Somewhere along the way, someone decided that if you want to matter—if you want your words to survive the noise—you have to feed the algorithm. You have to dance for it, scatter little pieces of yourself on timelines and feeds, measuring your own worth in notifications. There is a hum in the background, a kind of digital tinnitus, telling us: If you are not seen, you do not exist.
I’ve tried to play along. I’ve tried to slice my work into neat, palatable shapes. I’ve hustled, I’ve posted, I’ve watched the numbers spike and plummet, wondering if any of it means anything when the screen goes dark. At some point, it became less about poetry and more about performance—less about the quiet, necessary labour of making something real, and more about keeping up with a system that can never love you back.
Sunday Mornings at the River was never meant for this. I started it because I believed in books—books as artefacts, books as anchors, as places to return to when the world is spinning itself to exhaustion. But somewhere in the pressure to be visible, to “build a platform,” it became easy to forget that books have always found their readers, long before anyone knew what a hashtag was.
So I’m letting go. I’m stepping out of the quicksand. There is nothing urgent enough on my phone to justify missing the slow, stubborn work of making poetry that might outlive me. I want to wake up and remember that my job is not to keep up, but to go deeper. I want to make space for the kind of writing that doesn’t disappear after twenty-four hours, the kind that lingers, bruises, burrows in.
Will anyone read you if you stop posting? Will your work survive if it isn’t re-shared, re-posted, algorithmically blessed? Yes. Books have always travelled by stranger routes: word of mouth, dog-eared copies pressed into hands, letters, conversations over coffee. I’d rather build something that takes time, that demands patience, than shout into the void and hope for the best.
So, what now? I’ll write. I’ll make the best books I can, and I’ll send out a newsletter when I have something real to say. I’ll post a launch now and then, but I will not shape my days around engagement, or my self-worth around metrics. I will make room for silence, for letters, for books that are not in a hurry.
Maybe this is a kind of refusal. Or maybe it’s just self-preservation. Either way, it feels like returning to the thing I loved in the first place—the words, the work, the slow build of something that matters, long after the scroll has moved on.
If you want to come along, you know where to find me. Not everywhere. But somewhere real.
With gratitude,
Becks