We're with the bands

For Project ShaqBox, now is when the rubber meets the road

By Jesse Spector

If you’ve been here all along, you may have forgotten about The Flushing Review, and that’s fine, because there haven’t been any actual posts yet. Something that I’m adjusting to with Willets Pen is that it’s not frantic. I can put ideas aside and actually come back to them later. The pace is slower than I’m used to after 20 years in daily print media… but that’s also the point.

Likewise, the Willets Pen version of Project ShaqBox has thus far had one entry, by Tim Ryder at the end of September. The picture above is not the original Shaquille O’Neal shoebox, but another shoebox I had that was full of cards, and which I’ve now made into — as you see above — dozens of rubber-banded bricks of cards.

I’m sending these cards to writers all over — some you’ve already seen here, some you’ll know from elsewhere, some who will be all new to you — and they’ll write… well, we’ll see, because the idea here, and the way that Project ShaqBox folds into The Flushing Review, is to see what inspiration the writers draw from what they get in the mail. We’re starting with this shoebox of cards, and we’ll go from there. It’s pretty exciting, because having even this vague of a plan puts Willets Pen miles ahead of Twitter, a company that was just bought for $44 billion.

These posts will be paywalled, so that writers have the freedom to try different styles and methods, knowing that they have a supportive audience. But we’ll also be adding to the free rotation, as while I’m sending out hundreds of cards, I also have a whole bunch of 1984 Topps wax packs, and I’m going to start putting together one of my favorite sets of all time — the first one I really remember getting cards from, when I was 3 — and writing about it along the way.

Apologies to any baseball card collectors who are hurt seeing cards bundled with rubber bands, but it’s spiritually the right way to send them off from my collection — just as back in the 1980s, a bunch of cards bound with rubber bands was the equivalent of a grade school wallet (except that I also had a green velcro stegosaurus wallet which ruled).