I've started a Substack. Here's why.

After 35 years of punching a keyboard, I've finally learned something important about my work.

My great-grandfather Nelson Tramble. Circa 1900.

The man in the picture above is my great-grandfather, Nelson Tramble. He was born into slavery on an island off the coast of either South Carolina or Georgia. The exact location is lost to time.

After emancipation, he and his family moved to Arkansas and built a prosperous life in their small Dallas County town as a farmer. According to what I’ve been told, he and my great-grandmother taught folks in the community how to read and write. How, when or where Nelson learned those skills himself, I have no clue, but apparently education was a priority.

Everyone on the Tramble side of my family, from Nelson on down, was literate. My dad, Nelson’s grandson, was damned proud of that, and it showed. He made sure the first thing I received at the beginning of each school year was a library card. We also had a room set aside in the house as an actual library. Encyclopaedia sets, dictionaries, textbooks, Highlights magazines, mom’s Danielle Steel paperbacks, and any other type of reading material no matter how high or low brow belonged to this room. A desk, chair and typewriter completed the decor. A Commodore 64 was added in the mid-80s.

My folks also encouraged me to write. I was the family bard, coming up with short stories, poems, letters to the editor, you name it.

And this is the part where you probably expect me to veer into some romantic notion of starting this substack (should I capitalize substack?) because I wanted to honor my family’s love of the written word. But there was something even more important to my folks, making a living.

Workers in creative industries are having a difficult time, especially us writers. And the tarot book market has collapsed. This means that quite a few folks who write about tarot and spirituality are either giving up, pivoting to another line of work, or digging in for the long haul.

I’m doing the latter.

***

“The best way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t do it,” - Dad

I’ll be honest, 2024 has been an absolutely horrible year for me professionally and financially for my business. I’ve heard the word “no”, especially during the last 3 months, more than I have in the past 4 years. Two deck projects fell through and a book proposal was declared dead in the water, all due to circumstances beyond my control. The pandemic and the social unrest during lockdown caused an artificial spike in the spiritual sector. Books with subjects such as tarot, astrology and the like don’t sell anymore. With publishers risk averse by nature, backing a tarot book now is a chance they don’t want to take, no matter how promising the work seems to be.

Maybe because of age or because I’ve got nothing to lose at this point - or both - my recent professional knocks have helped me realize that I’m a damned good writer. Usually when I write a proposal or workshop pitch, I just crank it out, send it, and don’t go back to it until I get confirmation to move forward. But something weird happened during the last few months. For example, when I got the “no” about the book proposal (due to the tarot book market collapsing), I picked myself up after a week of mourning and looked at the proposal with fresh eyes.

“Oh my gosh. This is good!” I said to myself. (By the way, I have no clue what I’ll do with the proposal, which is basically the book.)

I’m a damned good writer not only because my family instilled in me a love of the written word, but because I inherited the intelligence and skill to make a way out of no way. I do that by writing.

Against the advice of a lot of folks around me, I pushed back on starting a paid Substack for a long time. One reason is that I still believe this platform will go on the market in the near future. Just a feeling, not a fact. The second reason was / is that I wanted my offerings, my tarot knowledge, and my entire brain to remain free and open to the public. I believed I wasn’t supposed to make money using a skill that had been given to me by my ancestors and that I love doing. (#TeamAquarius)

What would Dad say about that?

What would Nelson say about that?

***

Researching, studying, photographing, writing, creating, sharing. All of these things take time and skill if they’re to be done properly. These are things I do. And when I look at the current landscape of writers in the spiritual sector, I think I do them well.

Well enough to try and make a living doing them. Again.

With all the above said…thank you. Thank you for joining me here. Thank you for sharing this space. And on behalf of Dad, Nelson and all of my ancestors who came before, thank you for becoming a subscriber.