🧵 Thursday Thread: WITD CLASSIFIEDS
If you like piña coladas, getting caught in the rain ... just kidding (sort of) because you never know what you might find in the classifieds. Let's find out, with kindness and joy.
First, our 24-hour flash sale on WITD annual memberships ends today, so if you want to take advantage, here is the link good through midnight Central tonight.
We offered this yesterday in celebration of my essay, “The Cost,” being selected as a finalist for Best of the Net yesterday. It was nominated last year by the editors Ilanot Review. It was a tender essay and this has meant a lot to me. If you missed the backstory, it’s in yesterday’s post. Thank you so much for being here.
As for the WITD CLASSIFIEDS. Well, what’s weird is that my very first job after dropping out of college was selling ads in the classifieds department of City Pages, the big alt news weekly here in Minneapolis. I applied there because I had worked, while still in college, in the classified department at The Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota’s student paper. At City Pages, I identified some opportunities that got me promoted to manager of the classifieds department at the age of twenty. Then, I had my first baby at twenty-one and quit that managerial job to stay home with her after a several-month stint of bringing her to the office with me, leaking breastmilk all over the place, and trying to pretend to work while caring for her in a very young, very male environment. I wrote about that for On the Issues in the mid 1990s in an essay called “Reflections of a Feminist Mom,” which you can read here if you like. Remember, I was about 25 when it was originally published.
But the classifieds thing, maybe it’s in my blood, who knows? Not me.
What I do know is that some other communities here on Substack—namely and especially Anne Helen Petersen’s
—one of Substack’s most interesting, kind, and engaged communities—have a bustling CLASSIFIEDS feature, so, it seems only fitting that we give it a try here!And again, the idea emerged during our most recent Live Salon (the open mic readings at the end of The Visceral Self, when writers wanted a way to connect and find/share resources and links to each other’s published work, services, etc., and
& I said to each other—hey, WITD can help with that.Below are the guidelines for posting your ad, which I’ve simply copy/pasted from our announcement earlier this week.
One additional note:
Let’s not use the WITD CLASSIFIEDS simply to post links to our latest Substack posts. Why? After all, we love Substack! But … posting all those links will soon turn the Classifieds into something else, maybe something like another version of Substack Notes, and we already have one Notes. That said, if you have a significant post—it was a milestone in some way, such as being your first post, or a viral post (however you define that), or your 100th post, etc., then, yes, we trust your good judgment to share it. Otherwise, let’s keep CLASSIFIEDS for the the stuff that is more specific, particular, and wouldn’t really fit anywhere else. Heck, you can try to sell your sofa here if you like!
And a request: We really wish there were a way to share photos in Substack comments!! If you know of a way, please reach out by replying to this email or emailing writing@writinginthedark.org or by posting a Classified ad using the OFFER convention described below. The only idea we have is if you post the photo somewhere else (FB, Substack Notes, etc.) and link to it in your comment here, but we’re low tech, so you might have better ideas. If so, yay. We’re all ears! And if Substack is listening, please consider adding an image option to the comments feature!
Here are WITD CLASSIFIED guidelines to make scrolling easier and more efficient—to make the section most usable:
Every month or so, we’ll use a Thursday Thread to host WITD: THE CLASSIFIEDS section paid members.
Classified postings should be direct asks or offers for products, services, in-person meetups, writing groups, book clubs, exchanges & trades (work to read, services, etc), recommendations, questions, announcements, requests/ISO (in search of), etc.
Please follow the below convention when posting/replying:
Original posts should:
Begin with [ALL CAPS OFFER OR ISO + CATEGORY] for example:
[ISO MINNEAPOLIS BOOK CLUS]
[OFFER WEBSITE DESIGN SERVICES]
[ISO EDITING SERVICES]
[ISO MANUSCRIPT EXCHANGES & TRADES]
Include any helpful & necessary links
Location / best way to contact if relevant
Two other important headers that fall outside of OFFER or ISO are ANNOUNCEMENT and CELEBRATION. See #6 below.
Replies should:
Indicate clearly if you are interested in the same service [DITTO] + any other info you want to add
If you are able to meet the need [ANSWER] + info on how you can meet or address the OP
Please do not limit yourself:
a. The categories we’ve suggested are just a beginning. But you might have lots of other ideas, and you need not limit yourself to writing-related topics, either! Maybe you make clay pots that you sell on Etsy. Maybe you do tarot readings, or are searching for a good astrologer. Maybe you are wondering about a good veterinarian in the Cincinnati area. Maybe you are in desperate need of a page-turner novel for an upcoming flight to Boston. Maybe you just binged The Bear and are wondering if anyone wants to discuss season three. Maybe you need a perfect recipe for bread pudding (in which case, Emily has you covered). Please feel free to post what you have to offer or wish you could find—as long as it’s legal, safe, and kind. Let common sense and good judgment be your guides, please.
Know that WITD cannot endorse any service or goods offered in THE CLASSIFIEDS. It’s just another way for all of us to connect with each other! Both buyers, sellers, traders, and recipe-makers must use their own judgment.
Do feel free to use THE CLASSIFIEDS for celebration posts, if you have a significant publication to share (see note above about not posting all of our most recent Substack posts here—please use your best judgment to discern what’s appropriate, we trust you), a recent win, or any other good news. We love celebrations!
Don’t PANIC about our formatting guidelines and conventions. This is not brain surgery and nothing is going to go terribly wrong if you mess up. Everything is in service of making the section easier to scroll and use. You can’t go too far wrong. We’ll all be fine. We promise.
Share Your Ideas, Too, Please!
We’re open to your input and suggestions as we build this feature out into a meaningful way for members of our WITD community to find and get to know each other through local meetups, reading/book groups, and other social endeavors, as well as lots of other ways of connecting and exchanging knowledge, energy, wisdom, goods, and services. There is no rule against self-promotion in the CLASSIFIEDS, so, again, you are free to share your latest successes or services or new Substack features, etc., as long as you think it is a relevant, valuable contribution to the section and the community.
Feel free to be creative—as we know you are! We can’t wait to see what you have to offer.
A Word About Reading/Critique Exchanges
[I won’t repeat this section every single time we do CLASSIFIEDS, but I do want to repeat it the first couple of times. Feel free to skip if you’ve already read this and feel comfortable and confident in this area.]
Once WITD: THE SCHOOL starts, we’ll be devoting real-time discussion to the considerations we recommend when seeking feedback on your work-in-progress. For now, we just want to note briefly that your work is valuable, it matters a lot where/from whom you seek feedback, and we do have strong ideas and principles on this issue. You of course are free to follow your own instincts, but I do plan to share some of my own thoughts about feedback in a forthcoming Lit Salon post and then again, in more detail, during SCHOOL.
The short version, in the meantime, is here (excerpted from this longer post on The Very Bad Writing Workshop (& What To Do Instead):
I counsel my students to be very careful with their work, to treat it with the respect it deserves. I mean, consider what George Saunders said to Jane Ratcliffe about sharing work and feedback:
“I don't show anybody. I’m even a little superstitious about it. I don't like to talk about what I'm working on or share with anybody because this process has taught me that there's so many layers to the subconscious. It's so smart but also kind of shy and if you start interrupting it, like, ‘Jerry said this,’ the subconscious goes, ‘fuck you. Why are you asking Jerry? I know. You just have to be patient with me.’”
In this vein, I—when students are eager to get “feedback from others” on their work in progress—sometimes ask them, “Would you seek someone’s advice on your roof installation if they were not an experienced roofer?” Or, “Would you ask someone to diagnose a skin growth if they were not a doctor or dermatologist?”
Why do we ask for feedback on our work with such little discernment of whether those giving the feedback have the prerequisite skills? Simply being an aspiring writer (or an avid reader) does not automatically prepare someone to get under the surface of someone else’s manuscript, let alone help identify how to solve any problems and meaningfully improve the work.
“So,” I advise my students, “make sure that before you ask for feedback on your work, you’ve considered whether the person or people providing it are highly qualified to do so—and that the work is ready for feedback in the first place.”
What If I Can’t Imagine Ever Posting Anything in THE CLASSIFIEDS?
Great question. Just in the last week, I’ve gotten two beautiful emails from introverted writers asking whether I thought, for example, they’d get value out of WITD: THE SCHOOL if they just did the work quietly on their own and never really jumped into the discussions.
In other words, they asked if they were welcome to “lurk,” work independently, and not force themselves into the participatory waters of community.
And my answer was a resounding yes. I am no longer as shy as I once was, but as a child and teenager, I suffered from selective mutism!! I know what it feels like to be quiet. I know what it feels like to stand back and watch. I wrote about the value of honoring our need to hover on the periphery last week, in this post: “How To Be A Writer (Even If You Lurk)” in case you missed it.
The upshot is, we hope THE CLASSIFIEDS will be fun to scroll even for those who never post—and who knows, you might just find something there that catches your eye.