The Table is Set

trying to make a living through creative pursuits

Hi, Emily here of Next Dinner Party. I write to you from Washington DC, where I live, and from Substack, where my new writing will live. I hope you’ll consider supporting that writing, and by extension, me.

In 2012 I had just married a diplomat and moved to Yemen when I started a blog, The Next Dinner Party, and I kept that blog going for 13 years from all the other places I lived like New York City, Madrid, Jerusalem, Morocco, and Algeria. If you’d like to get a taste of my style so you can know what to expect if you pay for a subscription, these are some of my favorite blog posts I’ve written:

• Washington DC is the Paris of America, 2024

• On Saying the Wrong Thing, 2023

• A Bucket and a French Fry Omelette, 2021

• A Glimpse into Jerusalem’s Ultra-Orthodox Neighborhoods, 2018

• A Post in Which I Overuse the Term ‘Passion’, 2012

Life is, you know, life-ing, and things are different now and times have changed etc. etc. I’m no longer married, for one. I’m back living in America for the foreseeable future. It’s a wildly exciting time. I’m enthusiastically and open heartedly following all signs that will lead me through this next part of my life, which feels like the start of a really deliciously creative time. My urge to create is stronger that ever. Proof: I got “create” tattooed on my inner arm last year. But no, the real proof is the life I’ve created being back in my spiritual hometown of DC. It’s filled with deep conversations, delightfully quirky new friends, dinner parties, arty parties, epiphanies at solo concerts, planning what I’ll write on hikes in Rock Creek Park, getting a great color scheme idea for a design project whilst at an art museum or a pattern idea on the Metro. It’s reaching for my hot pink highlighter to mark a totally brilliant passage in a book I’m reading on my chaise and in my excitement, spilling my perfect slightly dirty gin martini (I’m not kidding you, I shake up the best martini in town).

And then it’s sharing all of these stories with the hopes others will find my way of life-ing inspiring, or at least interesting.

If you subscribe to my Next Dinner Party substack newsletter, you’d be reading my thoughts on literature, my own creative writing practice, art, interior design, architecture, culture, current events, life Washington DC, entertaining, cocktails, fashion, music, television, and more. And if that still sounds boring, lemme tell you: It’s also a sexy time of life for me. And I’m a loudmouth. So might I lure you by saying if you pay to subscribe to Next Dinner Party, you’ll be privy to learning why I think younger men are the bee’s knees and perhaps I’ll tell you the one thing they all comment on about “older women”?

My blog The Next Dinner Party is not going anywhere. It’s been constant for me for so long and in a couple of years of so much change, I'd not be ready to bid it adieu. I’ll still post essays on my blog from time to time but what I want to do now is a more frequent “newsletter” type dealy on a bigger range of topics. I am a writer. I am an interior designer. I am a brand, to some extent. (And the new home for my entire brand is Next Dinner Party, which also houses my blog archive). I hope for all of these creative pursuits to be income-generators (hate to use the word “jobs”) and none of these — design, writing, creating community — is independent of the others. It’s all creating things that didn’t exist before.

I call my brand Next Dinner Party because of a Gabrielle Hamilton essay in which she says that whatever happens, and whatever goes wrong at a dinner party, there’s always the promise of another great evening filled with conversation and good food and togetherness. I embodied that ethos in the decade-plus I spent packing up and moving to a new country every few years: Always there was a new community to build and new friends to have over for a wonderful evening party. And I’m continuing on the Next Dinner Party mindset here on Substack with this newsletter. There are so many warm and welcoming and wonderful things that are yet to be served. The table is set. You’re invited.