The Paris Writers’ Salon Live No. 4

This was a fun one. It was recorded in a space

Augusta Sagnelli

and I have called home for the last four years, which in a few short weeks will be just another Parisian memory.

John & Augusta & Armagnac

I have a lot to say about my life on Rue de La Roquette over the last four years, but that’s for a different time. Suffice to say, for now, that it felt fitting to record one final episode of The Paris Writers’ Salon in a home that means quite a lot to me … not just since 2021, when Augusta and I fell in love and she decided to build a new life in this small Parisian apartment above a kebab shop, but much further back, over a decade ago, when a kind Irishman who I met at a party near Notre Dame quickly became a close friend and graciously allowed my down-and-out-twentysomething-self to do laundry in his apartment, many years before it became my home.

I’ll be writing about Rue de La Roquette in weeks to come, but it’s not something I want to do off the cuff, so for now, just a BIG THANK YOU to all of my paying subscribers for the support and inspiration over the past years, which has had A DIRECT RESULT in allowing me to move into an apartment. There’s no need for hyperbole here: supporting working artists can change working artists’ lives (for the first time in my sixteen years as a working writer in Paris, I’m moving into an apartment where I can write not just on a desk, but in a room with a closed door!).

As

Augusta Sagnelli

put it in a recent Substack interview with

Eleanor Anstruther

, who has been a consistent champion of my work on this space and has actively participated in changing my life in various ways, it’s hard to describe just how much Substack support can help writers build a life that fosters creativity during an era when making a living from art alone is near impossible:

“When you pay a writer to read their writing, that money is going straight back into the work, whether it’s via a good hot meal or a new computer or a [writing desk at home] or a train ticket to the countryside where they can focus on that manuscript, that’s why if you can, you pay, because you’re helping bring about that artists next creation […]

New creations are coming, some in physical book form—stay tuned—and in this particular historical moment of so much noise, negativity, and mass-marketed destruction, it seems to me that

creating and generosity remains the best antidote to zero-sum greed and destruction.

Below, paying subscribers can listen to a video recorded at the legendary Mary Duncan’s literary salon a few weeks ago, where I performed a set of original songs and also discussed my latest novel, The Requisitions.

The song is an original called “Annabelle” (some of you have heard it in a different version sometime before), which is about somebody who has everything she was told she was supposed to want in life—the romance, the house, the dog, the picket-fence—and yet all she can think about is how happy she used to be as a child, “when I was just a girl I was so happy alone, now I’m losing touch with the Annabelle I used to know.”