One Year of Casting Love Spells
It has somehow been a year since I launched this little newsletter! In that time, I’ve been overjoyed, smitten, and spurred by the support pouring forth from this small (growing!) but mighty-in-my-heart community. The emails, the comments, the calls. The opening of discussions, and sharing of resources. The proverbial “cups of coffee” you all have bought me, motivation you’ve given me to write and calcify thoughts, to communicate and to care, even in the rugged post spinal surgery months that came soon after launch. Thank you for believing in me, supporting me, and joining me in this experimental cauldron of creation. As we head into the next year, it feels like a good time to a look at what we’ve built together, and draw up plans for what’s to come.
It’s fun looking back at my first posts, where I defined what this newsletter would be. They are beautifully vague and amorphous, allowing quite openly for Love Spells to figure itself out as it went. And indeed, the fluctuations in Love Spells reflect an inner world seeking balance with the rapidly changing landscape of social media and in effect how we humans socialize and communicate. They reflect struggles with vulnerability, with scarcity, with exhaustion. With an industry that is replacing freelancers of my ilk with AI, influencers, and smartphones in the hands of recent grads. Things that are cheaper and flashier. More likeable and clean, less messy and real. They reflect my struggle with putting my life, ideas, writing, beliefs, and creations out there into what I see as an incredibly problematic glut of “content”.
I have mantras for this (shout out to my therapist Deb.):
And also:
I’ve noticed that I tend to sway on how “personal” I want this newsletter to be. Sometimes, it’s my version of social media or the village square, a way to share the ongoings of life with those who care to hear about it, be they near or far. Occasionally, I’m diving head-deep into what feel like vulnerability piranha ponds. More and more, it’s become a place where I share the dissections and investigations that I undertake to better understand this world and current events affecting us all.
In my second Love Spells post about my evolving relationship with Social Media, I noted that I wanted to use this newsletter to be a better member of the social media community. What I didn’t realize at the time, is that this social platform would come to more or less replace all others. Every day I get closer to closing all my accounts except this one. It’s tough. I appreciate the tool that social media can be, and I think that it is destroying us. It’s destroying our minds, our communities, our ability to think critically and engage in healthy discourse, particularly diasgrement. It’s scrambling our ability to tell truth from lies, connection from conversion, friend from follower. Scrambling our concepts of success, self, community. It’s incredibly addictive and unregulated, leading to a mental health crisis that I believe we will one day look back on as an epidemic level event. When I open Instagram or Facebook, it is with a sense of gut-churning despair. Most of the time, I have to have the apps deleted off my phone to prevent unhealthy use. I have not followed through with my hopes of a return, and I’m not sure that I ever will. I’m closer to the edge of exodus. With Meta remaking itself to be more hospitable to a Trump presidency, Elon Musk and X enough said, BlueSky seeming to be just another echo chamber, and TikTok (byeeee!) something that never has nor ever will have my data or dopamine (and I sure as hell am not signing up for RedNote, though, tempting to want to observe this confluence of culture and I look forward to reading about it in my favorite news sources!) . . . . I’m just not sure there is much worth staying for.
I’ve found that I would rather put my social media energy here, into Substack. Which has its problems, no doubt (WTF, NOTES? Do we really need that trash candy scroll biz here?) but at least there are no ads, and since it’s email-based, I can always switch over to an old fashioned newsletter should it go down the pipes. And—I think that connecting with you all here makes me a better member of the online (social media) community. This is slow food content, spiced and simmered, curated and carved. Delicious, nutritious, and served with loving care.
I’ve posted about twice a month in the past year, half as much as I had hoped to. The posts themselves have been longer than I’d planned, more essay-ish and researched. Less the short stories, poetry and myrrh that I thought I’d be sprinkling here, the works in progress and whatnot. It’s felt like it wanted to become its own thing, something between social media and a public forum for my habit of cultural analysis. This socially responsible substacking takes way more time than I had thought it would! Which accounts for some of the missed posts, but doesn’t excuse them. Moving forward, I am working on creating a system so that the posts always happen. forming this mold a bit, building the container for Love Spells to live and thrive in, become the sustainable little binary bush that she wants to be.
I remain forever organic. Free-range, feral, musty and esoteric.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t seek a certain human rhythm with this creation. I tend to be a person who creates systems rather than works within them. However, as it turns out, the lack of, or constant creating and refinement of systems does not in fact enhance productivity or creativity. Better I’ve learned to pick a system and stick with it, and apply your energy to the creation within. Otherwise, you’re constantly applying it to the creation of the container. Easier said than done, and this is why I need a boss; please feel free to submit your resumes.
Feel free also to answer my survey about what you’d like to see in Love Spells 2025. After all, this newsletter is for you.
This is my favorite post of 2024, not a essay, but a poem I wrote (and read) in early recovery from my spinal surgery, my voice still hoarse from intubation:
That’s all for the reflections. Tomorrow is inauguration day. I am not thinking about it too much, as doing so tends to make me cry. I plan to spend the day outside in the sunshine recovering from a heinous lung/throat infection, grounding with the trees, meditating for all get-out, and working on a gift I’ve been making for you all, a little booklet of the Love Advice that my ex-boyfriend (but forever friend) Ryan Van Duzer and I collected when we bicycled across rural America in the wake of Trump's first presidency, making a little YouTube thang called Love Cycles. We wanted to understand our fellow Americans who had put MAGA into office, so we took America’s backroads coast-to-coast, using the tool of vulnerability to meet folks who live outside our little urban bubbles: Sleeping on their lawns, joining their parades, and asking them about a thing that felt like a friendly place to connect on: love. This feels like a good time to revisit these sweet folks, and put together their story for you. May America and her people be safe and well.
Love,
Alisa
WATCH
David Lynch: The Art of Life free on the Criterion Channel through the end of the month. Excellent doc on his life and art. RIP David Lynch. You were strange, visceral, brilliant, and singular.
READ
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingslover. Storytelling at its finest. This book should be required reading for all Americans. The characters are lovable in all their pain, anger and bliss, the world-building so rich you can taste the air they breathe. Kingsolver helps us to understand an important piece of American history and often misunderstood part of our demographic with compassion and deft skill. The perspective this story offers on the plight of rural America, and the insidious history of the opioid epidemic there, is particularly timely as we turn our country over to the government that this population was critical in electing. Our country stands divided, and stories like this offer a bridge.
MAKE
Dairy-free Gluten-free Choco Miso banana bread
I made this recipe up the other day and am eating it right now. It’s tender, savory and just sweet enough to eat all day. You can sub regular flour if that’s not an issue for your gut. This bread is grounding and calming, like a warm hug. Why not make some tomorrow, and share it with your neighbors.
INGREDIENTS
3 large ripe bananas, mashed
3/4 c brown sugar, packed
1/3 c olive or coconut oil
1/4 c applesauce
2 Tbs. miso
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1.5 c gluten-free flour mix
1 tsp. baking soda
3/4 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup dark chocolate
1/2 cup walnuts
METHOD
Preheat oven to 350. Line 9x5 loaf pan with parchment, leaving an overhang so you can grab it. In a medium bowl, mash the bananas, then add your wet ingredients and whisk to combine. Whisk all your dry ingredients in a different bowl. Scrape the wet mixture into the dry, and mix until just combined. Gently fold in the chocolate chips and walnuts. Smooth into loaf pan. Bake 55-65 minutes, until a tester inserted in the middle comes out clean. Let cool a bit on a wire rack before removing from pan.