Introducing photovoice field notes
something old, something new
Rather than bifurcate, this piece will stay whole.
There will be scholar.
There will be sundries.
And they will be interleaved.
It is also the last Sunday of July, but I am not putting this post behind the usual paywall.
Self-imposed rules be damned today!
It seems as though I am one month away from a two-year Substack anniversary. Apparently, I like to start things in August (yes, we are close enough). Since I turned five years old, the school year has been my leading calendar, my orientation to time. The new year does not start in January. It starts in late summer. It now starts in August.
When I first started writing here on Substack, I was in the thick of building my promotion materials to go up for full, as they say. It was a hectic time being a part of the very first group to go through the process with a new faculty productivity management system or whatever such things are called. There were so many bugs some nights I had creepy-crawly nightmares. Regardless, the work got done. The materials got submitted. Sometimes I go back to those external review letters and want to burst with gratitude for my colleagues who gave their time, energy, and expertise to help me flourish and be seen. Those letters are sacred and will be held onto for as long as I can hold onto things.
This Substack has been a place for me to put things out there that do not otherwise have a (public) home. It has given way to a small and important readership. Thank you. Connecting with people here—in a long(ish)-form way—feels much more meaningful and important than doing so in other fora: social media. Substack has some social media-like qualities (see Notes; think Twitter), but many people are here for the longer-form posts/newsletters.
My early Substack posts were random and fueled by inspiration. I would catch the tail of an idea, think “this would play well as a Substack post,” hit the keys, and press Continue. That was fine for a while. The posts usually had a nice arc, carried an insightful message, and were generally pleasing. I put nothing behind a paywall at that point, as I was just experimenting and having fun.
Once the promotion process was behind me, I started thinking more about writing—writing as an academic in a new season in particular. Once you’ve hit your marks and learned all the rules, you have to make (some) new marks and generate (some) new rules in order to sustain forward movement in ways that feel nourishing and meaningful anew. I have a lot of intrinsic motivation to write. I do not always have a lot of intrinsic motivation to write journal articles. Also, I add the word some because annual reviews don’t go away. In fact, they are becoming ever-more aggressive and overreaching in the current era.
Random writing on Substack was good, but it was an add-on. Not planned, not scheduled, not structured, not habitual. In an effort to invite more planning, scheduling, structure, and habit into my writing life, in December 2024, I decided to change my orientation to this platform and rebrand (I guess) my posts/newsletter. Rather than calling this project(?) “my Substack,” it is now called Scholar & Sundries. Much better. Almost sounds like an English pub. And one I would like to visit. This new orientation and new name came with it a new structure. Each post would have a section dedicated to something related to my academic life (Scholar) and a section dedicated to whatever I feel like writing on (Sundries). I also committed to posting a piece every Sunday, putting the last post of the month behind a paywall in an attempt to see whether any paid subscribers would actually result. I’d already been using Sundays to write weekly emails to the students in the master’s program I direct (SAAHE Sunday Not Scaries), and this felt like a natural extension of that. It made Mondays a little easier to tackle, a little better even, going into the week with a win. The idea was to regularly show up, write something at least mildly interesting, put it on the Internet, and see what would happen.
A few things have happened. And I am quite happy to have 60 subscribers (thanks again, y’all!), three of whom are paid, believe it or not (thanks again, y’all)! Some of these things include:
A colleague used one of my off-Sunday Scholar-heavy posts as a course reading and invited me to Zoom in for a class discussion.
Other people have been inspired to start their own Substacks.
In conversation, folks have brought up nuggets from the posts.
It is fun to, at this point, simply know something new will be created each week. Automaticity. It is a habit. While it is sometimes hard to show up each week, I do it anyway. I usually actually write the posts on Sunday mornings, with the goal of having them posted by noon, giving me the rest of the day to stretch out and feel satisfaction knowing I’ve already made and distributed something with a least a touch of value for others. I am committed to doing this until the end of the year at least.
While I like Substack and will maintain this platform and cadence through at least the end of 2025, I’ve gotten into something new. And I will explain in a moment.
Breaks between semesters are when I best innovate. In total, I have about eight weeks per year when I am not actively teaching, though during some of that time I am grading or prepping or both. I am in a break right now, and when the mental hum of you should be grading, which I usually feel—and have course evaluations to empirically support—dies down, the cognitive work I’d been doing yields important fruit. Things burst forward into consciousness. That happened for me earlier this week.
That fruit is https://www.photovoicefieldnotes.com/.
Apparently, this newsletter is not enough, and so I made another one based loosely on the current archetype, as I have done before with the Scaries. Yet I think, over time, this may become more than a newsletter. Baby steps.
I have been thinking about this idea—reading, watching YouTube, making copious notes—and then just did the thing this week. The ideas popped and flowed, and it was the result of all this thinking-consuming-making from the summer. I also submitted grades this past week, so there is something to that timing. My brain cleared its Tetris board yet the pieces continued falling. And voilà! Here we are.
Rather than simply create another Substack, I decided to try something new and dive into Ghost. See others’ work on the platform here and here, for example. It’s clean and sleek. And it requires a bit more work on the back end. But there is so much that can be done with it. I am still very much on the steep part of the learning curve.
Here is what I see as the two biggest differences between Ghost and Substack—aside from the programming/coding end because I do not have the understanding or lexicon to explain all that. First is price. Second is format.
So, price. Substack is free for users. Substack takes a cut of your subscription money, however. Ghost is not free for users. But Ghost does not take a cut of your subscription money. I pay nothing to use Substack. I paid for one year of Ghost at the Creator level for $300, or $25 per month. If I do not generate at least four subscribers at $7 per month, I will be losing money on this endeavor. At the same time, I am learning a TON, and that learning is worth the (potentially lost) money.
Now, format. Ghost is more beautiful, intuitive (after a while), and clean. I am enjoying the UX, and I like the UI (did I do that right?) AND THERE ARE NO NOTES. There is no social media-like pull. Ghost leaves you alone to do your work without tugging and pulling at your attention strings every time you engage the platform. There is no social media-laden accompanying app, and for that I am grateful.
While photovoice field notes is the name of the website I created, the new newsletter is titled four note friday. And you guessed it, the newsletter will be published on Fridays and include four items related to photovoice. Think resources, readings, insights, ideas, and activities and exercises. Creating a schedule (weekly Friday posts) and a format (four notes) was the key to unlocking a long-held block: I had been imagining long-form journal article-style posts. And that’s just not the genre for this kind of platform. Thank goodness. That was hard for me to pinpoint as an academic who likes all the words. Figuring that part out helped the other pieces fall into place. I’m much more relaxed about the whole thing. I do not want another job. I want an interesting and exciting experience.
I am starting with a simple and clear weekly newsletter. Everything will be freely accessible until September 12, after which time just one newsletter/post will be freely accessible per month. Once the newsletter gets its footing, I will adjust from there if and only if warranted. Workshops, courses, digital templates, office hours, and consulting ideas are aswirl. This is also me testing the waters to see if a second edition of my photovoice book is viable—meaning whether or not I want to write it.
If you’ve been enjoying this, you might enjoy four note friday, to which you can subscribe now.