The thing about journalism training is that it never leaves you. It doesn’t matter that you now work in a glassy corporate office, that you haven’t lugged around a broadcast camera or filed a story in years. It moulds the way you see things, permanently implanting a radar for stories into your brain.

And so, I have always been thinking and seeing in stories. Over time, a particular breed of these stories arranged themselves into a pattern stretching across time and space. My aunt practicing yoga over Zoom. The good morning messages my uncle sends on WhatsApp. The ancestral recipes that morphed to keep up with the times, a veritable Ship of Theseus on my kitchen shelf. They all said to me: we are constantly translating our cultural inheritance.

I guess that answers the first question about why I’m starting an independent publication: I could write about all of these myself, but I don’t want to. To monopolise this theme would be an injustice; there is the pull of stories flitting about in other people’s heads, waiting for a chance to be put down and committed to our collective memory.

Reason number two is, of course, that there can’t be enough publications in the world. The return to long-form writing and reading is heartening. It feels like wresting back control from platforms that monopolise our data and force-fit our expansive selves into their neatly defined pixel grids. It feels like reclamation.

I’ve decided to call it Patina, inspired by the scores of brass vessels aging gracefully in my parents’ home.

The crux of this independent online publication in its initial form is that “something is only lost if it falls out of our collective memory”. I love that it is expansive, and creates a home for stories across food, heritage, rituals, history, craft, memoir, celebrations, community, objects, and travel. I hope for Patina to be a space where writers and documentarians record culture and identity in flux, in a mix of personal memoir and reportage. Publication will happen in quarterly volumes, and each volume will be centred on a theme that is open enough for creative interpretation. The first volume will be out on June 1st.

In my head, the ideal Patina story is focused on how cultural practices evolve and adapt, reveals overlooked details or connections and has a clear contemporary relevance. A story would qualify if it explores:

• How traditions find new contexts

• Ways communities maintain cultural connections

• Adaptation of practices to modern life

• Evolution of spaces and objects

• Personal yet well-researched narratives of cultural continuity

You can read more about Patina's editorial vision and the kinds of stories we hope to tell in the concept note.

I hope to build Patina in public: to inspire others to start something similar, keep myself accountable, and revel in the spirit of experimentation.

Now comes the exciting (and daunting) part:

Bringing Patina to life

Some of my immediate next steps are building the actual website for these stories, finding writers who share this vision of cultural documentation, drawing in readers who care about how living heritage and how traditions evolve, and setting up systems to make this sustainable (I have so many plans!). This is a one-woman show for now, and will probably remain that way for a while.

If you’d like to help compensate contributors fairly, please contribute any amount you can via Buy Me a Coffee.

You can also support Patina by:

• signing up for updates and pitch calls on readpatina.com,

• following the journey on Instagram (@readpatina), and

• sharing this note with writers who might be interested

My heart is thumping with anticipation at the idea of starting something of my own—an experiment in the great philosophy of You Can Just Do Things. I cannot wait to see what shape Patina will take over time. Stay tuned!