I Have Eleven Readers and I Know All Their Names
Fame is relative; devotion is countable and enough.
My newsletter has eleven subscribers. One of them is my dentist, one of them is my mother, and one of them, for eight long months, was a complete mystery.
The newsletter is called Small Hours, which turned out to be truth in advertising. It goes out once a month: two poems, sometimes three, and a short note about where they came from. Every issue begins the same way, in a diary I keep on the left side of the bed, written in pen at whatever hour the line arrives, because I learned early that a line you promise to remember in the morning is a line you have decided to lose.
I started it three years ago after failing, thoroughly and in public, at being an internet poet. I posted into the void twice a day for a year. The void was polite. My best performing piece was a photo of my breakfast that accidentally had a poem in the background. A friend finally said, "Stop performing for strangers who are walking past. Build a room instead. Start a newsletter." I imagined dozens of subscribers... hundreds, in the shameful private version.
I got eleven.
But here is the thing nobody warns you about with eleven: you know them. Not analytics-know them... know them, know them.
Subscriber one: my mother, who forwards every issue back to me with typos flagged in red, as if returning a school assignment, and who once replied only, "The second poem was about your father. Don't argue."
Subscriber two: Dr. Osei, my dentist, who asked what I did while both his hands were in my mouth, interpreted my gargled answer correctly, and signed up in the chair, saying poetry and dentistry were the same trade: "Everyone is scared of us, and we both work one line at a time."
Three, Janet from my old office, who reads each issue on her lunch break and rates the poems out of ten with no explanation. Four, my college roommate Sam, who lives on a smallholding now and claims he reads my poems aloud to his chickens, and once sent video evidence. The chickens looked moved. It was probably the feed bucket.
Five and six are poets I met on a community wall for poets, who leave comments like postcards from people fighting the same weather. Seven, my aunt Rosa, subscribed on three devices because she does not trust technology to deliver anything only once. Eight, Kel, a barista who saw me editing in the cafe and asked to read, then became the only person who has ever quoted my own line back to me across a counter while steaming milk. Nine, Mrs. Dunmore, my high school English teacher, retired, who replies in full paragraphs with the closing line, "Keep going. I did not retire from reading." Ten, improbably, my landlord, who subscribed after fixing my radiator and finding a draft on the floor, and who has never once mentioned it in person.
And then there was eleven.
J.halloran. No name, no replies, no unsubscribes. Just a quiet address at the bottom of the list that opened every single issue... twice, on the months I wrote about loneliness.
I want to be honest about the arithmetic of envy, because it nearly ended everything. I followed writers with ten thousand readers, forty thousand, more. I watched their numbers tick upward like weather I wasn't having. Meanwhile my list had not grown in over a year, unless you counted Aunt Rosa's third device, which I confess I sometimes did.
There is a particular ache in making something monthly, carefully, for a room that never gets bigger, and last winter the ache won. I opened the diary one night and drafted a farewell issue. It began, This will be the last one, and thanked all eleven of them, by name, for three years of company.
I fell asleep before sending it. The diary was still open on the bed when I woke up, pen parked in the gutter of the page, and my phone showed one new email.
From j.halloran.
Her name was Joan. She was a hospice nurse, nineteen years on night shifts. And her email, which I have read more times than any acceptance letter, explained the mystery in four short paragraphs. She had not found the newsletter on her own. A patient of hers, a woman named June, had discovered one of my poems and made Joan read it aloud so often that Joan knew it by heart before she knew my name.
When June's eyes got too tired, Joan subscribed on her own phone and read each new issue to her at two in the morning, in that hour when, Joan wrote, "the ward is so quiet you can hear who is still fighting."
June died in November. Joan kept the subscription.
"I know I never write back," the email said. "But I read for two now. I have read your poem about the kitchen light to four different people at the ends of their lives, because it is the only poem I have that makes the dark feel furnished. I don't know how many readers you have. I thought you should know what some of us do with the poems. June wanted to tell you herself. She said, tell him he has no idea where his words spend the night."
I sat in bed with the diary still open to the farewell draft and cried in the fully undignified way, the way with sound.
Eleven readers is not a small audience. It is eleven front rows.
Everything I had ever read about building an audience treated readers as a crowd to be grown, a number to be farmed upward, and I had accepted that framing so completely that I almost quit a room where a nurse was reading my lines out loud in the last quiet hours of strangers' lives. Nobody tells you what writing for a small audience actually is. It is not failure at scale... it is cooking for people whose allergies you know.
It is a kitchen table, not a stadium, and things get said at kitchen tables that no stadium has ever heard.
I tore out the farewell draft. Not deleted... tore, because paper should be part of a decision like that.
The newsletter changed after Joan's email, though I doubt anyone could point to how. I write to names now, not numbers. Mrs. Dunmore will catch this comma, so mind it. Sam will read this stanza to the chickens, so give it rhythm. Janet will score this one out of ten, so earn the seven. And some poems I now write knowing they may be read aloud in a quiet room by a woman with nineteen years of night shifts in her voice, which means the last line has to land gently and leave a little hope on the nightstand, where someone can reach it without help.
On the first page of the diary on the left side of the bed, there is now a list. Eleven names, written in pen, updated like a guest list for a very small, permanent party. When I finish a poem at night I read the list before I read the poem, to remember who it is for. Then I cap the pen, and turn off the lamp, and let the words go where they go.
Eleven names, and June makes twelve.
I write for the living and one of the dead, and honestly, that feels like plenty.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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