Next week, my weekly newsletter, The 3 Cs of Belonging: Care, Connection, and Community, turns a year old. At the time of its launch, my book on belonging was soon to be released. I wanted a place to continue to write about people who are creating inspiring models of community and how to nurture deeper and more satisfying connections. Being relatively uninformed about how to compare platforms, I chose Substack because it seemed to allow me to interact with readers most directly. I am delighted with where I landed.
I didn’t know then how this platform would become a meaningful community to me as a reader. I first dipped my toe into the Substack universe before knowing what it was. As a morning ritual with my mother, she’d forward Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American to my inbox. Since then, I’ve signed up for a few dozen newsletters and gradually curated my weekly selection to a half dozen essays, columns, and other offerings.
I initially signed up at the free subscription level, and when I chose to read regularly, I switched to the paid subscription level. I upgraded to support my online community of writers and recognize their work’s value. Similarly, in March, I became an investor when Substack opened a community fundraising round aimed at its writers so that they could own a piece of the company. Whatever the outcome, I viewed it as a good investment because not all returns are paid in kind. Substack's decision to seek funding from its writers signaled to me that they view themselves accountable to them and, by extension, their readers.
The newsletters I’m currently reading are diverse in topic, yet the writing quality is uniformly excellent. Here is a sample: For politics, history, foreign affairs, and the fight for democracy, I read Heather Cox Richardson and Greg Olear’s PREVAIL. When I have limited bandwidth, I rely on these columns more than a major media outlet like the New York Times, which is a significant shift for me.
In The Elysian, Elle Griffin writes fiction and essays focusing on solutions for a better future. What initially attracted me to her site was an excellent essay where she lays out a detailed business plan to sustain herself as a writer. The mundane details of how to live as a creative person aren’t often spelled out so clearly, and Griffin’s posts like this one offer a path for others to do the same. As an example of her inventiveness, when she could not find a publisher for her utopian fiction novella, Obscurity, she serialized it on Substack.
Mona Eltaway writes FEMINIST GIANT, which she describes as a global feminist resistance to patriarchal fuckery. For years, she wrote for major news outlets, and with this newsletter, she took a courageous leap from a full-time job to write more freely, without the security and limitations of institutional backing. She’s on a mission to promote feminism as the vehicle to take down patriarchy and all its related oppressions. Every few days, Global Roundup, her curated roundup of feminist resistance worldwide, arrives in my inbox. Reading it, I feel connected to the women and their allies making a difference everywhere. Eltaway’s newsletter helps me tap into that same river of energy, which I believe will eventually usher in a paradigm shift toward justice, higher consciousness, and more love.
In Escaping Flatland, Henrik Karlsson publishes deeply thoughtful pieces on relationships and states of mind. The Swedish author, who lives on an island in the Baltic Sea, publishes one to three times a month when he feels he has something to share. His essay, Looking for Alice, about the evolution of his relationship with his wife Johanna, belongs in a “Best Essay” collection. His loyal readership is a counterexample to the commonly held wisdom you must publish frequently to keep an engaged audience.
As a reader, an unforeseen benefit of belonging to the Substack community is that I am now more sated from my online experience. I am bombarded with distractions vying for my attention on other media platforms.. I also noticed that reading more relatively longform pieces online doesn’t decrease the time I spend reading books. On the contrary, I spend more time engaged in reading. (And I get great ideas for books from the newsletters!) A direct positive relationship exists between my time spent on concentrated reading and my emotional well-being. In this way, becoming a loyal Substack reader has enhanced my life.
For the price of a latte a month, we can help support one writer who has chosen a path of independent writing. We can support three to four writers for the cost of two glasses of wine a month. If this model becomes sustainable for more writers as one source of steady income, it will be a game changer, improving the quality of what is available to readers online.
While The 3 Cs of Belonging is free of charge, most newsletters have a tiered system whereby writers can earn money by offering paid subscriptions. Readers who cannot afford to upgrade to paid tiers are still able to receive some free content. In this way, Substack's offerings remain accessible and for the benefit of everyone.