I started The Hag about a year ago. It was a project intended to get more of my writing out into the world without worrying about the oppressive perfectionism that so regularly weighs me down. When it comes to writing, I spend months and months (sometimes years and years) reworking essays until I feel like they’re ready for submission to literary magazines. Which can be cool because sometimes it gets me nominated for things like Best American Science and Nature Writing, and sometimes it can be very not cool when that essay is the only thing that gets published in two years. I needed to find more balance.
The goal of The Hag was to write one short piece a week, done in a single sitting, editing only for major typos and minor rewrites. I fell way short of that goal, writing just 19 small essays over the course of a year (I did stick to the single sitting rule though). However, it wasn’t a total failure. I wrote a lot more this year than I have in a long time, submitting much longer essays to my writing group every other month that will hopefully find homes in magazines and online publications in the coming year. And seeing even 19 shorter essays make their way into the world feels like a pretty big accomplishment considering I started from zero.
My Squarespace website is coming up for renewal next month and it got me thinking about how I’d like to move forward with my writing this year and what kinds of goals I’d like to set. While I love the aesthetic of my Squarespace site, it costs $144/year plus hosting to maintain, as well as a lot of personal promotion. I think the reason I slowed down on writing each week is that I found the process of writing the post, updating another Instagram account plus my personal account, publishing to Facebook, then crafting the email reminder to be a ridiculous amount of work (on top of working a 40-hour workweek).
So here’s my solution: I’m doing away with my Squarespace website, switching to Substack as my publishing platform (which it turns out is a really cool digital community of writers), getting rid of The Hag Instagram account, and doing all promotional updates via my personal Instagram. And I’m recommitting to once-a-week short essays (released every Wednesday) crafted in a single sitting. By next April, goddammit, I will write 52 small essays.
What does this mean for you, my like 20 loyal readers? If you want to keep reading The Hag, you can access my writing anytime by heading to my site. But what makes Substack really cool is that by subscribing to my newsletter, you’ll get my essays delivered to your inbox every week (without me really having to do anything other than write the essay). If you’re subscribed, you’ll also be able to like and comment on the essays, which I highly encourage because I think writing is really about community processing. I know we all need another email in our inbox like a hole in the head, but I promise this one might actually bring you a little joy to your life instead of a pile of dread. Plus, if I amass more followers (30? 50? the possibilities are endless) I might even work on some subscriber-only content for your super special little eyes. (Is this marketing? Did I do it?)
If you’ve been wondering why I’ve branded these short essays as “The Hag” and not, say, “Anja’s Pithy Observations,” it’s because The Hag is a bit of a writing persona that came about a few years ago after a friend gifted me an utterly horrifying painting of a skeletal, decaying wild woman with hair flying titled “Sea Hag.” I had just turned 25, finished a several-week trek through Peru and was starting a job in environmental communications that I was actually excited about (and even *gasp* utilized my Master’s degree). This terrifying sea hag, in a bizarre way, felt like the woman I was finally becoming—a powerful, self-assured being unbothered by the desires of men, capable of raising the dead. After spending a lot of my young adulthood trying to be small and dainty, pretty and agreeable, this sea hag woman felt like all of the things I actually wanted to be: expansive, rough, challenging, maybe even daunting.
And so these essays would have been called “The Sea Hag,” except when I went to set up my website last year, I discovered that most domains relating to some variation of “sea hag” were already taken (screw you, Sea Hag Marina). So I shortened it to just simply The Hag. While I greatly enjoy the visual image of a seaweedy, dripping woman emerging from the waves of a stormy ocean, screeching a blood-curdling scream into the night sky, I actually think the simple “hag” is better suited to who I feel like I am and gives me more options for natural exploration (she can scream from the ocean AND the land). I had the chance in changing to Substack to rebrand, but I’ve sort of fallen in love with my inner hag and think someone else can have the sea hag.
These essays are all centered around things my inner hag and I love:
nature
adventure
spirituality
food
anticapitalism
complaining
I’m committing the ultimate blog/contemporary writing sin by not focusing my essays on something narrower, but I hope you’ll trust me. Perhaps you’ll even find that these six themes actually are quite related. They might even all be the same thing.
I try not to write about ideas I haven’t processed yet, but sometimes I do find myself learning on the page right alongside my readers. I try not to spout answers or big life lessons, and I certainly won’t try to sell you anything. I’m just writing out here in the public space because writing is how I take in my world and I think it would be pretty neat if you wanted to join me in that.
Welcome (again) to The Hag!
If apps are your thing, and reading on a desktop is NOT your thing, you can now read The Hag in the new Substack app for iPhone (sorry Android users, deal with it).
With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience.
The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
Substack app not available for Android users
Substance app not available for Android users