There is no higher magic here on Substack than when a fellow writer esteems your work and you esteem theirs. Russell Smith and I have been sharing the magic for about a year. Very pleased to have interviewed him, and I think you’ll find his answers — and his Substack The New Now — fascinating and enriching to your quality of life.
Thank you, Russell, and thank you, reader,
Mike
MGW: Russell, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for the New Florence. You and I have been following each other since February 2023, and seem to genuinely esteem each other’s work. There’s also a lot of overlap between our interests and aspirations. So welcome.
RS: Thanks for inviting me for an interview, Mike. Glad to be here.
MGW: Let’s zero in on your emphasis on reinvention. How do you define reinvention?
RS: In my writings on the topic of reinvention, I’m often talking about self-reinvention. So, for me, myself, anyone – reinvention often happens after reaching a crossroads, where repeating the same patterns stopped working, and it’s become so obvious internal or external change has to happen. You weren’t just ready, but ready, willing, and able to reinvent a part of yourself that no longer served you in your life. Also, external events can lead to reinvention. The Great Recession that began in 2008-2009 led to millions of people reinventing some aspects of themselves to keep working – by shifting careers, or digging in deeper into the work they were already doing.
MGW: Excellent. You observe that reinvention usually involves asking new questions. What kinds of questions?
RS: The deeper questions that arise from practices such as daily journaling, note-taking, paying attention to where we are and who we want to become. I’ve been in a phase of early morning journaling for over two years, and since writing is my main art form, this activity has led to significant changes in my ideas and methods of writing. Part of this is the ability to follow questions as far as possible. Sometimes I received answers to where another piece of writing should go in my dreams, which has never happened before in my life.
MGW: I love when that happens. What does reinvention ask of each of us?
RS: Like I say in The New Now, reinvention asks nothing of us and asks everything of us. The poet John Keats’ idea of “Negative Capability” asks us to let an artist pursue truth and beauty without being held back by logic or science. In a time in the world where everyone seems consumed with data, as creators, at least unconsciously we’ve turned off a part of our minds to shut off the incessant humming of data, logic, and reason. As someone living within our culture, I’ve experienced how technology has reinvented and rewired our minds, emotions, nervous systems to the point where out of necessity we’ve begun to learn how to disengage from the tech hive-mind cocoon we’ve more or less unconsciously agreed to. There’s a great book on this subject published in 2011, by Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
MGW: Well said. I see you as the leader of a reinvention movement. Do you see yourself as leading a movement?
RS: I see myself as a writer, poet, artist, since it’s what I am and do. I like suggesting and putting the idea of a reinvention movement out there, and leave it in the hands of the reader to address what reinvention means to them, and then put it into practice. I was aware writing was my calling before my teenage years. I’m gratified that people who have read our book have gotten something from the overarching message of how essential love, personal reinvention, taking time to pause and think, and stand up for what you believe in during these times, this Hinge Moment in History -- ideas such as these offer an uplifting and clarifying message. Personal change happens in many ways. One of the best ways is to have reached an interior place where you’ve noticed you’re going through significant changes connected to changing habits, being more focused, applying what you’ve learned to staying with a creative practice in a consistent way. We’re all going through so many impactful changes by just living at this time in world history. Couple that with the lives we’d lived up to this moment, and, it’s a lot. If this is a movement, it’s self-directed movement.
MGW: We are all creators, you like to say. And you say we are wired to create. How so?
RS: Give a young child a crayon and they can draw anything that’s inside their head with it. One crayon. Naturally, combine a child’s innate creativity with a few good teachers over the years and they learn enough to become self-directed and pursue their own vision. We’re naturally curious, creative, ready-made for this world – to be creative beings on a planet that’s had many remaking’s over the millennia. I think of the line from Joni Mitchell’s song, Woodstock, “We are stardust, we are golden.” This type of perspective and energy is what’s key to hold onto, as we grow out of children and into adults.
MGW: Perspective and energy, for sure. Reinvention involves reinventing our minds. And asking more of our minds. You’ve stated that well, and you are always urging us on toward new thought patterns. What are a couple steps we can take as we’re reinventing our minds?
RS: Growing up, I think most of us heard the cliché, “People don’t change.” I’ve learned that’s just not true, and never was. Through reading, life experience, and finding methods to break free from patterns that have held me back, kept me stuck, I’ve found ways to rewire aspects of my brain, embedded habits, and social conditioning. Many of us grew up in a world where all of this new information about human behaviors wasn’t just inaccessible, but it was unknown. I feel lucky to have been exposed to ideas such as neuroplasticity and quantum thinking, which are more widely known in our world due to the Internet, books, podcasts. This moment in time is made for curious minds. Several steps we can take are pausing and slowing down, taking breaks throughout the day. Being kind to our brains and nervous systems. Meditating. Walking in nature. Exercising the mind and body. I’ve mentioned journaling. Each person is different, and different from who they were at each stage of life.
MGW: So if we are passionate creators with new minds – if we’re open-hearted dreamers and visionaries – what are some ways our everyday lives change?
RS: Being who you are, who’ve you’ve been called to be. Being an example of a caring human beings to other people. Being kind to ourselves. Being true to yourself, in all the forms that takes. Being present with people, becoming better listeners. Knowing things that’ve been normalized in our culture and were not always that way. Culture is cyclical. Things will shift back.
MGW: Very true. Let’s talk about culture. You and I both care deeply about culture. First, you encourage all of us to create something to shift our culture forward. Would you share more about your thoughts on this?
RS: I do believe in the power of art, in all its forms – to save lives. From the life-altering practice of making art (writing, painting, moviemaking, taking photos) to how we’re each enriched by novels, songs, movies, which are a daily injection of life-saving energy. The life-saving power of stories is a prime example.
MGW: You and I are both advocating for a cultural and social renaissance. What do you mean when you talk about this?
RS: I think we’re at the beginning or already within a cultural renaissance. There are people who think there isn’t any good writing past the 1970s. to this I say, look around. In fiction and poetry alone, there’s a current renaissance already happening. True, there are novels and movies that stay with us for a lifetime, and become touchstones when we need them. When we require sanctuary and inspiration. This is why writings from the past, as well as what being written right now are essential. It’s why creating art in this time is a vital activity, so the future societies and cultures coming after us will better understand what actually happened. Looking backwards one hundred years ago from the year we’re in, is 1924. Through this historical lens, we can see Modernism in the arts is in full swing. The writing and visual art created in that time period were globally influential and still resonates. Paris, New York City, Berlin, all of them were between wars and creators were creating in full-on energetic mode. There are times when an energy is in the air, and people who create are called to use that energy. I think we’re in a similar cultural stew, and what’s it’s cooked up is a cultural renaissance. This moment we’re inside of will be looked upon as a fertile, creative culture-shifting time.
MGW: This is too big a topic for one answer, Russell, but what are a couple things we can draw from the culture of our ancestors?
RS: Familiarizing ourselves with ideas, voices, cultures from the past widens our mental scope. Focusing on writing, books, literature – for me, two of my companions since my mid-teenage years are the two Marks. Mark Twain, and Marcus Aurelius. Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemens, along with one of your favorites, Charles Dickens were two of the first globally known writers, who not just wrote novels, but gave public reading of their works. Imagine seeing either one of them holding a room spellbound. One of my favorite facts about Mark Twain is that he was friends with Nikola Tesla. It’s fun to imagine their conversations. Marcus Aurelius was an Emperor of Rome, and he wrote Meditations during the last decade of his life. He views humanity, ideas about living, personal responsibility through a Stoic lens, commenting on how his mind interacts with Nature a great deal. I think what’s so powerful about his writings is the contemporary sound of this voice. Similar to how I think about Whitman.
MGW: Whitman is vital for me too. You say we should ask more of our culture. What do you have in mind?
RS: Now’s the time to ask what do each of us, all of us, authentically want from our culture? As I’ve said, I not only believe but can see how focusing on culture from a young age can keep young minds open. As a kid and a teenager, I was lucky enough to have friends who were tuned into many aspects of culture from a young age. Several friends were certainly into movies as an art form. So, for me, the aspects of what’s wrong with culture are things I draw attention to. Such as book banning. As far as the wider culture, two things that spring to mind are safe streets and neighborhoods, and a safe environment to live in. Livability. The basics. Add to that, knowing that our elected leaders live up to being honest, honorable servants of the people.
MGW: What is the most important cultural shift underway in the 2020s?
RS: Words, writing, language, AI, more awareness about individual personal liberties, and quality of life. Words are making a big comeback. After decades of having words become abused and turned into disinformation at best, and propaganda at worst, people have grown better lie detector software in their frontal lobes. It was predicted by cultural pundits a while back that we were moving away from language and heading toward a culture that communicates with symbols. Sure, symbols have been doing a lot of heavy lifting over the past few decades, but as we’ve seen people are reading more, not less. Loving words, narratives, characters, and seeking out books and stories more than ever. Humanity has been wired to love and need stories. The Internet shouldn’t be used as a playground for stealing ideas, but used for appreciating ideas and supporting the ideas that most resonate with the core of our beings. For those of us who love language, the word “content” has felt vaguely insulting for quite some time. For a several decades Big Tech has tried to desensitize people to words and language by calling it “content.” Novels, plays, essays, poems, and on and on – never were or will be “content.” They are magic keys to unlock minds. Along comes AI, and what does it go after, the amazing literature created by humans – complicated, good writing. It goes after story combined with narratives. AI is gobbling up whole novels and big books of nonfiction, by living as well as dead authors. Now that AI needs to be trained to make things with words/language, suddenly, large mega corps “train” their version of what AI is, by ingesting novels, essays, nonfiction, philosophy, and poetry, without any thought of the individual writers ownership. So, the theft of ideas is the same as if someone broke into your garage and hotwired your car and drove it away. There will be an increasing number of class action suits on the issue of stealing a writer’s work, without paying for it.
MGW: We shouldn’t leave the interview without noting that you and I are both writing, ultimately, about a society of big-hearted people who engage in loving care and loving kindness. Want to say anything more about this here?
RS: I like the ways we overlap. Caring for others, and doing so with an open-heart means going through enough life lessons to see how love and kindness are, or should be, the top of human behavior. Which is why seeing what’s going on in our culture and world is painful. This is another example of human qualities overlapping with societal aspirations. I’d love to see far more examples of kindness over violence, and truth-telling vs. lying, but the daily news shows me a different world. A world that’s in massive turmoil. Commenting on the hateful and harmful parts of humanity, is necessary, when we’re in such a divisive moment in the history of the United States. But, we’ve been here before, and we don’t have to travel back to the Civil War era for an example of when two cultural and social trajectories were happening simultaneously during the exact same historical moment. The Beat writers met, befriended, and influenced and helped each other, most intensely from the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. At the same time period, the Hollywood Blacklist and Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee was looking for Commies in cupboards and Hollywood bungalows, until one day he went too far. The Beats have left their mark on American literary and social culture, for their writings, as well as their cultural commentary and viewpoints. McCarthy is now viewed as an unhinged and dangerously obsessed politician who was finally brought down with four sentences “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” that were aired over national television, and spoken by Joseph Welch, special counsel for the U.S. Army. After years of letting McCarthy have free reign over how far he could go, public opinion turned against McCarthy overnight.
Russell Smith’s Substack The New Now
Russell Smith is one of those Writers that truly makes Substack the Goodness. Real, Holistic perspectives and Solid opines. One of the few whose POSTS I read all the way through. Thats how good they are. He deserves to be on anybody's show who will have him who's interested in this current ZEITGEIST blowing thru the world nowdays.
I am a gushing fan of Russell Smith. Like Taylor Swift level fan. This interview brings out other dimensions that Russell may not write about himself. I appreciate the deeper questions, seeking greater insights.