Happy Wednesday Folks,
First, a few admin things: today’s episode marks the end of “season one” of the Good Folk Podcast. Our team will be taking the rest of the month off in an attempt to spend less time online. We will be back with the podcast in January, with lots of exciting things up our sleeve. In the meantime, I will still be sending out regular newsletter posts as the year wraps up.
I want to thank you all for your incredible support these last six months as we launched the podcast and stepped into a new era of Good Folk. I seriously can’t put into words how grateful I am to everyone reading this, to the community we’ve built, and to all the people who— whether you enjoy this work or not— are willing to approach what they know of rural and Southern spaces with an open mind. There are always going to be stereotypes to dispel and practices to unlearn. But I, for one, am grateful to do it in this way, with you all. Thank you for putting up with my bad audio, my rambling sentences, and my inability to ever send anything out on time.
As we reflect on the last eleven (!) episodes of the podcast, Vic thought it would be fun to reverse the roles and interview me (Spencer). Then, of course, the Moore County attacks happened, and it wouldn’t have felt right to me not to discuss the situation, which still continues to unfold. We begin today’s episode with a reflection on what happened and how we got here, before the tables flip on me to discuss the past, present, and future of Good Folk. This is a conversation about my own journey into this work, one that is also intimately connected to my own biases, healing, and unlearning. It’s about finding meaning in what you do, even when some days it’s the last thing you feel like showing up for. It’s about loneliness and community, and feeling as though you are the only possible one in the world who thinks like this, who hurts like this, who loves like this. Of course, that’s never the case, but it’s almost impossible to understand that in the moment.
If anything, I hope this newsletter reminds you of that. We are all just hands reaching out through the darkness for another to grasp.
I’ll leave you with a quote I’ve been repeating to myself lately about art, and why we make it, by writer Neil Gaiman:
“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do... Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art. Make it on the good days too.”
On the good days, too. Yes. See you in January.
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