Poison Drum on Substack
The Season of Excellence
Dear Sangha,
I’m putting together a new and contemporary Poison Drum utilizing the Substack platform as the format. What is Substack?
This is a substack. A platform developed by writers and artists for writers and artists. It sends a formatted ezine directly to people’s inboxes and creates a website archiving all past articles and newsletters. It is a nice hybrid of Blogs and Zines, with an easy reader and viewer interface.
What you have in your inbox is a test of the Poison Drum Substack.
As a test environment, this is Tabula Rasa or a blank slate. There are several advantages and several disadvantages to using Substack.
The Advantages:
We can add a podcast allowing for oral interviews with Roshi, senior students, and others. It has a subscription function allowing us to reach beyond the Sangha to the larger community. One example from a Zen Student in Hawaii:
The Substack company is always improving, adding formats for their artists: For example, they have added support for Comic Book artists:
How Poison Drum looks can be easily tweaked.
It is easy to have rotating editors, much like the Arts & Ways group. Art, photos, and other digital media display well in this format. And ease of use along with an increased readership since few of the younger generation reads magazines whether in physical or digital formats. I personally have a hard time myself.
The challenges:
A limited practical length for each posting. It is possible to go beyond the readable e-mail length in each posting — But that requires the readers to go to the website which in some circumstances is great but coupled with the modern inability to read a full print magazine isn’t something that should be done too often.
The nature of a substack is episodic. An excellent suggestion by Erik is Poison Drum be released, seasonally. For example, starting on the Spring Equinox, we can do a season of excellence. Releasing individual Poison Drum Substacks a few times a week until the Summer Solstice. Or less. Or more. Releases can be preset up to come out on particular days in the future etc. Summer could be the ‘season’ of practice. Fall the season of magic.
A successful substack, if success is a goal, comes out regularly and consistently. This does not necessarily require a great deal of time commitment but suggests we have a rotating editor after 4 seasons etc.
Under the Poison Drum, substack can be multiple sub, substacks. Whether we would like to use those features, for example, the Senseis could have their own ‘publication’ is something which can be decided in the future.
What I’m asking of the sangha:
Continued in Part 2