Day 1: You're here, welcome

Transcript

Hi, good morning. It’s Monday, the 2nd of November. I’m John-Paul, and it’s a cool, clear, bright day in North London. Lots of the trees are looking amazingly yellow, orange, red, and a tiny bit of purple.

More to the point, if you’re listening to this, you’ve signed up for my 30-day course on how to produce a kind of micro-memoir by Christmas, and I’m really glad that you’re here.

There’s a good number of you, which is exciting, enough to feel a lot of momentum with lots of people working in parallel, and there are few enough of you that I can give everyone some personal attention.

Most of you in the UK, one is in continental Europe, one in North America, some of you I know from residential Arvon courses, some from Instagram, some from The Idler, wherever you’ve come from, whether I know you already quite well or hardly at all, welcome.

I’ve sent, I’m sending this morning, a long-ish email. It’s not a quiz. I won’t test you on anything. It’s mostly signposting, and you’re no more expected to memorise it than if you went into a large building and someone at the door told you where the loos are and where the canteen can be found and where the lifts are.

You don’t have to remember everything. Remember it if you want or don’t. More than anything, the email and this voice message, I’m really glad you clicked to listen to it, by the way, are designed just to let you know I’m really here.

I really want more than anything for you to produce a physical book by the end of 30 pages [I meant 30 days], and I was thinking about that last night and thinking, the bare minimum, I would hope for anyone, is that you at least curate a selection of images and print them with a few blank pages in there as well,

so that you can subsequently handwrite some captions with those curated pictures, which are in a book, and frankly, that would be a big win.

It might not sound like much, but most of us have got so many photos that just disappear into the digital void, but to have an actual book of the ones that you’ve chosen, with space for you to handwrite some captions,

and to think about what those pictures mean, that’s a really big thing in itself, but that’s the bare minimum that I hope for you.

Anyway, I’m going to stop recording now. I just wanted to say hello on the morning of Monday, the 2nd of November. Thanks for popping in and listening to this audio recording.