Never Gone

Phoebe Pan

The newsletter from which Soupbone emerged is now gone. Gone, in the sense that its archive has been erased and no longer exists. This was not a conscious choice on my part: a month ago, when I was checking up on the Soupbone website and making sure various hyperlinks were in order, I found out that the platform on which Soupbone originally appeared—Tinyletter—had shut down in February 2024. The notification email that Tinyletter had sent regarding their impending closure apparently went to the email I used to register the newsletter, which was my Oberlin school email, which no longer exists because Oberlin permanently erases all student accounts four years after graduation.

There was the initial shock, of course, and then a desperate scramble into my email archives to see if I’d saved any drafts of my letters. I found only a partial record—there are probably a half dozen essays I’d sent that I no longer have access to. I did realize, however, that whatever exists of the newsletter now remains in the inboxes of those who have subscribed over the years—a handful of readers, some of whom I still keep in touch with, and others I have never spoken to.

I think this is what happens, eventually, to all work that aspires to be collective: it reaches a point where it’s no longer about one person but about the space and precarity and trust between strangers and friends alike; it’s about what we remember of each other. The whole reason I started Soupbone was because I’d been a long-time admirer of my friend Tiffany’s newsletter, Cheers, and we had talked about “cross-promoting our newsletters the way bees cross-pollinate flowers.” I still remember the joy of receiving those emails, daily, and then weekly—that happy ghostly sensation of listening to a friend who lived hundreds of miles away relating an event as if I had been there from the start.

Soupbone’s ontology, now, is amorphous. It’s not a nonprofit, and not just a research collective or writing group. The simplest way we’ve defined ourselves is as a “group of friends who make things together,” though even that seems a bit reductive. Maybe it’s better that we’re only loosely defined. Maybe the distributed collective is a more sustainable model, taking into account the varied trajectories that folks move in, the career paths, the desires and existential pulls of our mid- to late twenties. It requires a different kind of attention than hanging out with friends in the city you live in. It requires patience and a certain open-heartedness: Look at how much I’ve changed. Look at what I’ve gone through. And, for what it’s worth, I’m still here, with you, together.

Who do you care for? How does “care” extend beyond your immediate communities? What does it mean to care for those who live hundreds of miles away, sometimes across oceans and continents? What makes it difficult to keep in touch with those who live far away? What makes it important to do so? Over the years, I’ve talked with a lot of folks about what it means to live “locally” versus “globally,” and how the local and global were never really antonyms to begin with. How important it is to take action at a local scale with a global framework in mind. I often find myself realizing how much smaller the world feels when the people you care about are scattered all over. How a wildfire in California hits that much closer to home; how an election in New York or the UK matters just as much as an election in Chicago, where I live now. How I care for all these places I’ve never been to because of the friends who make them possible.

Maybe, in the end, I’m just trying to get my head around the fact that we’ve been talking and writing and loving and crying and celebrating with each other for nearly six years. This zine marks our tenth zine together, and under the theme of “Soup” (more metaphorical than literal), I’m thinking about perpetual stew, the energy needed to keep a flame lit, and what it means to stir, to nourish, to watch something change before your eyes. I can’t predict what will happen to us, to this collective, in the years to come. That’s not the point. The point is that we have given each other new rituals to new ways of living; we have given each other these careful and precious ways of caring for one another across unspeakable distances. These are no small feats, and we are far from gone, in these spaces among spaces of our hearts.