Moby Dick Summer 2023

Have yourself a merry little Moby Dick Summer all over again

There she blows! The headline and subhead says it all: Moby Dick Summer is back, baby. It’ll run the same way as last year. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville will be serialized as a newsletter on Mondays and Wednesdays. And on Fridays, we drop a conversational recap of that week’s readings, or some other fun bonus material. We’ll try to make at least one or two of the Friday sends unique to 2023—a podcast episode or essay that didn’t air in 2022. The first chapters (or rather, the Etymology and Extracts) send on Memorial Day and it all wraps up by mid-September, or sometime before the first day of fall.

Since last year’s Moby Dick Summer concluded, we’ve more than doubled the number of subscribers. Welcome new crew members! You should know that the participatory nature of Moby Dick Summer is really what makes this Substack fun. Last year, it was a delight to see regulars pop up in the comments, like their favorite chapters, or reply to the recaps with their own takes on that week’s reading. So, when this thing sets sail, it’s not meant to be a passive newsletter you consume. Comment and clap back on the chapters. This whole project is about realizing a novel that many view as intimidating or challenging is often very funny, modern, and accessible (and yet it is also frustrating and challenging, but becomes less so when you have company). Subscribe, and tell your friends to subscribe by Monday May 29th, so you can get in from the beginning:

And of course, if you’re not down to take this journey again, or if the idea of slogging through that chapter comparing the mathematical symmetry of a sperm whale’s head to a right whale’s head sounds downright triggering, well, this email serves as a warning to unsubscribe.

Moby Dick Summer is captained by Kristen Felicetti. I’m a writer, reader, and frequent traveller (though not usually by ship). I also work on the Support team at Substack. That means I’m pretty familiar with how this platform works and I’m excited to use the new features my colleagues have built in the last year (Chat, Notes, Duplicate to Drafts¹) to hype up this great American novel in new ways in 2023.

1. No, seriously, bless the Duplicate to Drafts feature, which made it a helluva lot easier to schedule each of last year’s sends in a click. Without it, there would have been a whole lot of copying/pasting/scrolling/swearing.