the first thunder of the year
welcome to our first-ever edition of Essay Club
It’s a (thankfully) far shorter ‘sletter today. I’m busy working on my next No Gatekeeping interview (due in your inboxes on Thursday) so I’ve skipped the list-essay (they’ll be back next week) and brought you something a little different.
But before we get stuck into it, a thanks to all the new subscribers and the people who’ve been here since the start. The support I’ve received for WAYLT has honestly blown me away. What began as “just a writing exercise” to help shift me out of a slump has turned into something I honestly love. And to see other people enjoy that writing, too, is a special privilege.
Thanks again,
Sam
Okay, enough preamble. Due to popular demand, it’s time for Essay Club.
I first raised the idea of Essay Club as a way for readers/subscribers/friends to get together and collectively comb over a particularly good/interesting essay, long read, article, feature, profile, or even the odd short story. I saw it as a way to stimulate good ol’ fashioned community spirit and waffle about writing, without the inaccessibility of a book-length assignment.
Attention, for me, is key. Essay Club is crucially a far-less temporally taxing take on Book Club: a concept I always love the sound of but never actually engage with. As a slow reader, I am loathe to spend the best part of a month with a story I did not choose.
But Essay Club is different. For one, it is shorter. Far shorter. Stories will be a few thousand words, which you can devour over a lunch hour or bath time or train journey or break into tasty morsels and eat during coffee breaks on consecutive days.
And the stories chosen, I promise, will not be dull.
I’ll be choosing the first piece—one of my all-time favourites—but after that, I’d like subscribers to suggest some of their own. I’ll vet these, of course, to make sure they are in-keeping with my Not Dull Promise (NDP), but I’d like it to be a community exercise.
Inspired by a similar practise in George Saunders’ wonderful newsletter Story Club, this is not only a way to discuss our favourite writing but maybe share our own writing experience and discover writing we did not know before.
It’s about expanding your mind, is what I’m saying. But in the comments of this newsletter, I guess.
So, our first story.
It is this:
“Unity with the Universe” by Wright Thompson,
from July 2013’s ESPN magazine
Wright is one of my most cherished writers. Dynamic, colourful, thoughtful, dramatic, melodramatic, scenic, rhythmic, funny, heart-breaking and more, few writers are better at plunging their hand through the cartilage and into the story’s rib cage, plucking at its juicy, beating heart.
And by that, I mean, he has written consistently fucking great magazine stories for decades. When I was making MUNDIAL, he was the writer whose greatness I wanted our stories to aspire to. I don’t think we ever came close, but it was worth a crack.
To begin proving my point, here’s the sub-headline (or ‘dek’ if you went to journalism school instead of getting a real job) for “Unity with the Universe”:
Can a fly rod really hold the secret of life? In the central Montana mountains, a paralysed man and his wife are proving the answer just might be yes.
To seal the deal, here’s the opening paragraph (or ‘lede’ if you’re someone people avoid at parties):
MANHATTAN, Mont. -- Something strange is happening at the house glowing in the distance. Or rather, a web of strange things, magic almost, if you'll permit what might seem on the front end to be hyperbole. A man named Tom Morgan lives here, making some of the most expensive and sought-after fly fishing rods in the world, which he does despite having been paralyzed from the neck down for the past 17 years. He's revered for what he calls "thought rods," where the instrument functions as an extension of the mind, delivering the fly where you imagine it will go, not where a series of clumsy physical muscle movements try to direct it.
Yes, it’s a story about fly-fishing rods. But that’s just the beginning.
We’ll meet up here on the penultimate Tuesday of March—March 19th—to discuss how we felt about the piece in the comments.
See you there.