Patti Smith is preparing a special treat for her fans by launching a subscription-based newsletter via Substack, titled The reader is my notebook.
The “punk poet laureate” shared the announcement in a (wonderfully digressive) video posted to Instagram, saying that it will include original essays about books or films she’s enjoyed, as well as images, “shards” of poetry and music, and explanations of how she wrote certain songs.
In addition to the newsletter, paying subscribers will gain access to a serial written by the punk icon over the course of the pandemic. Titled The Melting, she describes the serial as: “a journal of my private pandemic.”
“Every morning for some hours, at my usual café, I sit and write,” Smith says in an introduction to the newsletter. “Notebook and coffee reign. Writing is what I do, and have since twelve, imagining myself Jo March. Now, in the time of the pandemic, isolated from family, friends, and fellow workers, we are reinventing our processes.”
“Through Substack I plan to form an inter-connective body of work for a responsive community.”
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