Being in community while leaving social media
Plus upcoming markets, fall plans, and my favorite book of all time
Good morning (or afternoon or evening), friend. Do you have a cup of coffee or tea handy? Perhaps some snacks? If not, you may want to grab some and settle in. There’s been a lot on my mind that I wish to share.
For me, it is currently Wednesday morning. I am wrapped up in a hand knit, woolen blanket, swinging from the egg-chair my partner surprised me with in September while nursing my 3rd (or is it 4th?) allergy-induced sneezing fit of the week accompanied by my umpteenth nosebleed. It’s 44°F (6,7°C), and I am grateful for this cooler turn of the weather, allergies and all.
A lot has happened in the space between our last chat. Two hurricanes have torn through the Southeastern United States, ravaging whole communities and triggering my own hurricane trauma unexpectedly. Early voting in Georgia began. Boysenberry (one of our cats) woke us up at 5 am yowling and hissing at Mr. Carson (our other cat) for reasons we couldn’t identify. Wars and famine and environmental disaster are looming around the world. I prepped for my first market and finished a book on backyard chickens and attended
’s How Much Money is Enough workshop. A friend’s family member passed away due to Covid-related complications while another friend received her first positive medical experience in her adult life. I purchase a $25 Visa gift card for a stranger who approached me in the Joann’s parking lot and then stayed up half the night wondering why I felt so weird about it. Wasn’t I looking to give more of myself to others?The world continued turning, for better or worse. The sun rose each morning and set a little earlier every evening. The mundane churned alongside the fantastical and the horrific. And I feel like a completely changed person on the other side of it all.
A lot of the internal shift I have experienced over these past few weeks really is a culmination of ideas, thoughts, feelings that have been brewing for years, but always felt a bit nebulous and un-graspable. It wasn’t until I started Nic’s workshop that I was finally able to conceptualize and put what I had been feeling into more concrete terms.
But now that our three-week course has concluded, I have an entirely new (or I suppose clarified is a more appropriate term) perspective on money, why I am earning it (aside from, you know, survival), what ways it is in service to me and others, what ways it opposes my well-being and others, and how I can develop a better relationship to it. One thing I kept coming back to again and again were ideas relating to the gift economy, planning for retirement by investing in relationships and community (instead of extractive systems like the stock market), and what the overall driving purpose behind my business even is.
Nic shared a bunch of resources for those of us who attended her class, including podcasts, books, and articles. And one of those resources that impacted me the most was an essay/ spoken word piece written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is also the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, one of my all-time favorite books.
In her essay, Kimmerer dives into the relationship the earth and plants have with the animals that require something other than sunshine and water for sustenance compared to our own relationship with not only other humans but also with the earth and the bounty in which it provides. It’s a very thought-provoking piece and convinced me that I absolutely must add her new book bearing the same title, The Serviceberry, to the top of my wishlist.
Shortly after finishing this article, I stumbled upon a post on IG that really sunk these ideas into the marrow of my bones:
Needless to say, I have been thinking deeply about what it means to be in community with others, how I can show up for my immediate community, how I can reconcile differences in views between local community members and myself, how I can build a sense of community both on and offline, and just basically beginning to build the world I wish to reside within. Even if that means starting small. Like really small. Like baking cookies and giving them to a handful of neighbors who might be searching for the same.
All of this thinking about community and resources and showing up better for those around me has led to my decision to leave Instagram.
I know, I know, I have been circling the drain of this decision for years, but it really took all of these pieces falling into place for me to realize . . . I really just don’t like being on the app anymore. I feel physically gross and bad and run-down every time I log on. Sometimes there is a brief glimmer of positivity and hope and that sense of community that reels me back in, but those positive feelings have dwindled at an alarming rate over the past few years.
I’ve fallen fully down the podcast rabbit-hole recently and listening to both Off the Grid (in general) and this very specific episode from Mary Grace Allerdice propelled me to finally pull the plug on this particular social media platform.
My plan is to be fully logged out by December 31st. I am going to set up my IG page more as an archive, adding back posts that I think others might find useful in regards to sewing / writing/ crafting and then leaving it entirely. I’ll redirect anyone who wants to stay in touch to my newsletter or my actual email address. And those who are very close to me already know how to contact me via phone.
I will say, I am grateful for all that the app has done for me. At one point, it was a beautiful space in which I found a sense of the community I longed for. I made connections and developed friendships with a number of truly beautiful souls that I still treasure to this day. But the app has outlived its original benefit and feelings of close-knit connection. It now takes up too much of me and distracts me from the concrete things in my life I find most important, including fostering the very relationships I had built there.
Now is the time to turn my attention elsewhere. There are so many things vying for my *very scattered* attention already, and I truly wish to return to the more physical, the more concrete as often as possible. Like writing this newsletter. Like connecting with my neighbors. Like sitting down for a coffee writing date in Atlanta with fellow writers. Like swinging in an egg chair, contemplating the myriad ways in which life might unfold.
Plans for the Fall
Let’s start with the garden.
I must say, having Arlen help me decide what to focus on has been really, really helpful for me. It’s given me a sense of urgency (without pressure) and tapped fully into my tendency to hyper-focus on one *important* task at a time when I know that the important task actually is: the front garden.
Over the course of a few weeks, we managed to clear out all of the path’s overgrowth, I fixed a handful of the garden bed boards and corner braces that had rotted away, and we mulched the front mailbox area for the first time in 4 years! That poor patch of garden was so sad: hard and dry as a rock and covered in anthills.
Now that Fall has arrived quite suddenly and fully, it is time to prep the actual beds with both plants and plans of irrigation. Our garden hose doesn’t quite reach all the way to the front beds, so instead, I plan on burying terracotta pots that can then be periodically filled with water from a watering can. I also plan to plant out a shit-ton of garlic (we adore garlic and it is SO EASY to grow!), rebury some flower bulbs, and top everything up with some new soil.
If that all goes accordingly, I will turn my focus to the small flower bed in the left corner (hidden by our pomegranate bush). It needs another round of weeding plus a new layer of mulch before settling in for the winter.
Outside of the garden, I am planning on having one final book drop for this year. I believe I have around 50-100 new books to photograph and add to the website, which I hope to accomplish by the end of this month. There are also a few miscellaneous items I’d like to add for the holidays in addition to the Winter Book Boxes that are already live.
Also, since Ive been so into thinking lately, I have been noodling around with the idea of what I want this newsletter to look like. I want to be able to dive a bit deeper into some of the topics I touch on instead of rushing through and giving just a brief synopsis on each, especially the topics that I find most exciting or I feel I have more to say. I’m not entirely sure what this might look like, so I plan to experiment a bit, possibly creating separate spaces for each idea to reside within Substack and then doing a more general, monthly roundup? Stay tuned.
Monthly Donation Pledge
I realize that in September, I failed to pick out or share my monthly donation pledge. I wound up combining both August and September’s sales figures and donating 1% of my August profits & 2% of my September profits to The National Wildlife Federation, which actually worked out great considering August saw very fews sales which meant I’d only be donating $5, but in September I taught a multi-day class which meant I was able to add $45 to that donation total! Not a whole lot, but every dollar helps.
Now, I mentioned before that I, myself, am a Hurricane survivor and that the recent hurricanes hitting the SE have impacted me emotionally (they missed our area, and physically we are safe). Seeing the destruction had triggered all of the feelings I had watching our home get buried underwater in 2005 from Katrina and has made my desire to help in every way I can more pressing than ever.
I’ve already personally donated to a mutual aid fund, but knowing how long it took for us to recover from Katrina and how long it took for the many parts of Louisiana to rebuild (I remember there still being areas needing assistance 5-10 years after the fact), I wish to continue by donating 3% of whatever profit I make in October to the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund.
Upcoming Markets
Last week and for the better part of this week, I spent much of my time prepping for my first market in nearly 10 years! Much of that time was spent in getting a feel for how I want my booth layout to look. I really wanted to create a cozy, welcoming, and easily browsable space, and I think I managed to pull it off. Special thanks to everyone who allowed me to text them pictures and videos for feedback! Sometimes you need a extra *dozen* set of eyes.
I even wound up painting my own little sign for the tent featuring my new logo:
As I mentioned, my first market is this coming weekend. If you are local to the Atlanta/ Athens area, I’d love it if you dropped by! The event is called The Abnormal Bazaar, and it will be held at Indie South (470 Hawthorne Ave.Athens, GA 30606) from 11-3 PM, Saturday, October 19th.
Then, in November, I will be participating in Gwinnett County Library’s Local Author Day which is sure to be a super fun day filled with other talented writers from the area + story time for kiddos practically all day!
My Current #1, All-time Favorite Book
I never thought it would happen. For years, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab has occupied my #1, all-time favorite book spot. I was so impressed with the lyrical prose, the effortless was that Schwab seemed to craft a scene, and the underlying sense of loneliness that she wove throughout this book of magical realism that I never thought another book would come close to moving me in the same way.
Enter: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern.
This book gave me everything I love all wrapped between the delicate pages of a book found by chance in a used-book store off Haywood Ave in North Carolina.
For those who don’t know, I am obsessed with three things and will almost always auto-purchase a book if they offer at least one of them:
A book about books
Fables/ fairytales as an integral part of the story
Anything to do with time (relativity, multiverse, travel, etc).
Without realizing it, this book offered ALL THREE. Even better, it wrapped each of these items up in layers of complexity, metaphor, stories within stories within freaking stories, diversity, magic, mystical prose, and even plopped it into the modern world (something I tend to avoid in my reading selections).
This was one of those reads where, as I was reading it, I felt sad knowing it would end and knowing I could never read it for the first time again. It was also one in which I immediately wanted to finish so that I could start all over again to see what I had missed, what little clue had been dropped that I forgot to pick up.
I only finished this story a few days ago and still I find myself turning it over in my head, marveling at the magic Morgenstern managed to weave into 500 pages, wanting to immediately purchase her first book The Night Circus, and wondering . . . might I ever write something this captivating in my lifetime?
New Book Club!
First, have you checked out the blog lately? There are several new book reviews up by
, my partner in crime, many of which I have added to my ever-growing TBP (to-be purchased) list.Being that Maria and I both seem to gravitate towards the same books and that we have each been looking for a better way to connect with more readers in order to gush over our favorites (seriously, we have hours long convos about books on the reg), we’ve decided to start a bookclub on Fable, which is an app for book lovers by book lovers.
We are calling our bookclub the No Pressure Crew. This is a phrase Maria and I often text to one another as a gentle reminder that there is no pressure to respond to our multi-leveled texts (some have as many as 100 replies), no pressure to push too hard in our respective businesses, no pressure to make the bed or do the laundry or eat something other than cereal of the day feels especially tough, and definitely no pressure to try to be perfect, especially around each other. We show up as we are when we can and fully accept one another as our beautifully messy selves.
We wanted to extend that whole vibe to our bookclub where we will have a longer time for each book than most other bookclubs (2-3 months) to finish each read. We also chose Fable to host the club because it has this awesome set-up where you can really go at your own pace. Every chapter has a little discussion room that you can pop in to whenever you have finished reading it yourself and leave any comments/ reactions/ grievances you may have while keeping it spoiler free. And because it is all housed in one place over the course of two-months, there is no time-zone barrier the way that hosting an IG Live might pose. You can pop in to discuss the book at literally anytime and still connect with other readers, even if we all live thousands of miles away!
If this sounds as awesome to you as it does to us, feel free to use this link to join, and you should also receive a $5 credit to purchase ebooks via the Fable app. We’ve just picked out the book for November & December: The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova. We hope to see you there!
Until next time,
💛 B.A. Franc