A Remark You Made: Great Moments in Subscriber Comments
Celebrating an award nomination for Call & Response!
Good news, friends. I’m nominated for the 2023 Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing. Based on this very Substack! My two fellow nominees are excellent writers for legacy media. I see my nomination partly as a sign of Substack’s growing respect in modern discourse. Newsletters can now play the role our once-thriving independent press and lit mags did: weighing in from the margins, delving into uncomfortable topics, testing formal experiments, and voicing alternative perspectives.
Thanks for your support of Call & Response’s eclectic content—especially my treatment of the arts as the stuff of creative nonfiction and examination of how the arts intersect with economic, personal, cultural, and other factors. This nomination belongs to everyone who’s subscribed, shared a post, or weighed in with a comment here.
I’m celebrating our good news by highlighting some of your choice comments on Call & Response posts. This is by no means an exclusive list. For every featured comment below, several others are worthy of inclusion here. (I do hear from Call & Response readers more often in personal messages than in public comments; those private messages will always and forever remain private)
Last June, I used a self-interview format (Hello, Socrates) to explore my evolving response to Joni Mitchell’s comeback.
Comments soon appeared from
, the contemporary ballet choreographer who created The Fiddle and the Drum with Joni. Like me, Jean said he’d worked through some self-analysis on Joni's comeback, also arriving at a place of acceptance and appreciation—he was just a bit further along in his conception of it all. Jean’s comments both affirmed my questions and challenged me to continue opening my heart:Empathy and honesty from a reader who knows a subject so well? A true gift.
Some of your comments raise an issue that I’d addressed in a post’s early draft but cut because it was too sticky or complex for timely handling. This happened a couple of weeks ago with Peggy Berg’s
comment on my column about shared aesthetics in romantic partnerships.Peggy wrote:
Still contemplating the requirement that my partner appreciate and love improvisation! (Not to mention hating overhead lighting…). But that was a crucial component in my relationship too and I wonder if it doesn’t have a lot to do with inviting the unknown. Making surprises and enjoying the wit and spontaneity that arises in the middle of one of those unexpected tiffs?
I agree with Peggy that a love of improvisation often is a sign of overall comfort with the unknown. When I was crafting the shared aesthetic post, I read studies on the interplay of personal values and uses of music in explaining music listener preferences. My fear was that sharing these studies’ value associations for my well-known musical tastes (self-transcendence, openness to change) would come off as smug, so I left them out altogether. When I read Peggy’s comment, I realized that I should have worked at presenting these fascinating studies until I could do so comfortably. Thanks, Peggy.
The third post in my Hard Truths for Poor Artists series focused on what I called the “forced error” of student loans, including some of my history with them.
weighed in with some personal background on his family’s hard work at upward mobility, sharing how he was raised with clear expectations that he’d exceed his parents’ accomplishments. He then wrote this:The question I find myself asking in your story, is: where is the generational aspiration?
It’s a critical question and a fraught one. Answering it means grappling with my Dad’s story, which I’ve not felt fully entitled to tell. Some small steps in that direction came in True Cliches of a Working Family Farm. I’m grateful for Darrell’s thought-provoking comment.
Finally, I laughed out loud at a response to my essay on the theme of how music ages with us over our lifetimes.
That Night in Toronto’s
wrote:“As I approached 50 I started telling friends that I was entering a stage in my life where I could either start doing drugs or start listening to jazz. I chose jazz.”
That’s it. A quick sample of your feedback—variously affirming, thought-provoking, encouraging, constructively critical, and just plain amusing. Such comments are priceless to us otherwise self-motivated, self-managed, and self-edited Substack writers. Thanks again, friends.
If you’re not the subscribing type but would like to make a one-time contribution to support my work, Venmo is always an option: @michellemercerwriter
See you here again soon.
There is no greater honour for a humble scribe than making a great writer laugh out loud. Congrats on the nom, and thank you for doing what you do.
Congrats - well deserved.