A Note to my Subscribers

Why this Substack? Why now?

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1957

Several times in the past few years, various friends and associates have told me that people “don’t really know who you are as a writer.” It wasn’t meant as an insult, and I didn’t take it as one. It was an invitation, a provocation, and it made think about how if you are writing about other people and places and ideas for magazines, as I mostly have, the writer behind the work sometimes gets obscured, or at least feels difficult to pinpoint. When I started this Substack newsletter recently, pretty much on a whim—my husband and I wrote a light-hearted list together, and I had to sign up as a writer in order to share a byline with him—I realized, all at once, how uncomfortable I was made by the thought of writing directly to, or conversing directly with, an audience, unmediated by a publication or an editor. And I understood that if my friends and readers did not know the person behind the writing, that may have been by my own design, however unintentional. My plan is to use this Substack as a place to experiment, to write more freely, to explore and examine the self in ways I have done only tentatively until now—a place to make myself more legible to you, my readers. Thank you for subscribing. Let’s see where it goes.  

—Amanda Fortini