reply to this and tell me what you really think

welcome (back) to a newsletter about stories, storytelling, and storytellers.

In the middle of last year, during an unsettling period of professional tundra, I started this newsletter to get some ideas out of my head. I wrote about football, mostly, and about storytelling, always. It got me thinking. Which I suppose is the whole point of these things.

Since September, I’ve not posted another essay. The reasons were obvious—I got busy!—and not so—I wanted to create something more sustainable to create and more consistent to read. So consider this brief email a notice of quasi-relaunch:

Welcome (back) to Why Are You Like This?—a newsletter about stories, storytelling, and storytellers.

The format will be iterative, no doubt, but I’m thinking (as I sit typing on my lunch break in the foyer of the Barbican) the rough shape will look something like this:

Every Tuesday, you’ll get a set of 10 things to think about this week: recommendations of great things to read, watch, listen to, see, do, eat, and otherwise mull over.

Every Friday, you’ll get an interview with a storyteller I think is worth paying attention to. I hope these will have all have a hook, something actionable or provoking you can take away and add to your own life and/or work. (The split between life and work—the way we feel one must inevitably cannibalise the other is an interesting one, isn’t it? I’ve spent a lot of time, money, and Zoom updates working on that particular chestnut, so maybe I should write about that sometime in…)

Once a month, an essay. About storytelling, I’d imagine. Starting to sense a theme here.

Once a month, a case study or maybe a little workshop or something. Probably about a creator, storyteller, brand, or campaign I find instructive, good or bad.

There’ll be some months it scales up, some it scales down a little, but I’m trying to cement a little routine with this ‘sletter. So, please, if you think the idea sounds like a good or bad or doomed idea, please let me know.

For now WAYLT remains on Substack but, depending on how this whole turns-out-there’s-a-lot-of-Nazis-on-the-platform stuff shakes out, it may end up somewhere else.

Thanks for sticking with me, all 891 of you.

Sam