[FINAL UPDATE - ADDED 30 July 2023: Thanks for reading! Black Stone Sanctuary no longer maintains a public newsletter. You can read the full public archives (from several different dates) via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The popular resources page is here.]
23 July 2023
Dear subscribers of Of Hearth & Shadow: Notes From Black Stone Sanctuary:
For a number of reasons, including major tectonic shifts in my creative and professional life and various health-related factors, I’m preparing to leave Substack entirely and shutter my Twitter accounts.
Shrinking my spheres of online attention allocation is a necessary step to free up time and energy for what’s next.
All three of my Substacks — Endarkenment, Of Hearth & Shadow: Notes from Black Stone Sanctuary, and The Anticareerist — will be deleted on Aug. 1, 2023. For the most part I will no longer be writing under these titles, at least not as separate topic-specific entities.
The new home base for my future writings will be A Digital Incubation Space on Paragraph. I've already published a few pieces there, including further info about why I’m leaving Substack and an intro to my new project, Forms of Incubation.
None of my Substack material will be migrated over to Paragraph.
In the months ahead I'll be building out A Digital Incubation Space into a permanent digital home: an online writing space where my work can survive the demise of any publishing platform because it lives on a blockchain.
Existing subscribers will not be migrated over to Paragraph automatically, since I didn’t want to assume you’d be interested in following this nascent onchain entity.
So if you’d like to follow my work outside of Substack, you’ll need to take action (if you haven’t already).
To follow A Digital Incubation Space, you don’t need to set up a whole new account on Paragraph, but you will need to click this link, hit the subscribe button, and enter your email. You’ll receive one short “welcome to Paragraph” email with a tutorial (like this one), which can easily be deleted or disregarded if you have no interest in publishing there yourself. After that you'll get an email every time I publish a new piece, and you can unsubscribe anytime with a single click. That’s it.
Even if you don't subscribe, you can always leave public comments on my Paragraph posts using an email address.
Again: I won’t be migrating my Substack material over to Paragraph. All of it will be deleted! (Apologies in advance for the broken links).
But you can always read all my previous Substack material, including subscriber comments, by searching at the Internet Archive where it’s already been preserved under the existing URLs.
However, I do plan to compile special curated collectible editions of my earlier writings, both published and unpublished. These collectibles may include:
The Black Tent Temple Guidebook
Collected Devotionals
Liturgical Development Notes
Black Stone Sanctuary: The Collected Essays
All collectible editions will be announced through Paragraph when they’re ready.
The online resources for polytheist-animist monastics page will be moved to The Cloister forum. Most of the forum is private, but as a public service, this page will be publicly viewable.
To clarify, Black Stone Sanctuary will continue on as an entity. The only thing that’s ending is the public-facing Substack newsletter.
Future writings I publish on religious matters will likely be found only on The Cloister, where many polytheist monastics and monastic-adjacent folks gather. (We communicate mostly asynchronously and in text format, but we just had our first scheduled Zoom call in June. It went very well!)
The idea here is to create more room for the Sanctuary to develop a stronger identity separate from me, its individual caretaker.
The Sanctuary is shapeshifting; it’s ready for an infusion of new energy.
So if Black Stone Sanctuary calls to you in some way — especially if you happen to live in Portland, OR, or have been planning to visit — then perhaps this is your sign to get in touch with me to talk about the future of the Sanctuary.
If that’s you, and you’re not already on The Cloister forum (join us!), then feel free to reply to this newsletter or email danicaswanson at pm dot me.
Thanks for reading. Hope to see you on The Cloister and/or on Paragraph!
~ Danica Swanson
Thank you so much for letting us know and providing info about your work on the Internet Archive. I have an account on the Cloister. I'm glad that forum is thriving. I'm in the middle of a job upheaval/transition, so I won't promise that I'll be over there quite yet except for maybe an intro, but my hope is that by the fall things will be more stable for me. I'm glad you're happy at Paragraph and I've subscribed. Thanks again for all that you've shared here.