You are invited to my private studio

I gave up writing a book eight months ago. I needed to let it go. Just last week, it came back on an ordinary not particularly good day.

On my notes app I wrote:

Bro i’m in fucking gremlin mode writing. The unsexy, unglamorous writing. Where your hair is looking oily and unwashed. When the apartment is a disaster. When you are smoking weed from a pipe at 2 PM on a Wednesday, avoiding the brain rot article you have to write for your job about climate change.

It has been wonderful returning back to it. Yet I remind myself that if it must leave again, that’s okay, I will let it go. As I’m back on this strange personal journey I want to let you in on some of that process.

I’m opening another room, here on this newsletter and you are invited. This room is my studio. It is a private, more intimate space. On the door of this room, engraved in gold it writes, “show your work.” Like a math test you took when you were fifteen, it is not enough to just display the final answer, here, we want to see how you got there.

A year ago, I scoured the internet trying to find every single podcast that Sheila Heti was on. Having read Motherhood and then How Should a Person Be, I needed to find any behind the scenes insight on how someone got to create books that were so influential to my own writing. My obsession took me down interesting corridors of the internet. I spent a month on the Red Scare podcast patreon to access a paywalled interview with Sheila Heti. On internet archive, I found recordings of a podcast she created, Podcast with Raisins, that, at the time, had all been scrubbed from the internet. Now, I’m delighted to find that she has revived it and it is on spotify. Listening to these interviews and podcasts gave me the confidence to believe that I could be a writer and an artist too. It was liberating and freeing to hear about the silly and unglamorous parts of it. I was able to bring this world of writing and books that seemed so far from me, closer.

Tao Lin posted a screen recording of himself writing for an hour on Substack. This video was the catalyst for me finally finishing the edits on my essay, My Journey to Mysticism. These little “studio visits” with writers and artists have given me the confidence and audacity I needed to keep going with my own work.

Here, on this paid newsletter I want to do the same. Because I am sort of an inconsistent person who is always creating, but often bouncing around through mediums, these “studio visits” will often look different week to week. Sometimes it might be a podcast, other times a video, maybe a screen recording of me writing, sometimes just field notes and suggested practices for you. Regardless, this is a space for process, for incompleteness, for following a trail and seeing where it leads. I hope you join me <3

In the future, when I get out of the malaise of Winter, I will be developing an online discussion group here for us to talk in real time.

this is us right now

This podcast is titled: real self love is devotion to something beyond the self

I talk about the field notes from last week when I built an altar to my creative process and fasted substack for a week. I learned about how deep my love and devotion for art goes, and how lasting self love is something that takes you beyond your self. Your love for art must be so deep and so encompassing that the shame around creating pales in comparison.

I played Ethiopian jazz at the beginning and the end of the podcast. This is the playlist I have been listening to that has elevated my mornings: playlist

This is the substack post I had written about some of last weeks findings:

People don't create art to become artists

Practice: create an altar dedicated to your creative process

-Thai x