Ready your wallets! Our most beloved punk angel, Patti Smith is launching a newsletter with a subscription-based add-on via Substack, which she has titled The reader is my notebook.
Shared via an incredibly digressive and heartwarming announcement on Instagram featuring her cat, the poet, musician and author posted a video letting the world know that the newsletter will feature weekly (or a "couple times a week") tidbits of original essays, notes on books or films she has enjoyed, photographic essays, "shards" of essays and music, notes on songs she has written, or "a meditation on Sylvia Plath, or the healing properties of turmeric."
All of the above are free to anyone who chooses to subscribe, but Smith isn't stopping there. For those who decide to be paying subscribers (worth every penny, we'd imagine), they will gain access to Smith's musings in the form of a serial written throughout last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. She has titled the piece, The Melting, and describes it as “a journal of my private pandemic.”
“Every morning for some hours, at my usual café, I sit and write,” She says in the long-winded introduction to the newsletter, which has us racing to substack with fervour. “Notebook and coffee reign. Writing is what I do, and have since twelve, imagining myself Jo March. Now, in the time of the pandemic, isolated from family, friends, and fellow workers, we are reinventing our processes.”
“Through Substack I plan to form an inter-connective body of work for a responsive community.” She says. We're with you, Patti!
Alongside her new email-based venture, Smith will make an appearance at Bob Dylan's 80th birthday with a performance, which will likely be as iconic as the very idea of it.
Watch Smith's full announcement, below, and subscribe to the newsletter via the Substack website.
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Image: @thisispattismith
