How to be in two places at once

Homemade Newspaper is the story of my life in a Connecticut forest and Los Angeles. I’m Mark Gozonsky, a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times — known for playing tennis on every public tennis court in LA County — and a retired high school English teacher with three pairs of overalls, two straw hats, and one chainsaw.

Free subscribers to Homemade Newspaper get a friendly newsletter approximately once a month, exploring healthy obsessions such as growing Mexican corn in New England, reading Dostoevsky in the summertime, and forming a Stereolab cover band.

Paid subscribers get the newsletter plus the quarterly print edition. The first issue is out right now, featuring an essay on learning how to wield a scythe and an appreciation of lawn plants I swerve around on my riding mower. I love how the issue came out, after five straight days of waking up at 5:30 in the morning due to excitement about producing an actual newspaper you can hold in your hands.

If what you really want is just the newspaper by itself, you can get it for $10.

Premium subscribers a/k/a Grupo de Gozo get all the above, plus an extra-big feeling of saying Heck Yeah to this enterprise, examplified by your first piece of infinitely rare Grupo de Gozo swag — an 8x10 color print of a psychological deer fence by my mom, the artist Dee Gozonsky. A psychological deer fence is when you surround a garden with birch branches to make deer think it’s a birch thicket with nothing good to eat in there so don’t even bother. Currently I am using a psychological deer fence to protect my crop of cacahuazintle, tomatillos, and flor de junio beans.

It works!

Being in Grupo de Gozo wins you a perpetual bounty of gifts representative of woodland-meadow-LA togetherness. A bounty is not just one thing. So let’s get you my mom’s watercolor as well as something complely different:

a totemic 45 vinyl record mounted on an ash log from my forest.

Round meets round, in a groove.

It’s a celebration of unlike things fitting together, just like Homemade Newspaper.