I started a literary publication in 2026, which is either a brave thing or a stupid thing depending on who you ask and how generous they are feeling. The landscape is not exactly begging for another voice. There are Substacks and newsletters and independent magazines and literary journals and personal websites and social media accounts run by people with better marketing instincts than I will ever have. The space is full. The space has been full for years. Starting something new in a full space requires either a belief that you have something to say that is not already being said, or a tolerance for shouting into weather. I’d like to think it’s the first one. Some days it is probably the second.

Starting something new in a full space requires either a belief that you have something to say that is not already being said, or a tolerance for shouting into weather.

But I did it anyway, and I think the reason I did it is worth talking about, because it has less to do with ambition and more to do with a specific frustration I could not stop noticing.

Here is what the writing landscape looks like right now, from where I am standing. The majority of what gets published online about writing and publishing—the content that rises, the content that gets shared, the content that builds followings—is instructional. How to write a novel. How to query an agent. How to build an author platform. How to self-publish. How to market your book. How to grow your audience. How to land a six-figure deal, how to write a bestseller, how to do the thing, step by step, with templates and checklists and timelines and calls to action.

I am not going to pretend this is useless. It is not. When I was twenty years old and trying to figure out how publishing worked, I would have given a great deal for someone to explain it to me clearly. The information has value. The people sharing it are, in many cases, genuinely trying to help, and they do help, and I have benefited from their work.

But I think something has gone missing.

What I see, over and over, is writing about writing that treats the craft as a series of problems to be solved—as if the entire point of being a writer is to optimize the process of becoming a more successful one. The content is oriented around outcomes. How to get the agent. How to hit the list. How to grow the platform. How to make the career happen. And the career is real, and the career matters, and I do not begrudge anyone for wanting one. I want one. But the writing life is not only a career, and when every piece of publicly available writing about writing is focused on the mechanics of career-building, something gets flattened. The conversation shrinks. It becomes transactional in a way that I think most writers, privately, do not actually experience their work.

What I see, over and over, is writing about writing that treats the craft as a series of problems to be solved—as if the entire point of being a writer is to optimize the process of becoming a more successful one.

What is missing, I think, is the other part. The part that is not a strategy. The part where you sit with a sentence for forty minutes and cannot figure out why it does not work, and then you change one word and it does, and no one will ever know you did that, and it does not matter, and it was still the most satisfying thing that happened to you all week. The part where you read something so good that it makes you want to quit and keep going at the same time. The part where you are in conversation—not with an audience, not with a market, but with other people who care about the same things you care about and want to talk about them at length, without a takeaway, without a framework, without a list of actionable steps at the bottom.

Community. That is the word. And I know it has been overused to the point of meaning almost nothing, so let me be specific about what I mean by it.

I do not mean a Facebook group. I do not mean a Discord server. I do not mean a paid membership with tiers and perks and exclusive access to a monthly Q&A. I mean writing that exists in public, that invites people to think alongside it, that treats readers as participants in a conversation rather than consumers of a product. I mean the kind of publication that publishes an essay not because it will perform well but because it says something worth reading, and trusts that the people who care about that kind of thing will find their way to it.

That is what I am trying to build with the Gazette. I do not have a content strategy. I do not have a growth plan. I have subjects I want to write about and a belief that other people want to read about them—not because I have data to support that belief, but because I have been a reader my entire life, and I know what it feels like to find a publication that speaks to you, and I know how rare it has become.

I wrote a note recently about the difference between writing for yourself and writing for an audience, and how I think the line between them is not real. This essay is an extension of that idea. The Gazette is not for me. It is not a journal. It is not a diary with a domain name. But it is also not for an audience in the way that most online writing seems to use that word—it is not optimized for reach, it is not designed for virality, it is not trying to convert readers into customers. It is a publication. It publishes essays, notes, criticism, and commentary about books, writing, and the writing life. It does this because I think those things are worth publishing, and because I think there are people who want to read them, and because the alternative—waiting for someone else to build the thing I want to read—stopped making sense to me a long time ago.

Starting something is daunting. I will not pretend otherwise. There is a particular kind of vulnerability in putting your name on a publication and saying, out loud, that you think it should exist. It invites the question of why—why this, why you, why now—and the honest answer is not especially dramatic. I started the Gazette because I wanted to read it, and it did not exist yet, and I got tired of that being the case.

I started the Gazette because I wanted to read it, and it did not exist yet, and I got tired of that being the case.

The landscape is full. I know. But full is not the same as complete, and I think there is a difference between a space that has a lot in it and a space that has what you are looking for. I was not looking for another guide on how to write a query letter. I was looking for a place that talked about writing the way writers actually talk about writing—when they are not performing expertise, when they are not selling a course, when they are just sitting with the work and trying to figure out what it means and why they keep doing it.

That is what the Gazette is for. Whether anyone else was looking for the same thing, I suppose I am about to find out.