A year and a half ago, the Rabbit Room started a poetry newsletter on a relatively new platform called Substack and it has been a smashing success. In the 18 months since the poetry newsletter launched, 7,000 people have signed up to join the newsletter. We’ve published more than 100 poems that were read over one million times—including dozens of newly commissioned poems new and familiar poets.
Ben Palpant interviewed a score of the most important contemporary poets of faith for the newsletter and next month, those excellent interviews are becoming a book called An Axe For the Frozen Sea, published by Rabbit Room Press. It is one of the many Rabbit Room projects quietly generating a lot of fruit, and it has been a joy to watch the community tell us over and over that they are reading more poetry than ever before.
Last month, we launched two more newsletters on Substack, one dedicated to finding, sharing, and continuing to build a community around music and the other dedicated to thought-provoking nonfiction articles.
Here they are: Music Newsletter | Articles Newsletter
“Culture is not a field that Christians are free to leave fallow, trusting that the soil will bear good fruit and remain free of weeds. We have to go out and till the soil, plant the seeds of better stories, and gather our communities around the fruit that grows.”
Why Substack?
People do not use the web in the way they did in 2007 when the Rabbit Room blog was launched. Today, we expect the best of the internet to come to us, not the other way around. Yet, more and more, algorithms drive what we see, what we read, and (to a greater degree than we like to admit) what we think. We have more choices than ever when it comes to what we read, yet less choice. The web has become a very noisy place.
Substack isn’t a miracle solution that will erase the negative aspects of those changes, but it does provide a way to outflank the algorithms and cut through a lot of the noise by putting the agency back into the hands of the reader, the listener, and the community.
Substack combines two things: a blog and a newsletter. Each time we post a poem to the poetry newsletter, everyone who has signed up gets that poem in their email inbox immediately. That simple function lets readers select the voices they want to hear and lets creators of every stripe connect directly with the people who want to hear from them without needing to cater to the ever-changing whims of algorithms.
Platforms Come and Go, Vision Remains
Platforms come and go because technology and culture are constantly reshaping one another. The Rabbit Room is not married to any single platform. We’re married to a vision. We are going to use whatever platforms and tech tools will help us cultivate and curate story, music, and art to nourish communities for the life of the world.
Why? Because The stories we tell one another and ourselves matter. Culture is not a field that Christians are free to leave fallow, trusting that the soil will bear good fruit and remain free of weeds. We have to go out and till the soil, plant the seeds of better stories, and gather our communities around the fruit that grows.
And that is what the Rabbit Room is all about.
Andy Patton is the creator of the Darkling Psalter, a collection of creative renditions of the Psalms paired with new poems. He holds an M.A. in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He works for the Rabbit Room and is a former staff member at L'Abri Fellowship in England.
For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry, Music, and Articles.
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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash