie doc audio and indie doc film and how we could work together, support each other.
At one point I heard myself say I was “on fire” with all these ideas — a subconsciously-driven choice of words to be sure. As soon as the words left my mouth I thought “What am I saying?!” But she said she was picking up what I was putting down. And I realized that I haven’t been hibernating after all. I’ve been smoldering.
That conversation was all the spark I needed to get back to work on this substack and share some of the things I’ve been mulling over.
I’ve been quiet, but I haven’t been idle.
I’ve been reading.
Besides Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and Yuval Harari’s Nexus (I’ve only scratched the surface on that one), I’ve been reading Evan Shapiro’s Media War and Peace substack in which he regularly talks about the rise of the creator economy and the power of “radical collaboration” — what happens when indie creators band together to take on the media giants. He calls it “collabragation.” Here’s a quote I love from his post: Year of the Creator.
The great irony of the Creator-sphere is that those who’ve traditionally had [the] least power – artists and fans – now leverage the most powerful tech companies in human history to control the media they use.
And I’ve been taking in bits and pieces of many other publications and ideas that have been circulating in recent weeks:
The Contrarian — former Washington Post employees’ Unflinching journalism in defense of democracy; which uses the tagline: Not owned by anybody
The Nonfiction Hotlist — described by its creators as: A curated shortlist of the best unproduced nonfiction projects across all formats… Our goal here is to simply amplify these exceptional projects in hopes of connecting them with the resources they need (financial or otherwise) to come to fruition and reach audiences
Free Our Feeds — described by Taylor Lorenz in this post as: A $30M plan to take back social media from billionaires
So much good stuff percolating.
I’ve also been writing.
I’ve mainly been writing syllabi and lesson plans for two classes I’m starting teaching this week — one on the Business of Freelancing at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. And an Intro to Podcasting at Wesleyan University (my alma mater!).
I’ve been co-writing an update of the AIR rate guide, which is coming out soon.
And I’ve been writing a fellowship application related to The Discovery Problem that I wrote about here. I’m excited about this — but I’m also superstitious — so I’ll save saying any more about that until after the application deadline.
So I’ve been quiet on this platform, but things are happening. Ideas are percolating and communities are growing. Fire can be so tragically destructive, but it can also be a force for change — necessary change.
For now I’ll leave you with this — borrowed from another substack I check out from time to time: Today in Tabs. I was particularly touched by the author’s most recent post. It was a departure from his usual meme analysis, and I found it inspiring. This line in particular:
This isn’t a marathon, this is the rest of my life, and what gets me through it isn’t eternal helpless vigilance or angry posting. It’s forming connections with other people around activities that bring me joy. It’s building trust, so that when some goose-stepping fuck tries to make me afraid of my neighbors, I can laugh at him.
It’s so easy to be angry at the world, and in my case to just withdraw into a sleepy, silent, cocoon. But I’ve caught a metaphorical spark, and we have work to do.
Very inspiring Mia.