BUILDING SOMETHING OF VALUE

A post from a reader makes my day and makes me ponder how sustained weekly reading has built something of value while teaching me a thing or two about the world.

In 2021, when I decided to start writing on Substack, I was discouraged by some well-meaning folks, their point being that the best investment of my time was to freelance for outlets where my work would be edited and, thereby, also receive a home where people would happen upon my writing. While that was not wrong, I have some reservations about being edited on a regular basis. I think creative writing needs a fair balance of both restraint and freedom. I wrote for several publications in the first decade of my writing career where I felt that I was edited so much that my voice barely managed a squeak on the page.

On Substack, I can be who I am without worrying about the voice of the publication that I’m writing for. Here, I’m not also held accountable to deadlines, especially when my home life is a bit skewed. Here, I can also talk about what’s happening in my life and hope that readers understand that it’s not always possible to strike a balance between life and work. I’ve found that sometimes the best attitude is to give in to the whim and caprice of the moment and simply write about life as it’s being lived. This is what I do on my other Substack newsletter where I just shared a story about the thousand names for my grandson.

There’s another reason I’ve found Substack personally rewarding. Once in a while, LETTERS FROM EVERYWHERE brings me an affirmation from writers whose work has impressed me over the years. Just two days ago, I heard from Leningrad-born

Olga Zilberbourg

, a San Francisco-based writer and author of Like Water And Other Stories, whose first English-language collection of short stories examines issues around displacement, identity, motherhood, immigration and adaptation, while offering “an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution.”

Olga was intrigued by my recent post about Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp and wrote to me about it. I told her then about another Kannada language novella—one by Vivek Shanbhag called Ghachar Ghochar—that I thought she absolutely must read. Literally, within a day, she managed to locate the book and read it. Then she reached out to tell me how much she loved it and went on to share her reading experience on social media while tagging my post.

Thanks to Olga, some of her readers subscribed to my work. I’m grateful for her suggestions on posts I could write whenever I’m unable to keep up with weekly reading. Given that I’ve read and written about some 150 books in the last three years covering about 50 languages from around the world, it’s certainly worth pouring over what I’ve done weekly for so long. Then there’s the realization tinged with disbelief that even as I was reading—and writing, right away, about what I had read—there was also inside me, a clear shift, at once intellectual and emotional.