Hello.
My name is Joy Marie Clarkson. I am a writer, editor, and podcaster living in London. I work at the Theology and Religious Studies department at King’s College London and am the books and culture editor at Plough.
I’ve written two books, one about happiness and one about metaphors. I used to host a podcast. And I have been writing on the internet every week since 2016, and for reasons sometimes mysterious to me, I keep doing so.
I write about all sorts of things here. Often, I simply write about making a life in London. I moved to East London last year after almost a decade of living in Scotland. It was in Scotland that I started to write a letter to whoever would read it every Saturday, as a happy distraction from writing my doctoral dissertation in theology. Through that habit, I encountered many lovely people, many of whom have read my ramblings for the better part of a decade. Since then, a lot has happened: I finished my doctorate in theology, I wrote my books, I got married, and I started working at King’s College London. And I’m still writing.
On this Substack, I write about teaching theology at a London university, visiting new corners of this city, and my fraught experiments with sourdough baking. I write about what I’m reading (for “research” and pleasure), watching, listening to, and baking. Sometimes I share bits of what I’m working on— which at the moment is a collection of short stories about women in Christian history whose lives and thoughts come to us in the rare form of their own words. In all these things, I find myself preoccupied with a few themes that I circle around: why it is so difficult to feel a sense of belonging in the world we live in, the fragility of memory and its importance for how we understand ourselves, how one can keep a soft heart and a sound mind in a time as oppressively mean as our own.
If any of those are things that interest you, I hope you will stick around (e.g. subscribe!). I post around one public essay a month, and a paid subscribers email every Saturday (my Saturday missive, as I call it in my own mind). I feel deeply awkward about the paid option, but I do it for three reasons: 1. I feel more free in my Saturday letter writing when I know that a limited amount of people will read it rather than (potentially!) the whole internet. These letters are a bit more personal and I like to share them with a smaller circle. 2. The financial support is very helpful and does give me the leeway to do more writing and creative projects 3. I like to think I put a fair bit of work into the weekly emails. All this to say, I do hope you’ll subscribe and maybe even consider supporting my work.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
