Why I Started My Substack

Being new to Substack feels like landing in a city that you have never visited before. You don’t know many people and you don’t know your way around. You don’t really know where to go or what to look at. I hope that changes soon.

My reason for starting Substack is to try and build a supportive and engaging community around the theme of The Disquieting Muses; those women in the world who are troublemakers and misunderstood for a whole load of different reasons. With intersectional feminism at the heart, my aim is to eventually provide a hybrid Substack, with some shorter pieces openly available and some longer publishable standard pieces via paid subscription. Ideally there will be one longer piece per month so that by the end of the year, subscribers will have an anthology of essays based on women and subjects that I love to write about: objects, places, photographs, cultural moments, archives.

The online world feels so fractured and toxic right now, that I’d just like to pull together a space for shared interests and hopefully form part of a community of people who want to contemplate questions such as:

Why was Sylvia Plath’s house in Devon so important to her unique Ariel poems?

What were some of the most enlightening objects in Anne Sexton’s archive?

What does it feel like to use something that belonged to Sylvia Plath?

Why was Dorothy Parker’s main achievement overlooked?

In what way was Marilyn Monroe a subversive hiding in plain sight?

The world is full of disquieting muses, so let’s be unsettled, and disruptive, together.