When Rebekah Moran was growing up in Florida, her grandmother in Woodstock always mailed her a handful of leaves after they changed color in the fall. As a result, her love of snail mail runs deep.
Now, the tables have turned. Grandma lives in Florida and Moran has happily settled in Cornwall, with her husband Mike and two young kids. They moved to the region in 2022 to be near Mike’s parents, after stints in New York City, San Francisco, and even a short one in Utah. “Cornwall has so much natural beauty and is still very accessible to the city,” Moran says. “The Hudson Valley has been a great fit for us.”
As she went about establishing roots in the area, Moran found herself feeling inspired by food writers and cookbook authors, including HV cognoscente Julia Turshen. The couple appreciates the bounty of local farms and the vibrant culinary scene and enjoys hanging out in the kitchen. “I think home cooking can be both romanticized and dreaded, even at all different levels of skill and experience,” says Moran. “I had this idea that I wanted to explore what it’s like to cook at home here in the Valley.”
I thought if I created something delightful in print that felt a little homemade, and kept it brief, I could find people who wanted to get it in the mail. I created the thing I would want to get.
Soon, the idea of a newsletter was simmering in her brain. For a tech-savvy Google alum, with substantial experience advising the mighty search engine’s high-profile advertisers, creating a digital product would have made sense. But by her own admission, Moran did not have a sizable social media following to use as a springboard and didn’t think she had enough visibility to make a go at a Substack. “It’s not that I wasn’t confident in myself,” she says. “I just didn’t think it was my best foot forward. It’s hard for me to even keep up with digital newsletters that I actually want to read.” Nostalgia for the look and feel of paper—think old-school zines—entered her internal chat. “I thought if I created something delightful in print that felt a little homemade, and kept it brief, I could find people who wanted to get it in the mail,” Moran recalls. Her mentors encouraged her. “Finally, one day, I just sat down and started writing,” she says. “I created the thing I would want to get.”
She named her passion project Passing Notes, in honor of a private notebook she shared with two friends in middle school. “When it was your turn, you’d get to read the previous entries and add your own,” Moran wrote in her first editor’s letter. “It was our own primitive form of social media.” The first issue, published last summer, went to friends via mail or personal hand-off. Bolstered by positive feedback, Rebekah made a sweetly funny video to introduce the newsletter on her Instagram (@rebekah_ny). As she started to gain steam, she posted more about it on Insta, TikTok, and LinkedIn. To her joy, people started to subscribe. Fall, Winter, and Spring issues followed. Publishing seasonally is her goal, both in terms of managing the workload and absorbing costs, since this labor of love is entirely self-funded and free to subscribers.
Content thus far has included seasonal recipes, cookbook reviews, tech hacks for sourcing and storing recipes, and a detailed rundown of her food buying habits, which include a CSA membership, the Beacon and Cornwall farmers’ markets, and a regular rotation of grocery runs to Adams Fairacre Farms in Newburgh, Target, ShopRite, and BJs. Simple, charming photos round things out. Moran handles the entire soup-to-nuts process of writing, designing, and distributing on her own. “I don’t always know what I’m doing but I’m figuring it out,” she says. “My 4-year-old sometimes helps me add stamps and drop envelopes in the box at the post office.”
Each print run costs a few hundred dollars and comfortably covers Moran’s mailing list plus some extra copies, including inventory to stock a few local businesses in Cornwall and Kingston. Right now she has no plan to cap her mailing list, but she does acknowledge that at some point, paper and postage costs may necessitate sponsorship or some sort of paid subscription model. Still, she wants to keep it as accessible as possible. “I’d love to create a revenue stream in the future so I can continue [this],” she says. In the meantime, she intends to evolve and refine the newsletter alongside her budding marketing consultancy, Creative Lady Studio. (Services include brand strategy, content management, and partnerships development.)
“Cooking is one of my joys, a way to treat yourself and others better than they expect,” she wrote in the Winter issue. “Let’s notice where joy comes from, and help be a source of joy when it’s possible.”
To get on the mailing list, go to creativelady.co and click on Newsletter Sign Up.
