Here's What You're Getting Into If You Subscribe to My Substack

The "start here" post. (Welcome!)

I was going to start this off by saying “greetings!” because that sounds formal and professional, but it also sounds like a bunch of aliens regarding the Stargate SG-1 team with hopeful suspicion. So I shall refrain. But I do greet you. Thank you for visiting my website. I still don’t really know what to call it. Not everyone is familiar with the term “Substack” and when I try to explain it to people who ask “what do you write?” I normally flounder around attempting to compress “newsletter,” “blog,” “human interest column,” and “personal updates but also more formally organized essays” into an elevator pitch. “Website” is doing some heavy lifting.

In any case, you are already ON the website, so hi! Hello! My name is Amy, and I have been writing since I was five years old and shamelessly plagiarized The Three Bears to write my own “first book.” It was made of construction paper and stapled together by me, which was a large and dubious accomplishment for a five-year-old. Since then my creativity has become at least marginally more original and I no longer use staples. I do write longhand whenever I can, though. Something about putting actual pen to real, dead-tree paper activates a special part of my brain.

I call this place “Something Funny, Something True” because it sounded good in my head (kind of a riff on “something old, something new”) and because I write about everyday real life and also things that make me laugh. Here’s a bit about that:

I also write an awful lot about books, because books have shaped who I am, and I believe that books shape who most of us are. I am a Christian of the Protestant persuasion who considers herself ecumenically curious, and for obvious reasons the Bible has shaped a great deal of my worldview and moral compass. But I also think that the promiscuous reader can cultivate virtue through a wide exposure to the common themes of humanity in good fiction, and I’m proud to say I am an avid reader of novels, “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.”¹ As you might guess from the quote I chose to illustrate this point, Jane Austen is my favorite author of all time. I have written a great deal about her and will continue to do so.

Of course, I also write about other books. And TV! And music! And movies!

I also write what is known on the internet as “conceptual humor” and by normal people as “short humor” and “the type of thing you’d find in McSweeney’s and The New Yorker” except that I have yet to be published in either of those. Some examples:

In the past I have written about parenting, but now I save most of those topics for my recurring essays at The Pomegranate, of which I am a managing editor. SFST is now focused less on my life as a mother and more on my life as a reader and writer (which is what it was meant to be from the outset, anyway).

Most of my newsletters and essays are free, but paid subscribers receive access to the full archive, and help to fund my work with babysitting so I can write (!) and contributions to my ongoing English degree.

I am a stay-at-home mom, technically speaking, but I am also a freelance writer and editor, a part-time childcare provider and also a part-time (soon to be full-time) college student. I suppose you could just say I am a mom, then, who doesn't work a traditional office job. At the time of this writing, I have two little boys, preschooler-aged and toddler-aged. (I don't want to have to update this page dozens of times for accuracy so their ages are vague.) I do not use their real names in my writing, to protect their privacy— online, they are known as Andy and Ben. I am not as precious about my husband's privacy and will freely inform you that his name is Rob. We also have a black cat known as Jane Pawsten. She is very beautiful and smug about that fact.

I've called my particular brand of writing, in the past, “nerdy nostalgia,” and here’s why. I like to learn and write about what I’ve learned. I grew up on Dear America and American Girl and Louisa May Alcott and the historical fiction of Jane Yolen and Ann Rinaldi. I was a homeschooled adolescent whose awkwardness and minimal social life were overshadowed by the books she couldn’t get enough of. I read Dickens and Austen and Gaskell and Orczy and Conan Doyle and even wrote my own clumsy iteration of a historical novel informed by real literature. (A story I can tell another day, perhaps.) I wrote a blog about classic books and period dramas and made several lifelong friends and started volunteering at a historic estate and got really, really into 19th-century costuming.

And now? I write for the little girl who had her nose in a book for years and was determined someday to write one. (I’ll get there. Just wait.) I write for people whose To Be Read list will probably never be finished in their lifetime. For people fascinated by the past and what we can learn from it, but who are grateful to live in an age of civil rights and antibiotics. For women of disentangling their sense of self from patriarchy culture. For moms who are trying to stay afloat and be creative in the little-trenches years. For Christians who want to cling to Jesus and their faith but who want nothing to do with right wing hegemony and Christian nationalism. And for writers who are determined to be succinct but somehow manage to make everything 25% longer than it needs to be.

Thanks for reading to the end. Because I wrote this for you.

1. This is a quotation from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen; if you already knew that but you looked at the footnote anyway, we are probably going to be friends.