Introducing: Banya Obbligato, a Series of Extras and Companion to Well of Souls

Listen to this post:

Hi there. It’s been a while. Over the last two years, I’ve neglected this blog as I’ve been working on Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History, which will be published by W.W. Norton in October.

​But I’m back.

Nonfiction writing is often described as an iceberg—with just a portion of the writing and research showing on the surface, while an enormous mass lurks out of sight below in the water. As I was sending a full manuscript to my editor in December 2021, I decided to see what the Well of Souls iceberg looked like. The book is just over 77,000 words long. But to get there, I had 164,000 words of notes from 211 secondary sources and 114,000 words from 338 primary sources. ​

I have old and new books that have so much more interesting material than I could include; images that similarly were interesting, but just didn’t make it in; images that just helped me imagine streetscapes and places I couldn’t travel to during the COVID pandemic; histories and facts that couldn’t fit in the book (no matter how hard I tried); and stories of people bearing traditions today.

Enter the beauty of the internet. I’ve been keeping the Open Stacks blog on my website since 2014 as a place to share material culture from private collections I find interesting, stories that I didn’t have the energy to pitch a publication, and just cool stuff. In the last few years, my posting pace slowed as I worked on Flowers in the Gutter and published articles. But, now that Well of Souls is close to publication, I wanted to use this space for a series of extras and as a companion to the book.

Banya Obbligato will be a series of weekly blog posts leading up to and following the publication of Well of Souls (some of them have to wait for a few of the reveals in the book and the title of this series will be clearer when you read the book). The posts will include book recommendations, interviews, compilations of images, (even) deep(er) dives into characters that I mention in the book, history outside the time period of the book, and even totally tangential stories I just think are cool.

These posts will all be tagged with Banya Obbligato and be here on the blog, for free. I’ll also be sending a monthly newsletter with the posts from that month, and maybe other articles related to the book. You can sign up for the newsletter here. I decided to use my own website for these posts and the newsletter (even though there are things like Patreon and Substack) because I wanted it to be completely free and in my control. While integrally related to Well of Souls, it is editorially and financially separate from the book. So, if you want to financially support the blog, newsletter, or my writing, you can do so here.

Thank you,
Kristina

This is part of Banya Obbligato, a series of blog posts relating to my book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History. While integrally related to Well of Souls, these posts are editorially and financially separate from the book (i.e., I’m researching, writing, and editing them myself and no one is paying me for it). So, if you want to financially support the blog or my writing and research you can do so here.