Finding Peace Through Beauty

Reorganizing with a tighter focus

Hello, Poetry Friends!

I first started habitually writing poetry in 2016. Back then, the poetry was mostly pirate haiku. I needed a distraction, and I thought others might as well.

I also created the Weirdo Poetry brand back then as a publishing house for whatever it was that I was going to publish.

The Weirdo Poetry newsletter came along in 2019 with no plan or niche other than to share what I was writing, and later, drawing and collaging.

For the past year, I’ve been inconsistent. Part of this is the result of significant family health issues that have changed the amount of time I have to create. But, mostly, it’s because I felt unmoored. I didn’t know what direction I wanted to take the newsletter. It felt too scattered, too unfocused.

But, after a lot of thought and experimentation, I have a new organizing principle for this newsletter and my work as a whole.

Cozy Wonder.

I want to make beautiful things that make people feel things. I want to create spaces and places where you can feel safe relaxing and resting a spell.

The world needs many different voices. Strident voices are needed. But that is not where my special genius (to the extent that I have any) lies. My natural voice is calm, measured, and joyful. I like to imagine my true inner self as something that looks like the laughing Buddha walking through the forest with a walking stick and a sense of wonder in his eyes.

In this newsletter, I’m inviting you to walk with me. The newsletters will be guided walks through different real and imagined landscapes, mostly in nature, but I have more than a few city walks in mind. We will notice what we notice. I will create a place for cozy wonder, leaving room for melancholy and the bittersweet as they come.

These walks will be presented as a mixture of prose, poetry, illustrations, and poetry comics. They will also be a blend of memoir, nature writing, and personal essay.

Paywalled posts will come on Sunday mornings, and Thursday morning posts will be free for everyone. This Sunday, I will send out the first of these new walking posts, and it will be free for everyone to give you an idea of where I’m going in the newsletter. I’m also going to experiment with sending out a podcast feed of me reading the posts on Mondays and Fridays.

I considered renaming this newsletter, but I’m too attached to Weirdo Poetry. I’m going to call this new section Wonder Walks, and I’m going to retire all of the other sections of the newsletter. The posts will still be in the archives, but the separate sections for things like the Asynchronous Poetry Book Club will no longer appear on the newsletter homepage or menu.

This past year, I have also been quietly working on some fiction. It’s cozy fiction. A novel and a graphic novel. Once they are ready, I will be serializing them through this newsletter behind the paywall. But all of that is still a ways away.

I hope all of you will come with me as we Wonder Walk our way through the next several years.

If you’re curious about what my new direction looks like, this post from Medium is a good example of my conscious effort at writing in a way that creates cozy wonder. It’s not exactly like the guided walks you will be seeing, but it’s closer than anything I’ve published in this newsletter recently.

Today, I will leave you with some of my favorite poetry comics from the archives. The next time you hear from me, it will be as we begin walking together at sunset on a Pacific ocean shore.

Thanks for reading!

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason