Hello, my name is Geoff Carter. I’m 57 years old, of the generation called X and fitfully proud to belong to the first sociopolitical group identified with a meaningless letter. I am of Puerto Rican descent on my mom’s side; my dad’s lineage is, like, Russian-Jewish-Irish-the Bronx, though given a choice of homeland he’d choose EPCOT. I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, but I left that religion at age 18 and have dealt with the fallout since, first through failed relationships and social awkwardness, and lately through therapy. I’ve made my living as a journalist since the mid-1990s, working at alternative city magazines and Pulitzer-winning newspapers in Seattle and Las Vegas. In fact, I actually live in Las Vegas, unlike most of the people who make their living writing about the place. I share a home in Downtown Vegas with my longtime companda Laura Herbert and our dog Gigi … at least until some other municipality makes us a better offer.
I couldn’t begin to tell you what I intend to do on Substack. Not yet. I think I’m here because I’m not saying what I need to say in the course of my day job. There are multiple guardrails on what I do for the Las Vegas Weekly, some of them institutional, some self-appointed. See, I have the word “editor” in my professional title which, among other things, means “do more with less” and “dude, shut the fuck up.” The writer I was when I began down this road—brash, long-winded, discursive—is sandwiched beneath many accumulated years of editorial process, mellowed age and probably cowardice.
Until recently, I was content with that. But that writer is also the one whose fearlessness and rule-breaking first got me in the door, and then fueled me through those early years while I taught myself how to do the job. Early career Geoff Carter was insecure, reactive and dreadfully naive; he routinely used words he only partially understood, and wore vests with cutoff jeans. But I was always serious. I always, always wanted to get better at what I do.
When I was hired out of SCOPE Magazine into the Greenspun company in May 1996, I half-believed that I had pulled one over on them. My CV had no college worth the mention. I’d had a byline in SCOPE for just over two years—several bylines, actually; I also wrote under a half-dozen pseudonyms, including Crystal Dynamic and Iggy Squeeze-Vomit—but my day job, my real job, was buying up used CDs at Record City and Disc-Go-Round. I suspected they’d hired me because I was prolific (six other bylines), and still young enough to have good habits beaten into me. It never occurred to me that they liked my writing, and that they wanted me apply it more broadly—to interviews, long reads, editorials, newsgathering. It took me years to figure out that I could transform the navel-gaze voice I employed on stuff like The Passenger into a populist voice that still sounded like me, but kept the me me me out of it.
I’ve never believed myself successful as a writer and I’m not likely to anytime soon. (No, I didn’t neglect to mention my impostor syndrome in the introduction. I couldn’t find a spot to squeeze it in organically.) But from time to time, people have approached me to say that something I once wrote had meaning to them. Nine times out of ten it’s something I’ve forgotten that I wrote, but they held on to it, referred to it, dwelled on what it meant. I take it as a message for that other writer, the one I buried in the garden. My younger self wrote from his heart, from his soul—what I used to call “the underneath stuff.” Didn’t edit himself; he just wrote and wrote and wrote, trusting another editor to make it fit and cohere. Today, I’m wasting that florid, largely filterless writing on Twitter and its clones, and I don’t need to tell you why that’s fucking dumb.
So, let us Substack, savage reader. I’m mildly jealous of the creative freedom that Substack has afforded my friend Kim Foster—the James Beard award-winning author of The Meth Lunches and the undefeated best writer on my block—and the laser-focus it has leant my acquaintance Vince Beiser, whose Substack about the materials needed to build a sustainable future, Power Metal, is a compelling must-read. I don’t know what my Substack will be; hell, I don’t even know what to call it. (I took the title of my late-2000s Seattle blog, The Spellout, as my username. But this is unlikely to be Spellout 2.) And I don’t know if this is gonna work—if this is gonna make me want to, y’know, write FR FR. But it’ll busy my mind and maybe salve my soul while I wait, impatiently, for the offers to come in.
Let’s go! We are now substack buddies and I am thrilled I get to read more of you here!!!!!