One Year Later

A Southern Knickerbocker in Review

My first post on this Substack was on May 31, 2023. It was prompted by a headline I saw on the internet, and born out of a felt need to get this thing going. Taking pop culture as a starting point seemed pretty natural to me.

In that year, I’ve had just a tad over 5,000 distinct readers, of which 200 signed up to keep reading on a regular basis. This is a different way of thinking from the old blogger days, when monthly hits were what mattered more than knowing if it was a repeat customer. To those of you whom I do not know personally, but you read these ramblings anyways, my thanks.

I’ve intentionally tried to be broad in what I write about here, largely because my interested are broad. While so many of the Substacks I’ve seen succeed here are narrowly tailored, I did not want to lock myself into a particular category early on, thus hindering what I could write about if the mood struck. This has been satisfying overall, and I’m happy with the topics I’ve covered.

But it doesn’t surprise me that the most popular post here has been my first essay on Classical Education. And it’s not even close. That particular post is one of the only ones I’ve seen shared by others on social media. It would be tempting for me to shift towards writing solely about CCE as a result. After all, that is my primary vocation and experience.

However, I’m not prepared to make such a shift. Whatever the future holds, there seems to be enough interest to keep this project going for another year. In fact, I’ve had enough interest that I’ve decided to change two things here.

First, I’m going to turn on the paid subscription service. But the content here will continue to be free. This is “bad business,” some might say, but I prefer this to the idea of starting some other service like Buy Me a Coffee of Patreon. For some reason, there are readers out there who want to financially support this endeavor. Lord bless you. But I don’t see this as a long term money-making endeavor. Hence, I will activate the subscription service for those interested souls, but everyone will still be able to read my weekly missives. For those who subscribe, I am creating a “Subscriber Content” section which will have PDFs of some of my work and may begin to have some audio content as well. We’ll see.

Second, I do plan to write more about CCE than I have previously, for all the reasons mentioned above (interest, experience, vocation). But I want to keep writing other things as well. Heck, I may even venture a poem or two in the near future. God only knows. But I do think it’s important for me to keep writing and thinking about classical education, so you can expect to see a bit more regular writing on that topic.

Ultimately, I hope whatever finds its way here will be of encouragement to you, dear readers. And if you think there’s something here worth sharing, please tell your friends. I’d love to have them join the conversation.