Substack MixTape
Connection and Transformation in April 2023
March 31 of this year I started this Substack, The Brown Barge, after a week using the new feature Notes as a beta tester. That experience crystallized what I’d been feeling for a year or two–there’s such much writing on Substack that makes me feel more connected to other people and the world.
Using Notes also gave me the chance to connect with other writers–some that I’d been reading for years, others that I found via Notes–and the process of consistently writing and publishing for a small (but growing) audience has been transformative. I wrestled for a month writing a post about my mom’s unexplained illness; I turned a Note response to Hamish McKenzie into a longer post about how social media is like the middle school cafeteria; and I published two issues of my Monday Mind Meld post, where I highlight my favorite Substack pieces from the previous week.
So to wrap up my first full month, I’ve created a Substack MixTape of some of the best posts from other writers that were published on Substack in April 2023. Like the mixtape that you created for your high school crush, this mixtape has a particular theme and a particular person in mind. The theme–connection and transformation–link to the person I had in mind while creating this mixtape: me a month ago.
But even though I created this mixtape with my one-month-ago self in mind, there is something here for every reader. So come along for this journey. On Side A, we’ll explore human connection through essays, video, and short fiction about birds, Barbie’s, friends, climate, and hand-holding. On Side B, we’ll transform together reading essays, poems, and short fiction about firing a CEO, tending weeds, noting fragrances, and growing trees.
Side A
Track 1: Dada by Taegan MacLean
I don’t know what your mixtape philosophy is, but I like to come out of the gates with a track that smacks you in the face with emotion. Dada by Teagan MacLean immediately hit me with a hard jab to the heartstrings.
At first, I thought this was going to be about the early 20th century avant-garde art movement, Dada, but that is because I am a weird literary nerd and not a weird dad nerd (both are good kinds of nerds). Track 1 on our Substack MixTape is, instead, about birds and fatherhood.
The thing that I loved most about this piece is that it combines a well-crafted essay with a video that elevates this from a very good personal essay, that jabs your heartstrings, to an expression of love via art that is a knock-out blow to the heart (in the best way).
Speaking about his daughter, Taegan says:
I worry for her all the time. It’s this layer of my life that wasn’t there before. She’s so special it hurts. It’s a miracle that something this beautiful and resilient and loving can exist in a world that’s so often inhospitable.
In the video, as Taegan reads this section he hurries over to grab his daughter’s hand as she runs through a playground. It made me cry and it will make you feel something too.
Reading time: 15 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 2: We Are All Just Barbie Girls In This Barbie World by Heather Marie Vitale
So we’re all crying after track 1. Time to lighten the mood, right? Our second track, starts off with a light and fun trip down nostalgia lane as Heather Marie1 explores her relationship with Barbie. I was laughing as I pictured Heather Marie’s mussed-hair Barbie driving her sensible minivan to her Dreamhouse time-share in Boca.
But I love a good mixtape fake out. And remember Side A is all about connection. So get ready for emotion as this post builds to explore friendship.
Barbie felt like a friend–perhaps one that was a little too perfect but she meant well. How when you were five she was an unconditional friend and less a symbol of heteronormative gender roles. She could be anything you wanted her to be, even if that meant a sloppy mess (but a sloppy mess in Malibu).
Reading time: 6 minutes
Required musical accompaniment:
Track 3: Are internet friends "real" friends? by Elle Griffin
From the Museum of My Nostalgia by Heather Marie Vitale we segue into the Museum of Elle Griffin, Writer Extraordinaire. Elle starts this exploration of friendship–IRL and online–by describing herself as a museum with “so many rooms and galleries that make up my life, each of them filled with every artifact of my existence.”
Elle summed up why I’m so obsessed with the weird (in the best way) ecosystem of writers and readers here on Substack:
There has been writing that has deeply resonated with me, that has made me feel not alone, that suddenly gave me an idea or helped me know what decision to make.
I read this piece and was put into a very reflective mood–thinking about friends from different eras of my life, the rooms that we have in common, and those we don’t. There are so many different types of connection and Elle gives us the kind of work we need here for our third track–contemplative, meditative, bridging us to our next post exploring a different world completely.
Reading time: 14 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 4: Human Island - Part I by Claudia Befu
We’re getting close to the end of Side A and it’s time to shake things up. Human Island, a short story that is part of a collection of climate-fiction pieces that Claudia Befu is serializing on Substack, shakes the mental snow globe.
I have a strong intuition that the future will be far more strange than we imagine and that fiction is a window into some of these strange possible futures. I hope to never live in a future like the one that Claudia creates–a barely survivable deathscape of climate catastrophe a thousand years in the future–but I loved exploring how a vastly different future might shape the way we connect with other people.
In particular, I loved the small moments of connection between Nova, the protagonist of the story, and an unnamed stranger on a pilgrimage to sacrifice himself in a religious ritual in this future world. As this unnamed old man says:
There’s still much to live and die for in this world.
Reading time: 12 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 5: I think you’ll understand by BDM
After traveling to another world, the best way to return to our present Earth is through a small act of physical connection. BDM gives us that in this essay that explores the way we connect with other people through the simple act of hand-holding.
I think that ending Side A with a short essay about a simple act is perfect, because this essay used hand-holding to make me think about how much I appreciate the connections I share with other people and animals in my life. This sentence gives the perfect flavor of what to expect in the rest of the essay:
I’ve learned over the past year that sometimes you have to ask for help you don’t think you need—a good practice on two fronts, one of which is that we often ration out asking for help with the idea you ask for it when you really need it and relationships don’t really work that way, and second sometimes you just have to give people something to do as an act of generosity toward them.
Reading time: 4 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Side B
Track 6: Help there's a dead CEO in my head by Adam Mastroianni
Side B is all about transformation and I’m kicking things off with a mixture of comedy and insight. This piece starts off getting the laughs in with lines like:
All hail the captain of industry that lives between our ears and behind our eyes! Wise are his ways, and true! Long may he reign!
But after a bit it transitions into the type of introspection on consciousness that comes from “being a lump” while your body recovers from an external invasion (in this particular case the offending intruder is COVID).
This post reminded me that my internal narrator is closer to a 22-year old McKinsey hire, full of PowerPoints and big ideas, than a Fortune 500 CEO–and that, above all, I can be deeply okay2 by accepting that the entire world doesn’t depend on the superhuman strength of my internal Jack Donaghy.
Reading time: 7 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 7: Tending the Weeds by Norman Plumage of Soaring Twenties
I discovered a cool group on Substack called The Soaring Twenties Social Club that is an eclectic group of people with a simultaneous reverence for art and irreverence for rules. Track 7 is a poem from a Soaring Twenties member named Norman Plumage. I’m assuming that is a pen name, but either way Plumage is a cool last name.
I added this track to the mix because it captures the sticky ambiguity of even mostly positive ideas like transformation and manages to do that in the space of a couple of lines like:
tending the weeds
the past and future become muddled
We just contemplated a shift in an internal theory of consciousness in the last track and transitioning into poetry put me even deeper in the waters of introspection.
Reading time: 2 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 8: the olfactory pyramid // notes on notes by nicole of olfactory seconds
Time for a palate cleanser delivered via a post about the fragrance notes of a perfume called JAZMIN YUCATAN from D.S. & Durga.
This post is an example of a weird dive into a subject that, on the surface, I should not be interested in at all: perfumery. I have never worn perfume, do not particularly enjoy the smell of other people wearing perfume, and have never seen the words D.S. & Durga before in my life.
But this gets added to the playlist because it inspired me to think about how we transform chemicals into scents and then devise elaborate, but ultimately flawed, systems to transform those scents into words.
As the subhead of this piece says:
top, middle, and base notes are a lie but the lie is all we have.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
Track 9: Pine as Noun and Verb by Sherman Alexie
We’ve made it to our last track and wrap up our April 2023 Substack MixTape with a piece of short fiction from Sherman Alexie. On one of my first days using Notes I had a nice brief back and forth with Sherman about basketball. It was really cool to have a small interaction with a very famous and talented writer that I’ve been reading for 15 years.
This short story repeats a refrain throughout that is both so simple and yet so elegant:
The plant grows in every direction but the root remains.
Sentences like this make it the perfect capper to our mixtape, though I must admit that I was drawn to the story from its title and the connection that I have to pine trees.3
But even if you don’t have the same connection to pine that I do, this last track connects the continual transformation of life with the beauty of the rooted connection that remains constant–if we take the time to look for it.
Reading time: 3 minutes
Suggested musical accompaniment:
At 69 minutes of total run time, the April 2023 Substack MixTape fits just under our 74 minute limit for a CD-R (the standard format I used as a teenager making mixtapes in the early 2000s).
I had a blast putting this together and if you give this mixtape a spin I think you’ll leave feeling a little more connected to strangers on the internet–and the tiniest bit transformed.
Disclosure: Heather Marie is my very talented and loving partner.
Bonus track
The first part of my last name–Oren–means pine in Hebrew. I also grew up in a part of the country that was once densely populated by forests of longleaf pine; I ran around in my childhood backyard amidst a constant pile of pine straw and pine cones; and one of my most cherished possessions is a beautiful keepsake box made of pine with my family name inscribed in Hebrew that my partner, Heather Marie, gave me.
So cool being part of this mixtape. I'll listen to 'my song' 😉 and get back to you later on. Thanks as well for the feedback on my story, it's so interesting for me to see the story though someone else's perspective.
Nice work! It’s a mini-guide to some good writing.