Readers' mixtape 1
An anthology for Scorpio season
About ten days ago I put out a call for Substack newsletter recommendations, and received a wonderful variety of posts from writers and readers. I’m sharing some of them here, along with other favourites I found along the way. (These recommendations are filtered through the lens of whichever topics are floating my own boat at the time, so please forgive me if your suggestion isn’t here.)
I’m not sure yet, but I think I’ll make this listicle a monthly instalment, so please do send me your favourite reads for next month’s list.
I always feel kind of awkward telling people I’m into astrology – like I’ll either lose credibility in their eyes, or they’ll get excited and start telling me all sorts of generalisations about Virgos and I’ll have to backtrack with an “Okay but not that kind of astrology,” and eventually find myself drawn into a conversation I never meant to have. But I am into astrology, and I might as well get things over with and admit it here. The topic will come up again. (I am also into making pacts with plant spirits, having coffee with my dead grandmother, and blaming missing objects on the fae. Phew. I said it.)
Anyway, so it’s Scorpio season and I’ve really been feeling it. In a good-but-wow-this-is-rather-intense-isn’t-it? kind of way. In keeping with that, these past weeks I have been drawn to the dark, the existential, or even the somewhat macabre here on Substack. But then also to stories about flowers, and poems about self-acceptance, because life and death are wonderful bedfellows (like my hippie friends would say, it’s all about that polarity).
It’s springtime in the Southern Hemisphere, but spring also holds a kind of death, I find. Birds build new nests, larvae transform into wasps and fly off, we pick up new ideas and projects, and we all leave behind our winter selves like bits of broken carapace. That’s as it should be, but also, it’s a little bit sad.
In keeping with all this happy-sad, here are the recent Substack reads that gave me all the feels.
To anchor all this talk of Scorpio season in some good astrology, we have
‘s newsletter The Venus Chronicles. Her post about Scorpio season would probably have been even better read right at the start of this season (21 October), but really, there is never a bad time to read about the alchemising power of death in all its forms. Take this quote, for instance:“but a fear of death is not a love of life. on the contrary, anyone afraid to die is also afraid to live because safety seeking is the death of spontaneous action and joy. the more fearlessly you can meet life on life’s terms (including the fact that it will someday kill you) the more deeply you can sink into the present moment, where all the good action is.”
Yum. Also, her newest post, which came out after I started writing this piece, is equally wonderful.
And since we’re on the topic of death, here is a glorious piece by
, strikingly titled “Nature worship for the rotted world”. This post challenged me to accept the world’s invitation to love it, to say yes to it even where it’s ‘ugly’ – specifically, even where humans have made it ugly. It’s one thing to be inspired by the beautiful forest around me, but can I extend that same open-hearted presence and willingness to be a witness even to decay and extinction?The paradox of this piece is that in a sense it is written from a post-hope perspective, and yet it is a deeply hopeful read. I found it impossible to pick a favourite sentence, but here is an extract:
“In order to truly learn from nature, and in order to understand that we are nature, we must not fall prey to the illusion that we are perfect, untouched landscapes, or that we should be trying to return the world to some flower-filled, forested paradise. No — we are ruins and we are spring rain. We are the prey and the predator. We are the wildfires that scorch the hills in order to clear shape for new land. We are the tides and the whirlpools, the rich reefs and the airless, luminous deeps.”
In
newsletter To Be Seen, she writes poems specifically for her readers, a concept I though was both innovative and heartwarming. Although much of her writing is aimed at parents, I nonetheless resonated very much with her October Poems. She’s inviting poetry requests, so send her some if you have need of tailor-made encouragement.On the topic of poetry – here is another one that I loved. It’s by
and it’s about frog pose – yes, the yoga pose. Frogs have been crossing my path a lot lately – in poetry and stories, but also on my daily walks, and in their nightly choruses – and I am beginning to pay attention to the agility in their ungainly bodies, the beauty of their strange ugliness. What transformation beckons here, if I can let go of my preconceived ideas? This post is about that, and about the magic of self-acceptance.Speaking of the beauty in ugliness,
has a series on her newsletter that’s all about “the terrible unrecognized beauty of ugliness,” and it’s the content I never knew I needed. Take this mission statement, for instance:"I have a rule about Halloween: no cute costumes allowed. If you have to be a princess, it should be a dead princess, or a gross princess, or a scary princess. Ugly-only is my rebellion against the sexy-centric prefab outfits generally available to women for this holiday that I believe should be dark and dirty as intended."
The first in the series features the ugliest of toys, the second features movie characters, and best of all, you get to vote for your ugly personal fave!
A wonderfully odd yet eminently readable writer is
, with her newsletter of the same name. A medievalist by day, Emily juxtaposes the modern world against the past – as found in horror tropes, medieval literature, or even the lives of her parents – to hilarious and thought-provoking effect. Her writing is deeply relatable yet absurdist – I keep finding sentences I wish I’d written myself, yet know my brain would never have come up with, like “I think about oysters, humans and the surprisingly porous line between the two.”Her post peak media consumption: werewolf romance and the end of the world was the most recent to make me laugh and make me think. And perhaps my favourite lines from it were her comparison between how we consume media today versus how her parents did 40 years ago:
“My dad walked from shop to shop in a town he asked his parents to drive him to to compare prices and work out where he could afford one (1) Pink Floyd album. I sit on the toilet and think, ‘Wow I never listen to French music', so I find a reddit thread on French music recommendations for Phoebe Bridgers fans and have downloaded three albums before I flush.”
I’ve been struggling to find South African newsletters that aren’t about economics or politics, so stumbling across
’s piece Breathing in the Backyard felt like suddenly arriving home. What starts as springtime musings gradually becomes lessons in ecology, musings on history and humanity, and finally ode to life itself.
“For this is the game of the garden. As the geraniums spill through the cracks and onto the public pavement, it reminds us of this great force of life in which I, you, we, are in a constant relationship.”
- ’s Fyodor and the Foxhole is longform writing at its best, weaving together strands of different life stories – Tolstoy, a death-row inmate, an atheist chaplain, Viktor Frankl – in an open-ended meditation on meaning and hope.
Another great South African find,
’s newsletter Love Letter delivers incisive yet warm missives that cover almost all the things I want to read about. From her “about” section:“I care about language. About its power. I care about power – who has it and how they wield it. I care about people who have limited or no access to either the language and tools of the dominant culture or to power. I care about listening. I care about art and music and books. I care about living creatively and hopefully even though – or especially because – life is hard and our systems serve the ruthless and the powerful only. These concerns emerge in my letters.”
Every piece of hers I read spoke straight to all the grief and anger and frustrated love I feel towards the world, and towards my country in particular, so I had a really hard time picking a single one to recommend. Quietly Radical and The Smoking Self were two of my favourites, though.
- ’s brand new newsletter Love & Struggle – captioned “all stories are human relations stories” – uses a series of vignettes to cover a particular topic. The result is writing that really brings home its message, without ever belabouring the point. I loved the format and the topics thus far.
I intended only to profile smallish or emerging writers, but
’s piece on magic, illness, and pumpkins added joy to a particularly heavy day for me, and I thought you might need some of that too. (It’s likely that you’ll find yourself wanting to binge-read the rest of their newsletter too. Do it.)
I’m typing the last of this post from a guest room in my sister’s house in Kigali, Rwanda, where I will be visiting for three weeks. Being somewhere so unfamiliar – even this city’s soundscape is surprising to me – is challenging my writing voice. I find myself doubting my most familiar turns of phrase, suddenly flipping them over to inspect their undersides. Half of me wants to go explore the world outside, the other half of me wants to sit at this strange desk and write and write until I land back into myself. It is a time of strangeness and transformation for me – but also for the world, I think. Thank the stars for writers who put the words we never knew we needed to our experiences.
(If you’re from the US and reading this in real time, then I send you all the empathy and faith I have to give.)
Thank you Rita! Love the mixtape approach, the best kinda throwback 🙏
Oh wow thank you so much for the shout out! And I can’t wait to check out all the others you have listed here. This is amazing ❤️