Small is where the best connections are made
Small is where the best connections are made
SmallStack's Guest Post series
Our first Guest Post was a resounding success! If you missed it, follow this link to read Amanda B Hinton’s kind words to herself as a new writer with a tiny audience. We’re back today with another great piece to share with all of you. Guest Posts are going to become a regular feature here on SmallStack, and we’re hoping to host them every other week (maybe more!).
If you’re interested in writing a Guest Post for SmallStack, visit our Guest Post page to learn more about the process and submit your pitch! Guest Posts are a great way for our community to engage in conversations about things we value, questions we have for ourselves and others, and ideas about how to be great at staying small or growing bigger.
Today’s writing comes from the desk of
who holds a special place in their heart for the small aspects of creating and building community with others. She shares gratitude in abundance, and we feel that same gratitude for what she has chosen to share with us for this week’s Guest Post. SmallStack is pleased to welcome Sarah Teresa Cook!Small is where the best connections are made
by
Last week, I started making sense of an idea I’d been carrying around for months. Picture it: A writers club, but specifically for us neurodivergent folks who wish to tend and grow a strengths-based writing practice that accounts for our full selves; our craft and our joy, our goals and our needs.
Channeling all my descriptive powers, I opened my laptop and started thinking about the things that drive my teaching and space-holding philosophies. Certain go-to words showed up right away. Tender. Intersectional. Belongingness. Reciprocity. Yes yes: all good terms. And alongside them, a surprising and insistent one: Small.
I found myself writing about a “small” club for a “small” community, where we could have “small” experiences together. It was my first draft, but the word felt adamant. I impulsively listed a cap of 10 participants. Then I wrote a strange thing about having a true sliding scale; participants, I envisioned, could pay anywhere from zero dollars up to the full amount.
I paused. I noticed how good I felt, how clear. I messaged Robin: I think this has something to do with you, that your project has influenced me. Something new had entered my vocabulary. New-but-old. It felt like maybe I’d never used the word “small” before. And it felt like maybe the trajectories of my personal life and my professional life, and all these goals I’ve been setting and scrambling toward, were lining up around one singular idea.
That small can be worthy.
Small is Real
New-but-old is a feeling I’ve been steeped in for months now. New-but-old is what was conjured inside my body when my therapist first uttered the word, “Autism,” last winter, and I had, for the first time in 36 years, a grasp on my own internal reality.
New-but-old is what I feel every time I’m picking up a cool insect and doing an okay job at guessing what it might be, or reading a sentence that bowls me over, or hiking somewhere in the Columbia River Gorge.
New-but-old is what I felt when I read about Robin’s SmallStack project: This radical notion that something small isn’t automatically bad or limited or a failure. If you spend even a fraction of your human time on social media, or you find yourself in the business of thinking about income and creativity in the same thoughts, you know what those disparaging words are pointing at.
A small number of followers.
A small number of likes.
A small program launch.
A small *GASP* amount of money.
You don’t have to be self-employed to be deeply, destructively influenced by big business rhetoric and capitalist expectations—and I suspect us neurodivergent folks are extra vulnerable here—that trick you into wishing constantly and only for bigger achievements. That you’ll go viral. That you’ll become rich. That you’ll finally be known by floods of people, your name and image swallowed up whole in the mouths of those who know your content. But do they know you?
And it felt like maybe the trajectories of my personal life and my professional life, and all these goals I’ve been setting and scrambling toward, were lining up around one singular idea. That small can be worthy.
Small is Knowable
I’ve always been confused by the language in certain calls for submissions, especially the ones geared toward writers who haven’t yet published a full-length manuscript. Attention emerging writers! the calls read, again and again. Emerging from what? I know what they mean, but I don’t understand it. What they mean is: Maggie Smith and George Saunders and Margaret Atwood are known writers.
What they mean is:
is not a known writer.
Yet with some frequency, I get emails or messages from others, telling me that something I’ve written has had a positive impact on them or made them feel seen. And almost 300 people have taken a moment out of their finite time on this planet to say, yes, I’d like to receive the fruits of your creative labor in my crowded, noisy inbox, a handful of them even willing to pay me money in exchange for it. And I’ve published enough chapbooks to not remember how many chapbooks I’ve published, a direct result of approximately 34 years of writing experience.
“You have to already be a known quantity,” my partner laments every time he hears a too-common story about a good writer with a good manuscript who can’t get their book published.
I’m not interested in arguing that big achievements are objectively bad ones. But I am very, very interested in what happens to our sense of self, let alone our belief in our creative and writerly impulses, when we give too much attention to a version of success that can only be satisfied by rapid, gigantic achievements.
Small is Sacred
I realize I’m doing what I always do, trying to write about one thing—in this case, smallness—only to find that I can’t do it without writing about many. Is this ironic? My attention sprawls, growths lengthy. Gets big in order to get its footing around something small.
But I think it’s all connected, as I think most things are—Autism; publishing; the ongoing work of wrangling myself out of terms that don’t hold me anymore, in order to put my body near the ones that do. More irony: I am better held by small notions of success than big ones.
Are you?
Well, have you asked yourself?
Small makes space for authenticity, integrity, and reciprocity.
Small lets multiple people see and respond to each other in real time.
Small facilitates mutual witnessing.
Reciprocity, mutuality… these are the words I am tired of sacrificing. I am tired of sacrificing the sincere joys of a small, mundane life at the Altar of Acclaim. There’s something so healing, I told Robin, about seeing someone casually describe small things as valuable.
Small is where all the best connections are made. The intimate conversations. The tender one-on-one interactions. We make ourselves small enough—we get on our hands and knees if we must!—in order to peer at the stems and the dirt, and we imagine all the microorganisms rumbling and intersecting underground, nourishing the blessed soil. There’s another word for this kind of small: Sacred.
It’s okay to be known by a small number of people, to have a small number of readers, a small number of friends. You are known by the people who know you. And so: You are known! Fully emerged. What you’re doing counts.
You count.
I value smallness because I value the reality it affirms. Real people building real relationships, carefully and over time. People who grow like plants. We seem very still most of the time, yet here we are. Blooming.
Sarah Cook is a real human trying to write a bio for the nth time. What makes a bio good? What if we keep changing? Here's a list of things she has loved for a long time: film & instant photos, chickens, Hannah Gadsby, getting tattoos, stickers, rollerblading, being warm, rewatching Gilmore Girls, bugs, scary movies, creativity, writing, and talking to others about creativity & writing.
From the growing SmallStack Team, we’re sending out a great big THANK YOU to Sarah for their outstanding contribution to our Guest Post series. If you enjoyed this, please tell us about it in the comments!
And if this has sparked an interest in submitting a Guest Post pitch to us, please visit the Guest Post page for more information. We absolutely want to hear from you!
“Small is where all the best connections are made,”
Robin & Robin
I love this. Thank you Sarah.
For unknown reasons I woke super early this morning. An idea for some work that had been brewing for some months but was largely relegated to the 'one day/too hard' bucket, leapt to the forefront of my mind and just would not let go. Much of the theme of my thinking was 'small' and 'connection' and 'conversation'. Why don't I run a 'small' program with capped numbers and lots of interesting discussion and no overt promotion. Why don't I keep it intimate and supportive and exploratory and informal rather than big and bold and 'out there.' It felt right. It felt possible. It felt exciting.
Your words have bolstered my belief that this is the right path. Perhaps some synchronicity? A movement? Whatever it is- thank you.
Wonderful meditation! I reoriented and feel inspired. Thank you.