A kingdom for a newsletter

Can this Substack hold the vasty fields of voice?

The first page of the prologue in The New Penguin Shakespeare edition of Henry V, a treasured gift from my legend of a teacher.

Have you ever had that classic performance anxiety dream: the one where you show up to give a speech and you have absolutely no idea what you’re going to say?

I’ve had it a lot, and at least once in real life.

The first time it actually happened was in my second year of graduate school, on a regular Monday morning as I was headed to Classical Text. I was thrilled to be in this class, because I’ve loved Shakespeare since I was a kid and because our teacher was a legend whose passion for the Bard was almost as high as the rigorous expectations he had of us to do his plays justice.

I hopped on the eight-minute shuttle ride across campus, behind one of my classmates.

“How was your weekend?” I asked, noticing that he looked like he hadn’t slept much.

“Rough,” he said. “Did it also take you the entire weekend to memorize the prologue to Henry V?”

My face went hot.

No it did not, I thought to myself. Because I’d completely forgotten to do it.

There were only two options, and showing up unprepared wasn’t one of them. I had to either figure out how to bend time or learn one of the most famous speeches in Shakespeare in under eight minutes.

In a rush of panic-fueled adrenaline, I excused myself to the back of the shuttle and ripped open my copy of the play. The prologue is a soliloquy consisting of 34 lines, all in iambic pentameter, with phrases like, “the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt” and “make imaginary puissance.” You know: simple stuff. I dove into the text and began reciting it silently to myself, letting the rhythm of the words move through me and doing everything I could to cram all 244 of them into my brain.

Seven minutes and 45 seconds later, I got off of the shuttle, walked into the rehearsal room where we had class, stood up in front of my legendary teacher, and recited the entire speech from memory.

I sat down and glanced over at my classmate, who was staring at me with huge eyes.

“How the—” he started to ask.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

Thinking about it now, I still don’t know how I did it.

It was one of those times when the impossible became possible. When I shouldn’t have been able to do so much in so little, but I did.

I joke that it ruined me, because now a part of me is convinced that I can do anything in eight minutes. This might explain why I’m a serial last-minute packer, or why I still think I can defy LA traffic even after a decade of arriving late.

Or why I’ve taken it upon myself to create a full-on show within the container of a newsletter. A show that tackles simple stuff like expressing all that you are in a world that so often feels built for the opposite.

Which brings me back to the prologue of Henry V.

It’s a big speech, and a beautiful one. A punk-rock call to arms that asks everyone listening to entertain the possibility of doing the impossible. A bold invitation to imagine that a humble wooden stage is actually a whole kingdom that spans the vasty fields of France and beyond, that a small cast of actors can easily multiply into two mighty monarchies with a massive ocean between them, that throngs of invisible horses can just gallop around, that time can indeed bend, and that everything is life at its largest.

By the way, quick footnote: “vasty” is just a Shakespeare-y way of saying vast.

One of my favorite things about the prologue is that it is as unsure as it is audacious. It asks, “Hold up—can we really cram all of this in here? Is this overly ambitious? Is it way too much?”

And then before there’s time to answer, the decision is made.

“Sorry, but yeah,” Shakespeare writes (in a much more Shakespeare-y way). We’re doing this. We’re not going to be obnoxious about it, and we’re definitely not going to be perfect at it, but we have a huge story to tell. One that is easily as big as the vasty fields of France and at least as important to us as those mighty monarchies are to the kings and queens who run them.

And so yes: we are going to do this audaciously ambitious thing with what we’ve got, and we really hope that you’ll see past our imperfections, fill in the rest with your imagination, and come along for the ride.

There’s a common misconception that if you’re not sharing your voice with the world, it’s because you don’t have anything to say—when in my experience, it’s exactly the opposite: it’s because you have so much to say—endless thoughts, big ideas, whole-bodied emotions—that it doesn’t seem possible that there will ever be a way to contain it all, much less communicate it all.

How can a handful of words express an ocean of feelings? How is a two-dimensional resume supposed to reflect your multidimensional brilliance? How does a tiny phone screen even pretend to be a proper window into the many nuances of you?

The short answer is they can’t—at least not any more than a simple stage can hold a bunch of invisible horses. But they can be a call to the arms of imagination, a springboard to a bigger story, an invitation to see life at its largest and you at your fullest.

And we know this is true, because we continue to try. Every time we write a rough first draft or piece together a mood board; every time we practice for a job interview or pitch a crazy idea to a friend over coffee. Every time we stand up in front of a room with sweaty palms to present our work, or show up on the picket lines holding signs to fight for our worth.

And we’ve experienced moments, within the long stretches of many attempts, when the impossible did in fact become possible: when we said exactly what we wanted to say, when we had a conversation that changed the direction of our life, when we made something that turned out even better than we imagined it could be.

Fueled by all of that, and by that magical shuttle ride that ruined me, I’ve decided to do this audaciously ambitious thing: a full-on show in the humble container of a newsletter, with a new act delivered to your inbox every Sunday, all about the audaciously ambitious act of expressing all that you are.

I’m not going to be perfect at it, and that part of my brain that thinks I can do it in eight minutes might mean you’ll sometimes get it on Monday or Tuesday. But I sincerely hope that you will see past the imperfections, fill in the rest with your imagination, and come along for the ride.