Why a Print Newsletter?
The Value of Print in Precarious Times
PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN
As we shared last week, Loam is launching a print newsletter. This newsletter is the fruition of our desire to experiment with new and old forms of connection and community building that not only free us from AI algorithms, but also invite us to cultivate the earth intimacy skills and attention necessary to nurture lasting change. So we want to take some time today to share a little bit more about why this project is important to us.
We hope our upcoming print newsletter will be a source of enchantment this Autumn. But we also hope it will galvanize action. Although this particular missive isn’t very long—it’s a single page 18 x 24 fold out—it’s a small reflection of our bigger commitment to print as catalyst.
At Loam, print is the medium we’re most comfortable in. As grateful as we are for the accessibility (and low overhead!) of the digital, we relish how a book or magazine can give us space to really build a world. Print is a place of possibility. And you can tap into its power without needing an internet connection! That’s magic to us, and something we want to continue to protect.
That desire to preserve print is part of a bigger conversation we’ve been having about how we want to show up to our work. Over the course of this past year, we’ve written a lot about divesting from social media. For some people, getting off of social media isn’t really a big deal. But for us, it’s meant risking legibility and reach. Although logging off itself was really easy, choosing to reorient toward how we communicate and build community with our readers has been a complicated process. It dredged up ideas surrounding success, value, productivity, and responsibility as culture workers, and forced us to confront the ways that the Internet has shaped our lives: sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the markedly worse.
For us, the conversation about social media isn’t really about social media: good, or bad. It’s more about sustaining focus, and reawakening awe, and reckoning with the ways in which the very fact of scrolling—and scrolling—can normalize violence and climate collapse. Screens can dull our senses, such that when we encounter footage of war right next to an ad, we struggle to intake the stakes of the situation. Although there is wisdom in the freeze response, social media has given us a tool for numbing our pain rather than moving through, or being with, our grief and rage. We might get so overwhelmed that we can’t actually do the work needed of us at this moment, or so stuck in the freeze that we struggle to access the incandescent love that makes humans risk everything—comfort, cultural conditioning—to protect the people and places we care about.
As we have shared in earlier missives, focusing on print is also a practical consideration. The idea that digital is intrinsically more accessible a medium is a partial truth; powering a phone requires energy from the grid, and scrolling through social media necessitates a server connection.
We are in the era of extreme weather, and this means we need to cultivate diverse modes of communication so that when an alert system fails, or the Internet goes down, we have other proven and practiced ways of connecting with each other. This can look like printed resource guides, or even well-marked meeting grounds so that neighbors can gather together during, or after, a storm. At Loam, we believe we don’t have to (and shouldn’t) wait for the catastrophic to start practicing multiple forms of communication; we can do so now.
Of course, preparing for sea changes is no guarantee of outcome. But as Loam contributor and Weaving Earth facilitator brontë velez reminds us, the work isn’t only to rehearse for disaster. The work is to be a companion to disaster by encountering the precarity, and continuing to commit to caring for our community.
This newsletter is a small offering. It’s an experiment we want to build with you. These are precarious times, and we hope that what you find in it—from an essay on divesting from social media by Loam Editor Kailea Loften to an Autumnal blessing by Weaving Earth Executive Director Lauren Hage—will fortify your spirit in the midst of everything.
Click below to learn more about this sliding scale offering. We’re so grateful again for your support!
In love and solidarity,
Loam