Who am I?
Hi, I’m Lancelot Schaubert of Little Egypt.
I don’t live in Little Egypt anymore, I’ve been a New Yorker for a decade. But in New York, everyone’s from somewhere else…
Speaking of Little Egypt, I am the author of the novel Bell Hammers, which Publisher’s Weekly called “a hoot.” That sounds suspiciously as if they’re secretly run by owls. I’ve sold dozens of stories, hundreds of poems and essays to outlets as varied as McSweeney’s, The New Haven Review (Yale’s Institute Library), Shondaland (Shonda Rhimes’s publication), The World Series Edition of Poker Pro, TOR.com, Riddlebird, and I’ve pretty proud of selling pieces to both Nonbinary Review and The Anglican Theological Review in the same morning.
In that capacity, I am a full voting member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. I edit The Showbear Family Circus (which, in its heyday, published over 500 works from 400+ renowned academics, artists, and authors) as well as the anthology series Of Gods and Globes, compose and performs songs from my albums H.A.L.T.S. and All Who Wander, deliver keynote speeches, narrate audiobooks, produce various short films and theatrical productions and graphic novels. The latter I reinvented with Mark Neuenschwander through photonovels like Cold Brewed, which won the oldest photography competition in the world PhotoSpiva, judged that year by a representative from the Chicago Museum of Photography. The Missouri Tourism Board commissioned our second photonovel The Joplin Undercurrent that year.
What is this substack about?
I write about how to be better.
Not how to be more skilled or specialized. How — and why — to be a better human being.
In the film, literature, music, and science I create — as well as in the film, literature, music, and science I digest — I seek the highest. I seek the best ethical acts and most heroic moments of virtue in my fellow humans. I seek the most beautiful moments of sublime encounter with both the everyday and the otherworldly. I see the truest total truth within a given historical moment, including hours.
I don’t want to be or follow a great man. I want to be and follow a good one.
In terms of subject matter, that means I cover a broad swath of human experience. But that’s because this substack isn’t about a subject, but a perspective. I share my words and lend my voice to try to help people think cleverer, feel deeper, and act truer.
I believe that art should not merely entertain or sell product. I believe art should cause us to change our minds, soften our hearts, and motivate our activism to be true and good. Same with the sciences and manual arts. And therefore artists manual and fine alike — as well as all out thought thinkers — should not seek first to be richer, smarter, sexier, cooler, more relevant, more tech savvy, or more powerful. They must seek to be better and to make things that will make others better: this — virtue — is the soul of true renown and is my one and only goal with all of my work.
Sometimes I do this through wholistic trivium: the total logic, grammar, and rhetoric behind my art and sciences and those of others. Other times this happens through large surveys of a field. Still others involve ridiculously specific personal experiences like that time I climbed into a shower naked with an American greywolf.
Who is this substack for?
You.
It’s for those moments you’re feeling reflective right before making something, those moments you’re feeling a little melancholy for something you haven’t experienced or thought in awhile when it comes to beauty or truth or ethics, and it’s for those moments where you want to think and feel a little deeper about some encounter you had with a work of culture. Those reflective moments are pushing you to be more you-i-er.
I hope to help you along that way with what I write and create.
My work should inspire you, push you into a reflective space, and send you out to make what you feel called to make.
Why should you subscribe?
Because my perspective on the virtue of works of culture and thought can only be found here. The folks I pull from are, generally, dead. Or at least obscure. Or at very least, when they’re popular, they’re all unconnected prior to my having written about them. They seem disparate and diffuse until you see the througline. Trust me: if you read and experienced them from the angle I did, you wouldn’t be reading this.
You’d be writing this instead.
As you’re not the one writing this, you’ll want to make sure you’re one of the first one to read and experience it all. It’s a wild ride, but it’s good.
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You’ll be surprised who you encounter in the comments.
