What is Work/Craft/Life?
This newsletter takes you on the fascinating—and often surprising—journey into what makes us who we are. Think Humans of New York, but about work. As American philosopher Will Durant once said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” Feature profiles, chronicling people and the work that shapes their lives, serve as the heart of this newsletter: plumbers, artists, stay-at-home dads, long-distance truckers, morticians, carpenters, barbers, high-rise window washers, teachers, dog breeders, chocolatiers, nurses, soldiers, writers, priests, stonemasons, and beyond. These are their stories.
Here’s a fan favorite, a profile of Vince Nanni, a UPS delivery driver who many call The Prince of Delancey Street.
Flowing from these, the newsletter also offers:
The Workshop - Posts, including expert Q&A’s, how-they-did-it stories, and guest essays that offer lessons on achieving your success and work happiness.
HistoryCraft - Posts about ‘Lost Arts', quirky ephemera, and profiles of people who have shed this mortal coil but whose lives still resonate today.
CreatorCraft - Personal insights and day-in-the-life interviews that can help guide your own creative life, whether you’re an artist, writer, photographer, musician, just love to make stuff, or you’re intrigued by how others do.
Why subscribe?
Take it from the great Stephen King, “People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.” If you like feature profiles of interesting people in your favorite newspaper or magazine, you’ll love these deep, day-in-the-life dives into people’s work. Not to be too sappy, but we all have a great story to tell if given the chance.
This newsletter promises to stir a lot of different feelings. Sometimes the stories will inspire, make you laugh, satisfy a curiosity, or simply smile. Other times they might make you despair at the unfairness of the working world. In still others, you will learn lessons on how to raise the bar in your daily work life, satisfy a long-held wonder about ‘how-do-they-do-that', or discover a bit about why you chose your job path.
No matter what, you will come away from each issue understanding a little more of the people—and the world—that surrounds you every day. I hope that’s reason enough to read, subscribe, and tell others about Work/Craft/Life.
All new in-depth profiles, published every other week, will be available in the free subscription. I’m thrilled to have you join!
On becoming a Paid Subscriber, you’ll also be able to:
Bonus Profiles & Special Posts
Full access to the whole Work/Craft/Life collection of profiles
My sincere appreciation for supporting this kind of storytelling!
Who’s the Wizard Behind the Curtain?
No wizard. Sorry. These stories come from the collective us. The mail carrier on your street. The taxi driver who takes you across the city. The electrician who makes sure you’re not stumbling around in the dark.
As for the newsletter’s creator, that’s me, Neal Bascomb. I serve as everything from interview hunter, researcher, photographer, sound technician, writer, and editor.
Like most of us, I have been shaped by my work and craft, with all its attending triumphs and heartbreaks. At age nine, I started my adventure as a lollipop salesman. Since then, I’ve worked a range of jobs, including forklift operator, babysitter, dog walker, bookstore clerk, TJ Maxx cashier, purveyor of knives, financial analyst, pool cleaner, legal intern, hockey referee, international journalist, book editor, literary agent and publisher.
I am also the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of a range of non-fiction narratives, including The Perfect Mile, Hunting Eichmann, The Winter Fortress, and Faster. I’ve made a career writing stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and the subjects of this newsletter are no different. For more information about my “other” work, check out www.nealbascomb.com. Or read my profile here How I Write History: Or, a Window into My Crazy
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