Those of us at Coffee+Crumbs moved our monthly newsletter to Substack for many reasons, one of them being our resistance to the Devil that is the social media algorithm, and the havoc it’s reeking on our writing souls. Another reason has to do with making the decision to not be a part of cultivating and endorsing the short attention span. We don’t offer quick fixes. We aren’t here for the click-bait. We want long form essays; slow reads that are genuine and hard and leave readers empowered to search for and attend to the beauty and the gifts in their own lives.
The switch to another platform is always risky, especially because we are now putting some content behind a paywall, but who am I kidding? Everything about writing is risky. To write a story and share it means we want to commune with the world. It means we believe we can. That feels shaky and vulnerable almost all the time, but it also is the effect of the belief that we belong in it.
Everyone on the writing team takes turns writing an introduction to our newsletter, and I offered to do January’s, not realizing that this was the month we’d make the switch to Substack. When I sat down to write, I assumed something about goals and planning and New Years’ Resolutions would bubble up but what kept knocking around in my brain was a conversation I had with a couple of people about Mary, Zechariah, and Gabriel (it was Advent and I was in church, so it’s not like I was randomly talking about these people, although with me, you never know). Someone asked how come Zechariah lost his voice but Mary did not even though they asked the same question. That got me thinking about stories and storytelling – who tells them, and how they’re told – both with and without words.
So I wrote about that because it felt most pressing and hours before the newsletter went out, I learned that over 12,000 people had subscribed to our newsletter. What I want to point out here is not the number, rather, the fact that Ashlee Gadd, the founder of C+C, gave me the chance to write this year’s first introduction. It would make sense for her to write the inaugural essay, but she gave me the opportunity to use my voice. The more and more I think about Zechariah, the more I think that his being made quiet wasn’t so much a punishment as it was another story being told. If that is the case, then Ashlee and I were a part of two stories: the one I wrote, and that of a mother giving another mother a chance to write.
In church on Sunday we sang the hymn “O God in whom all life begins,” as our sending hymn, and this line sums up how I feel being a part of a group of mothers who are also writers and who both use their voice and encourage others to use theirs: “So bind us to a community that we may risk and dare.”
May it always be that I am willing to risk and dare. May it always be that I am surrounded by those who urge me on.
Read (and subscribe!) the essay here.
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