Monthly Meanderings: July 2023

Fayoum Oasis, police escorts, and bagfuls of pottery

Welcome to new paid subscribers Victoria, David, and Suet!

Friends, I can hardly believe that July is coming to a close. I feel like I’ve failed you this month, as I haven’t been writing regularly. It’s incredibly important to me to uphold my end of the bargain with you, my biggest supporters, so I’m pausing payments until I can get back into a good rhythm. (For those of you who are yearly, your subscription will be extended by the amount of time payments are paused.)

While I don’t have a good excuse for not writing lately, I do have a reason: this newsletter is starting to feel a bit like jamming a square peg into a round hole. The kinds of pieces I most love to write—travel memoir—are neither easy nor formulaic, and because they come exclusively from my head rather than from synthesized research or other outside inputs, they aren’t easy to produce on a specific timeline. I simply have to work through my thoughts until they make sense. That takes as long as it takes, and doesn’t lend itself well to a newsletter with a regular cadence. It leaves me constantly stressing about when I’m going to publish. Friends, I desperately need to recalibrate.