The essay is the form in which most of my favourite writing about slowness lives. Not the piece that argues a position, but the piece that walks around one. It has the room to notice things, to let a subject breathe, to come to a conclusion that is barely a conclusion at all. Linen takes the same kind of thinking. The three writers below work in that long, patient register.
Rebecca May Johnson
Rebecca May Johnson's Dinner Document is one of the most serious essay projects in the poet-core neighbourhood of the internet. She writes about food, about the domestic practice of making, about the intellectual weight of a repeated meal. Her work treats cooking as philosophy, which it is, and the prose has the specific pleasure of thought that has earned its shape. I read her the way I read poets — slowly, with a pen nearby.
Georgina Shannon
Georgina Shannon writes Georgie's Corner from Cornwall, documenting a Cornish lifestyle of sustainability and minimal living. Her blog is the kind of long, steady writing that does not trend but accumulates. Over years, it has built up a picture of a specific life in a specific place, and that specificity is what makes it feel true. I admire how she has held to the long form of blogging when so much of the internet has pushed everyone toward shorter units. The patience shows.
Inkcap Journal
Sophie Yeo's Inkcap Journal is a UK conservation and nature Substack that Robert Macfarlane has publicly endorsed, which is about as good a cosign as that corner of writing can offer. She reports carefully on British wildlife, land use, rural policy — the kind of information that rarely makes mainstream news but shapes the countryside that a lot of poet-core aesthetic draws on without acknowledging. I read her to keep my own idea of rural honest.
The linen dresses we make in Bulgaria are the kind of thing to wear while reading essays of this length. Cup of tea. Long Sunday. Nothing moving too fast.