How Do I Know This Is a Newsletter?

I’m taking an online graphic design class, and in the first week we were asked to put together a portfolio of ten images, which I have never had to do before. We were to focus on one object—the example given was an orange—and then apply a range of techniques for depicting the object. You could paint an orange, you could do a line drawing of an orange, you could cut an orange in half and use it as a stamp, you could create a digital orange.

I chose a feather that I picked up off the ground as the starting point for my portfolio. I don’t have a lot of art supplies, but I do have a lot of office supplies, so those were pressed into service, along with a borrowed small paintbrush. I traced the feather with a Sharpie, I dry brushed its silhouette with fountain pen ink, I drew it with fancy highlighters that I use on my wall calendar. Having exhausted the physical feather for inspiration, I cut feathers out of sticky notes and drew a feather on a chalkboard. Ten feather images is a lot, especially when most of your media were bulk ordered from Staples.

Learning to produce and iterate and push the images was very helpful. But the thing I’ve been considering the most is a central question to graphic design: How do I know this image is a feather?

If I stripped the image too far down, to just a central line with some shorter lines coming off of it, it looked like a tree. If I made the image green, it looked like a leaf. If I zoomed in too far, it became abstract lines. Zoomed out too far, and it could be part of a wing or an entire bird. The keys to featheriness were unexpected: color (not green) and shape (not symmetrical). Feathers are usually wider on one side than the other, while leaves tend to be even on both sides.

Maybe the instructor didn’t intend for this self-paced online graphic design class to raise ontological questions about the nature of feathers, but here we are. Or here I am, anyway, and I’m bringing you along.

I’ve also been thinking about the nature of the newsletter—what it is in essence, what it has been as I’ve used the form so far, and what I want it to be going forward. Like my feather portfolio, it will take fifteen or twenty attempts to get ten that work, and maybe only one or two of those ten will make me think, Fucking nailed it.

A newsletter is clearly not a few things—a novel, for example. Novels have characters, and something happens to them, though it doesn’t have to have a proper plot like I learned a thousand years ago in high school. Novels are much longer than newsletters, maybe starting at 50,000 words, whereas if a newsletter passes a thousand words or so, they had better be very compelling words.

It’s not reported nonfiction. I’m not interviewing anyone, and I rarely do any digging for sources. I’m not writing the life of an author, or a biography of a book (that’s my master’s thesis project), or a history of the fork or anything.

It’s not a poem, which has form, sometimes meter and rhyme, usually striking images and metaphors, and a concentrated expression of an idea. A newsletter is plainly prose broken into paragraphs, and my newsletters in particular rarely stray anywhere near the poetic.

It might be an essay. Essays have no fixed length. They can be a few paragraphs that you have to turn in for a fourth-grade project or a book-length work (I’d argue Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message is a book-length essay.) They explore an idea—say, a half-baked ontology of feathers and newsletters. They may focus tightly on that idea, they may range outside the lines to show the edges of the idea at hand, they may draw on other sources to bolster or test the idea. They may join a cultural conversation in progress or they may present a new enough idea or a fresh consideration of an old idea that sparks a new conversation. Sometimes newsletters contain essays.

A newsletter is a missive that is sent from one person to many others, whether that’s a dozen or a hundred thousand recipients. It can be received in a physical mailbox (I’m not against doing this; let me know if you want real mail, readers), an email inbox, or via social media or a dedicated app like Substack. The purpose is in the name: a letter sharing news. The holiday letter from your aunt with news about your cousins is a newsletter.

The worst kind of newsletter is one that only wants to sell you things. I send these too, from my little publishing company. They come out once a month so people who read my books know when there’s a new book coming out and if something is on sale. These newsletters are useful! They contain news, and they are sort of letters. But they’re also the kind that can clog your inbox worse than bacon grease in a sink drain.

I’m coming to the conclusion as I write this that a newsletter communicates meaningful information from one person to many. And the meaningful communication that I want to send to you, dear readers, is that books are not only worth reading but worth thinking about. And that reading a book, and thinking about a book, doesn’t have to be a weighty slog. It can be light as a feather. Or ten feathers fashioned from office supplies that you’ve scanned with your phone and saved as a PDF to turn in for peer review.

KHG’s latest translations, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion and Volume 2: Spectacle are available now from her shop and from Bookshop.org.