Crushing paywalls.

a new way forward for us

Hi friends,

When I launched this newsletter, I called it Wandering Home because I wanted to write and share stories about home, art, and faith. I said I’d make it a refuge where we’d consider beauty and truth rather than feed cycles of consumerism.

Wandering Home is two years old now. I’ve reclaimed and come to know my voice. You also know my voice. I keep writing about place, creativity, and peacemaking because they are guiding forces for me, and I keep sharing them because they’re universal, relatable, and so very human.

I’m grateful to be writing here. I’m no longer here writing for just myself. I’m not just a “journaller” who is writing for my own pleasure and benefit. This is for you now, dear reader.

Do you know that I never have written a whole newsletter post in one sitting? I may draft in one go, but I like to let pieces breathe and live outside of me for a bit – usually a few days or sometimes weeks – before I edit. It’s in editing that the real writing happens. Days and days of work go into the first pass read through, then making the second draft, then sometimes a third and adding graphics and photos. It’s my process. It’s slow and deliberate. It’s how I keep a posture of responding instead of reacting. It makes room for me to learn and grow as I write, or to change my mind if I find in the editing process that I’ve misspoken, which is not the same as a typo.

I am still a fellow wonderer and wanderer. I’m wired curious and creative. I mine for the lessons and beauty along the way for us. My favorite part? Sharing those discoveries. Offering them to you. Over time, the “what” and “how” of sharing and offering has evolved in the decade I’ve been writing online. Thank goodness. Or you’d still be subject to copious cliches and tired climbing metaphors all these years later.

I’ll start this off by saying Substack is an ideal place for me to publish my writing. It is unfussy, free of external ads, and a creative commonplace of thought and art. I love it for those reasons.

I’ve also learned a lot about Substack as a user in the past two years.

I willingly pay for a handful of Substack subscriptions. These are writers who I want to support. There are others that for now I recommend and share and will pay in the future when I can. I do this as a vote in favor of their work, not the platform they publish on. I have utmost respect for anyone trying to be a working writer. There is no judgement from me how or where anyone chooses to make it work. I mean that. I’ve purchased a lot of Substack subscriptions, and I typically see it as a warranted exchange for the energy that other writers are putting out into the world. I’d like to think that my paid subscribers would feel the same about me.

It turns out that my own Substack has outgrown my original intentions. I am at a crossroads because my newsletter is less sustainable than I'd like. The logical next step would be to monetize the work I do here and turn on paid subscriptions. It's simple, straightforward. Everyone’s doing it so people “get it.” However, Substack subscriptions won’t work for me, even though they work for some. It’s part energy, part ethics.¹

I’m in a 34-year long phase of life of trying things to see if they work for me. Throwing out ideas, bringing them to life, and seeing what sticks. I’m learning what does and does not feel sustainable and enriching to my creative work life. For example, this newsletter was an experiment in getting my voice back, recovering my online community from losing my decade-old Instagram account, and holding myself accountable to write consistently.

It’s working and time to expand. It’s time to experiment again.

I’m not turning on Substack subscriptions or building a paywall – I still want to offer my work for free – but I am offering a new way for you to support my work.

The most important thing to me about my presence on Substack is that I’m read, not that I’m paid. Which means I have to write. Which means I have to live, learn, travel, type, and edit. For me to write is for me to spend time, energy, creative resources. It’s not free. That word – free – I love it in the liberation sense. I hate it in the access/resource sense.

I decided a long time ago that everything I wrote about Palestine would be free, until Palestine is free. The archived posts that now make up the content in Hub for Palestine will not be behind a paywall because the intersection of art and peacemaking is some of my most important writing. I’m not hiding some of my best work from those who can’t pay. That’s the writing with the capacity to change minds and hearts.

But the crux is that this “free” model doesn’t generate income for me that would allow me to do more of it unless I turn on subscriptions. In that case, basically Substack wins, we lose (math below in the footnote.)

My goal here is to keep my work financially accessible and possible. I want to write and share because I have something to say, and I think you want to hear it. I’m not interested in selling. I have a design career where I do that already. And when I eventually publish my memoir, I will need to do it then. But in the meantime, I come to Substack to write, to share creativity, stories, home, and peacemaking.

Crushing paywalls.

I stay curious about how to do this weird storyteller/artist/peacemaker thing well. I’ve worked for over a decade to answer this: Is it possible for a self-employed person to find financial stability without selling their soul? Does my need to make a living justify also wanting my work to hold meaning? These shouldn’t be such visionary questions.

I have enacted alternative financial systems with my professional work (with graphic design and photography, I work on sliding scales, pro-bono, payment plans, and other approaches.) I'm generally willing to redistribute my income to work at a lower cost for those making good impact on the world. When I decide to work this way, it’s on my own terms and when I can afford it. It can be hard to know what exactly perpetuates unjust cultural expectations of free work from artists. It’s so pervasive. But I offer alternatives anyway. I like to err on the side of generosity.

But there have been costs to that strategy. I continue to learn to value my own work enough to ask for fair compensation and be willing to negotiate when there are limitations. Some of the toughest work of my career has been to figure out how to make money doing things this way. But I’ve never regretted being generous. It’s not the only way, but it’s a good one.

I want to live into generosity – what I can give, create, offer, make space for, show up with, make better. I want to work with how we can make peace, how we can be better together, how we can lift each other up, how we can make the world more just and more beautiful. It’s so much richer than trying to prove that I’m making it. It is much more interesting to me than proving how great an artist or person I am. This shift requires radical generosity.

Artists should be valued for what they bring to the world. The world needs artists, and artists have to live to make their art. What we can’t afford is for artists to be all used up and to stop creating. What a tragedy that would be.

To continue to be a humanitarian, I have had to undo ideas of capitalism and classism, especially the ones that promised I could charge the bare minimum and suffer personally for it. I am a product of the evangelical church, non-profit world, and missionary-savior complex. Wherever I fell, it was radical. I’ve deconstructed manifesting destiny, spiritual bypassing the need for a stable financial life, and prosperity gospel. And still, being self-employed is hard and the world says if I don’t own a house and get to do the jobs I want like write books and a newsletter, then that’s my fault because I chose a way of living and working that is based on the values of equity, collective care, and generosity instead of money.

I want solutions that are rooted in justice and liberation for myself and everyone else, which means undoing our “money for content” mindset. I want to make more abundance and stability, not just more money. I don’t want to just make a living, I want to remake the world through storytelling and peacemaking.

Buy Me a Coffee Memberships.

I spent time and intention making this decision. I asked people how they felt about paying for my work. I examined the ways asking for your support would sooner or later create conditions neither of us want. I have wrestled about when to write this post for a number of reasons – it’s uncomfortable to launch something not directly related to ending genocide in Palestine right now. It’s also pretty uncomfortable not to. It’s time for me to make change so I can give more of my attention to the things that really matter.

Every year for my birthday, I raise funds (sometimes upward of $500+) for other people and organizations doing work I believe in. Well, today’s my birthday. And in this season of life, I am thrilled to get to do myself the work I want to see done in the world, to join forces with other creatives and world-changers, and gather the resources to go farther. I believe in what I’m building and I want you to support it.

What I want for my birthday this year is to keep doing what I’m doing.

What am I doing? Reshaping our world with visual storytelling and artistic peacemaking. Not trying to save the world – I won’t take that job anymore. I'm building community around my ongoing personal creative projects and advocacy, and giving glimpses into the process on the Buy Me a Coffee platform, which I’ve used for a while to take one-time donations. I’m inviting you to be a part in whatever feels right to you.

You can now become a Monthly Supporter to help me grow my personal creative work and get it out into the world. It is up to you if you want to pay. I’m not going to judge either way. And you get the same newsletter either way, no previews or upselling. I have decided to include some extras for paying members not because they’re in a position to pay and others aren’t, but my BMAC supporter page is a less public place to share experiments and more sensitive content. These will be creative extras I won’t otherwise share, but I’m making them because I want to (more specifics below.) This new gathering space is where you can contribute to my work, and where the paid benefits will live.

The creative projects I'm developing, including this newsletter, are not free to make, and they keep me on the coffee. Right now I have the membership price set to $10/month or $110/year (one month free if you pay for a whole year upfront.) Membership is a simple vote in favor of my work, my creating. It will generate a little extra income for me as a creator, and gets you more involved. It allows you access to more things I otherwise can't share publicly.

The free work I’m already doing is the value. The support makes it sustainable for me. This is not value-based pricing or “charging what I’m worth.” This is simply the amount I’ve decided can empower me to keep doing what I’ve promised, which is to show up here several times a month to keep pointing us toward creativity, peacemaking, and ideas about place.

To keep wandering home.

To keep going.

Monthly Supporters.

If it feels good for you and you’re in the position to do so, consider becoming a paid Monthly Supporter. Here are the additional perks:

• You are a constant encouragement and fuel for my personal creative work.

• Wandering Home posts stay free for everyone, but you keep me writing.

• Invitation to Coffee Breaks, weekly virtual gathering on Friday mornings. I dreamed this up because I love to share inspiration and processes to help us carve out intentional time for our creative work and souls. We'll do some co-working because freelancing and WFH can be isolating AF. This will include:

  • Virtual co-working space with me and other creatives

  • Poetry/reading and conversation on creating, belonging, wandering

  • Contemplative practices and art-making exercises

  • Occasional co-creator interviews and virtual studio visits.

• Behind the scenes of my travel and volunteer work. I normally do this in a private Facebook group, so this will move to BMAC.

• Excerpts from my book projects. Currently I’m editing my memoir, so you’ll be the first to get updates on that. I have a couple other books up my sleeve in the near-ish future.

• Audio versions of select essay and poetry posts. I love spoken word which allows for a rich poetry experience, so I will share that in BMAC. You can find the first one here. Sometimes I will record Wandering Home posts in my own voice, and they’ll be available only on BMAC.

• Free access to download my custom handwriting font when you become a Monthly Supporter.

• Free city zines, my intentional travel guides. These are my newest mini publication about favorite places to travel. I’m curating and designing them to include useful tips for visiting some of my favorite places and/or work remotely. Which places do you want to see a city zine for?

• Occasional handmade goodies in the mail. I love snail mail, especially postcards. So if I ask for your address, it’s nothing weird.

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Having you join my paid Monthly Supporter community would be the greatest birthday gift. That you would consider becoming a consistent financial supporter of my work (or buying me even one cup of coffee) is such a beautiful, generous thing to me.

I have big dreams for this next phase at Wandering Home and in the BMAC space (and my 34th year!) Please come be a part.

You in?

1. If you care about why I chose to move my paid memberships outside of Substack, what follows are those details. If you don’t care, I’ll see you next week! Before you go, here’s my Buy Me a Coffee membership page where you can become a monthly supporter of my work.

For the curious, let me explain what I mean when I say this decision was “part energy, part ethics.”

I strongly believe that artists should be paid, and as a career artist, I’m always asking but at what cost to us? The pay-to-play model keeps artists always hustling and selling while platforms and founders get rich. It is the hard work of artists underwriting corporations and social media platforms. And the artists are still struggling and told it’s their own fault for not trying hard enough. This is exhausting creatives and their creativity.

I hate selling when I want to be writing, creating, redesigning the world, and I know others do too. But that’s what’s required to “grow a platform” or “build a subscriber list” here. Unless you already had a large following on another blog or platform, you are not making money on Substack.

Substack and Stripe takes about 13% off the top of earnings. It takes more than 115 paid subscribers at $5/month on Substack to make just $500 a month. To put that in perspective, I currently have 122 free subscribers total with an even lower engagement rate, and below that are the would-be potential paid converts. With my current subscriber numbers, that means my options are either to charge you a relative shit-ton to earn a living here, or charge less/not enough and earn so little it’s not worth the extra energy I'd have to put in to maintain and keep selling to you and others. That’s the math. Before self-employment taxes, which hover at an additional 20% of that income. From a numbers standpoint, charging you to read doesn’t make sense and, in the long run, probably hurts my ability to grow because of the paywalls and restricted access for new readers.

This is deeply frustrating, this sad circle of scarcity. I won’t tie my worth to these figures because it feels like selling my soul. And asking you to buy it back just for me to market it off again.

I don’t love the way monetizing a newsletter functions on this platform or how it feels to me personally. I don’t upsell. I was told to upsell when I worked as a carhop at Sonic and I never did it, but I did give people free stuff I was supposed to charge for. Extra cheese here, a handful of cherries there, just don’t tell my boss. I am not Sonic and so you can have it. Likewise, I am not Substack. The writers here are not Substack, except for the ways we are.

“First, [platforms like Substack] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
—Cory Doctorow

The ways I foresee Substack breaking bad informs what creators will have to make here to stay afloat, stay relevant, stay read. This affects the quality of writing I’d have to do here, which inevitably will impact your reader experience.

What I hate is opening an email with a catchy headline and finding out two paragraphs in there’s a paywall, and no value to me until I pay. I don’t want to dupe you into opening my emails and do bait and switching. I respect your time and energy too much. I have an allergy to being sold to like that, or being expected to work for free just so I can sell to others that way. I prefer to not have to act like a tease who promises valuable stories but actually delivers conversion marketing. The upsell and the hustle is the opposite of how I want my creative work to feel. I want it to feel free, beautiful, true, useful, and communal. I am here to storytell, not to market, build a platform, or self-promote.

On the other hand, my beef is about ethical consumerism and who we’re giving our money to. It’s about who I decide to split my money with, and by how much. It’s not always realistic to expect full agency when the systems are what we have to live under. For example, I pay thousands in annual self-employment taxes which bolsters the U.S. military budget. While I stand fully with military families, I can’t imagine a less ethical spend of my money as I watch the U.S. government allow and fund the devastation of Palestine.

When it comes to my own work, I’ve continued to ask myself if where I put it is perpetuating harm that might outweigh good.

Substack has its fair share of critics. Content moderation is a concern around here lately. Some influential writers are considering what staying or leaving means while they try to hold Substack responsible for making money off the content of some extremist groups. Substack has so far decided not to censor these groups and people, and in support of free speech, I tend to agree with the decision (so far.) But I’ve also asked why we (the Substack community) would want to censor only neo-Nazis and not Zionists here or elsewhere online, when they’re promoting ideology that requires the erasure of Palestinians?

The irony is content that is pro-Palestinian (and I do not mean anti-Semitic) would be among the earliest to be wrongly labeled hate speech if history is at all interested in repeating itself. Who gets to decide what is harmful? It is me, or is it the institutions I split my earnings with? That's my concern, that it will bend toward the will of the most powerful. And the most powerful can't be bothered by the least of these.

So far Substack is not censoring writers, but will they now that those who are making money for them here are questioning their ethics using selective frameworks for what’s harmful?

Where’s the line we hold or toe or cross to protect free speech? I’m a questions-raiser, a line tow-er myself. And I intended to keep talking about Palestine anywhere I can. I’ve grown furious witnessing Palestinians and activists be moderated and banned on Meta (Instagram and Facebook) for months now during a genocide. Does this end up like Meta endorsing genocide as a product of their bias and discriminatory practices? Substack and Meta both have their White supremacy problems. A lot of writers here can’t afford to leave the only platform where they get paid even just a little for writing, so they can’t question it. But I'll use my privilege to ask the hard questions. Content moderation is one of those slippery slopes, isn’t it? I would ask on Twitter/X if it weren’t already on its deathbed from the same disease.

I wish it weren’t this way. When one platform will kick us off for speaking up for the marginalized and the other is posturing with “say what you want” like it’s the wild West, does it make this a lesser of two evils situation?

I can try to be conscientious, but there’s no escaping capitalism and supremacies in this case. We have to work to live around here. What other good options do we have, other than to be a light in dark places? Flip tables when necessary? Make new templates for work? Buy each other coffee as a form of collective care?

I have a responsibility to cut away all that's not creating a better world so that redesigning it through storytelling and artistic peacemaking can be more possible. Platforms like Substack are necessary for this. We just have to keep calling them to something better. This is not only my purpose, but my praxis, and my ethics.

Thanks for being interested.

And yes, I do realize what I’ve done here, soliciting your paid subscriptions on a direct monetization tool in a Substack post about the “enshittification” of digital media platforms while ragging on the broken culture of artists as commercial marketers.

Ironic.
Sublime.
So meta. (No, not that Meta.)

But accidental? No. For the number-curious, Buy Me a Coffee takes 5% compared to Substack’s 13% fee, and I get to give away my best work here to you for free. And should censorship take a turn for the worst here, we have options. Good ones. Oh, and the user experience and interface for us both on BMAC is a huge draw for me. Also, coffee? Very on brand.

I think this is called this a win-win-win.

If you'd like to explore my Buy Me a Coffee page and consider paid monthly membership, you can do that here.