Welcome to Notes From The Edge!

A newsletter by Jeff Chang

Welina mai! Welcome to my newsletter, Notes from The Edge.

By way of introducing you to what this thing is — here at the beginning of the beginning when it hasn’t even really materialized yet — let me tell you a little about my writing history.

(They say the older you get, the longer the stories go - so, as a great bard once said, sue me if I play too long.)

In the years when I was coming up and trying to find my voice, I had two opportunities to write a column for print magazines: the first, in 1991, was called In Da Flow — yeah, we all wrote like Bonz Malone back then, though my excuse was that I actually grew up speaking pidgin in Hawai’i as my first language — and it was for URB Est. 1990, and Raymond Leon Roker (who sometimes reposts classics from those days in the 90s and 00s).

I was very young and thankfully I was writing under a pseudonym so I could make lots and lots of mistakes.

In 1998, Tommy Tompkins gave me a column at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and I called it Got It Bad, after the King Tee classic. I think this was where I really had a chance to develop my voice.

And that voice was all over the place.

I had been influenced by the late great Greg Tate, the gonzo journalism and criticism of rock writing’s early days (Hunter S., Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis), as well as by my hip-hop journalist peers like Joan Morgan, dream hampton, James Bernard, Cheo Hodari Coker, and so many others.

I wrote about music, but through the lens of my weird interests. I had come up as a community organizer who was better at stories, research, and comms than numbers and strategy. So as a young freelance writer who was also full-time editing a magazine called ColorLines, I did lots of different kinds of writing - from investigative journalism to electoral and political coverage to street reporting - and all of it found its way into my columns.

The columns became places to mix it up and experiment with narrative drawing on all the weird things I was learning. The regular pace of it could be grinding, but I look back on it now with gratitude. I was forced to learn more quickly as a writer than at any point in my life.

(For better and worse, much of my print era work is no longer available. But stuff from the blog era from 2004-2014 is preserved - for better and worse! - here at the Can’t Stop Won’t Stop blog site we decided to keep online.)

These days I am fortunate enough to write about almost anything I want to. And now I finally have the time to do so again. So what you’ll find here will reflect my broad array of current obsessions — it might be about a book, a movie, an art show, an album, or it might be a moment, an event, a moment of history, an object, some lessons I’ve learned about writing or the creative life.

I’ll also be here to let you know about some of the big projects I’m working on, while they are in progress, or after they are done.

Back when I was writing columns, I used them as ways to float new ideas, try new things, explore stuff I wanted to know more about. It’s a blessing that decades later I’ve had the kind of career that will allow me to return to that.

So welina! You are welcome to follow along here to get monthly (at the least) notes from the edge I’m perched on here on the rim of the Pacific.

For now, we won’t worry about paywalls and all that. I’m not against them, everyone needs to eat, but when and if that time comes, we’ll cross that bridge together.

Thanks for dropping in and feel free to bring a friend by anytime!