The reason you have not sent a newsletter in fourteen months is not laziness. It is that at some point you decided a newsletter was a monthly essay, and you were right to refuse.
Almost every teacher who quits sending quits for the same reason. The thing they designed was too big to survive a busy October.
Four a year, and mean it
Here is the version that survives: four emails a year, each one short enough to read standing up, sent at roughly the turns of the season.
Late January, when people are deciding what their year looks like. Just before Easter, when the spring workshops and retreats get planned. Early September, which is the single strongest moment in the whole teaching year because everyone in Europe is reassembling their week. And early December, which is quieter but is when people book things for the new year.
That is it. Four. Nobody unsubscribes from four emails a year, and more importantly, you will still be doing it in 2029.
The instinct is that four is not enough to stay in someone's mind. Test that against your own inbox. You almost certainly remember the two or three people who write to you rarely and well, and have muted everyone who writes weekly. Frequency is not affection. Frequency is mostly noise, and noise is what gets a sender deleted.
There is also a hard practical argument. A schedule you keep for three years produces twelve emails. A monthly schedule you abandon in month five produces five emails, a stale list and a quiet sense of failure every time you open the tool. Twelve beats five.
What a rare email is actually for
Not news. You do not have news, and pretending to have news is how newsletters get boring.
A seasonal email has three jobs and they are all modest.
It reminds someone of your name in a context where they can act on it. It tells them where and when you are teaching right now, because that has almost certainly changed since last time. And it names the one thing coming up that has a date and limited space, if there is one.
That is the whole content. You are not building a publication. You are keeping a thread from breaking.
The shape that works
Open with something you actually noticed, in two or three sentences. Not a teaching, not a quote from Rumi, not a paragraph about the season as metaphor. Something specific from the last three months that a person who was in the room would recognize.
Then the practical block: where you teach, on which days, at which times. Put it in plain lines. Half your readers scroll straight to this and nothing else, and that is a completely reasonable way to read your email.
Then one thing with a date, if you have one. One. Two options is a decision and people postpone decisions.
Then stop. The instinct to add a playlist, a pose of the month, a book you loved and a note about your teacher training is the instinct that kills the whole project, because next time you will have to do all of it again.
Subject line: say the contents. "Autumn classes, and a Saturday in November" gets opened. "A note from the mat" does not.
A real one
This is what one looks like in full. It takes eleven minutes to write.
Subject: September classes, and a workshop on the 16th
Hi,
The Thursday class has been unusually full since the summer, which I think is because it got dark early and people want somewhere to be. I have changed almost nothing about it except that we are spending more time at the start now, ten minutes on the floor before anything else. Several of you have said it is the only ten minutes of your week where nobody wants anything from you. That seems worth keeping.
Where I am teaching this autumn:
Thursdays 18:30, Ost, Kastanienallee. Every week until Christmas. Saturdays 10:00, Studio Nord. Every week except the 25th. Tuesdays 07:30, Nord, from October. Early and quiet.
One thing with a date: Saturday 16 November, 14:00 to 17:00, backs and shoulders. Three hours, twelve people, at Ost. It is the workshop I ran in March that filled in a week, so if you want a place, reply to this email and I will hold one for you. 45 euros.
If your body has been doing something odd and you want a pair of eyes on it, I have Wednesday afternoons free for one-to-ones this term.
That is everything. See you on a Thursday.
Anna
Two hundred and forty words. It has a real observation, a schedule someone can act on, one dated thing with a reason to reply, and a soft mention of the other work. Nobody dreads it, because there is nothing in it to dread.
Notice what is absent. No apology for not writing sooner. No "hope this finds you well". No image that takes four seconds to load. No paragraph explaining what the newsletter is.
Reply, do not click
"Reply to this email and I will hold one for you" outperforms a booking link for a small workshop, most of the time, and it is worth understanding why.
It is one action instead of four. It works for a person reading in bed. It produces an actual conversation, which is where the questions get answered that would otherwise be a silent no. And the replies tell you something a click never does, because people write two sentences about why they want to come.
The trade is that you have to handle the replies yourself, and hold places on trust. For twelve spots that is fine. For sixty it is not, and then you use a link.
Write it in one sitting or not at all
The whole thing should take under twenty minutes. If it takes an afternoon, the format is wrong and you will not do it again.
A method that works: on the day, open a blank message and write the schedule block first, because it is pure information and requires no courage. Then the dated thing. Then go back and write the opening paragraph last, when the email already exists and you are just adding two sentences to the top.
Most people do the reverse, sit staring at an empty first line trying to find a voice, and give up. Start with the boring part.
Send it in the morning on a weekday. Do not send it at 22:00 on Sunday, which is when teachers do their admin and when nobody reads anything.
What to do about the fact that nobody replies
Some emails get five replies and some get none, and none means very little. People read and do nothing and then turn up to your class in February. That is a success, and it is invisible.
Do not chase it. Do not send a follow-up because the first one was quiet. The chasing email is the one that makes people unsubscribe, because it is the first message you have sent that is obviously about your needs rather than theirs.
Look at one thing only: whether the room in September has people in it who were not there in June. That is what the email is for.
Which tool, and how little it matters
Teachers lose weeks to this question. It is genuinely the least important decision in the whole thing.
Any of the standard email tools will do everything you need: hold a few hundred addresses, put an unsubscribe link at the bottom that works, and stop your message being classed as spam. The free tier of most of them covers a list this size comfortably. Pick one in twenty minutes, on the basis that the writing screen does not annoy you, and never think about it again.
Two things not to do. Do not send it from your own inbox with everyone in the bcc field, because there is no working unsubscribe and eventually you will slip and put four hundred addresses in the to field. And do not build the email out of images or a template with six blocks and a header photo, because it will look like marketing before anyone reads a word, and the whole point of this thing is that it does not.
Plain text, sent from your name, reads as a person. That is the entire design brief.
The one to write now
Open a message and write the schedule block. Where you teach, days, times, until when.
If you send nothing but that, four times a year, you have a newsletter, and it is already better than the beautiful monthly one you have been not writing since last spring.