Endorsement: Anne Ishii’s Substack
Photo via Asian Arts Initiative.
BY JOEY SWEENEY | Anne Ishii is an author, the host of WHYY’s Movers & Makers, and the curator of Philadelphia’s Asian Arts Initiative, the arts non-profit where her keen eye has overseen an ongoing, truly dynamic new era. She’s really good at all of her jobs. But on Letters From Annie, the daily Substack newsletter she launched three years ago, all of this — and everything else in your own life — fades into the background for a minute, for something so personal that each day’s entry is an act of inventive bravery. And while she definitely brings all of her knowledge bases to bear in this — entries variously touch on art, artistic practice, the world around the arts, and so on — this is something else. It’s often deep art thoughts that are really deep life thoughts.
From a newsletter last July, this bit that I pasted into my Notes app and which is still there:
The point of writing is supposedly that the seduction is mutual. A reader keeps looking for my words, and I keep looking for the reader. So I am in awe until I am bitter, when people don’t seek an audience because they’ll find you with or without your persona. Because you get away with anonymity. And when I think about it long enough, I consider the anonymity a disability. I use that term with no presenetiments except that it means you operate in the world with a different set of rules that I don’t understand. An attenuation of reality.
There’s more where that came from. — daily, in fact. For a while now, Ishii’s been writing “love letters” as a loose theme, and stretching that concept as far as it will go. It’s going pretty far.
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