So glad you’ve found your way here, hello!

I’m Emily, a writer-photographer and editor—usually in Kuala Lumpur, sometimes in Berlin, or wherever work, travel, and family/friends take me.

Emailed at least once monthly, this newsletter is called “Movable Worlds” because it seems to encompass the idea of a world in flux, shaped by the great challenges of our age, and how we meet it with the worlds we’ve accumulated within ourselves.

Mostly, you’ll be hearing from me, and occasionally from other guests.

At its core, what animates this newsletter is a deep and capacious curiosity about how different lives play out in different places—fuelled by forces like environmental change, migration, cultural shifts, political/historical conflicts, but also changing personal circumstances—and how we make or remake places even as they make or remake us.

You’ll notice that I think a lot about how we navigate place: exploring it, living in it, passing through it, simply being in it.

I’m also curious about the passions that propel each of us through the world in our attempt to find our place in it, and how the caverns of our private lives are impacted by public events, continuously reshaped by memory. I’m always compelled to wonder how others experience feelings of belonging and alienation and how they steer their way through the possibilities or fault lines of overlapping citizenships: of our communities, of our countries, of the world.

During a time of multiple crises that can feel existential, when we may be in need of new stories to live by, I also think a lot about how we make sense of the world and how we tell its stories, and who gets to tell them and for whom. So you’ll find here, too, ruminations about reading, exploring, truth-finding, writing, imagining, and trying to live—in whatever little way possible—a creative life.

Readers here make up a small community of migrants, travellers, and readers from all over, of different professions and passions. Many are writers, editors, photographers, artists, and designers—storytellers of all stripes.

But at heart, Movable Worlds is for anyone who wants to belong to the world more fully and who is curious about how other people inhabit it. It’s about being out in the world as an act of communion and the interconnectedness of all things.

Despite any romantic talk on journeying, though, what’s most important is what happens in between: when we stop for a while and try to make sense of a single place—and if we’re lucky, some beauty and meaning for ourselves too.

If all this sounds good to you, please sign up to receive my letters in your inbox. Being able to take you with me, every step of the way, means a great deal.

Signing up is free by default, and as a free subscriber:

• you’ll be able to read, like, and comment on public letters,

• but only access free previews of occasional paywalled letters.

If you have the means, you can also opt to be a paying subscriber:

• you’ll be able to read, like, and comment on public and paywalled letters,

• help me fund guest writers,

• and gift me more time to write this newsletter.

Most letters will be public. Occasional paywalled letters tend towards more personal life updates, behind-the-scenes notes on my work, and curated reading lists to help fellow writers tell stories better.

Your making a paid subscription would let me publish more guest writers here and increase the fee—currently USD$150—in the future. Emotionally, of course, it’ll let me know you support my writing and curiosity ❤️

In any case, whether you go free or paid, with so many things demanding our attention these days I’m grateful simply to have you reading!

I hope every letter makes its way to you as a little surprise, and that you find something in it that intrigues, tickles, and awes you. Here’s to reading, exploring, and telling stories, over and over again.

Till we meet next between the lines,

P.S. I occasionally mention someone I call W.C., a.k.a “Willing Companion”, in my letters. It’s a cheeky reference to Martha Gellhorn’s U.C., “Unwilling Companion” (a.k.a Ernest Hemingway), in Travels with Myself and Another 😆

What exactly will I receive in my inbox?

Letters belonging to one of these categories:

• Wayward

  Dispatches from wherever my curiosity takes me. In short: on reading, exploring, and writing—on repeat.

• The Great Affair

  Essays by, and conversations with, friends, acquaintances, and familiar strangers about how they’re finding their own place in the world—and also occasional reported dispatches.

• Landmarkings
  A round-up of essays, journalism, and fiction about how we make sense of a rapidly changing world and our place in it, and how we tell its stories.

I’m growing to think of this newsletter as primarily a learning tool—through reading, noticing, and conversing. I’m thinking that what I put down here will form the raw material of things that may make it into longer, more thought-out, work. For a long time, I was struggling with what to publish here and what to save for fuller expression, and I think this approach may help clear my head.

Also, this isn’t a full-time endeavour. I squeeze letters in between other projects. I try to write at least once a month, sometimes more. There may be occasional lapses, when life or work gets in the way, but I’ll make up for it by sending more letters in subsequent months or extending paid subscriptions for free.

You started this in a pandemic?

The pandemic made clear how one’s experience during this time can be determined simply by where one is born or resides, and underscores how important the freedom of movement is.

Should we always move? There are plenty of reasons not to.

But there are also plenty of reasons to—and I think the freedom to do so, with fair conditions in place, should exist, so that everyone may pursue a life of meaning wherever they may find it. The fact that some others can only ever long for elsewhere, while others have no choice but to leave, and leave again, in pursuit of an ever-elusive dream of home, makes this even more important.

In this vein, I hope this newsletter will, as it slowly grows, also serve to broaden the idea of what we mean when we talk about “global citizens”, “cosmopolitans”, and travellers—to include migrants, refugees, and exiles, who are not always recognised as such in their own right.

How else can I show my support?

Follow me on Instagram. I’m also on Mastodon (which I use as a kind of notebook) and Twitter.

Write a guest letter. I pay USD$150.

Buy from my Bookshop.org shelf, if you’re in the U.K. Where possible, book links throughout this newsletter will direct there. Essentially, you’ll be supporting independent booksellers—instead of Amazon—and 10% of the sale will come to me. (If you’re in Malaysia, please support Lit Books!)

If you’re a publisher, commission me to write, report, edit, or photograph. I’m always looking to explore different modes of storytelling too.

How can I get in touch?

Just reply to my emails, or write emilydingwrites-AT-gmail.com

I would love to hear about your experiences in relation to anything I write about, and I’m happy to receive story tips, reading recommendations, and suggestions for the newsletter. I’m also open to considering publishing collaborations.

I would also appreciate a heads-up on factual errors or alternative perspectives. I try always to be accurate, but I’m sure to have my blind spots.

Any disclaimers?

I feel I should note, because of the way the internet is going: this newsletter is coloured by my own particular sensibilities, but not all the time. I sometimes recommend reads I don’t fully agree with or feature people whose world views don’t entirely align with mine—if they offer a good starting point for discussion and, more importantly, reflect the variety of lived experiences in the world. I may even change my mind from one letter to the next.

Writing a newsletter is, by its very nature, an ongoing conversation. While being somewhat intentional about what I do here, I also want to let things hang loosely enough so that I can feel free to follow what interests me at any given time. In this way, I hope Movable Worlds will be a continuous—if slightly haphazard—discovery, each letter building on the one before. In times of such rapid change, when old certainties are giving way, nothing can be the last word on anything.

How this newsletter has evolved

It started out as an experiment, and I hope it’ll continue to evolve freely. It first began in 2019 as an ad-hoc reporting diary, in which I shared unpublished fragments of human stories I found while on assignment, as well as haphazard lists of reading and culture recommendations. I posted only sporadically, with months-long gaps between letters.

But amid the pandemic, I felt I wanted to be more intentional and expansive with this newsletter. I’ve since refined its mission statement and consolidated the archives, in separate categories, to better reflect the tweak in focus. Since June 2021, I’ve been publishing at least once or twice every month, and hope in time to build something of more consequence here.

In November 2021, I changed the overarching name of this newsletter to Movable Worlds, to better encompass everything I might conceivably want to do with it, and gave the name “The Great Affair” over to the guest section.