Five grand

Thank you for a milestone, plus my weekly shareables: Extreme fishermen, ordinary beauty, and the dB's are back

As a rule, I don’t obsess over the stats for The Writing Shed. I’m always happy to see my email ping* with a message that I have a new paid subscriber. Other than that, I don’t pay much attention.

*The truth is, my email never pings anymore. I used to HATE it, back in the early days of email, when it pinged all the time and I didn’t know how to make it stop. One of the great days in my online life was when I figured out I could turn off the ping sound. Ah, sweet relief. But I still think of that ping when a new email comes in.

But the other day, I was clicking around the dashboard and saw this:

I am damn proud of this.

Mainly I am proud of all of you who subscribe to the Shed, free or paid—especially those of you who have been around since the beginning, back in February 2022. I brought about 1,200 subscribers with me from my old MailChimp newsletter, so since then the number of subscribers has more than quadrupled.

I poked around behind the curtain a little more and learned that the Shed has readers from all 50 states and 81 countries. Your first thought might be “bots!”, but nope—I’ve heard from many of those international readers, as well as from so many of you here in the States, and I’m deeply grateful that all of you find something enjoyable and/or meaningful in these letters to you. (That was one of my original names for the newsletter—Letters To You. I might still change it to that one day.)

I’d love for the Shed to reach even more people—to make this big, warm community we’ve built even bigger and warmer. I’m going to share these newsletters more frequently in places I haven’t done much before, like LinkedIn and Instagram. If y’all have any suggestions along those lines, drop them in the comments.

But the only real and reliable source of growth in this online world is word of mouth. I’d like for us to do that together.

I’d appreciate it if you could share the Shed with folks who you think might enjoy it. To that end, here are links to some of my favorite posts:

Silver days—our 25th anniversary

Herschel—the loss of one of my heroes

The fisherman—memories of my dad

Kristi Noem, dogs, and me

Dilbert, RIP

I’m especially proud of my Heaven is a Playlist series on the songs that move me the most. Swear to god I’ve got more of these coming up, but for now here are the first three:

Little Richard, “I Don’t Know What You Got But It’s Got Me”

Etta James, “Take It to the Limit”

Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”

Some of those might also be new to those of you who are recent subscribers. Either way, read and share, read and share, read and share. Sharing something you enjoy is one of the best gifts you can give another person. And if you share the Shed, it’ll be a gift to me as well.

Here’s an easy way to share this post:

And here’s a way to share the Shed as a whole:

Every time I get to the end of a thank-you letter, I think of those Bartles and Jaymes wine-cooler commercials from the ‘80s, featuring two old guys (who were supposed to be Bartles and Jaymes, I guess) awkwardly doing the ad read, but always closing with “Thank you for your support.”

Now I’m the old guy, awkwardly telling all 5,006 of you how glad I am that you’re here, and hoping you stick around for many newsletters to come. Thank you for your support.

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10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. On Sept. 15 the Charlotte Observer, where I worked 23 years, is cutting its print edition from six days a week to three. We are one of the few remaining homes that still gets the printed paper, and this is going to hurt—not just us as readers, but the people whose jobs depended on it. My friend Cristina Bolling did a story I hoped someone would do—the story of the carriers who have delivered the Observer for (in some cases) decades. (Charlotte Ledger)

2. The Washington Post is beginning a series on the lives of public servants, and the kickoff piece is fantastic—Michael Lewis’ story on a bureaucrat who has saved countless coal miners’ lives, and the tunnels he traveled to get to that place.

3. The secret behind pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s hits, and a lot of other songs dominating the charts: songwriter Amy Allen. (NYT)

4. Anne Lamott on the unremarkable moments that, as we get older, feel more and more remarkable. (WashPost)

5. The great writer Sarah Smarsh on killing trees to save the prairie in her part of northwest Kansas. (Orion)

6. Look, I love to fish … but not in a million years would I try “wetsuiting,” where you go out neck-deep into rough seas to catch huge striped bass. But there are people crazy enough to do it, and they make a hell of a story. (The Atlantic)

7. I couldn’t get through the college football season without Jason Kirk’s Watch Grid, which tells me which games are worth watching each week and when they come on. Plus you’ll see a request from Jason in this week’s post to urge libraries to carry his book HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU, which he and I talked about on SOUTHBOUND a few months ago.

8. I posted some music from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings here a few weeks ago … here’s a Q&A with them by the great Amanda Petrusich of the New Yorker, centering on the tornado that almost destroyed their studio.

9. I’ve always thought of the North Carolina/New Jersey band The dB’s as the Velvet Underground of indie rock … their albums back in the ‘80s never sold that well, but they influenced scores of bigger bands. They’ve reunited and are on tour as we speak and so that gives a reason (not that we needed one) to revisit their catalog. Here’s one of my favorites, “Think Too Hard,” which to me sounds like Squeeze crossed with the Replacements.
   

   10. Last week I had an MRI—the results were good, everything’s fine—but it is a little disconcerting to be jammed into a cramped little tube with a bunch of doctors monitoring you on the outside. Sort of like birth in reverse. The one good thing was that they gave me headphones and asked what kind of playlist I’d like to hear. I told them ‘70s R&B. And so, as they stuffed me into the canal and the machines started pinging, I heard the calming tones of … “Brick House.” I would have laughed out loud, had they not told me to be still.
   

   
   
   Have a great week, everybody.

—TT