At this point there are well over 1 billion newsletters. That’s a non-scientific but conservative estimate. Everyone, including me, has their own newsletter asking you to subscribe and pay for them to write so you can maybe read it when it lands in your overstuffed email inbox. Daunting. Add in all the other subscriptions you have and it’s impossible to keep up and stay out of the red financially if you want to read, listen and watch everything you’re being told YOU MUST. It’s enough to make someone give up on everything altogether.
And that’s kind of what I did a few years ago after newsletters came into fashion. I unsubscribed from nearly all of them. I cancelled a few other subscription services we didn’t use and began to curate more closely what I was reading, watching and listening to. Why would I ever need audible if I never listen to audio books? Why was I subscribing to the latest cool “journalist” on twitter’s newsletter when I wasn’t reading it because it was a waste of time? The New Yorker gave me weekly heartburn because I have to read every page and no person can do that every week if they have kids or a job. Done. Cancelled. And it wasn’t the only subscription.
There were a few the exceptions and one of them was A.J. Daulerio’s newsletter The Small Bow1, which is focused on addiction and mental health, but has become something more since it shifted to a more newsletter format as opposed to a full-on publication with funding, which it lost when its grant ran up. Since it moved to a newsletter format, Daulerio has dedicated more time to writing about himself and his own struggles as an addict, someone struggling with their mental health, and what it’s like to be a parent.
Daulerio’s writing has become a salve. I see much of my own struggles through him, even if I am not an addict. He puts into context a lot of my feelings and how I see myself. His writing is some of the first that I’ve read that puts out there how I see and feel the world — how my constant struggles with overthinking stem from some awful feeling and memory form childhood.
Daulerio’s past is well-documented (he hates the Esquire story, but I feel differently about what it’s saying and doing). He’s the former editor of Deadspin and Gawker. He was put on the hook during the Hulk Hogan trial for all the money. He has his demons and he owns them. But now, away from the pressures of the New York City media world, he’s found his own voice as a writer. Before, he was someone who helped other writers explore the boundaries of what could be done on the Internet. The Small Bow has given himself that chance. It’s become his way to give back and also as a way to heal in his public way. And, more than anything, it’s a newsletter that speaks to more than just its target audience because of Daulerio’s growth as a writer. His essays are multifaceted and often settle into something deeper on a second reading.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you launch The Small Bow and why did you decide to write about yourself?
It started in n 2018 actually. Do you remember Civil, the crypto company that was starting? We were part of that crew. You had to pitch and apply for a grant and I pitched it. I was kind of piggybacking on the opioid crisis and basically being like, okay, we're going to be devoted to how drugs and alcohol are part of this culture and whatever. And I won the grant.
We had a grant for about a year. It was pretty healthy. It was my full-time job at that point, and I wanted to treat it like It was its own publication. I hired Clancy Martin and hired Edith Zimmerman, and doing mostly freelancers throughout, and I didn't really do any first person stuff. I think I did one or two pieces in the first year, and then when the money ran out, I wanted to keep The Small Bow going, so I switched over to a newsletter format, which was heavily dependent on me. And one of the first stories that I wrote was about Rob Ford, which was kind of like this journalism slash personal essay, and it felt really good. I mean, when you get in that mode where it's just like, oh, this is kind of just exactly the voice that I want, doing it exactly in the rhythm that I want. I'm getting everything I want onto this page. I hadn't felt that way in such a long time. I just like, I'm doing exactly things the way I want them to do it and being truthful in a way that I hadn't been able to have been truthful before. And it got a good response.
That was the first hurdle for me: is this going to be accepted by an audience in a way or received by an audience in a way that I hoped it would be? And it did, and little by little that audience started to grow.
I got to a point where I was writing about the trial and someone had emailed me and said, “I know nothing about your background. I'm just here because this is supposed to be a good recovery blog or whatever.” That was like, oh, well now it's its own thing and I can be a little more open and honest with where I am today as opposed to diving into my past all the time. And that's why I try to stay as present as possible. I write a lot about fatherhood and Al-Anon stuff, and I think why it's working so well is that it's not rigid about what a recovery site is supposed to be.
The voice of the old AJ is so different to the voice of The Small Bow. I think there's not a vulnerability and there's no facade in your writing.
I'm using it as an opportunity to get better writing, which I never felt like I had an opportunity to do. Even when I was at Gawker, I felt like I was a persona and a lot of that stemmed from the fact that I was in charge and I needed to be the Id of that site. And, obviously, I was super into spectacle. I thought that I was good at that and that was my job. In a way, that's kind of why Nick [Denton] really liked me, because I was the person who was willing to look bad in public and, as much as I was willing to, there's a lot of nihilism attached to that, and obviously with my drinking and using and just all the depressive stuff, that helped create that person. But I didn't like being that person.
After the GQ thing ran there was a lot of heavy coverage based around the Brett Favre story, so I was the most popular sports blogger on planet Earth for around three months. It was very heavy dose of micro-celebrity that I was torn between.
Everybody wants an ego boost.
One hundred percent. I think especially if you wanted to write at certain places, you want that sort of validation. You want to be that guy that people talk about on Twitter. I want to get selected by Longreads and win National Magazine Awards and all this kind of stuff.
And to go to high school reunion and be the cool guy, right? I want to do this writing thing that you think is ridiculous and it’s hard.
And I was getting that, but for all the wrong reasons. I was experiencing a lot of this fame that I had coveted where it was just like, oh, people know who I am that aren't me. I'm getting emails from people in high school and college and all those things. And then there was HBO Real Sports, which did a segment on me at that time, and when that aired I remember getting these horrible emails telling me how ugly I am and that my parents hate me and all this shit. And I agreed with the people. I'm like, you're right. It brought all those bad feelings that you kind of pull down. I remember calling my dad, who wasn't helpful in that situation. I'm like, “man, I want to quit.” He is like, “yeah, don't quit until you get another job.” I'm like, “fuck you, this sucks. This sucks right now that I am this guy, and the only way I can kind of continue on this path that I'm on is to be this guy, this jackass who is causing a lot of hurt for people.”
It's like the WWE character almost. You have to lean in hard. But I mean, the bigger thing with that is the thing I admired about Deadspin a lot of times was the writing was good and the editors there were really good. And now you are able to write and I can see your brain working as you're writing, which is a really, it's something I usually am not a huge fan of, but with you it works because I trust you as a writer in those sections.
How do you mean you “see how my brain is working?” What do you mean by that?
Your thoughts are on the page. This was a late nineties period where people were unsure of themselves of their writing, but they're actually a hundred percent sure of themselves. And it can drive me crazy.
Like fake self-deprecation sort of thing.
Not self-deprecation.
It's insecurity.
Yes. An actual insecurity.
Genuine insecurity,
I can see it on the you trying to process it, which is, as I said, not always my favorite style, and yet it works extremely well because I can see your writing evolving throughout each piece. So I'm wondering if you're finding that now.
It's funny, when I first started writing online and I had pretty traditional sort of background in journalism: I was at local newspapers, and then I did a music zine for a little while. When I moved to New York, I was working for trade publications, but I was also at the advent — we're talking 2000 — of internet sort of personal writing. I was a part of that. That's where I met Will Leitch and a couple other people that I'm still close to. I was writing satirical sort of essays. The goal was to get in McSweeney's or something like that.
Do you remember Jim Romenesko’s Media newssite at all?
Yeah.
It was Drudge level of exposure in media world. I wrote a satirical essay and it was getting a lot of coverage, and it made the front page of Romenesko’s media news, and at the time I was like 26 and I was at this bond publication writing and I was getting all these emails. I remember the managing editor of Rolling Stone at the time was like, “pitch us something.” I had a feeling like, oh man, I've made it. This didn't take long at all. Only a year, and I've got all these publications that are my dream jobs wanting me. Nothing ever came from that.
I started to do a column for this publication called Knot Magazine, which is more personal essay based. It's no longer there, obviously, you go to the wedding site when it comes up now, but it wasn't that at that time. A lot of that voice is essentially the voice that I'm using for The Small Bow.
That was 14, 15 years ago, and that was the writing that I really wanted to do: being funny, sad essay guy. I was trying to be David Sedaris at that point, and that's what I wanted more than anything. But Gawker had launched and all these people that were starting in that industry were around and it felt like you're part of something, and I wanted to be a part of that so bad. I wanted to work for Gawker and I wanted to work for Nick, and I wanted to work at it like an alt-weekly. I was doing all of that stuff, but the only way I could get into that world was by being an asshole. I mean, that's what I discovered. I didn't have the chops a lot of my friends did. I was not a great writer. I was pretty good at telling jokes, and I was pretty good at being a heel, and I leaned into see where it could take me. That was kind of how I got started, but with the hopes that if I got successful enough at doing that, I would have a choice to go back to the other guy. It never happened.
Well, what made you want to be a writer in the first place? Why? I know why I wanted to be a writer. I read W.B. Yeats as a ninth grader. I failed English in seventh grade and then I read Yeats, and I was like, what is that? How do you do that thing on a page and how do you make me feel that way? And then you realize like, oh, there's no jobs for a poet.
I'm going tell you what I remember very vividly was I wasn't reading Yeats or anything like that. I was reading Stephen King when I was younger and I remember, I think it was “It”, and he did a passage where he was describing an old basketball court with the knitting ripped off a hoop and he described that it looked like a medieval torture device. And I got that. I understood exactly what was going on, and I think that was the first point where I can see the world in that way, and that's what a writer does. That was the thing that I remember. How do I become a person that can describe things in that way?
Initially, I wanted to write music reviews. I was kind a music dork coming out of college, and I was like a studio rat, and I worked in that field. I was writing that stuff, and then I was writing little record reviews about a lot of the 90s bands, and that became kind of more of a passion for me than being an a and executive for Matador Records or whatever I was into at that point.
I interned at Matador Records for about two seconds, and I was commuting from Pennsylvania and taking the ferry to New York, and I couldn't do it. I mean, that was the thing where I discovered that I liked doing this stuff. I had my first brush with getting paid for something that I wrote when I wrote something for Chicken Soup for the Golfer’s Soul when I was 24, something like that. I got published and it was a completely fraudulent essay. But I did that and I was like, oh, I enjoyed that process. I enjoyed writing from a first person perspective, even though I was writing as my dad, but that was the part where I was just like, okay, this is probably what I should do. So that was my early 20s. I discovered that it was something that really loved doing.
You went to Temple University to take a creative writing class, what was the plan after that?
It was right after I got published in the Chicken Soup for the Soul thing and that was my attempt to kind of get better because my parents were kind of in the mindset — at least my dad was — that you have to go to school for this in order to get better, you need some sort of official paperwork piece of paper. That's why I took that class. But, I also wanted to measure up, I think, with other people in that class, but it was a bad place to do that. It was all older people. The thing I wanted was to figure out a way where I could be taken seriously, and I thought that that was the route for doing it — taking more schooling. I was doing journalism at the time with local newspapers and everything along those lines and writing dopey feature stories, but what I really wanted to write was funny, sad essays, that was it. And I couldn't figure out exactly what the path was to get there. So I was taking the class to hopefully kind of point me in that direction, but it did not.
But then you become an editor at Deadspin and Gawker and have a great team of writers and working for them, guiding them. You're doing that thing of helping other people find a path and it sounds like you weren't thinking about AJ as a writer.
No, I wanted to make as much money as possible being kind of just king-maker.
I have a real good instinct for developing talent, so to speak, and I love doing that. I always joke around with a couple other people that we should have a fantasy draft of writers and build our teams because I love doing that. I love big conceptual projects, which I mean, The Small Bow is a little bit, right? And that's another part of what I do that I haven't been able to develop.
I got hired to be editorial director of Spin and they were trying to get rid of the magazine, and all the writers there had these lifelong music journalists and they were worried when I came in because they thought I was going to change it to pageview shit and make them do slideshows and the opposite was true. I was going to go there and basically be like, guys, we probably got six to 12 months before they shut this thing down, do whatever the fuck you want and let's have fun. I think that's the best thing you can do as an editor: basically let writers dictate what they want to be and then help shape that. I think everyone has to start with good ideas, and if you don't have one, then you give them one and then just let 'em go and that's it. And just fuck up and grow.
I don't think we have enough fuck up and grow in this profession anymore.
No, we don't really, and I understand why a lot of places are losing business, but I think you're going to find out pretty quickly whether the newsletter you're about to do is going to work or not, and how much hustle you want to put into that, because it’s a pretty good feeling when you're doing exactly what you want to do and someone pays you $45 for it. It's a really great feeling as opposed to an editor saying, you get $2000
I have contributed to The Small Bow in the past.