About Kate Tyson & Wanderwell
I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I'm trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks. —Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hello. I’m Kate Tyson (née Strathmann)
I am an artist, advisor to small business leaders, writer and deep thinker specializing in subversive ideas. Originally from Philadelphia, I currently (most of the time) call the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont home along with my partner Kha and overly-opinionated dog Josie.
Through Wanderwell, I advise business leaders alongside a small team of expert number wranglers (aka, bookkeepers). This newsletter is my writing home and, while part of the Wanderwell world, also a container for thinking beyond business advice.
My work in the world, if I were to boil it all down like maple sap1, is about understanding systems and changing them. About digging underneath the current paradigms to uncover new ones. Often called gently challenging in my approach, I aspire to help people to think differently and ask world-altering questions.
Since my “day job” is at the helm of a small business advisory practice, I situate most of my systems change work within the broad fields of economics and business. This wasn’t an expected path for a young person who has since birth identified as an artist with a rebellious streak, nor for someone who prefers words to numbers! But here we are.
I do, however, come from a family of entrepreneurs and my brain loves systems. It turns out that business finance is more about relationships than math. And that business and economics can provide a meaningful way to channel anarchistic political views and an artist practice.
I write for people who want to think about business more humanely, radically, and collectively. Who hunger for a different kind of exchange that does not demand profit and growth as its sole focus, but instead centers justice, equity, and deep care.
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update. Wanderings are not published on any particular schedule. Sometimes you may hear from me weekly, other times, many weeks may pass.
About Wanderwell
Wanderwell is my consulting and bookkeeping practice that grows thriving small businesses, while investigating new models for being in business. Wanderwell integrates financial expertise with an empathic, vision-forward approach, and leads with the belief that businesses can help create a new paradigm that centers people, community, and the environment.
I have worked with hundreds of business leaders to build supportive, successful businesses that care for humans. Wanderwell’s financial services team provides bookkeeping and accounting services that are strategically grounded and geared towards sane, day to day decision making.
Learn more about working with Wanderwell here.
What’re Boss Talks?
This is a "section” of writing and conversations providing more practical wisdom for leaders and owners of businesses. (More on subscribing & unsubscribing from sections here.)
While I write and think expansively about systems change, my ‘day job’ is advising small business leaders and entrepreneurs, and I believe in grounding the big picture, visionary, and radical thinking in praxis. I don’t deign to know what folks will be interested in reading about, but this section includes more practical advice, and may be mostly of interest to those that can readily apply it.
What’re Whiskey Fridays?
A podcast where an experienced lawyer and consultant get together, drink, and tell you what we really think.
My dear friend and legal colleague John Gerber and I started holding “Whiskey Fridays” as office neighbors a number of years ago, gathering to sip whiskey and talk business and life. Sometimes we invited other folks. We share a humanist view of business and have worked with many of the same clients over the years.
Deeper back, Fridays were originally Whiskey Wednesdays, a ritual from the first commune I lived in involving clothing optional cooking. Pour me one, neat, and I’ll tell you that story sometime.
So let’s just say the name is a nod to subversive communalism, rituals around comradery, and our favorite spirit.
A Note on Paid Subscriptions
I currently send all writing and interviews to all subscribers. Since one of my own core, essential practices is to never publish on a schedule, I also don’t want to set up expectations that you, dear reader, will receive writing on the regular; for me that would degrade the quality of my thinking and writing significantly, and it’s just not necessary!
That said! I am so grateful to all of you who do choose to support. Paid subscriptions receive downloads of all zines and experimental publications (currently published roughly quarterly), including previously published work, and can comment with abandon.
Additionally, Zine Club subscribers receive physical copies of publications as they are released. Hand bound by yours truly, and mailed to your home address.
Which is to say, over hours and hours, usually with a community and a bottle of some libation to pass. The ratio of maple sap to maple syrup is something like 40:1.
