the genealogy book : an ongoing work-in-progress via substack,

Incase you haven’t caught, I’ve been posting excerpts (six so far) of my current non-fiction work-in-progress on my substack for a while now , “the genealogybook.” With the discovery of my birth mother’s name and other details over thepast decade, I’ve been deliberately working to explore some of these new threadsand their implications. Over the past two months, I’ve been posting pieces on variousLoyalist/New England threads, including Puritan (Boston, etcetera), German (I’mcurrently working a piece that references Philadelphia’s Germantown), Irish(the Peter Robinson settlers of Ontario) and Dutch (the New Netherlandssettlement), as well as the counterpoint of my Glengarry Scottish upbringingand foundation. I have a whole new family tree, someone said. I think, instead,I simply have two trees that meet at the roots. Am I any less one side nowbecause of this other?

I’mattempting to treat the substack like a weekly column, and most pieces that I’mposting these days are from this new project, although I am also interspersingwith short stories and the occasional other essay on prose writers (I recentlyposted one on Joy Williams and another on Ernest Hemingway, for example, withanother on Gail Scott forthcoming). You can sign up for free, or for the paidoption. I’m only posting “paid” pieces every third or fourth, as there’s stilla part of me that can’t quite offer terribly much that excludes non-payingoptions.