New Substack post: ‘Reading, and being read, in community’.
A longer-form text on carving out pathways for allowing others ‘in’ and myself ‘out’, in order to be read (literally, physically, emotionally) in writing, body, and mind.
Read here: /p/reading-and-being-read-in-community
Image: Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait
Anyone who knows me knows I am always, always late to a party. Now I get to be late to two, hehe.
Substack ✅ and an end of year reading list 9 days into January ✅. So here goes introducing Off Margin on Substack…
Off Margin will continue on @radio.worm across 2026 to explore text that moves off the page. But it is also now cloning itself (sort of) onto Substack where I will be (hopefully) sharing all manner of writing, as part of this growing and expanded practice I am painstakingly honing. Off Margin (Substack) will focus on a multitude of reading and writing lives, and texts that move both off and back on (uh oh) the page.
To kick off, I wrote about the role reading and writing has had in my life across the past year and how this has completely transformed my approach to them both as interconnected, active practices that are far more intuiative, embodied, and experiential than I previously gave them credit for. I’m talking about waiting room and insomnia companions, temporal passages, portals to place and space, self-flagilating vulnerability sticks, holistic soothing balms, and much more.
Also, as part of a vow to move away from strictly ‘consuming’ books and move into a space of engagement (which can also, sometimes, feel very vulnerable!) this first post is a way of paying homage to all the people, places and books who knowingly, but mostly unknowingly, shaped my reading and writing life in 2025.
I hope those who this speaks to will enjoy reading!
Link to post here: /pub/offmargin/p/life-reading-life-writing?r=4wa8x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Subscribe to Off Margin Substack here: /offmargin
In ‘The New Art of Making Books’ (1975), Ulises Carrión proclaimed that books exist, “as objects in an exterior reality, subject to concrete conditions of perception, existence, exchange, consumption, use.” For Carrión, a book needed to be created and read as a spatio-temporal entity in which language was complementary to the object, a part of the structure, in the process of creating meaning and, crucially, producing specific reading conditions.
This upcoming episode of Off Margin will pick up on this idea to delve into ‘Textures of Writing’, and explore the textual landscapes in which writing can emerge, be generated, present itself, and be circulated, as well as the environments in which texts find themselves mirrored, in response or repellent to, or that they embody or act in friction towards.
If a textual environment is one in which the contexts and settings from which we speak or write language are also consumed, and interpreted - encompassing both the physical and social factors that influence the meaning and understanding of a text - what is the direct relationship between a text and its environment? What are the settings, terrains, and conditions from which texts can emerge? And how much does the environment influence how a text is produced and received?
Tune in today at 20:00 for Off Margin w/ Amy Gowen !!
( design credit: @sudo_wu )
