Last week’s dispatch marked the conclusion of Only by the Grace of the Wind, a novel I have released in serial instalments on Substack over the past three months. Thank you, dear subscribers, for sticking it out for the entire run. Nobody unsubscribed, which is reassuring, and it was gratifying for me to finally share this particular story.
I wrote Only by the Grace of the Wind in the interstices of late 2020 and much of 2021. Most days, I put in my 500-1000 words before the sun rose, hunched over my desk, typing with seven fingers, sometimes eight if I was feeling ambitious. It was a sort of shadow dance I performed each morning as a new doctor, a pantomime between my artistic and clinical selves, a past manqué arcing over a reluctant present. It is likely no surprise to you that a few strands of my own story are braided into Karina’s. And though I have since moved on to and finished other long-form fiction projects, I still return to this one in the small hours, when I do as my sleep psychologist suggests and practice stimulus control (ie, heaving my uncooperative, wakeful body out of bed and onto the couch to wait for somnolence to take hold once more).
Initially, I had hoped to publish my book traditionally. I thought that its conceit, equal parts Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt and Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” would inspire some interest. But after a few years of querying literary agents and small presses, I wondered whether I would have to just print the manuscript at Staples and gaze wistfully at it from my rolling chair. There had been interest, at times the kind that gets one’s hopes up, but ultimately, the answer was a polite no, often with a few compliments and an exclamation mark to soften the blow.
It was kismet, I think, that the very week I had decided to mothball Only by the Grace of the Wind I was introduced to Substack, which I had initially misconstrued as a document management platform. Elle Griffin, a prominent Substacker who had written a post that was featured in Evgeny Morozov’s weekly e-mail Syllabus, piqued my interest with an intriguing pitch. Her dissection of the apparently moribund contemporary publishing ecosystem offered an alternative to appeasing the gatekeepers: the online serial novel.
Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club and Choke, had recently sold a book he had been releasing in boluses on Substack. Salman Rushdie, the embattled Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, has serialized a new novel as well. George Saunders is on Substack. Junot Diaz, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates as well. The aspirational promise of this shiny new venue filled me with an electric kind of excitement, which I had not experienced since I was too young to know better. And so I began to build my Substack. And here you are.
Even now, this all feels very new to me. Since the late aughts, I’ve been a lackadaisical, at times surly Facebooker, showing up infrequently and lurking without liking or commenting. This was bad behaviour, I know, and I should have have been more conscientious, if not out of principle and love and fellow feeling, then at least to accumulate precious karma and clout, which I now know pay dividends. To atone for my decade-and-a-half of heedlessness, my foray into Substackland has involved daily genuflection at the altar of virality, which giveth and taketh, and a belated conversion to the Benevolent Church of Earnest Online Engagement.
Here on the Stack, I have found a sprawling, topographic intellectual grounds where interesting people are writing extremely interesting things. A bit, maybe, like the Athenian Agora, but with a “solopreneurial” ethos and a penchant for pastiche. Sure, there are swamps, with all their wafting reactionary ripeness, but there are many more oases, flanked by creative outposts and idiosyncratic online businesses. I’m aware also of the vast inner reaches, where the topical meets the therapeutic, but my particular route has detoured away from these crowded, sparkly locales.
Much of the writing I’ve encountered in my insular Substack cul-de-sac is raw, tendentious, and compelling. I have most enjoyed being able to leave comments—questions, stray thoughts, expressions of awe—and receive thoughtful, friendly replies. As an aside, some of my wanderings have ventured into fairly colourful discursive territory, where I’ve encountered real-deal fascists, neo-monarchists, and adherents of the so-called “dissident right.” This has been a bracing experience, I will admit, because I have so assiduously circumscribed my reading over the last twenty years that I almost never encountered erudite, persuasive conservative writing “in the wild.” Ultimately, they could not entice this dyed-in-the-wool pinko, but their ideas, and the sizeable and vocal readerships that espouse them, have changed my understanding of the intellectual landscape in North America.
Perhaps at this point, some of you might be wondering, what is Substack, anyway? This is a question I kept asking myself week after week as I prepared my posts for deployment. Even after three months of dedicated exploration in the in-between of otherwise hectic days, I’m not sure I have a coherent idea myself, though I have learned that this, too, is par for the course.
Nominally, it’s a newsletter platform. For big names with preexisting audiences, it seems to be a liberating entrepreneurial venture. From veteran bloggers, tweeters, and miscellaneous social media savants who have “made a new home here,” I have gathered that Substack provides a modular community of kindred spirits and the possibility, however remote, of a paying writing gig. Like the universe, it is forever spreading outward. And as I spelunk ever-further into its crags, I’m learning that it has its own cultures, subcultures, and folkways.
I’ve lingered to observe a few brawls. I’ve been genuinely edified (and unsettled) by perspectives I never would have encountered given my previous media siloing. I think more than anything, Substack has opened up my cloister and shown me how many people around the world are thinking, writing, and creating (pardon the buzzword). This is more a commentary on my own, likely self-imposed seclusion than the state of the world (or “the discourse”).
There is, I will admit, occasionally the sense that I am like a dog at an open window barking into a darkened alleyway. I, the dog in this metaphor, can hear other dogs, so I bark excitedly, sometimes adding a stentorian howl for emphasis. But barking does not always yield a bark back, I have learned, and given the high-pressured blast of excellent writing flooding email inboxes daily, I often wonder whether the skew of writers (a multitude) to readers (unicorns dancing in the night) might make the whole enterprise a fait accompli. Some quite shrewd analysts have mused that Substack might even have the trappings of a pyramid scheme, wherein eager no-names prop up a few shooting stars with requisite, but ultimately unrequited, attention.
Back at the ranch, A Very Narrow Bridge, I have become accustomed to tumbleweeds and coyotes. Every now and then, an interloper has stopped by to leave a lovely comment on one of my chapters (thank you!). But mostly, I have hung out in my compound, polishing metal stuff and receiving the occasional wire from the handful of family and friends I have dragooned into receiving my weekly dispatches through Substack’s “invite everyone you know” initiative.
Jokes aside, as of the writing of this piece, I have twenty-five subscribers who do not know me in the world of solids. Some of these new friends seem to be reading my posts, for which I am very grateful. A sizeable number have disappeared into the brush, never to be seen or heard from again. In Substackland, subscriber counts are a measure of one’s reach and growth, so I imagine some aspirants subscribe reflexively in the hopes that they’ll get a subscription in return. I’m a simple man, not above a little quid pro quo, so their wily plan worked, albeit with far more emptiness than I had bargained for. I have my doubts about whether a crowded online Agora is the best place for anyone to hawk their books.
Or maybe these days, it has to be. It’s hard to imagine a more accessible, ostensibly democratic way to distribute one’s fiction, belle lettres, and screeds. Substack boosters herald the utopian promise of a literary marketplace. Skeptics decry the banal, monetized rise of dilettante pretenders. To my mind, Substack has elevated some truly inventive, meticulous, and subversive fiction. And for better or worse, its historically laissez-faire, idealistic posture has allowed for tremendous discursive freedom, including an unfolding meta-critique of the traditional publishing world’s privileging of certain types of identity and experience and a burgeoning set of grievances surrounding masculinity and permissibility. I have mixed feelings about the framing of these issues, but the debate has found mainstream purchase as well.
Of late, I too have wondered about identity and gender and their discontents. In fact, at this very moment, Karina is observing us from atop an elephant in the room. She is nonplussed by my taking a cue from Bugs Bunny, throwing a lampshade over her and her overlarge hoss, and stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the occasional plaintive trumpeting coming from my enormous lamp.
Part of this is, I think, defiance. There was no guile behind the choice, no stratagem, conscious or semi-conscious. If anything, I think I was probably being obtuse. I did not follow the #ownvoices dictum, nor did I stay in my lane. Even now, as I try to marshal some sort of persuasive rationale for my decision, I’m faltering. If this online essay were a piece of paper, it would look like a palimpsest, with pink rubber streaks crisscrossing the page and the silhouettes of dozens of provisional explanations.
Ultimately, I wrote a story as and about Karina Bergson because it was the one that came out. And the decision to go with that impulse is the single most liberating thing I have ever done as a writer.
There were things I could all of a sudden articulate, thoughts I could permit myself to have. Karina is not me, but she is now a part of me, and sometimes I still refract my own experiences through the lens she has gifted me. Without her, I’m not sure I could have processed some of the deeply fraught and haunting aspects of doctor training. Recently, I had a not-so-subtle reminder of the cruelty of the medical edifice right here on Substack. I almost blew a gasket in the comments section (Carmen, my wife, will attest to this with an eye roll).
I suppose you could say I wrote as Karina because she emerged when called. If she didn’t linger as she does, always at the tips of my fingers, I don’t know if I would be the same man. Even now, as I write this, I imagine she is watching over my shoulder.
Perhaps you have guessed already, but Karina’s clinical encounters share certain similarities with my own. Some of her memories and dreams are mine as well, but tilted slightly, as though viewed through a prism. The vast majority of the book is, of course, pure invention. I found inspiration in the writings of the mystical rabbi Lawrence Kushner, the physicist Carlo Rovelli, and the historian Frances Yates. In Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, I found permission to allow Karina a poetic inner voice and penchant for soliloquy.
As well, I spent a fair bit of time with Victor Gollancz’s long-forgotten and truly astonishing compendium of excerpts and fragments, A Year of Grace, which the famed publisher and activist compiled as a salve for his melancholy. It lifted, evidently, through the sorting of some of the most sublime expressions of humanity ever put to paper. The title of my novel was taken from a selection of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s memoir, Flight to Arras, which I first encountered in Gollancz’s priceless volume.
I still think a lot about Henri Bergson’s arcing theory of duration and Martin Hagglund’s thesis that we are free only if we can ask ourselves what we want to do with our time, which is forever running out. This brings me to the question of what is next for A Very Narrow Bridge. I have my misgivings, and they seem to cluster, fittingly enough, around time and memory. If Substack is a waystation for one’s writing—or, more broadly, one’s career as a writer—then I wonder about what happens to writing published in this liminal space, where ephemerality is super-charged.
I remarked on another Substacker’s post that I think a great many writers secretly hope that they are Kafkas worthy of Brods, unheralded but not for long, if only a passionate intercessor would hurry up and rescue the unseen. I have quite a bit of unpublished work, essays and long-form fiction, that I could set adrift on the Substack sea, like little paper boats. But the tug of the shipyard also grows stronger. A psychic once told me that I was a builder in a past life.
And so, I think I will spend a bit more time in the analog world, not just to consider a future paper regatta, but also because Substack maintenance is serious business. I miss my early-morning writing practice, which has been on pause since May.
I’ll be back, I think, if not with another serial project, then maybe with an essay or two. In the meantime, I will be reading in the interstices and marvelling at all the imaginative and searching and outrageous work I see daily on this very interesting platform.
Speaking of reading, since you’ve made it to the end, why not reveal yourself with a like or a comment? Let’s bark into the alleyway together.
*Note: The illustrations accompanying this story were generated using AI technology. I’ve left them as a sort of cyber-hairshirt. Please read my repentant anti-AI mea culpa and, if you can, forgive me.
Love this postmortem! Funny and so genuine!!