Coming Soon to Art of Conversation

An added bonus for supporting this project

When I first began writing, decades ago, I was sure I was going to be a novelist. All I wanted to do was write fiction. If you’d told me then that one day I’d be writing non-fiction, and that I’d be publishing weekly essays to my own website where I would have thousands of readers, I’d have thought that a fiction stranger than anything I was then attempting to write.

And then (as the Art of Conversation origin story goes) I began writing about what I was reading while I lived in a country where English was rarely spoken. I felt lonely and often misunderstood, so going deeper into art felt like home. I soon discovered that I was writing for the same reason Joan Didion gave in her essay on the topic: to find out what I think.

Just as writing each essay is a step into the unknown, a method of mapping the cultural territory I’m exploring, Art of Conversation is a series of experiments. I try to find out what works for how I write and how my readers engage with that writing.

I’m now at a point where I hope to make this adventure one that pays financially, so that I can devote the entirety of my time to it, rather than what time I can make between shifts at a day job. I believe that I’ve earned the trust of enough of my readers to ask that if you can afford to become a paid subscriber, please consider it.

I’ll continue to make all of the essays and Marginalia pieces available, for free, to all readers. Now, I’m going to be offering bonuses to paying subscribers, beginning with a new feature I’ve just added to the homepage: Deleted Scenes. These will be a peek behind the scenes of some of my essays, sections that had to be cut for various reasons, and occasionally a piece of further insight into how I wrote a piece, or how I research, or anything else that seems interesting and salient.

I never want to miss an opportunity to thank all of you for reading Art of Conversation, for engaging with the writing — commenting on the essays, restacking them on Notes, and recommending them to friends and family — and, of course, for becoming a paid subscriber. I couldn’t have predicted any of this a decade ago, and I’m excited to see what wonderful things I can’t now imagine that will come out of Art of Conversation in the future.

All the best,

Matthew