On March 20, I invited Dr. Sarah Fay for a lively conversation on "Scholarly Writers on Substack".  Sarah Fay, author of the popular Substack Writers @ Work newsletter, is an expert consultant who helps writers flourish on this powerful (but sometimes rather confusing and complicated!) publishing platform.

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Sarah and I discussed why scholarly writers might choose to publish on Substack and how they can thrive there. In the second hour, we led a hands-on workshop for paid subscribers of our respective membership communities (my WriteSPACE and Sarah’s Substack Writers @ Work) in which we responded to questions about how to get started on Substack and enhance your writing aspirations and goals.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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Some memorable quotes from Sarah and Helen’s conversation:

• “Substack may be the university of the future”

• “If you’re passionate about academia but struggle to churn out words in a publish-or-perish kind of way, then Substack can alleviate some of this stress.”

• “Substack can let the fatigued academic write in a different voice”

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In the first hour, Sarah revealed the fascinating evolution of her career as a Substack whisperer, coaching countless writers on how to make their newsletters thrive on the platform. Sarah and Helen then explored all of the fabulous and uplifting reasons why any academic could and should start a Substack newsletter. If you’re an academic, chances are you’re passionate about the niche you write in, and sharing your writing publicly with others isn’t unfamiliar. You’re also no stranger to hard work and can probably squeeze in a once-per-week, or even once-per-month, publishing schedule.
If this sounds like you, Substack may just be the ticket! The thing is, as an expert writer in your field, no one else can do what you do. And your writing probably solves a problem that some people are willing to pay to solve. While Substack can be a great form of additional income, both Sarah and Helen advocate it as a great tool for academics specifically. It can:

1. Amplify your academic work by reaching new and interdisciplinary audiences

2. Supplement your academic writing and your writing skills—you could write about your academic work in a different voice or for a different readership, transforming your research into long-form journalism or creative writing

3. Allow you to take a break from your academic writing life entirely and focus on exploratory, creative, playful writing

In the second hour of this Special Event, Sarah and Helen answered participants’ questions and offered tips and tricks for successful newsletters, including these gems:

• Opt for fewer words and more engaging multimedia content (that said, there are readers who love really long rambling posts on Substack. If this is you, try to target your audience. An unfiltered mode of writing can be a great hook for readers).

• Re-stacking inspiring posts with a note is a great way to get noticed and join the community. People will likely re-stack your posts in response!

• Start from an exploratory place, it’s fine to make changes to your title or subject as you go along.

If you have or are considering your own Substack, do tune into the recording of the live event available in the WriteSPACE under ‘Videos’. At the end of the video, you’ll find Sarah’s writing prompts for analysing your current substack and/or exploring new possibilities.

Thank you to Sarah and Helen for an inspiring and informative exploration of Substack for academic writing, and thank you to all the participants for sharing your comments and engaging questions.

See you again at the next event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can now watch the recording of the full two-hour event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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Over the years, I’ve written a lot about writing and risktaking: for example here and here and here. All writing is risky, after all — and as a scholar, mentor, and tireless advocate of stylish academic writing, I see it as my mission to empower writers to face those risks with courage, resilience, and even joy.

Rēinga is a hypermedia poem about creative risktaking that enacts and embodies creative risktaking. Cape Rēinga is the place in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand where, according to Māori legend, the souls of the dead leap down the roots of an old pōhutukawa tree and start their journey to their ancestral homeland of Hawaiiki. Rēinga variously signifies “the place of leaping,” “the departing place of spirits,” or “the netherworld,” the place where the spirits go.

First published in March 2009 in ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics, Rēinga exists in three different versions in my online poetry collection The Stoneflower Path (2007-2009): as a hypermedia digital poem; as a plain text linear poem; and as an audio recording.

The poem at the top of this post, recorded in March 2024, is clearly different from the one that I recorded back in 2009, not only in terms of my reading pace (slower) and the timbre of my voice (older), but because the words are different. That’s because neither of these recordings fully captures the complexity of the “real” hypermedia poem, which exists in potentially millions of versions.

Do you find the prospect of leaping into a bottomless poem discomforting? Exhausting? Exhilarating? I suspect that your answer to that question will tell you something about your own propensity to take creative risks — or not. Either way, I hope that my guided tour into and through the labyrinthine roots of Rēinga will inspire you to try something new, maybe even something risky, in your own writing.

Enjoy!

The Stoneflower Path

Fifteen years after I first planted The Stoneflower Path in cyberspace, the whizzy website of which I was once so proud now looks as clunky and dated as Bill Clinton’s Blackberry. That’s the risk, I guess, of creating at the cutting edge (or, in my case, at the colorful edge) of technology: everything ages so quickly. An even greater risk, I secretly suspected at the time, was irrelevance. I put in many hours creating those two dozen digital poems using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Audacity, and Flash; but was anyone ever going to read them, engage with them, remember then? Much as I feared, my self-published collection attracted little critical attention and slowly faded into obsolescence. (Only recently has the tide turned; a few months ago I learned that The Stoneflower Path is now considered a digital literary landmark!)

My hypermedia collection deliberately spotlights the risks and rewards of hypertext, the literary genre that The Stoneflower Path at once embodies, critiques, and celebrates. A hypertext is any text that contains hyperlinks: that is, digital links to words, images, or other media in or beyond the text.1 Hyperlinks offer readers a convenient way of accessing information related to what they’re reading, which is why they’ve become such a familiar presence in virtually every text designed to be read online (including this one). But those temptingly highlighted links risk disrupting the linear flow of our reading and directing our attention elsewhere, much as a footnote drags our eyes to the bottom of the printed page.

When planted deliberately to confuse or misdirect, hyperlinks can lead us off the beaten track completely, sending us spinning into a textual maze with no clearly marked exit. That’s how Rēinga works — and that’s why reading the full hypermedia version of the poem requires a willingness to leap into the dark.

At the place of leaping

First conceived of and published before smartphones and touchscreens became ubiquitous, Rēinga is best experienced on your desktop computer or laptop using a mouse or trackpad.

When you enter the poem by clicking on the title, you’ll always be directed to the same static image — a stained glass mosaic depicting a pōhutukawa tree, two sailboats, and a full moon — and the same opening line:

At the place of leaping

From there, however, the poem bifurcates. As you move your mouse around over the tree, the land, the sea, and the sky, you’ll discover two live hyperlinks. This is your first moment of uncertainty, your first leap into the unknown. A click on the lower sailboat takes you to a glowing purple-and-orange image with the line, This is how I want to live:

A click on the upper sailboat takes you to a grayscale image with the line, This is how I want to die:

From there, it’s no longer a matter of leaping off the cliff into life or death so much as swimming in a roiling sea of possibilities. With 20 live hyperlinks per screen (18 pōhutukawa blossoms + 2 sailboats + 1 moon, minus the current link) leading to more than 50 possible image-plus-line combinations (I used every single Photoshop filter!), you can often create a poem of 20 lines, 30 lines, or more without encountering a single repeated line.

The moon delivers only moon-related phrases, and the sailboats always bring you back to the same two choices — this is how I want to live, this is how I want to die — so you can use those three objects to create some structure for your wanderings. For example, to generate a 16-line poem with a similar cadence to my two voice recordings, try the following sequence of clicks:

at the place of leaping
[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[blossom]
[moon]

[lower sailboat] this is how I want to live:
[blossom]
[moon]
[blossom]

[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[blossom]
[moon]
[blossom]

[blossom]
[blossom]
[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[lower sailboat] this is how I want to live:

Then return to the place of leaping (either by using your back button or by closing your browser window) and repeat the sequence without making any effort to follow exactly the same path. You’ll end up with a new poem that sounds and feels similar to the first, yet hauntingly different.

The hypertext of life

Life is a hypertext, full of risky leaps into the unknown. So is writing. So is art — or, for that matter, any form of creative practice.

In a post titled RISK, our #AcWriMoments prompt for the month of March 2024, Margy Thomas and I each recalled a risk that we’ve taken in our own professional lives. I reflected on how, back in 2001, my husband and I decided to move from our comfortable home in the Midwestern United States to a small island nation in the South Pacific with our three kids, all our earthly possessions, and no jobs or likely job prospects in the academic fields we had left behind:

Those first few years were tough, as we struggled to find our feet personally and professionally. But eventually we both reinvented ourselves in new careers that suited us even better than the ones we’d left behind, and our children got to grow up amongst friends and family in one of the most beautiful countries on earth, a place with strong social and community values that we cherish. Not long after we moved here, I experienced an unexpected creative flowering as a poet and artist, like a rose bush blooming more abundantly than ever after a hard pruning, and I shifted from writing about modernist poetry to writing about scholarly writing.

If, back in 2001, I had clicked on the hyperlink that said Stay rather than the one that said Leap, would I be writing this post today? I doubt it. The poems of The Stoneflower Path were among the many products of the creative flowering that I experienced within my first few years in Aotearoa New Zealand — and Rēinga remains one of my favorite blossoms in the bouquet. I still get a thrill from generating a new poem every time I click beyond the opening image, a photo of the stained glass pōhutukawa mosaic that I crafted “in real life” for my mother’s 80th birthday back in 2005. (It now resides on my brother’s mantelpiece in California). And I still love leaping into the unknown to find out what I’ll learn there.

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