This newsletter is for:
writers of all stripes
multidisciplinary creatives
spiritual seekers
snail-mail enjoyers
deep question askers
retreat-goers
recovering creatives
jacks-of-all-trades
owners of too many notebooks
handwritten recipe lovers
burnt-out artists
sticker collectors
validation addicts
human beings
the best part
My goal is to take this newsletter as offline and old-school as possible by sending missives in snail mail form each month. These newsletters will include writing on creative and spiritual practice, tools and resources for building and sustaining creative attention, and all sorts of other ephemera—stickers? vintage postcards? handwritten recipes?—it will differ every month!
Becoming a paid subscriber at $5/month will allow me to send this newsletter physically every month and break-even on cost. Between Substack fees, materials costs, and stamps, I’m not making a profit off of this thing! I just want to reach you in the real world.
Join the snail mail club now:
Updates via email will be sparser, and will include excerpts of my writing, links to upcoming in-person offerings (including retreats and classes), resources I’ve found helpful, and round-ups of the things that I’ve been paying attention to and inspired by lately.
about me
Nadine Santoro is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator. She is the Publicity Director of Deep Vellum and the curator and host of Patchwork Literary Salon, a monthly reading series. She also co-hosts the podcast Thinking Straight, a lesbian anthropological dig into the world of heterosexual romance novels. Nadine is a graduate of Fordham University, where she studied creative writing and theology. She lives in Brooklyn with her fiancée and their two senior dogs, Knives and Young Neil.
about my work
If you don’t know how to be a person without being a creative, my work is for you. I see the divine in everything, and I see creative practice as both a divine gift of being human and a means to make sense of our world. As creatives, whether we write, paint, sculpt, dance, or sew, we have likely been funneled through various channels of training, schooling, and advice-giving in the process of honing our crafts. We’ve received all kinds of practical skills, and maybe we’ve won awards, or been published, or had a show, or been otherwise encouraged by outward markers of success. And it’s likely that along the way, the why of our work has become fuzzy, or diverted from the pure thrill of creation that drove us when we were children.
What is art for, anyway? And what, specifically, is your art for?
I want to return to the beginning, to creative practice for the sake of itself.
“The Western idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to our work ethic, which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete person who is already there. This is not practice for something, but complete practice, which suffices unto itself. In Zen training they speak of sweeping the floor, or eating, as practice. Walking as practice.”
— Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch
(emphasis mine)
So we figure out how to practice. And we pause. And we listen. And we practice some more. And our lives become joyful and busy with the love and community of people who see us, and we ebb and flow in and out of different routines and seasons, and we just keep practicing.
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.— mary oliver, from “praying”
join in community
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