Two years and some change ago — August of 2023, if the archive is to be believed, and the archive is the only record-keeper here — I published the first essay on this site. Quarto & Vellum, the bookstore where I’d spent eleven years, had closed that spring; the math stopped working, as it does, and I went back to the thing I’d been trained for before retail consumed me: sitting alone with sentences. This blog was supposed to be a quiet place to leave them. It is now twenty-eight pieces later, and I remain genuinely uncertain whether that’s prolific or negligible.
What I do know is that I’ve never checked a traffic counter. I disabled analytics the week I launched, which seemed like the sensible thing to do when I’d spent eleven years behind a register learning that certainty about who wants what drains all the pleasure from the offering. I didn’t want to know if anyone was reading. Then email began arriving. Several hundred pieces of it over two years, each one an actual person saying this essay did something to me—and because I’m constitutionally incapable of ignoring mail, I answered every message. This seemed like the opposite of what a website is supposed to do. It feels like the only sensible thing I’ve done.
I rewrote the theme in the fall—Marginalia, I called it, because I’m not creative about metadata but I am committed to an oxblood accent color that no one asked for. The redesign was small, mostly invisible to anyone but me, which is the way I prefer changes to be. Hand-built, slightly imperfect, the work of someone who learned HTML by breaking her own terrible early websites. There’s something right about that constraint. It keeps the ego proportionate to the vessel.
The essays themselves have surprised me. Not all of them. Some arrived dutiful, even I can feel it—pieces I knew I should write because they were the obvious follow-up to something that seemed to resonate. Those sit on the site like furniture someone assured you was important. But then there are the ones that arrived unbidden, fully formed at three in the morning, the pieces I didn’t know I was thinking until my hands were writing them. Those are the ones I keep. Those are the ones the librarians and marine biologists and one person’s grandmother with a dictionary seem to recognize, and they send them back to me with corrections, elaborations, better phrases than the ones I found. The comment section has become my co-editor, which is either the worst or the best possible outcome and I haven’t yet decided which.
For eleven years I spent my days on the other side of the transaction—I recommended books, handed them over the counter, watched people walk out into the world with a story I’d pressed into their hands. That was work I loved absolutely, and it was also work that kept me from doing the thing I’d once assumed I would do. I thought losing the store would free me. Instead it just made clear how difficult it is to write for people you can’t see, to spend hours on sentences that might disappear into no one’s afternoon. At the bookstore, the transaction was immediate. There was always someone to tell whether the book landed. Here, I publish into what might be silence, and somehow that’s become the less lonely option.
I have no plans for this place, which is precisely my plan. The essays will continue to appear when they’re done appearing—not on a schedule, not because I’ve manufactured a thought into a deadline, but when something has actually coalesced into a shape worth keeping. The six of you who asked for an RSS feed should know that it works, and that your names sit in a small note I’ve kept. There will be no redesigns that matter. The oxblood accent color stays. I will keep answering the mail.
That’s what I know at the end of two years. Twenty-eight pieces, several hundred letters, a handful of correcting comments from careful readers, and one small redesign that nobody noticed. I spent over a decade selling other people’s words from a beautiful storefront. I’m still learning to let my own words leave from a much quieter space—but they’re leaving. That seems like enough to mark, on a day like this, with honest gratitude.