I’m Tom Beck, a writer from Minnesota. I named this newsletter after the small region in the midwest where I grew up. The Driftless is a unique ecological region that was spared by the glaciers of the last ice age which rendered most of the midwest flat and featureless. The Driftless, however, retained its original character, its “steep hills, forested ridges, deeply carved river valleys, and karst geology with spring-fed waterfalls and cold-water trout streams.”

I want this newsletter to be a small, bizarre, idiosyncratic corner of the internet. Where much of the online discourse has been flattened by relentless quantity over quality, ideological head-nodding, and shameless self-promotion, The Driftless seeks to retain the “steep hills and forested ridges” of a pre-always-online literary world.

Here we believe in:

• Slowness over speed

• Rest over hustle

• Exploration over goals

• Obscurity over fame

• Difficulty over ease

• Failure over success

• Silence over noise

If you agree with this approach, I want you here. Subscribe, comment, introduce yourself. Tell me what you like. Tell me what you want to see.

I’ll tell you what I want to see: the strange, the bizarre, the hard-to-categorize, the heart-felt, the cringe, the rough and messy edges, the failures. I can do my part by offering some of that here.

Welcome to The Driftless.