Striking Flint offers sparks for your curiosity and inspiration.  Notes and curated recommendations on a range of themes  — books, poetry, history, art.

Why subscribe?

You’re curious, and you’re busy.  You enjoy discovering something new, or looking at something familiar a different way, or seeing what people in your community are enjoying.  Perhaps this brings you inspiration for your own work, or a moment of distance from it.

Perhaps you’ll share your own thoughts and recommendations, or perhaps you’ll simply enjoy hearing what others are commenting.

Striking Flint’s brief, idiosyncratic posts are intended to deliver that sense of discovery and community.   

Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.

What You’ll Get

Quick notes and curated recommendations on a range of themes—reading, writing, history, poetry, translation, languages, art, museums, cities, etc.   

This is a new endeavor, so the format and frequency of posts will evolve. For now, you can expect:

• Quick Strikes - short posts about what has my attention right now. No particular rhyme or reason, just interesting things.

• Themed posts - posts around a particular theme

• Searching for - posts intended to gather recommendations and ideas from the community of readers.

If you’re looking for a definitive guide to x, this isn’t the place.  This is the place for a slightly eclectic slice of x.  There may be obvious references and there may be esoteric ones—the only requirement for me is that they fire the intellect and the imagination.

About Me

I’ve always loved researching, for work and for fun.  The words we often use about research — digging in, going deep—come with a sense of narrowing, but for me research has always felt expansive. 

The more I look into something, the more threads I pull or tangents I explore, the more I feel the complexity of the world and the work we create about it. 

A flint does nothing until you strike it against something else, and then it creates a shower of sparks.  Some of them catch; some of them fade. 

I’m trying to write about those moments of contact.