🚀 Update from Laurin 🚀

She's finally doing the thing. And she's writing this heading and subheading about it in third-person.

Hey, Y’all —

You’re receiving this message because you signed up for this email list like a million years ago. You probably forgot about it because I haven’t sent any emails!

Publishing a newsletter is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’ve dragged my feet, though, because I’m a scaredy-cat. Am I ready to make such a commitment? Where do I even start? What if I fail?

Dumb questions and fears paralyze me. But there’s so much stuff I want to write and share, so I decided to forget aspirations of a grand launch for this effort and just start writing and pressing the “Publish” button. 

And with that, Kudzu News is born. I don’t know what it’s going to turn into yet, and it will probably evolve as I figure out what works and what doesn’t. Please send me feedback — especially critical feedback. (But no need to make me cry or anything. I already know I ought to fix my hair and wear lipstick, Mama!)

What am I going to write about? At the moment, I’m obsessing over Governor Henry McMaster’s decision to dedicate $32 million to kickstarting a controversial private school voucher program. That’s the bulk of South Carolina’s share of federal money designated for governors to allocate for addressing schools’ emergency needs arising from the Coronavirus pandemic. This is what I’ll focus on in the first few “real” emails following this one. 

If you think the voucher stuff is a total snooze-fest, please stick around for a little while longer. I promise these emails won’t be all boring policy pontification. There will be a gracious plenty chickens and dogs and boiled peanuts too.  

Thank you for joining me here, and thank you for your readership. If you’d like to support this effort with more than just your eyeballs, I’ve set up paid subscriptions too. For a while I’ll send everybody on the list everything anyway, but the goal is to make this newsletter … and perhaps its eventual podcast sister … so awesome that it’s worth a few bucks a month. I figure I’ve gotta prove that to you first, though.

I look forward to your feedback, questions, “news” tips, and whatever else you want to send my way. Thanks again, y’all. This is going to be fun. 

From the Pee Dee with Love,

Laurin