Hello and welcome to the 34th issue of Place! You’ll receive a usual Place dispatch next week, but we wanted to take this opportunity to lay out some of our more future looking thoughts as this strange year begins to wind down and a new one approaches. You may have noticed on our social feeds that we’ve been hinting at something in the works – now, we’d like to let you in on it. As always, thank you for reading and for your incredible support in this endeavour so far.
At Place, we believe that the experiences, sensations and conversations we have as we move about the world stay with us, stacking up as the years go by, forming who we are and the way we view the world. Do you have a letter to share? Send it to us at placeletter@protonmail.com. If you are interested in writing for Place you can find our inaugural pitch guide here. If you’re the social type, follow us on Twitter (@place_letter) where you can share your favourite pieces and Instagram (@placenewsletter) for a visual feast. Yours, The Place editorial team.
An Interlude, and a Wish
First of all, we’d like to take a moment to offer up our wholehearted gratitude to all of you who have read, liked, and shared this journey with us since Place launched its first issue way back at the beginning of the pandemic. The world looks a lot different now than it did then, and maybe we’ve all gained a bit of a new perspective. The places that have surrounded us during this time have surely taken on a new form, for better or for worse. Sometimes these places have held us up, other times they’ve seemed too close, or too far away. Peril has become a new undertow of movement, pushing feelings of escape, adventure, pleasure, and discovery that are usually associated with travel, over to the side.
Over the past seven months, we’ve taken some long and hard looks at our understanding of place within this new context via the writing that we’ve sent to you each week. From the consequences of far reaching Google maps, to the significance of reading on the road, to the way children experience movement, we’ve held the experience of travelling in the modern world up to the spotlight, to look at all the nooks and crannies that make these brilliant experiences what they are. We’ve explored the intricacies in searching for belonging, of finding a home, and creating one. We’ve looked at potentially mundane spaces and found the beauty in them, discovered what they reveal to us about ourselves, our families, and our culture. And we’ve brought you snapshots of the world, from what dinner looks like from Australia to the Yukon, to what a ghost story feels like in Iceland, to what a day spent in Helsinki could bring.
It's been a rare gift to have written and edited these letters to you. As journalists, we are ever aware of the shrinking media landscape, of the fatigue that comes with an endless news cycle, of the overwhelming feeling of not knowing where to turn to or what to consume when we get a spare minute. And for that we thank you deeply for including us in your weekly reading time. When we started Place, we did so with the aim to carve out a space for writing that would provide a respite and a journey. So far, we’ve found incredible amounts of meaningfulness in this endeavour. And now, we’re on the precipice of something new.
We would like to be able to continue to grow, and include a wider breadth of perspectives and meditations on space, movement, and travel. We believe we have the right platform to do so – this newsletter – but at the moment, we don’t have the resources. The world of journalism and media may seem like a convoluted or ambiguous nebulous to those who are outside of it, and sometimes it is. But there is one thing for sure – that writers, particularly those at the beginning of their career, women, and BIPOC, are often not compensated for their work. Before they are even given a chance to get a shot at a paying-job, many writers are forced to write for free, to build up a portfolio of work before an editor or employer will take a chance on them. This doesn’t do anyone any good. Writers can’t get their work out there, and the world goes on without hearing from a new and needed voice.
While we believe that Place has the potential to support such talent, we have not been able to compensate our contributors up to this point (aside from a select few commissions over the summer out of our own pockets). We have either written these pieces ourselves or worked with writers who have generously given their time and creative energy because Place offered a platform for their work that may not have otherwise found a home. We have been blown away at the depth of these contributions and know that if we had the monetary resources we would have the opportunity to give a space to even more of these voices.
That’s why, in the next couple of weeks, we will be launching a paid subscription model for Place newsletter. What this means is that there will soon be options for you to pay monthly or annually to support Place and the writers that send you a new dispatch every Friday. For now, you can still subscribe to Place for free, but in the coming months we may release exclusive content that only paying members will have access to. We have not ironed out all the details of what our subscription model will look like, but rest assured, we will be sending out more details in our Friday dispatches in the coming weeks.
With the holidays approaching, there are many reminders going around to shop local. To support the small businesses, artists, and crafters who have struggled to make ends meet throughout the pandemic. This is an incredible message to take to heart, not only because of its positive contribution to the environment, but also to your local economy and neighborhood. By considering purchasing a subscription to Place (as a gift for someone else or for yourself!), you will achieve the same impact, in that 100% of profits will go towards supporting a new writer and their voice.
It is a big wish of ours to continue to watch Place grow, to read your thoughtful feedback, and to encourage introspection on the spaces that surround us each week. It's a humble dream that in our small quiet corner of the internet, the inbox, we could continue to cultivate insightfulness, curiosity, some deep breaths of rest, and the fresh air of escaping to somewhere you haven’t set foot in before.
If Place has brought you the same respite that it has brought us over the past several months, we hope you’ll be able to understand our vision for the future and even better, come along with us. If you have any questions, queries or thoughts on this new step for our newsletter, we would love to hear from you at placeletter@protonmail.com
Until the next email,
Yours,
Place.