Tiny Potatoes

A bit about insignificance

At first, I invited six people.

It was January 2009 and my husband at the time had confronted me about my frustrations at work. I had a good, solid job in college admission - a sidestep from my original career plan of working in healthcare - in order to get us stable and fund his nursing education. I was very good at my job of recruiting students and building an alumni engagement program, principally because I had no boundaries and was willing to work 18 hours a day for a salary that started with a “3” and contained five figures (but also offered tremendous benefits). After a fall of nearly continuous travel, including red-eye flights and cost-saving connections, I landed in a mounting pile of reading - many more applications than we had expected, and no more days to review them, and I was weary on every level.

This was not what I wanted to do with my life.

“Well, what do you want to do?” He asked.

“I want to teach yoga, stage manage, and write!” I said.

“And what are you doing that serves that direction?”

Nothing.

I was doing nothing in service of any of these aims, other than writing the annual (hilarious) Christmas letter.

The conversation continued, and ended with a one liner that has become a mantra of motivation for me.

“Who do you suppose will publish the nothing you’ve written?”

The truth of my experience is that Anne Lamott’s agent does not in fact show up at your door with Ed McMahon, or seated on a red-eye next to you, and offer to represent you based on your good-girlishness and charm.

You must write something first.

That summer I did two notable things. First I filled the container garden on our expansive patio with potatoes. Second, I started writing a private blog, and shared it with six people in an email that said - “Hi, I have to put words somewhere that eyeballs could see them. I’ve selected your eyeballs, but no pressure to read. I just need it to be possible for someone to read it. You know. In case you take an epically codependent redeye flight to Boston and end up seated next to a literary agent.”

The potatoes were a defense mechanism - the year before our container vegetables had been ravaged by a family of bears and a sadistic squirrel. Mama and two babies came up and tossed our 20 gallon planter of potatoes like it was a beach ball, and that miniscule fucker took a bite out of every single pepper on the deck. We needed something that would grow and be green but that was unappealing to wildlife. Potatoes are that - the leaves are large, lovely, and toxic, and they can endure direct sun and intermittent watering, which is the only watering I offer. At the end of the summer we harvested several pounds of golfball sized delicious taters.

follow me for more terrible cell phone photos of baby bears and pathetic tomatoes

The blog was called “Daily Musings of Undetermined Significance,” and it’s still there. I posted nowhere near daily, but in the same format I had been writing since 2002. Reflective memoir, with some accidental humor, followed by a list of ‘things I have learned from this’. The best bit from the first post?

”4. Home renovation is not my forte. My study will hopefully be completed by the apocalypse.”

(Side note - the study became the Joy Room, which was indeed finished before the pandemic).

It gave me the confidence to write publicly, and in 2011 I started “Catching the Yoga Bug” and “Pack(ing) It In” and “Yogini’s Favorite Vegan Recipes.” Even though Anne Lamott’s collection of reflective memoir essays _Plan B: Further Thoughts On Faith_ had kept me alive from 2005-2007, I did not think anyone would want to read MY narrative reflective memoir essays - I was a relatively boring* white woman in a vanilla town, and so I got practical and specific.

Reflections about Yoga
Packing Tips
Recipes

It will not surprise you to know that my most successful post ever was indeed a recipe: aloo gobi and chard.

(Potatoes, in fact.)

I shirked the formula of writing your entire life story and describing in painful detail each utensil used to feed the SEO bots, which may have more to do with my success than the recipe itself, but I think it’s pretty good.

I also started writing for hire, ghost writing and copywriting for all manner of people and companies. Most of my hired words are unattributed content you see on websites, blogs, and how-to’s, many of whom have collapsed into the space-time continuum. The only piece above the surface was The Blessing and Curse of my Infertility, a reflective memoir-esque piece I wrote after a rogue editor literally appeared at my door and asked me to write my story. While writing paid a few bills and funded vacations and scholarship contributions, writing for hire has always felt a bit more like prostitution to me than my life’s work. It was taking my talent and drive and dribbling it away in service of others, adding to the din of the internet. Catching the Yoga Bug held it’s last post near the end of 2018. I was newly in a romantic relationship that I did not want to write about publicly, and I turned my attention away from internet posting and into writing books. I maintained a mostly newsletter, which often included a bit of extemporaneous something. I’ve never gone back to review the 10+ years of newsletter content because the very thought of it is nauseating.

I submitted my memoir to my publisher in the fall of 2019, and we both decided that I would likely get more traction with a practical book first, so in December of 2019 I wrote 5,000-10,000 words a day and created a blitz draft of Better Boundaries - I lovingly referred to it as a ‘pile of book’, which was then beautifully edited by Becky and published by LaunchPad. It released in November 2020, a month after my person was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and so I did essentially nothing to promote it. Instead, I wrapped it up in swaddling clothes and pushed it into the river in the hopes that it would survive, and endure, and one day part the seas for those on the run from codependency to the promised land of healthy interdependence.

It was rescued by the six original readers and hundreds more - people whose paths had crossed mine at a pivotal moment, sufficient that they purchased and read and reviewed. There is a consistent flow of purchases from a number of unlikely places, most notably English speakers who download the eBook in Japan (If this is you - howdy! WHO ARE YOU???). Seventy three folks have rated it on the South American rainforest site, 72 favorably. Multitudes of others have dabbled in other reviewing sites, leaving tremendously kind words about the writing and the content.

[Important to note that I would not choose to use the term “Shanghaied” in any context - it must have fallen from a tree branch as the swaddled baby book drifted down river]

Many reviewers - some I know and some I’ve never met - wrote to me personally and directly, asking for more. Asking how they could fuel my writing process - allow me to devote more hours in a week to writing than the other things that feel necessary in the face of bills and a partner who was navigating resurrection.

In May of 2021, I started the [virtual latte], a subscription-based newsletter, principally out of desperation. We were just barely vaccinated and the world of traveling and teaching yoga did not feel possible in light of the erratic autoimmune disease of my person, and because ConvertKit offered a financial incentive if you launched a paid product in May - earn a certain amount, receive a bonus amount. More than the $20 I felt I could possibly earn via their incentive month, it felt like a sign that a paid newsletter might be possible.

And people signed up.

And I wrote weekly.

A year later, I migrated my 41 sweet subscriber souls over to Substack, because ConvertKit is not really designed to offer paid newsletters and makes cancelling a pain. Subscribers would have to muster the courage to email me directly to cancel (or cancel their credit cards) and that felt like an unnecessary hardship. If I were a swindler, I would be set, but alas, I retain a moral compass.

Substack is designed for writers, and makes signing up and cancelling simple (I hope… but let’s not push our luck… no need to try it out…). It also offers a higher price point possibility - people can sign up for free, or for a monthly (or annual) subscription, or a mega subscription. I waffled, knowing I would likely lose subscribers on the way, but feeling like it was the more ethically sound option.

Four people chose the mega subscription, which I call Coffee Connoisseur (howdy - I owe you an email about book club! I’m a bit behind on reading because of the vertigo-go), and 26 others migrated across. A quarter of the list hasn’t resubscribed, and that’s really ok, especially if they had wanted to cancel a long time ago and had been stuck in the uncomfortable position of wanting to cancel without the tools to do so.

And?

Three others - three random people - have located and subscribed to the paid [virtual latte] from within Substack (howdy, friends!). And dozens of others have signed up for the free subscription. Maybe someday they’ll come on over? They can’t read what YOU can read, dear benefactor, but they can have a free sip as all of my weekly posts are paywalled.

Within days of porting my list of paid subscribers over to Substack, I was invited to apply for a program called Substack Grow - an incubator for writers to learn and leverage the platform to support the growth of their work. I applied and was selected, and managed to attend the first virtual live session immediately following my first visit with Levi the vestibular PT. I was partially upright and malnourished, but I attended. Each Wednesday we learn and then have the opportunity to connect in small breakout groups with other writers based on some common interest. In each breakout room, I have done my best to offer insights and ask questions. In every instance, people have a larger following than I do. Some are regularly published in The New Yorker, or have landed on the NYT bestseller list more than once, or have hundreds of paid subscribers on Substack, or 10,000 followers on Instagram or Twitter.

In every single instance I am aware of the tiny potatoes that I am as a writer.

How did I even get selected into this group???

The whole point of the [virtual latte] was to provide a tiny token of gratitude to those interested in financially fueling my writing process, and a forum for me to write about anything and everything that struck a whim (rather than the Kardashians or listicles). The point of grow is to learn how to leverage all of the bells and whistles of this platform to reach out into the realms where people who might be served by your words can find them.

This? Is terrifying. 

Two weeks ago I spent a good portion of my vertigated time migrating the old lattes into a google drive, in search of some themes and direction. Trying to discern which of the 64 published lattes are the best, because in Grow, the invitation is to make an example of your best work free so that those who would like to get to know you can have a full-bodied latte to savor.

So here I am, asking you, my dear reader, what have you liked the most. Are there pieces that rise to the top for you? Subjects you particularly adore? What do you think best showcases me as a writer? I’m encouraged to make that free. What would you like to read more of?

(I’m also just curious.)

I know you read the thing, because many of you reply to or reference the thing in other correspondence. Wow.

Thanks.

For reading, and for sometimes saying so.

You (YES YOU) help me make time to sit down and word. YOU help me feel like I can write about anything, including writing. And potatoes. And significance.

PS: I know I’m not boring, just like I know no one is boring. In fact I believe wholeheartedly that the best advice I’ve ever given is to live a life worth writing about.

PPS: I really wanted to figure out how to tie potatoes and lattes together, but the best I had was a bad joke about latkes and it just didn’t fit anywhere above ;)