It didn’t take long for lockdown to be reframed as the chance to finally produce that creative masterpiece you’ve been sitting on: after all, Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the plague, so what’s your excuse? Patti Smith – as ever – did something more interesting with her time, focusing not on one singular work but an opportunity to let her wild creativity roam while she shielded with a bronchial condition.
In April 2021, Smith launched a Substack newsletter to share her poetry, music and thoughts. It quickly inspired The Melting, a longer, serialised work (now at 45 parts and counting) that started as her private pandemic journal before undergoing a glorious multimedia mutation that blurs fact and fiction. “I was already looking to get out of my skin and move into another dimension,” she told Esquire.
From her inimitable evocations of lockdown claustrophobia, a “parallel”, multidimensional world emerged, in which Smith embarks on a path of discovery that draws in science-fiction, warnings about the climate crisis and dealings with the defunct Continental Drift Club that may be familiar to readers of M Train.
“The reader is my notebook,” says Smith, who credits her Substack with reinventing her process of creating and publishing – a bold and thrilling assertion from an artist who has never trodden a conventional creative path, from those early days in New York City’s nascent punk scene, to collaborations with her partner Robert Mapplethorpe; taking early semi-retirement to raise her family and gloriously re-emerging as one of the greatest live performers of her generation.
Latterly, she has made her name all over again as a powerful and inventive memoirist with Just Kids, M Train and Year of the Monkey – and autumn will bring a new photographic publication, A Book of Days, collecting “a year of reflections and images, inspired by my Instagram, but original throughout … The fruit of much labor, populated by sacred ghosts, and celebrating the new.”
You can ask Smith about all of this, and anything else from her fantastically sprawling history, when she sits for the Guardian’s reader interview. Post your questions in the comments by 6pm GMT on 27 March and Smith’s responses will be published on 1 April.
• Subscribe to Patti Smith’s Substack and read The Melting at pattismith.substack.com
