This from Austin Kleon:
What I love most about newsletters is the letter part — the epistle, the missive, the bulletin, the dispatch! What’s going on — in the studio, in my life, in my mind — that’s worth sending out? Worth opening? Worth reading? Not only do I think newsletters should be letters, I’m starting to think that all writing gets better — and maybe even easier — when we simply try to sit down and write a letter.
And Nora Ephron writing about blogging in 2006, back when everyone was at it:
One of the most delicious things about the profoundly parasitical world of blogs is that you don't have to have anything much to say. Or you just have to have a little tiny thing to say. You just might want to say hello. I'm here. And by the way. On the other hand. Nevertheless. Did you see this? Whatever. A blog is sort of like an exhale. What you hope is that whatever you're saying is true for about as long as you're saying it. Even if it's not much.
Both sprung to mind when I stumbled upon Receipt from the Bookshop, a wonderful day-in-the-life newsletter from bookshop owner Katie Clapham. As anyone who has ever worked in retail knows, there’s an awful lot of sitting around and thumb-twiddling to be done between customers. Katie has found the perfect way to fill those gaps:
Every week I send out my free post … live from my award-winning independent bookshop by the sea. I open the draft when I open the shop, detail the day’s customers and transactions, and then send it out to readers before I go home.
Katie could’ve blurted these moments onto X or Threads or elsewhere, but collating them into a newsletter gives them more meaning. What you end up with is a tapestry of the splendidly mundane, just people passing through the day, all adding up to something more; a vivid portrait of the bookshop. It’s not a long long read, but it does call for that extra bit of deliberate attention from the reader; a nice chunk of time dedicated to one voice. Give me this kind of blogging over social media’s torrent of microaggression any day. Exhaling letters rather than coughing up grawlixes.