Introducing coup de feu

in which I finally give in & start a Substack.

Hi there,

I’m Annabel Graham—a writer, editor, creative director and sometime photographer based in Los Angeles. Born and raised in Malibu, California, I also grew up part-time on a sailboat in Brittany, France—hence my undying love of the ocean and all things French—and spent my high school, college, and grad school years on the East Coast (Massachusetts, then New York).

I’ve been writing about arts & culture for over fifteen years—first in a blog I started while studying in Paris (which landed me my first “real” journalism gig, for Autre back in 2011), then for a number of different publications, including Vanity Fair, Vogue, WSJ. Magazine, Bookforum, W, Surface, The Paris Review Daily, The Believer, and BOMB, among others. I’m now the editor-in-chief of The Panafold, a new print-only quarterly magazine celebrating California arts, architecture, design, and culture. I also write short-form literary prose (like this essay in The Sewanee Review), and have been working on my first novel for the past several years (as with most things I care deeply about, it’s a long & winding road).

Editing an arts & culture magazine lights up so many aspects of my soul—my passion for storytelling, visual art, and design; my extroversion and desire to connect; my sincere love of lifting up other artists—but I wanted to create a dedicated space where I could share some of my own more personal, less polished writing. The name of this Substack, coup de feu, is an homage to my college Tumblr (yes, it’s still floating around the Internet, still plastered with my early forays into shooting on 35mm). The phrase means “a gunshot” (literal) or “a sudden flurry of activity” (figurative).

For years, friends have been asking me when I’d make a Substack, and for years, I’ve resisted—perfectionism is a doozy. But perfect is the enemy of good, and I’m working on loosening my grip, sharing more of my messy parts with the world. There’s something joyful and nostalgic about returning to a version of my blogging days, when I created freely, irreverently, and mostly for myself.

There is also the fact that my childhood home in Las Flores Canyon burned to the ground two months ago with decades’ worth of journals, photographs, art, and precious mementos inside—so maybe the creation of this space is, in some sense, a reclamation of what I’ve lost. I might no longer have family photo albums or any physical proof of The Talking Rake, the “book” I wrote and illustrated at age six (only child), but I’m still the person who made it, and the girl in those long-gone images; my mind and soul are still here, still churning.

Some of what you might find here: musings & mini-essays on grief, identity, perception, desire, creativity, containment, mental health, the concept of home, physical and psychological landscapes, language, literature, food, art, design, California, and France. I’ll also throw in a few roundups of my favorite things—what I’m reading, watching, cooking, learning, listening to, lusting over, thinking about.

Thank you for being here.

x Annabel