Good evening, Saturday evening. It is a very rainy late afternoon here in Northern New Mexico, and I keep looking out the window wondering if I'll spot the turkeys floating away into the twilight. I've been hunkering down inside today working on finalizing the last steps of what I'm finally excited to announce is a new era for my work.
As I mentioned in my most recent essay, I've been working through some mental blocks and ruminating quite heavily on my writing and production process this last year, including what, if anything, I was doing with this project. You can read that essay at the link below if you're curious.
Mel Buer
Words About Work has been a wonderful name for a great project, but I expanded to more multimedia work, personal essays, and other items over the last year, and as I began to really open up the scope of this newsletter over time, the name became increasingly more restrictive. It's time for a rebrand.
Introducing The Common Route
The Common Route is a multimedia newsletter that features the same great labor reporting and biweekly news digest that I started this project with. As always, these items will always be free to my readers. In addition to my usual movement reporting, I have expanded the newsletter to include video reports, visual essays, cultural and class analysis, opinion pieces and memoir, and dispatches from my travels. There's a lot of great work that I've got planned over the next 18 months, and I hope you'll take this journey with me.
Introducing New Sections
As part of the redesign, I have created new tags for each of the new sections of my expanded publication. Some of these will be familiar or feature the same sort of stuff I've been working on these last couple years (my labor reporting, the digest), and some of it is new:
- The Shop Floor: critical reporting from the frontlines of struggle
- The Worker's Wire: biweekly labor digest
- Field Notes: Q&As, behind-the-scenes work, and other fun bits and bobs about my work and life
- Marginalia: Political, literary, philosophical, and film analysis
- Daybook: Creative nonfiction and memoir
- The Drift: Travel writing from a class conscious perspective
The Shop Floor, The Worker's Wire, and Field Notes will always, always be free for folks. I will never paywall it, and you can read it for free without a membership. The other sections will only be accessible with a paid membership (which you can get for a very affordable $8/month). If you are already a subscriber (free or paid), you do not need to do anything with your account. You should still be connected as a subscriber––you'll just see a new header in the emails.
I want to once again take this moment and thank everyone for their continued support of this project. It's my hope that this new direction is edifying and wonderful for both of us.
Much love,
Mel
