If the blank page is the visual metaphor for writer's block, so the empty bedside table paints a picture of a condition just as morbid: reader's block. This is a condition that afflicts me regularly, particularly when I have just finished a book I really like. What to read next to match the humour/pathos/linguistic experiment of whatever minor masterpiece has moved me? In the internet age of information overload, you would not think that literary inspiration would be a problem. There are top-10 lists by genre/gender/theme available with the click of a mouse, while online booksellers will automatically recommend titles based on your previous purchases; if you loved Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn, you will probably love Nora Webster too. But what if you have no idea what you would like to read next, no key terms to type into your search engine? What if you have no interest in reading more of the same? What if you would like new reading material to find you?
TinyLetter (tinyletter.com) is a free personal newsletter service with an appealing retro feel, delivering individual missives to users via email. The best introduction is via the TinyLetter Forwards newsletter, a weekly mail-out that quickly displays the quirky diversity of correspondents using the format. (They currently number more than 100,000; subscribers, meanwhile, reached nine million in 2014). Over the course of a month, I gave myself over to the TinyLetters feed, which sent me a smorgasbord of reading material direct to my inbox. I cooked pasta with an American single mum; was serenaded with ‘A Song a Day’; took advice about ‘How To Watch Battlestar Galactica’; and read a quite wonderful piece of experimental fiction by Clear Signals, which reminded me of WG Sebald in style and atmosphere, and showcased the potential for digital publishing formats to push the boundaries of fiction. The newsletters were all beautifully designed, and many included visual embellishments and audio clips. It isn’t quite the same as the postman arriving at your door, but there is a satisfying sense of connectedness about it nonetheless.
Most of the newsletters are fairly short too, so they work as a perfect filler for empty moments of the day that might otherwise be spent scrolling through social media sites.
TinyLetter has attracted a number of prolific journalists in America. One user, Rusty Foster, even found his TinyLetter, 'Today in Tabs', syndicated by Newsweek, who publish his cranky newsletter (it is essentially a snarky list of pet hates) in both their daily digital and print editions. His feed is so successful that 'Today in Tabs' is now his full-time job.
The writer and filmmaker Miranda July, meanwhile, whose latest novel, The First Last Man, has just been published, spent 2013 working on a newsletter project with a cohort of celebrity collaborators that included Lena Dunham, Kirsten Dunst, Sheila Heti, and Kate and Laura Mulleavy, under the rubric: 'We Think Alone'.
For the project she solicited friends to forward a selection of emails that they wrote and received to her, and she curated a themed compendium of these emails for subscribers, delivering them by email on a weekly basis.
The content of the emails was deliberately mundane – money, business, a discarded draft. Indeed, mundanity was the key: how people “comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene,” July wrote, “self-portraiture is quietly at work here.” The project attracted more than 100,000 readers, who were rewarded with the knowledge that unless they were to forward the emails on themselves, the virtual missives would remain something both private and shared.
Maria Popova has perfected the art of the newsletter with Brainpickings, the weekly “interestingness digest” she has been sharing with readers since 2006, which is delivered by email to subscribers every Sunday. Popova collates a variety of cross-disciplinary resources from her week’s online reading, taking in everything from art and sciences to psychology and politics. A recent edition, for example, featured a review of an alphabet book by Maira Kalman with extensive reproduction of images, a report on “An Edible Time-capsule of the Creative Scene of 1920s Paris”, including a recipe for James Joyce’s cocoa, and an essay on Leonard Cohen and mindfulness.
The newsletter itself is stylish and clearly designed, with leading features and a side-bar for smaller stories and curiosities, like the Literary Jukebox series, which matches favourite quotes from Popova’s beloved books with songs. The Sunday arrival of the newsletter is especially apt; it is like a digital version of the Sunday papers, bringing together the best features and literary stories from the previous week. There is enough to keep you going until the next instalment arrives, but not enough to overwhelm you.
And that is what works so well about the digital newsletter phenomenon. It does the hard work of curing reader’s block for you. It seeks you out and gives you something finite to look forward to.
Whether that is a 600 word TinyLetter or a more expansive cultural digest, it requires nothing more of you than to subscribe.
