8 Questions for... Molly Crabapple
Ink Vault
is an artist and author of Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham).
Ink Vault is part sketchbook from an all night party, part diary from a night train through somewhere far away. It is a place for work more spontaneous than would fit in the outlets I usually write for, and more real than I’d want to post on the algorithmic Pavlov’s Box we call social media. Above all, it’s an experiment. Maybe a bit of a conspiracy between you and me.
1. Why Substack?
I have been online for the last twenty one years, and for me, the halcyon peak of social media was the old days of blogs. I was one of those LiveJournal girls, and I miss the non-algorithmic, unfiltered internet of prose. I miss words, experiments, intimacies, mistakes. So much of the present internet is a controlled, corporate auto-scroll of shrieking videos. I miss the days when we could write and thus could think. Substack seems like the closest approximation to this.
2. How long did it take you to find your groove?
I don't know if I have. Substack is a bit of experiment to me - a sidepiece that I return to for fun or compulsion when I'm done with the work that pays the bills. It’s a way for me to put down my thoughts that are too raw or spikey to get past an editor, as well as a way for me to approximate the whisky fuelled all night conversations I have with my friends on the page.
3. How has it changed you?
Substack gave me a shot of courage. I love editors, (and all writers need editors ferociously, no matter how much some of them bitch), but there's a freedom to just speaking directly to you monsters. At the same time, Substack has a bit more privacy then just blasting to 109k followers on the site formerly known as twitter. In general, the people who read you want to read you. This has given me a freedom that I had probably deprived myself of for years
4. What mistakes have you made?
I barely wrote in my Substack for a year because I was finishing a 400 page manuscript. Gratitude to the paid subscribers who stuck with me.
5. To pay or not to pay?
Pay. How else are writers supposed to get by during the media apocalypse
6. What artistic and technical choices have you made?
I decided to publish my sketchbooks in their entirety, whether they were of naked performers at an all-night party at the Chelsea Hotel, or of old men selling lemons at an Athens street market
7. What’s been the effect on your writing?
Substack removed the self-imposed gag from my throat.
8. In it for the long haul?
What does the long haul mean for the internet? As long as Substack doesn't go the way of winky blinky video reels and VC induced enshittification, I'm here. If that changes, I'm not. One thing that being online for two decades teaches you is that no platform is forever.
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Awesome post. It is so positive to communicate about what bothers and what is real. What angers and what needs to be said or written. Life is such a perilous journey fraught with difficulties, bad things to be sad about, injustice with random opportunities to make something better or improve the human condition, some joy, happiness and solace. So being able to talk about, write about and draw anything that one needs to is incredibly important. That Substack offers this safe place is a miracle that I hope continues. To unearth and unpack what normally is unseen, unappreciated and criticized so it is observed, discussed and appreciated is the grace that our place in time on Substack provides. Thanks for this excellent interview post.