Everybody is starting a Substack! Or griping about Substack! Or both! The buzzy newsletter platform is home to all kinds of publications, including some that are basically music blogs. It has also become a favored destination for prominent writers who’ve either jumped ship or been forced out from more established media outlets, some of whom (such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi) are very publicly warring with the modern journalistic establishment. Substack is even subsidizing some of these writers, a program the company is planning to aggressively expand after recently raising $65 million. This aspect of the business has been controversial. Some have criticized the lack of clarity about how much writers on the Substack Pro model are getting paid, while others have raised concerns about the large number of anti-trans writers the company has chosen to sponsor. People who love to get worked up over the media business cannot stop arguing about it.

The latest big name to launch a Substack is punk legend Patti Smith. In her first post on the platform, Smith writes that she plans to use her Substack as a clearinghouse for the kinds of writing that she has previously scrawled on notebooks in coffee shops and kept to herself: “my weekly ruminations, shards of poetry, music, and musings on whatever subject finds its way from thought to pen, news of the mind, pieces of this world, free to all.” She’ll also be publishing a serial called The Melting, which she began writing last April, described as “a journal of my private pandemic.” She intends to make the first few installments free and public; the rest will be restricted to her paying subscribers. Here’s her message announcing all this:

In the corner of my room is a small suitcase, packed over a year ago, ready to tour the world. That was to be my traveling work, which never came to pass.

I am still here.

Every morning for some hours, at my usual café, I sit and write. Notebook and coffee reign. Writing is what I do, and have since twelve, imagining myself Jo March. Meditations, crime novels, and poetry, hidden in stacks of notebooks, written in every stage of life. Now, in the time of the pandemic, isolated from family, friends, and fellow workers, we are reinventing our processes. Through Substack I plan to form an inter-connective body of work for a responsive community. Each week I will post my weekly ruminations, shards of poetry, music, and musings on whatever subject finds its way from thought to pen, news of the mind, pieces of this world, free to all.

On Tuesdays, subscribers will find my first serial, The Melting. No one has read these pages. A journal of my private pandemic. My first entry was exactly one year ago, on April 7th, the night before the full Worm Moon. Tonight, I am sitting at my desk, under my skylight, that same moon overhead. I will post the first few entries for everyone. Then, for my paid subscribers, I will post an installment every week, as well as posts relating to its expanding world, finally fulfilling my Jo March fantasy as she serialized her Gothic tales for the newspaper.

I offer The Melting, words known only by the pages themselves, to be given a new life here. In my Substack world, I hope that you, dear reader, will be my notebook.

You can read and subscribe to Smith’s Substack here.