same spaceship, new direction

Hello! For those who subscribed to Supermassive Black Hole back in the beginning, thank you. Writing explicitly about my miscarriage and grief was a huge turning point for me, and your witnessing and reading was a huge part of that.

As you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t sent an installment of SBH in a while — in part because I feel like I’m in a different place with grief, and have been wondering how this newsletter might change to reflect that. To oversimplify it, writing about grief here helped open up other spaces in my life where I can address and accept it, and the pull to use this space is now lessened—I’ll also admit to a bit of burnout on writing about shitty feelings week after week, despite that being self-imposed.

But I have still loved writing these little essays and sharing them with you. So — Supermassive Black Hole is changing.

Starting next week, SBH will become a monthly newsletter with short essays on the darkness within and the art we make and love in spite of it all.

There will be reflections on how a profoundly depressed person could have written Mrs. Dalloway, why I think the Hole album Live Through This is essentially Shakespeare, why I love reading creepypasta when I’m sad, and why the hell creative people keep making art when no one asked them to or paid them to. It’ll be pretty much the same personal-essay tone that SBH has been up until now, and there will be plenty of sadness, but I’ll be widening the scope a lot more. (It will also feature more original illustrations!) If that sounds cool to you, I hope you’ll stick around.

Thank you all for being a part of this extremely personal and vulnerable part of my grief — it has meant the world to me.