Why I’m Starting A Substack

There’s a box of newsletters sitting in my office that I haven’t been able to send.

I’ve been avoiding admitting that for a long time. The Right2Vote Report and its evolution, Prisonality Magazine, are print publications I started for incarcerated readers. Distribution reached prisoners in 350+ facilities across 44 states over six years following the largest national prisoner demonstration in US history, the 2018 National Prison Strike. We sent issues during the national prison strike. We sent issues during a pandemic. We sent issues when I had to empty my own bank account to cover printing costs.

And then, last year, I had to stop.

Not because the work wasn’t working. Because I was.

The print grind is heavy. Updating mailing lists for subscribers who had been transferred in retaliation. Tracking which facilities still accepted our content. Training new summer interns every year to do the data cleanup work. Raising printing money in $5 increment prisoner donations, which were always the most touching. Writing, layout, printing, mailing, opening snail mail, fighting prison mailroom rejections and responding to letters from inside repeating every quarter.

I loved it. And it burned me out.

What changed

I didn’t want to stop the work. I wanted to stop the part of the work that was draining me. The part that ate my time, my creative practice, my ability to make music, paint, write poetry, do the things that fuel me so that I can keep going.

In 2023 I tried Finding Fuel, thinking that CD sales would support the newsletter. It didn’t. The people who wanted it most behind the wall couldn’t buy it faster than corrections staff took it down and made it unavailable simply due to who I was.

So I’m trying something different. The print newsletter doesn’t end. It changes shape. Instead of a quarterly grind I run out of my in-home office, I’m building a Substack that funds an annual print run — and that gives me the room to put my whole self into what I send out.

What you’ll get if you subscribe

Every week, four kinds of posts, rotated:

1. Field essays — what I’m learning from the organizing. Prisoner-led campaigns you’ve never heard of. What a letter from an incarcerated reader taught me about a legislative bill. Why foundation funding often misses what incarcerated people are actually asking for.
2. Creative work — original songs, poems, and paintings. Including new work I’m building from letters mailed to me by readers inside. This is the practice I had to set aside to keep the print newsletter alive.
3. Mailroom Monday — primary-source reporting from inside. Curated excerpts from letters, art, and writing from incarcerated people across the country. This is the section no mainstream outlet can write, because no one else has the standing distribution to do it fairly centering inside content with the consent of the people whose words being published.
4. Organizing briefs — what’s actually moving on incarcerated citizens voting rights, sentencing laws, and the campaigns prisoner-led movements are pushing right now with concrete asks you can act on.

What you’ll get if you become a paid subscriber

• The full issue archive (every issue from 2017 through today including the Prison Strike Newsletter, Right2Vote Report and Prisonality Magazine)
• Mailroom archive with digitized prison mail content including inside artwork, a collection of mailroom rejections (the reasons for rejection border between petty, hilarious and infuriating), narratives, legislative ideas and words of gratitude
• Audio downloads of my music as I release it
• A monthly Zoom call with me — Q&A, what’s working, what’s not
• The right2vote on what I cover next 😉
• Access to send your own words of encouragement to inside subscribers printed in the next issue
• The knowledge that your subscription directly funds the annual print newsletter going to 350+ facilities — which I could not afford to send this year

Two things I want to be honest about

If you’re a incarcerated person reading this — most of what you’ll have access to would come through snailmail, not Substack. Substack requires payment and email access that you may not have. If you want the digital archive of recent issues, write me back at the address on your last issue, and I’ll mail you a packet. You can also encorage a loved one to subscribe to my Substack to keep you updated on posts here more frequently.

If you’re a foundation program officer, journalist, student or advocate reading this — there’s a flagship annual report coming at the end of this run called The State of the Inside. It’s the first national criminal justice publication built from letters mailed out of 350+ U.S. prisons, and the only one that pays its incarcerated contributors. Watch out for it.

The ask

Subscribe — free or paid, whichever fits. Forward this launch post others who should be reading it. If you’ve supported SawariMedia in the past, this is the new home for that support.

I’m going to be honest with you about what works for me and what doesn’t. I’m going to be honest about the burnout, the rebuild, and the slow climb back to the work. And I must be honest that this Substack only survives if enough of you decide it’s worth your attention. My goal is to send the next issue of Prisonality Magazine after 500 people subscribe to my Subsctack with at least 100 paid subscriptions.

The print room is finally quiet. Let’s see what fuel I can build from here.

https://amanistudio.substack.com

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