Asparagus’ Last Medium Newsletter
Dear Medium followers,
You may be aware that we send this newsletter out using multiple platforms. A small percentage of our email subscribers receive this version, through Medium. But the vast majority subscribe through our email service, Mailchimp. As long as Medium has been our publishing platform, it made sense to send newsletters out this way in addition to using Mailchimp. But when we migrate to our new website in a few weeks, we will no longer be publishing on Medium. And that will include newsletters.
So, if you want to keep hearing from us after this month, you may need to take some action.
Medium gives me the option of exporting the email addresses “of subscribers who’ve opted to share their email address,” which appears to be about 50 of you. Unfortunately, I’ve been poking around trying to figure out where/how you might have opted in, and it is not at all obvious. (I have theories, but they could be wrong.) Which means it’s also probably not easy for you to check if you’ve “opted in” or not. So annoying!
Still, to make the transition easy for those people, at least, I will export that list before sending out September’s newsletter, and import it into Mailchimp. If you know you don’t want to receive this newsletter via Mailchimp, you should be able to take yourself off that list by unsubscribing to this Medium newsletter. You won’t miss anything, because this is the last one!
The problem with this plan is that if you want to keep getting our newsletter and have not opted in, I don’t know how you can check and change that. The laissez faire option would be to wait until September 16 and see if you get a newsletter. The more proactive option would be to sign up through Mailchimp now, so you don’t forget. You can do that here: https://bit.ly/GetGusMail. I hope you will!
Because nothing is changing for our Mailchimp subscribers, their version of this newsletter had a different subject line: “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Far be it from me to compare anyone on Earth (let alone myself) to iconic actor Michelle Yeoh. But with all the different Asparagus projects currently in their final stages, I do feel some affinity for her multiverse-hopping character in this summer’s excellent film of that name. There’s a lot going on! Let’s get into it.
Gus in the community
As mentioned last month, we’re about to host our first in-person event since February 2020! We’re partnering with the EartHand Gleaners Society for a lovely outdoor evening learning about what it could look like to make textiles entirely locally — from sourcing fibre, to spinning, dyeing, and weaving it. We’ll get a chance to try some of the techniques ourselves, and watch artists from EartHand demonstrate the others.
Intro to Local Cloth will take place from 5:30–7:30 pm on Monday, August 29, in Strathcona’s Trillium Park, rain or shine. You’re welcome to bring a picnic, and we’ll have Oddity Kombucha and cold water on hand to help with the heat, if it holds. (If the rains make an early appearance, we’ll have tents.) To keep the evening as accessible as possible, we’re offering registrations on a “pay what you will” scale, including free registrations available to folks for whom payment is a barrier. Pre-registration is required for this limited-space event, so sign up today!
Register for Intro to Local Cloth
Green living tips
Before filling you in on the rest of what’s coming soon, I want to take a moment to remind you about Asparagus Tips, the sustainable living newsletter we launched in July. The second edition went out a couple of weeks ago. In it, our tipsters Sun Woo and Zeahaa dug into our archive and gathered all the insights they could about how to clean up your laundry’s act. Then they shared them exclusively with their subscribers.
When you signed up for this newsletter, we promised it would be pleasantly infrequent. So except for sending the first edition of Asparagus Tips to all our newsletter subscribers, we didn’t automatically subscribe you to the new newsletter after it launched. If you didn’t sign up after that first issue, you’ll have to click the link above to check out all the laundry tips Zeahaa and Sun Woo gathered. And then I hope you’ll sign up for another helping. (For what it’s worth, their newsletters are a LOT shorter than mine!)
Bottom line, the planet is precious, and so is your time. Our bite-sized, evidence-based tips can help you make greener choices on the go. So sign up today, and ensure you don’t miss the next edition.
Coming soon
Notice the pretty yellow and red buttons in this edition of the newsletter? Those colours are a nod to the palette of our gorgeous new website, currently under construction. It will include plenty of our signature Gus green too, of course. But now that we’re building something we’ll have complete control over, we get to incorporate other colours we love from the world around us: sky, soil, flowers, bees.
Beyond looking great, the new site will make so many things easier, like finding and sharing content that interests you, learning about our phenomenal contributors, or supporting our work financially. If all goes well, the site should launch before the next edition of this newsletter goes out. If not, you’ll get to see it shortly thereafter. I’m so excited to share it with you!
In the meantime, we’re also putting the finishing touches on our next print issue. Launching the new website and publishing a new issue were both on the schedule for this summer, but we certainly thought they’d be spaced out better. However, life did what life does, and some parts of the issue just needed more time than anticipated. Still, we’re days away from printing, and there’s great stuff inside:
- An exploration of the many benefits of outdoor school
- A look into the world of sustainable travel certifications
- The story of how an abundant element is transformed into colourful kitchenware (and whether we should be concerned about that process).
And of course all your favourites: Our Environmentalist from Hell and Black Sheep Parenting columns; the work of a truly fabulous artist for In Perspective; and a Reuse this Magazine page featuring Uganda’s King of Beads. Plus some stunning original illustrations by Tommy Li on the cover and inside. And it’s all about to be printed on 100%-post-consumer-recycled paper. We should be mailing copies to subscribers within the next 10 days, so this is the last time I’ll encourage you to renew or subscribe before we put together the next mailing list. You won’t regret it.
Reading material
Before I leave you, I will of course share all the pieces that we’ve published online since I last wrote. Heads up that these should be the last stories we ever publish on our Medium-hosted site. Migrating our entire archive over to the new website is a big job, so we’re taking a hiatus from online publishing until the new site is ready to launch. We have lots of great writing and journalism to share with you once we make that switch. But for now, I hope these (and the rest of our archive) will tide you over:
- From Deputy Editor Alia Dharssi, a story about the ways some major fashion brands are trying to reduce waste within their industry.
- The first instalment of our collaboration with the Climate Disaster Project, which will continue with the cover story of the new issue.
- A new essay from Leacock-Medal nominee Christina Myers. (She’s hilarious in the rest of the world, but her work for us is typically on the sad side. Christina contains multitudes!)
- A portrait of an endangered BC butterfly and efforts to protect it, brought to you by Amir Aziz.
If you’ve read all of the above, you know I have a lot to do that isn’t writing this newsletter. So I’m going to leave you to your reading, and spend some time on the rest of it.
Keep taking care of each other,
Jessie Johnston
Editrix in Chief, Asparagus Magazine
