not jumping on the bandwagon so much as waiting for it to slow down to a crawl before I decide it’s going the same way I am and hitching a ride…

Yes I’m late to the party but y’all, let’s consider allowing trends to last more than five minutes. Let us think about these challenges and let them sit with us. Let me find the time to write something meaningful about these records. And because I’m having such fun with it, let me do three at a time.

Has summer been kicking anyone else’s arse? I’m sure it has. Gone are the carefree days of lie-ins and wandering around the UK for weeks, visiting mates and fam, spending my bank account down to nil. Now it’s too bloody hot to think, and I’ve got a kid that has a, quite frankly, absurd schedule, and apparently I have my own job to worry about. And a book to edit. Which we’ll get to in a minute. But in the meantime, here’s some bits and bobs that I’m enjoying.

Memory is a funny old thing. I saw Marjane Satrapi speak at Stanford University for the Bita Prize for Persian Arts back in 2018, and had several questions written down for the Q&A, but the one I remember the most vividly, and the one I remember asking, was about how she makes room for the different parts of her background, her heritage. The Persian part, with her upbringing in Iran. The French part, with her coming of age and trying to define herself. I remember her saying something about the fact that you don’t. They don’t make peace with each other. They just exist and are you.

After I heard of Marjane’s untimely death last week, I went back and watched the video, searching through the Q&A to get the words right.

I’m starting this month’s dispatch with a segment that a lot of folks are probably feeling: theleila is in a weird headspace.

I’m living in a time of desperate compartmentalizing. Trying to think of how to wish my cousin in Iran a happy birthday in one sentence, and hoping the war will come to an end in the next. Reading news about delicate ceasefires and the destruction of a culture I am removed from but is still half of who I am, and then trying to write a grant application. We’re (mostly) all feeling this odd duality of life, witnessing the dismantling of imperfect but vital systems but still needing to do the meal planning.

Thanks to a confidence-boosting kick up the butt from Pippa Grant’s session at this year’s Pikes Peak Writers Conference, I’m giving this newsletter thing a try again. Monthly, because the thought of doing anything more often makes me want to bury my head under the covers.

It won’t be perfect. It probably won’t be long.1 But it’ll be something, and it’ll be me.

Spurned into a bit of Substack action by Linda Caroll’s prompt to “Tell us a tiny story about a pet you’ll never forget in 150 words or less.”

I almost let myself get away with going over the word count, because I 1) have a difficult time with restrictions when it comes to my personal life and 2) I have enough of that with grant writing. But then I reread Linda’s note, that “a shorter word count to make us write tight,” and remembered why a challenge like this is vital for writers. Especially the more verbose ones (like me) who have a hard time honing in on their point (yes, me).

Ah, fuck it, I’m going to do a Best of 2025. Why the heck not? When was the last time I did a proper Albums of the Year or anything similar, in a proper long(ish) format? As in, not just a list of album titles and their corresponding artists? Likely it was when I was still an editor at Southeast Performer, when I’d be scrambling to write my Letter for the Editor before deadline, in between chasing down freelancers for their wayward pieces, and inevitably coming up with something else to fill the pages when said freelancers went radio silent, or a band turned in a Tour Diary that was unreadable.

“Rewrite your first chapter as the opening scene of a movie. What is she wearing? What is she drinking? What are her surroundings? What is she listening to?”

That last part. That was probably the most important part.

I was on the phone with my book coach, outside a busy brewery, a rare Denver drizzle coming down. I’d recently sent her the roughest of rough drafts of my book, which, after a decade or so of stops and starts, had actually taken form as a fully-fledged story. Well, almost. Hence the rough and hence the book coach.

What was she listening to?

She being my protagonist, Bea, a music journalist in 1989 London, working for a thinly-disguised NME-esque weekly.

Hm. How to use Substack? I reckon I’ll start off with a bit of a diary sitch, somewhere to look back on whatever the heck I was doing. So don’t expect anything too fancy, these will be memories and thoughts taken on the fly.

Hopefully as the book gets closer to completion (and who knows? Maybe publication), there will be more about that too.

What better way to kick off my foray than with my thoughts and not-great videos/photos from Little Simz’ first Denver gig, and my (likely) last of the year.