I'm traveling the world to study utopia

An update about my life and artistic process.

It’s been one year since I started writing this newsletter full-time, and it really has been a dream come true. 

And I’m ready to keep dreaming!

Going into my second year, I want to tackle some more ambitious projects and really challenge myself to become a better writer. This coincides with some big life changes for me and my husband. He recently quit his job to take a sabbatical before he starts his next one and we will be taking this opportunity to travel around the world and study some of these utopian projects first-hand. 

I have plans to study a self-governing forest in Germany, a waste-free village in Japan, a cooperative in Spain, a solarpunk garden in the UK, a self-governing city in Italy, and autonomous cities in China. I’m excited to meet people and communities around the world who are creating prototypes for the rest of us and to write about how they might contribute to a better future.

Some of these stories are visual in nature, that’s why I’m also going to attempt to expand my art into video this year. My husband and I recently purchased a drone and some video equipment and have been playing around with video editing. You can be prepared for some amateur-hour video essays as I learn this new skillset and attempt to create a visual accompaniment to some of my more aesthetic-minded essays.

As we travel, I’ll continue to publish my essays (and now videos) as I complete them. After an analysis of my first year in business, last year I published 56 essays and 12 fictional stories, and I really am proud of my body of work, but seven of my essays were lazy and I wish I would have fully developed them rather than rushing to get them out by self-imposed deadlines. I even wound up deleting four of them—my future of democracy series—so that I can read a lot more and think those through more fully (thank you for your critical feedback on these! I’ll be excited to re-publish a much better version as I learn more).

All of this means that if I continue with my current writing schedule (writing until noon every morning), but hold myself to a higher standard and don’t rush things just because I haven’t published in a while, you should expect about one essay per week on average, sometimes two. I’ll also be experimenting with weekly discussion threads in Substack Chat so that our conversations can better inform my work, and am setting a goal to publish at least five YouTube videos this year, as well as a scattering of shorts.

I’ll also continue work on my utopian novel (which I write on Saturdays and Sundays), and I could not be more thrilled to take a research trip to China, Japan, and Southeast Asia for book inspiration this winter. (If you know of places I should visit please let me know!) This has been a complete joy to work on as I research a better world!

In that vein, I have some incredible research pieces lined up—I’ve been thinking a lot about human flourishing, the future of work, how we can evolve capitalism into a better framework for humanity, where governance should go from here, and what our planet should look like in the future, as well as studying utopian and humanist philosophy on how we can live a more beautiful life. I have interviews scheduled all over the globe to this end and I can’t wait to learn your thoughts on all of the topics I’m exploring.

I’m also excited to announce a new partnership with Interintellect for my literary salon discussions going forward! We’re studying some incredible utopian novels the second half of the year and our salon discussions are now available to everyone! Our summer reading is Ada Palmer’s incredible Terra Ignota series (inspired by Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Utopian philosophy!)! I hope you’ll register to join us for our salon discussions!

• Utopian Worldbuilding in Terra Ignota

• Dystopia & Utopia in Aldous Huxley

• Shangri-La: Buddhist Dreamscapes in the Western Imagination

(Collector subscribers get access to the whole series free!)

Finally, I have several book projects designed, proofed, and ready to go—I am only waiting to launch these on Kickstarter until I know I’ll be home and thus able to ship them to you. By the time I’m home, I’ll probably have several print projects ready to launch and I’ll just publish them one right after another. I’ve also started work on the Elysian Volume II, which will be coming to my subscribers toward the end of the year. 

Volume I.

This is a very exciting time for my life and art. Not only am I working to strengthen my writing and expand it, but my husband and I are excited to live a more beautiful life ourselves, to enter a period of our lives filled with fun and adventure—a mid-life gap year that we have been planning for close to two decades. I will share the more personal side of our travels on Substack Notes (in the Substack app) if you want to follow along, and will even publish the occasional travelogue here as it pertains to my work.

If you appreciate my work and investigations into utopia, I’d love your support as a paying subscriber—I prefer to leave my essays open and available to all subscribers if I can. If it’s not the time in your life to support artists financially, I’d also really appreciate a recommendation or if you’d share my newsletter with a friend. These are the things that allow me to continue to write this newsletter for a living and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that support!

My husband and I just got back from a month-long vacation in Portugal where we attended the Taylor Swift concert in Lisbon, backpacked through Madeira, and wandered the famous bookshop in Porto. Now we’re home, getting our house ready to rent out before we head to Spain for my first international assignment. I can’t wait to share what I learn there, and to talk with you about how we can create a better future.

See you next week,

Elle Griffin

Some shots from Portugal