A Magical Year of Charlotte's Web Thoughts

And many thanks for making it happen.

(image credit: Carol Yepes // Getty)

Good morning, friends!

It’s been one year since Charlotte’s Web Thoughts officially launched on this site and, for the first time in my life, I could pay the bills by writing my opinions for a living.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for that.

In that time, my essays here have gotten numerous press mentions, led to appearances on cable news, drawn the ire of social conservatives, been anthologized at least once in a forthcoming writing textbook that will most likely be banned in my home state of Texas, and been featured at SXSW, all of which 14 year-old Charlotte could scarcely have dreamed of realizing someday.

All of this has led to a few major announcements that will be coming over the next six months, including a rather big one you should expect to read by the time fall is upon us. Yes, that announcement, which I imagine, at the rate our country is going, will only catalyze a future book ban.

I don’t wanna make your eyes glaze over with a comprehensive inventory of the essays I’ve written over the past year, but I do want to highlight a few notable moments that you, my dear readers, made happen with your support. And a few moments that may have made you smile.

I’m pointing these out because I am not too proud to request, with a full heart, that those of you with a paid subscription continue supporting my work and those of you with a free email subscription consider making the jump to a paid subscription.

This is the very small price I pay for being a professional writer who gets to call my own shots: coming to people who care about my work, fascinator in hand, and asking that they keep it going. I am all-too-happy to do that.

AFTERNOON ANGER, LATE NIGHT WRITING, AND MORNING JOE

I know five months ago seems impossibly distant at this point, but if you can think all the way back to January, there were a series of widely reported antisemitic news events, including a school board in Tennessee that voted to ban Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, a children’s book about the Holocaust.

Upon reading the news, like all of you, I spent most of that day and the next being enraged by the cowardice of grown adults who are so uncomfortable with the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany that they would attempt to shield their children from learning about that moment in history in a manner that would prevent its reoccurrence, which, I have always felt, has been the absolute best argument for learning about history.

Anyway, I was pissed, and that night, I was up very late in my office, still rattled, and I thought of my late friend Henry Greenbaum and what he would have had to say about all this. I thought of my own education on the Holocaust, the unlearning of what I was taught in school growing up and the relearning of how the Holocaust didn’t happen overnight but, in fact, over many years of incremental and unchecked horror.

So, I wrote a Twitter thread and corresponding essay on here and woke up the next morning to both going viral. The next day, Morning Joe reached out and devoted an entire segment to Henry’s story and why antisemitism must be exposed and held accountable, in part, by robust educational tools on the Holocaust.

It was the first time in a very long time I could remember something I wrote being featured on cable news that had nothing to do with trans rights. Me being transgender didn’t come up, nor should it have. The focus was on Henry’s story, the ongoing threat of antisemitism, and the obligation of all of us outside the Jewish community to hold that hatred accountable.

You can watch that segment here:

THE FIRST ANTHOLOGY BUT CERTAINLY NOT THE LAST

In 2021, a school district in Virginia was confronted by a physical education teacher who refused to use the appropriate pronouns for his trans and non-binary students, making national news and partly energizing the Religious Right’s latest efforts to turn public schools into Christofascist safe havens.

Amid the fervor, the incident made me think back to childhood when the P.E. teachers and football coaches I had, all men, would refer to boys with feminized insults as a way of “motivating” them. The irony dawned on me that these adults were literally the first to call me a girl.

I wrote an essay on the subject that resonated far more than I expected, so much so that W. W. Norton reached out and asked to include the piece in their soon-to-be-published fourth edition of Everyone’s an Author, their primary text for instructing high school students on writing.

Being the absolute nerd I am and always was, it delighted me to no end that trans and non-binary kids will see a bit of themselves while learning how to use words to illustrate the world around them.

Y’ALL REALLY LOVE TO LAUGH

I wrote no shortage of serious essays this past year—on a variety of subjects, from baseball to trans-affirming surgery to Joe Rogan to midnight conversations—and they all did relatively well, but the pieces you folks seemed to love among the most were the ones that made you laugh.

In November, as the nonsense scaremongering over “cancel culture” escalated through the melodramatic martyrdom bullshit, propagated by the likes of Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and a number of other commentators who are professionally aggrieved with nary a true reason for such fears, I wrote a satirical open letter from their point-of-view. “The World Must Know I Am Being Silenced” blew up, and I unexpectedly received numerous messages from so many of you that are just as fed up with this childishness as I am.

I was in Boston with my dear friend Ana when I wrote a few tossed away tweets musing over how to correctly make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Much to my surprise, the tweets got a lot of traction, and I turned the concept into a humorous essay that became one of my most read over the past year. Y’all are ridiculous, and I love you for it.

Okay, admittedly, that essay I published around Thanksgiving on cranberry sauce wasn’t all about laughs, and at least one friend pondered aloud to me if the reader felt they had permission to laugh with the intermingling structure of serious statements on trans rights. That was the point! It was meant to highlight the uneasy relationship between two very different but parallel worlds navigated by most trans and non-binary people. Yes, of course you can laugh! I just wanted you to think a bit while you did it.

Anyway…

Friends, I mean it: you made this all happen. In my discussions with Substack, they have been incredibly pleased with the success of this little blog and are quite eager to see where it goes next.

As we embark upon the second year of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, I offer my unending gratitude for your support and ask that you continue it with a paid subscription.

If you’re one of the many wonderful folks with a free email subscription, consider bumping up to a monthly paid subscription. It’s the cost of a cup of coffee every month for a writer whose work you love. Quite a bargain.

Here’s to the next twelve months. Love you all.

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Hi, I’m Charlotte Clymer, and this is Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, my Substack. It’s completely free to access and read, but if you feel so moved to support my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription: just $7/month or save money with the $70/annual sub. You can also go way above and beyond by becoming a Founding Member at $210.