Next Year I Will Teach From a Clay Jar
New workshops from your correspondent in fairyland
The best part of this newsletter business is also the best part of the internet: I’m here in Greytown on a bright summer morning, and y’all are out there across the motu and around the world. On this screen, however, we’re all hanging out together in the same…place, if that’s the word?
Katherine Dee calls the internet a fairyland and that works for me: “where ordinary rules dissolve, where time slips, where travelers risk forgetting who and what they are.” To the list I’ll happily add forgetting where you are. I write and y’all kind people read and we all cheat geography together. Magic, ain’t it?
I’m going to break that spell with an invitation to some very in-person, real world workshops next year—details below. But first, back to the internet:
From My Clay Jar to Yours
Sam Kahn is another writer here on Substack whom I admire. He wrote a recent post wondering what the hell ever happened to cosmopolitanism, which he defines as “a notion that identity is synthetic and isn’t primarily conferred by ethnic or nationalist bloodlines, that a person is, fundamentally, a ‘citizen of the world.’” Americans in particular have turned inward, he notes, though the phenomenon is everywhere. He works quickly through the familiar reasons—the siloing of the internet, identity politics both left and right, our stubbornly tribal nature—but the big picture he drew really hit home. I grew up thinking the Peace Corps was the coolest job on Earth. Until Kahn mentioned it I hadn’t thought of it in years.
I grew up a ‘90s kid looking desperately outward at the wide, wide world. Our family hosted foreign exchange students in boring ol’ Phoenix, Arizona, and both my sister and I went on our own exchanges as soon as we could. Adulthood came and I never stopped moving. I did the Eurail pass, I taught English in Mexico, I built a trash collection service in a Honduran village. Then I turned pro, trading all that rambling experience into cool gigs as a foreign correspondent in Bolivia and a university lecturer in China. Now I’m a dad raising American-ish kids in New Zealand. By this point you could fairly say this endless international exchange, and the synthetic (not fake, but made) global identity it’s given me, have been life’s chief source of meaning.
For better or worse, my fingers want to add. The flinch is ingrained. I have learned to apologize for being so damn weird. Sometimes I even apologize to myself. This year I’ve somehow both vowed to become Kiwi and to remain American until death. In aggregate, it seems, I’m a proud cosmopolitan. On any given day I’m a shrunken nationalist just lookin’ for a wall to hide behind.
It’s hard out there, keeping that cosmopolitan vibe afloat. You need good times and money. You need hope and privilege and open doors and plane tickets. You need to see the world not as a crowded rock to squeeze for food but as thing to believe in, whole, for its own sake. I still want all of this, for my kids above all. I fear I am watching it slip from my grasp. From all our grasp.
I started this newsletter as a return to the dream: cosmopolitan letters from an internet fairyland where I am American and not, Kiwi and not, and yet a believer in both. I’m stoked to have piled up all these words, but I’m most fiercely proud of you, my warmly divided community of readers: this mailing list runs about 40/40 NZ/US, with another 20 percent the world over. Find me another such club out there! Nobody bails when I go deep on small towns on either side of the split, either. We’re a legit binational-plus tribe, we are. Citizens of the goddamn world!
I don’t use the phrase lightly. At NYU Shanghai we taught cosmopolitanism til we were blue in the face. I can recite the story of Diogenes without looking it up. He was the original cosmopolitan, coiner of the term. He was also batshit crazy. He lived naked on the streets of Athens and slept inside a large clay jar. He didn’t need any more shelter. The world was enough.
Which is the true fairyland? The faith that nations, with their sad little walls, will make your soul complete? Or that you can find the same completion without their shelter, a ghost of the world curled up in a jar on the street? Which traveler has truly forgotten who or what they are?
Workshops in the Real World
This summer in Greytown, New Zealand I’m throwing a bunch of great workshops at Mrs. Blackwell’s Village Bookshop. Call it a residency, like I’m Celine Dion in Vegas belting out the joys of writing! We had great fun at last year’s workshops—see the photo up top—so we’re back with more:
Writing to Reveal is the closing workshop of The New Zealand Stationary Festival on January 10. After a day celebrating the joy of sleek pens and bitchin’ notebooks, we’ll explore how regularly scribbling down your thoughts can lead you to wisdom you never knew you had. Tickets here. (Buy a full festival ticket for a killer totebag.)
January 10: Writing to Reveal with Dan Keane
Writing Your Life is a series of stand-alone workshops on genres and methods of autobiographical writing. Our memories give us everything, and with practice you can learn to fashion them into all kinds of art on the page. In each Tuesday evening session we’ll read examples, learn a few tricks, then write and talk our way through the craft together. Great conversation, great vibes. You’ll learn a bunch and leave rarin’ to write:
February 10: How to Write a Place
February 17: How to Write a Portrait
February 24: An Elegy for Something Lost
March 3: The Everyday Haiku
March 10: How to Start a Story
Attend as many as you like! Click each link for tickets. If you want to attend all five, you can sign up here for a discount and a free Midori notebook (Japanese, top quality, paper like ice cream.) I’d love to see you there!
Deeper into Fairyland
These letters will pause for the holidays and the first part of next year (which is very much still the holidays here in work-to-live New Zealand.) To my darling paid subscribers—thank you, thank you, thank you!—I’ll suspend paid subs until February. I’ll use the time away to hang with the kids and read without purpose. I’ve also got a new project I’m cooking up and I need to disappear awhile to get it together. Watch this space in 2026! Til then—the South Island, a bach, a hut or two, and long days on the green op-shop reading couch under the window. Fairylands all.
Now my daughter’s asking to hit the Greytown pool. My son wants the Carterton pool. Place always wins. My warmest regards to you & yours, in whatever nation the holidays catch you. Ngā mihi nui, y’all. See you next year in fairyland. //
Ata Mārie Dan
What a great (and timely) post. I'm signing up for writing about place workshop because thankfully it's not during the Martinborough festival or Waitanagi day - but also because this business of cosmopolitanism (is that the word?) really interests me at the moment. Early last year I read a great detective novel where The Hole in Manhattan was as much a character as a place - where the Mob hid the bodies -and still might. I am on the list to receive updates by emai about progess ( there has been a lot of talk) and can attend Zoom meetings, I 'visited' via Google Earth - it certainly is surreal real-estate and place out of time - in every sense - worth a google if you have time.
Enjoy your break, the South Island and hopefully the van.
Happy holidays, sir!