Subscribed readers of Homo Vitruvius have been recently more quickly growing, including a good influx the past couple of weeks, and it occurs to me that new readers may not have a clear understanding of what they’re getting on Homo Vitruvius. Of course, there is an About page and even better, the front-facing Home of Homo Vitruvius on the main page. They explain my mission here and provide samples of some varieties of writing I do. But not everyone reads those, so I think I might now present myself in a more personal way: where I’m coming from, what I’m about.
If you are a Substack habitué, by which I mean someone who, besides reading various Substack authors, loiters in the corridors and halls of Substack Notes – and not everyone does, by any means – then you know that there is much talk there about achieving Substack success. Success is measured in numbers of subscribers and paid subscribers. It’s hard to imagine any Substack author who doesn’t seek at least the former. The motto around planet Vitruvius is: “You read; therefore the writer exists.”
Among the common truisms on Substack is that to find success, an author must establish a niche. What is it you offer to readers, science fiction? Cooking instruction? If readers can’t be sure who you are, they won’t be drawn to you. If you offer a lot of what they are not seeking, they will pack their subscriber bags and depart.
Readers will want to know, then, from the start, that I am not a niche. In fact, that’s my niche. That I am not a niche. I advertise myself pretty much everywhere as a writer who writes in all genres, and I do. On Homo Vitruvius, you will find poetry and fiction, literary and film criticism. Off Substack, poetry and film criticism are among the areas in which I’m most published, along with memoir, which I publish on Substack, too, in various forms. I publish historically themed essays, mostly in relation to my novel-in-progress, of explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition of circumnavigation, The Dream of Don Juan de Cartagena. I have written unproduced, award-winning screenplays in competition. One of them, What We Were Thinking Of, among other awards, won second prize at the Maui Writer’s Conference Screenwriting Competition (now defunct – story of my writing career). I have since adapted it for the stage – it’s truer home, I came to believe – and it is, as I write, entered in some of the most significant national U.S. playwriting competitions. Wish me luck.
Mostly, I have published, and publish on Substack, in the genre of the essay. Over the years before Homo Vitruvius, it was often political and controversial cultural commentary. I am less interested in writing that kind of work now and have done it on Substack over my first ten months only in a couple of very compelling instances. My essays are what essays originated as, my personal responses to the world at large and so the they embrace many subjects and themes. That is who I am.
I was a professor of English for thirty years, a second career, after an early and unexpected career in business and some earlier years of confused and disturbed misguidance in the world. A confluence of circumstances, more than any decision, decreed about a year and a half ago that my teaching career was over. It was at an age when many people would reasonably end a career anyway, so call it what you will. Then, as it turned out, I was offered a class to teach this coming summer. I can use the money, so once again, I’ll be introducing to undergrads the pleasures and principles of poetry.
I could easily have pursued graduate studies in philosophy instead and almost did. Based on my undergraduate work and lifelong interests, I could just as well have been a professor of history or political science or gone to law school. (That or professor is what my mother always dreamed. I made her happy with the latter, though far later in my life than she hoped. But she was happy, to start, that I survived at all.) My first major as an undergraduate was film. One of my ideal lives, had I the talent, would be jazz saxophonist touring the clubs and playing with the band deep into the night. Instead, I watch and listen to others do it. Competing with that vision is the lucky life of varied and creative collaboration led by a working theater actor. I watch others do that too. A third ideal is expressed in my definition, all my life, of how much wealth I would wish for if wishing could produce wealth: as much money as it takes to travel anywhere I want to go anytime I want to go there. (And I’m not talking hiking and hostels.) I love travel, road and to far places, as I’ve written about.
I’d love to be president if I didn’t have to be a politician too. Maybe, instead, in that case, secretary of state, but then I would have needed to pursue studies in international or public policy or diplomacy and none of those directions occurred to me at the time. Besides, I was far too dysfunctional in those years to commit to any disciplined career like that.
In any event, I made the right choice in the end, the one that was always tops, the life of a writer, and the reason I review all these Walter Mittyisms with you is to convey that all those interests infuse my writing and what I offer here on Homo Vitruvius.
I came to Substack and created Homo Vitruvius on impulse, in a creative inspiration, one might say. I was very happily but also very solitarily deep into two years’ work on the Magellan novel. I was in bed in the middle of the night on my phone (is it now ever thus?) when, in support of my writing, I thought to get back on the Twitter I’d fled months earlier, with a new account, just to have a presence there. With my lifelong interest in Western antiquity and my allegiance to the values of the Enlightenment, and because Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man drawing (inspired by ideas of the Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio) had just played a role in the Magellan novel, I quickly conceived that identity. I was aware of Substack, though I knew little specifically about it, and thought the next day that I would create my own presence here in further advancement of that writing career.
And here I am ten months later, with all of you. It’s been far more than I anticipated, including, prominently, the quite amazing Substack community of writers, who are so supportive and so mutually delighted by each other’s best writing and invested in each other’s mutual success. I’ve made friends, friends I hope will last, writer friends and reader friends – the best kind of friends.
Some people coming to Substack are writing with energy and focus for the first time in their lives. They’re still finding themselves, finding, as it’s been framed, their niches. They’re pursuing some vision of success and carving out that niche to try to fulfill it. May the Word follow them wherever they go. I found myself as a writer a long time ago. (The world finding me is a different matter.) I am here to write all that I write, about all that I write about, to offer up all that I am as a writer to those who will receive me. As I do say in all the information blurbs around Homo Vitruvius, this place in digital space is about the writing as much as the written about, and that is the constant to which I hope you will be drawn. If that makes me not a Substack success story, so be it.
I am the voice of the nicheless in the nicheless niche!
No to the niche!
Join me – and tomorrow we will conquer tomorrow!
Speaking of “tomorrow,” that’s Monday in Vitruvian time, when I will offer the third entry in my Extraordinary Ordinary People series.
Faire un essai with you all again then.
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”
"No to the niche!" Solidarity, brother.
Enjoyed reading this as I have an article coming out this weekend about my own move away from being too niche. Glad you are here as I enjoy reading your work and I continually learn from those with more experience. Keep writing great things, whatever the topic might be!