I’m Darren Samuelsohn, and this is love, journalism. Today we have personal news about my leadership role at the National Press Club and a heads up on a self-published book of poems.
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Three-plus years ago, journalism fired me. I named this thing love, journalism anyway. I knew I was being defiant. Now I think I was also being accurate.
Some news first: I’ve just been elected chairman of the National Press Club’s Board of Governors. And my first-ever book — a small collection called Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven— has arrived. We launched Valentine’s Day 2023 and didn’t really mark the three-year point when it passed. So let’s mark this one.
If you’re a paid subscriber, a copy’s coming your way. I have a limited edition of 100. Be among them: subscribe soon, and if enough of you want one and we run out, we’ll see about getting another batch.
This isn’t the first thing I’ve ever published. Readers of Season One already know “The Alaskan Chocolate Oil Spill” — one in a series of stories I wrote in eighth grade, 1989, complete with a UPC barcode I drew on myself in magic marker. There’s another batch or two of stories from around that same era I’m still deciding whether the world needs to see. Probably not. Some things can stay in the notebook.
Because that’s where all of this actually started, in notebooks. I’ve been a writer since before I can remember. One has drawings of NFL quarterbacks I did as a kid. Some are from Japan. I wrote to impress my family. I ran for prom king by scribbling the first drafts of my column in them. I wrote to get things out, the way Natalie Goldberg taught a generation of us to. Going back to it with love, journalism wasn’t reinvention. It was a logical place to land again.
I didn’t know, back then, that I’d bounce in and out of this three separate times. This has been the longest stretch I’ve managed to keep the Substack going. The original intention was always that this could also become memoir material, and that’s further along now than when I first said it out loud. “Love, journalism” gave me a theme I didn’t know I was looking for.
Here’s the sharper version of it, three and a half years on: I launched this to find out whether journalism was ever going to love me back. But I think the real answer is that this whole thing has been journalism's love letter to me — quietly telling me I was alright, even in the moments it had just dumped me.
As this latest relaunch took form, I started thinking of my lifelong passion for writing as something that’s been happening just beneath the surface. A visit to New Lanark in Scotland illustrated it better than I could imagine- always there, moving, doing work. Time now to build some infrastructure.
Hemingway said it better than I can: “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.” That’s the whole operating principle of this publication named out loud.
Finding great joy in trying to live in Hemingway time instead of daily journalism time — mornings for writing, afternoons for living. Minus the boxing. Open to some of the fishing.
Love, journalism has been catching people’s attention, too. The National Press Club Journalism Institute ran a piece on burnout a while back and quoted me saying it plainly: “Anything but journalism is going to make you a better journalist.” And: “Mental health is health.” Those are my own words, coming back around.
And here’s one I’m genuinely proud of. I’ve been a member of the National Press Club for most of my time in Washington — busy enough, most of those years, that volunteering wasn’t really an option. That changed coming out of 2022-2023, when I took on a leadership role with the professional development team, launched a mentorship program, and ran for the board last fall. Nine months after that, I’m chairman — and chairman of the ethics committee too. I’m excited to represent independent journalists and Substackers there — a whole group who’s been trying, for a long time, to be seen and heard. Though let’s not pretend the medium itself is new. I.F. Stone was doing this decades before any of us — a one-man newsletter, no institution behind him, just the work. Substack didn’t invent this. It just gave it a new name and a mailing list.
David Allen — a Season One guest — told me once: “The muse is fickle. She comes in and then goes out. If you don’t grab it while it’s there, good luck. She’ll go find somebody else to give that to.”
There’s more coming. Thirty-plus years of notebooks. One memoir taking shape in public. Get in early.
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