Who Am I (What’s My Name)?

Armchair Traveler is now Conversation Pieces

Is there any bigger responsibility than naming a person, a pet, a passion project?

I’ve always had a funny relationship with names. Perhaps it’s got something to do with where my own came from: I was born late on a rainy Thursday night, and as family lore has it, my parents named me Rachel. But that lasted for all of a few hours: my mom sent my dad home from the hospital to get some sleep, and when he came back the next morning, he declared, “She’s not a Rachel, she’s a Sarah!” And so it was.

By the time I was in preschool, I’d decided that I was tired of Sarah. My best friend was a little girl named Megan, who lived down the street; I decided that I’d very much like to be called Megan too. I was so convinced that I asked for my 4th birthday cake to say “Happy Birthday Megan.” My parents, hilariously, obliged (and reprised the joke on my 18th birthday).

My naming commitment issues followed me into adulthood. When I brought home a mini goldendoodle puppy in 2021, I assumed his perfect name would be immediately obvious to me. Instead, I waffled for days, a hard deadline - his first vet visit - looming. Was he an Archie? A Murphy? A Mikie?

I thought I’d finally decided on Leo - though something about it still nagged at me, signaling that it wasn’t quite right. And when my grandma made a passing comment that he looked like a teddy bear, I couldn’t unsee it. Ironically, it must have been obvious to anyone but me: years later, even ChatGPT took one look at a photo of him, completely unprompted, and declared “Teddy” his perfect name.

When it came time to name this newsletter, I just couldn’t make up my mind. This problem was part genuine identity crisis - what did I actually want to write about? - and part convenience (was the domain name available and could I afford it?).

Finally, I talked myself out of my spiral: I wanted to write about travel, art, design, interiors, the objects I couldn’t stop thinking about. And travel was the obvious category I wanted to position myself in, right?

After weeks of perseverating and procrastinating, I finally landed on Armchair Traveler. I liked that it felt editorial without being too terribly cheesy. I liked the double entendre: it clearly signaled travel but also - more subtly, perhaps too subtly - interiors. Best of all: it was available on Substack, with a .com domain name that wouldn’t bankrupt me. It was enough to get started.

But Armchair Traveler never quite fit what I actually wanted to build: a newsletter about how art, objects and design reveal places and the people who inhabit them. Before I started writing, I was sure that travel was the dominant frame; the objects I encountered along the way were secondary.

But as I began publishing, I realized that week after week I wanted to start with the objects themselves. I wanted to write about Uzbek tapchans (or bed-tables, as we called them), about hauling a French chandelier home in my carry-on, about the contemporary sculpture that reminded me of my aunt’s jewelry box.

Ironically, my subconscious mind was light years ahead of me: as I was brainstorming new names for Armchair Traveler, I had a faint memory of claiming a couple of other names on Substack. When I logged into my Substack dashboard, I realized the answer had literally been there all along, waiting for me to catch up: Conversation Pieces.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve collected my own conversation pieces: the anthropomorphized concrete planter that my dad instantly dubbed “Henry,” the enormous Dutch marquetry credenza that barely fit up the back steps of my walk-up, the mola textile that I bought from an artisan on a deserted beach in the San Blas archipelago, barefoot and buzzed after a day of island-hopping.

And without realizing it, I’ve been writing about them for the last few months, too: the silk-on-silk suzani that got away, the collection of Alfred Eisenstaedt photos with perfect provenance, the Antonio Santín painting I desperately wanted to reach out and touch.

The spirit of this newsletter has been Conversation Pieces all along - and now, the name is finally catching up.