Why Now? On Why I Wrote And Self-Published A Pamphlet
And the inevitable questions we must ask ourselves when making new work.
A few weeks ago I put out a pamphlet, called ‘Hope Must Be Held In A Clenched Fist’, all about hope and resistance and one of the scariest nights of my life, when racists descended upon an event I was attending. It feels strange to put work out at this time and shout about it and go on the self-promotion trail.
Everything pails in comparison to what’s happening in the rest of the world. Even work that attempts to meet the moment where I’m at, and offer you, the reader, a route forward. It all feels so gross, the idea of self-promotion. And so I’ve been a little quiet these last few weeks. I’ve popped on to social media a few times to repost kind words from lovely people. I’ve done my work, written my new book, worked on the script for [redacted] with [redacted] and [redacted] and taught my classes and played football with my kids and that’s all I’ve managed. But this did start as a creative writing substack and I do have a few pamphlets left to sell so maybe this week I’ll give you a little peek under the hood of writing something with urgently, ultimately asking yourself the question one should ask of any work, why now.
For me, why now is one of the most fundamental intentions one should set for themselves. Why now helps us meet the moment. Why now helps us decide the point of view, the perspective, the distance, the closeness, the lens that we’re seeing the work through. Why now allows us a timestamp. Some work is forever work and some work is now work and some work is then work.
Why now asks the question why not three weeks ago, why not three years from now, why not tomorrow. Sometimes, more often than not, in fact, the answer is, if not now then when? Why now is not the same as why me. I guess I could answer why me at a future point as another indirect way of doing some self-promotion.
So, to the pamphlet, the peek under the hood, the why now of it all. A thing happened to me last Christmas that was the last straw in a sequence of events throughout 2025. It was Christmas, I was tired and ready to shut down for the year, but after a hard 12 months of organising, doing some pretty spicy anti-racism work, trying to make the city I live in safer, something happened (what happened? Buy the pamphlet etc etc) and it sent me into a bit of a rageful silence over Christmas.
Processing the event, I found that the more I mentioned it to friends, the more I got frustrated with how scared they were for me, because what happened shouldn’t have been a surprise. People have been warning about the emboldening of the far-right for so long now that the fact they were employing intimidation tactics from the 70s and 80s shouldn’t be a surprise. And it shouldn’t scary. It should be enraging. I felt like I wanted to write something to make people act. Make people do something.
When I work with writers, the two things I often say are, what do you want a reader to do after they finish your work. What’s their call to action. How do you want to recalibrate the world for them and what should they do with that recalibration. I also paraphrase the Maya Angelou quote about how people will never remember the things you say or do, but they’ll always remember the way you made them feel. I came across that quote in a writer’s room I was a part of in 2023. It was on the door of the showrunner’s office and I would walk past it every day of that room and it’d make me think deeply about what I wanted the reader to feel, the viewer to feel when they finished a work. I also knew I wanted to write an anti-fascist text. But how on earth do I write an anti-fascist text when I am not an expert in anti-fascist history, writing or thinking. I’m just a vibes merchant who knows a bunch of people in the movement? The thought sank me. While it felt urgent, I felt compelled to put pen to paper, I crumbled under my lack of dilligence and research.
It occurred to me that writing something to my daughters would allow me to qualify what exactly I wanted to say and how I wanted the reader to feel. Ultimately, my two kids are the primary audience of anything I do now. I used to write back to myself, to the gaps on my own bookshelf at various points in my life. The coming of age book I needed. The memoir I needed. The essays I needed. The contemporary fiction about the way we see ourselves online I needed. But since my kids have become voracious readers, everything I write is in the knowledge one day they’ll be a reader (if they don’t find the work I do completely cringe, that’s a very real possibility). Either way, whenever they read the pamphlet, I know it’s for them. They were my first reader, and I knew how I wanted them to feel: hopeful, joyful, realistic and resilient enough to fight. I knew what point of view to employ. And I knew what would make them hopeful, joyful, realistic and resilient. The essay, while written for them, is for you. Because it’s a time stamp. They’ll read it in years to come. But right now, it’s here, for you. And I want you to read it and act. That’s the feeling I wanted.
Why now, then? Why self-publish? Because sometimes you don’t want to wait around for something to go through the proper channels. It needs to be raw and immediate. It needs to be unfiltered and inelegant. It needs to be rough round the edges and full of heart. Urgency in writing can be so very compelling. And while we’ve had the internet to speak to our immediacy, I miss the pamphlet form. The ‘I need this out there now’ feeling.
Anyway, I won’t go on. Ask yourself why now.
I’m writing this to you, wanting to sell you a pamphlet, and help you to think about your writing in new ways using a platform that’s recently been exposed for profiteering off nazi literature. It’s mad isn’t it. Tech platforms that claim to democratise publishing, free speech, voices, they’re like casinos, everyone has their pyrrhic victory, but when you’re taking money from everyone, with no thought about who’s money it is or where it came from, you always win. I have big decisions to make about Substack. I have been using a bookshop.org link to push an affiliate link to book sales that help independent book shops, but bookshop.org recently announced a partnership with Spotify, whose lack of payment parity to artists, whose use of AI-generated music, whose platforming of ICE recruitment ads, whose CEO’s investments in military tech have resulted in the deaths of innocent people in Palestine… I have to think about that too. Casinos, the lot of them. I don’t know where I’ll take my work next. But I know that sometimes, just saying sod it, and publishing something in a pamphlet, it’s the only thing to do. Because if not now, then when?
I hope you’ll consider buying my pamphlet. I printed 1000 copies. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. A moment of hope, disappearing into the ether.
