Vulnerability on Substack

What is the risk and is it worth taking?

A cyber-cityscape with messages in neon being sent across the sky

I’ve moved most of my activity online to Substack recently. While “Harrowings” is all about scratching the surface of things - including cyberspace - to make room for creative work, it’s also my main publishing arm for the Harold B Gill Foundation, LLC, which I started on September 17, 2024 as a means of protecting, preserving, and promulgating my late father’s creative work - as well as that of my grandfather.

Vulnerability is part of the price of being a public persona and I’ve been willing to take this risk going back into the 1980s when I first began working on translations with the idea of making them more available. My focus back in 1988 was Sprengel’s Handwerke und Kuenste in Tabellen — roughly translated that is “Trades and Arts Tabulated.” That was a 17 volume vocational textbook put together by the rectors of the Realschul in Berlin between 1767-1777. Nothing too controversial in the 80’s but revolutionary in its day and a real feast for those interested in the preservation of pre-industrial trade practices, the work deserves to be more widely known in the English-speaking world than it is. So, that was the start of my publishing ventures - walking in the footsteps of my father who was a research historian.

Still, it feels that this work - important as it is to me - is just part of what I want to be doing here on Substack. I’d like to open myself up so that others can learn from the ‘fragments I have shored against my ruins” (with apologies to T.S. Eliot) and, as importantly or moreso, I open myself to receive those treasures others have to offer.

If I were to ask all of you to drop a comment on what you are here for and how you are planning to use this platform, how many would step up? Let’s see….