The Stall

There's a lot to be said for the moment when you accept that the best thing you can ever do for yourself is The Thing that makes you the most uncomfortable. As a result, it is time for us to rebuild my Artisan Poetry Cabin from the space that it previously occupied in a landscape that was, for about a year, exactly right for it, right up until big business turned up and appropriated most of the land for profit.

Things that will remain a constant include the following:

• Posts on Monday/Wednesday/Friday because that routine has been missed and it gives space to balance long-term projects with personal passion and unexpected acceptances.
• Building the Perfect Beast will return on Mondays. I'm hoping for some time at the end of the month to reintegrate the Substack archive to my liking, and we'll then make a page for all of the old shit, allowing easy reference.
• Art: Trail will become a new Friday Feature which then straddles my various local projects this year, giving space to create work for a mini pop-up Exhibition I have booked for November 1st.
• This means Wednesdays become a general wibble about whatever else I have going on currently, where you can see me perform and what I have 'coming out' in terms of work and shiz.

All this will lead to what I believe the trade refers to as a Soft Launch on March 16th, in the hope that a) I might get some subs from Insta and Bluesky and b) see a). I need to try and persuade new people that there is life away from Substack, and I am worth listening to because shoving a subscription model down their throat seems largely pointless. After that, it is all in the lap of the Internet Gods.

This could not have happened at a better time, all told.

I realised that annotation could be its own form of subversion about the same time that only sticking words on a page was getting boring. Ironically I have a personal art piece in progress with someone else which very much leans into the same ethic, and I am absolutely here for this, and anything else that does not take itself too seriously. This week I have been reminded of the fragility of life, in many ways.

If all I have is myself and my own ethical integrity, I cannot allow that at any point to be sold. That is what happens across every form of social media right now, but without it this remains shouting into a void of my own creation. The trick therefore has to be how I take the skills at my disposal and subvert what everybody else is telling me works, into something that works for me.

Welcome to a space where we will do that, and a great deal more.