Characteristically Speaking

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Characteristically Speaking is a weekly Substack from Jo Taylor—novelist, retired ER nurse, and psychic medium—and it does not stay in its lane. That is the point.

 

Each Tuesday, Taylor brings a working writer's precision to the things most newsletters won't touch in the same breath: the sodium-potassium pump and Gandhi's salt march. What it felt like to run a code in a rural ER at 2 a.m. What the dead sometimes say. The private moral architecture of ordinary women. The way memory reconstitutes itself, slightly wrong, into something truer than fact.

 

The newsletter runs in four distinct currents—Writing, Nursing, The Woo, and Life in General—but they are fed by the same source: a Gen X sensibility that is simultaneously opinionated and generous, skeptical and wide open, clinical and lyrical. Taylor has published two novels and a poetry collection under her own imprint, Road Clothes Press, and writes the way a person talks when they've earned the right to say exactly what they mean.

 

With 944 subscribers and a 49% open rate, the audience is small and exceptionally engaged. These are readers who stay.

 

Free. Weekly. For people who think reading should feel like something.