Long live shelf offering
RIP shelf offering, 2020-2026
A bittersweet note: this will be the last post for shelf offering, a newsletter by Apoorva Sripathi. Writing this newsletter has been a crucial, rigorous, and joyful part of my work, and vestiges of its presence can be seen on Instagram @ 💌shelfoffering. If you are a paid subscriber, please do cancel your subscription and thank you for the support. I’m eternally grateful. I will keep the archives here for a while until I build a place to house them. I’m also going to pause paid subscriptions. I’ve started writing at another place already, the link to which is below - see you there!
Hey so I’ve been writing and rewriting this piece in my head for weeks and I’ve gotten impatient with what I really want to say. This is my last post for shelf offering (unless I make a surprising comeback and startle myself). I’m not going to stop writing altogether, I’m merely moving domains. There is no one reason why I’m leaving but there is no overwhelming one to stay either. Since I joined substack four years ago, I’ve been itching to leave. I never really took to this platform for some reason and I never really took to people who said ‘hey I read your substack!’ Although, I’m very grateful for their and your presence, what I do like to hear is, ‘hey I read your newsletter.’
I started shelf offering on buttondown on a whim in 2020, offering recipes and small notes on food, and pivoted to essays on food and culture through the lens of anthropology, memory, history, and art when I moved here. But I’ve been a writer all my life, perhaps the only identity I’ve been comfortable and confident enough to sport. I was pushed into freelance in 2018, after a life-changing illness took hold of me and has held me close ever since, and I still remain in its capricious moorings eight years later. In these eight years, I’ve edited magazines, cookbooks, medical content, essays, fiction, and poetry. I’ve also written all of these things (minus the obvious ones). I never wanted to write recipes again until I launched paid subscriptions and had to offer something towards that. But I did begin to enjoy writing them in my own chaotic way. I eyeball measurements, cook, and then note down and put together a recipe, a method that seems so opposite to industry practice. My attempts at recipe writing here helped me place recipes in other publications and now, sometimes when I make something good, my brain automatically defaults to: this would be a great recipe to publish. I have come to think of this as some sort of benediction — of bounty. Knowledge is endless but my faith has never been and that is something I’ve been trying to correct.
I also never wanted to talk about my work on social media but I did that as well and found it to be an exercise in humiliation. I’ve since abandoned it. What I’ve realised is that since 2018, my writing career has been about restarting again and again. shelf offering was a microcosm of that experiment, a place where I showed up both regularly and spasmodically. Sometimes the reward was abundant and pleasing, but mostly it was non-existent. I had to clarify repeatedly, for myself, that the reward was writing itself. I relearnt how to think as a way to stretch time and use whatever came up in those writing sessions.
I have extracted a lot from myself in these six years of maintaining a newsletter and I’m quite proud of myself. This newsletter has seen it all — heartbreak, betrayal, happiness, network, friendship — and so I feel reluctant to say goodbye. I started it out of boredom and somewhere along the way it became real. And I’d like to leave before it’s too late. I’m still writing, on a new website called the grounded report, which I built using simple code. There are no schedules, deadlines, or peer pressure over at the new site. I’ll still send out updates on my writing via an email newsletter service, albeit sparingly. All my subscribers here are automatically added to the service but if you’d like to opt out, send me an email (by replying to this). No questions asked.
And, if always, you’d still like to support my work, you can send me a one-off amount like the olden days of this newsletter! Even a small donation means a lot, especially if my words have meant something to you. Thank you for the support, and bye — it’s been nice writing to all of you for six years now!