The Oscars, the Pulitzer & SNL

Newsletter Issue #59

I was talking with my friend Trey recently about how duplicative social media can be. I’ve been thinking about this aspect of social media since I joined Bluesky a month ago. Why join another social media platform? For the most part, users tend to post the same things across all platforms, which is what Trey and I discussed. What’s the point? And I guess the point can be two-fold: Different audiences (with some overlap) and different ways of sharing content (text, images, links, video, etc.).

Bluesky is a microblogging platform that seems to have finally settled in as the replacement for old-school Twitter. Bluesky is text-based and limits posts to 300 characters, but it will allow users to include links and images in their posts.

I decided if I was going to keep Bluesky, I wanted to take it a step further and make the difference three-fold: different audience, different way of sharing content, and different content.

So I’m sharing some things on Bluesky that I don’t talk about on Facebook or Instagram. Most significantly, I’m finding Bluesky is the perfect platform to post about three projects I started this year as a way of immersing myself more into some of the things I love most: film, literature, and history.

My Oscar Project: I’m watching the Academy Award winners for Best Picture from the very beginning, starting with the winner for 1927/1928, a silent black-and-white film called Wings. My goal is to watch a couple of films a month and to finish in summer 2027. I started this project once before and made it through 1954, On the Waterfront. What I remember enjoying most was watching the evolution of film. I watched films go from silent to talkies and from black-and-white to color. I watched gradual changes in everything from film topics to special effects to cinematography to title sequences. And I watched the growth of the craft of acting—when Marlon Brando comes on the scene in 1954, he blows away everyone who came before him, and yet those who came before him gave him the foundation to become the actor he became. I’m excited to get back to this project and just finished rewatching Wings to get started. My roommate walked into the room and said, “How can you watch a silent movie? It looks so boring.” It actually wasn’t boring, it tells a great story—it’s like a cross between Pearl Harbor and Some Kind of Wonderful—and one benefit was that I had to immerse myself in it and give it my full attention, so I could read the dialogue cards.

My Literature Project: I’m reading the Pulitzer Prize winning books for fiction that were published starting with the year I was born: To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. My goal is to read two books a month and to finish in summer 2027. I thought about how much I enjoyed seeing the evolution of film, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this applies to literature over time, too. I decided not to go all the way back to the beginning (1918). I kind of did that in my undergrad, plus I have a feeling I’ll read enough books by white male authors as it is. :)

My SNL Project: For history, I decided to do something cool. After watching the four-part docuseries Beyond Saturday Night and the film Saturday Night (about the couple of hours leading up to the debut of the live show), I decided to rewatch the first episode of SNL, called Saturday Night in the beginning. It aired on October 11, 1975, when I was 15 years old. Lorne Michaels described it as a Saturday night in New York City. I am struck by what a time capsule Saturday Night Live is of the past 50 years: history, politics, music, culture, fashion, language—you name it. So I’m rewatching every episode, and I’m especially enjoying the monologue topics (often surprisingly relevant today) and Weekend Update. My goal is to be finished by the end of 2027, but this is going to take watching an average of an episode a day—there are a lot of episodes! So I may be binge-watching SNL well into my retirement years.

I’m a project person. I love taking on projects that help me get from here to there or that immerse me in things I love. They help me make the time for activities that might otherwise get pushed to the back burner. Do you have any projects going? I’d love to hear about them! Or heck, if you don’t have any of your own, feel free to join me in one of mine!

XOXO

Leanne

“My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.”

—Edith Wharton

SOME THINGS FOR READERS

The Fine Line Between Before and After
(Jackie DesForges reviews Little Mysteries by Sara Gran for Alta)

I’m the Woman Down the Hall Screaming: I could no longer sit up, and I wanted my mother.
(personal narrative by Rebecca Schankula for Electric Literature)

How One Perfect Strawberry Helped Me Survive a Scary Mammogram
(essay by Jaime Lewis for Jenny)

Singularity
(short fiction by Mellissa Sojourner for The Missouri Review)

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SOME THINGS FOR WRITERS

If you’re one of my writers who insists you need multiple points of view, George Saunders would like a brief word with you:

Office Hours: Two Voices Combining to Make a Slight Difficulty
(George Saunders for Story Club with George Saunders)

10 Ways to Turn Your Writing Resolutions into Realities
(Gabino Iglesias for Gabino’s Substack)

Alle responds to: “Five agents have my manuscript. Now, a small press wants it!” Does one immediately contact the agents and share this precious info?
(Alle C. Hall for An Alle Alert!)

What should writers do about social media? On finding a sense of purpose and community this year.
(Dan Blank for The Creative Shift by Dan Blank)

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SOMETHING TO UPLIFT AND EMPOWER YOU

Paul Crenshaw breaks down one of my favorite short stories and discusses its relevance today.

On the Grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and The Mustard Seed in the Heart of The Misfit

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Leanne Phillips
Writer | Book Coach | Editor
​leannephillips.com

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