Gentle readers,

If you’ve signed up recently, welcome. You can find all essays at paperairplane.substack.com, writing news at fb.com/elilyyu, an artisanal, hand-coded website at elilyyu.com, and my first novel, On Fragile Waves, due out February 2, 2021, somewhere in the exquisitely painful, Schrödinger’s-cat uncollapsed waveform of electrons that is your local bookstore’s preorder form.

If you’re new here, you might like these public essays (the most popular so far):

The delightful misadventure that is The Paper Airplane currently relies on the financial support of eight subscribers—these essays keep popping up overnight like toadstools because of them. My deep thanks to these folks.

Subscribers receive access to longer, more personal, and more technical essays, including:

(If you pay $6 for one month to read the entire archives, then unsubscribe, that’s fine.)

Sit wherever is comfortable. Have a cup of tea, if tea is your thing. Come and go as you like.

—Lily

Postscript for longtime readers: essays might be light on mycology for a while. This season I’ve picked three shaggy parasols where I had a bushel two years ago; five chanterelles when I had a full basket last year; and on top of that, my local mycological society canceled all its field trips and forays.

On the bright side, I’m less likely to be eaten by bears.

The Paper Airplane

A quick note to new folks