Dear friend,

For some time, many of you have known Afar through its bags, collections, launches, and occasional commercial updates. Those will remain part of our work. But with A Bag of Stories, we are opening another door.

This is not simply a newsletter about our products. It is a letter from the world behind them: the roads, materials, hands, landscapes, workshops, communities, and forms of intelligence that shape what we make and what we carry.

A letter asks for another kind of attention.

It does not arrive like a feed. It does not demand to be consumed in public, between one image and the next, while the hand is already moving elsewhere. A letter enters more quietly. It waits in an inbox, on a table, inside a folded page. It carries a voice, a place, a reason for writing.

This is why we chose to call this section Letters from Afar.

The name carries two meanings. Afar is the place and the spirit behind our work: a social enterprise rooted in Ethiopia, shaped by materials, travel, craft, and the people who make movement possible. But “afar” also means distance. A letter from afar comes from somewhere beyond the immediate. It crosses space. It takes time. It brings news, but also atmosphere. It tells the reader: something is happening elsewhere, and it may concern you.

A Bag of Stories was created from that distance.

It is a magazine about travel, materials, community, photography, responsible work, and the objects we carry. It follows roads, hands, workshops, local futures, good companies, field notes, and the quiet biographies of things in motion. It begins with Afar, but it opens outward: toward places, makers, landscapes, journeys, and forms of knowledge that deserve more than a quick glance.

Letters from Afar will be the way we stay in touch as the magazine grows.

Sometimes the letter will bring new stories from the site. Sometimes it will offer a reading path: three articles to follow slowly, a photo essay to return to, a field note that opens a larger question. Sometimes it will share what is happening behind the page: a journey being planned, a material being researched, an image being edited, a collaboration beginning to take shape.

It will also leave space for smaller things.

A sentence from the field. A photograph that stayed with us. A note on a maker, a road, a tool, a place, a book, a textile, a question. A signal from the workshop. A trace from the archive. A detail that has not yet become an article but is already asking for attention.

We want this letter to have a slower rhythm. The world already sends too much. Too many updates, too many announcements, too much urgency without depth. We have no interest in adding noise. We will write when there is something worth carrying: a story, an image, an idea, a path through the magazine, a reason to look again.

This matters because attention is part of the work.

A magazine like this cannot be built only through publication. It is built through listening, editing, returning, choosing what to show and what to protect. It is built through the relationship between reader and story. A newsletter can easily become a tool for traffic. We want Letters from Afar to become something more precise: a small editorial bridge between the magazine and the people who follow it. A place where readers are invited in, without being pushed.

There will be no need to read everything. There will be no race to keep up. Each letter will offer a few doors. Enter one. Leave another for later. Follow a thread from a bag to a workshop, from a photograph to a road, from a material to the land that produced it, from a company to the people whose work gives it meaning.

The letter will help us connect these threads.

Because A Bag of Stories is not a collection of isolated posts. It is a map in progress. The themes speak to one another. Journeys lead to materials. Materials lead to hands. Hands lead to work. Work leads to companies. Companies lead to communities. Communities lead back to the roads people take, the objects they carry, and the images that remain.

A letter can move through this map with more freedom than a homepage.

It can pause. It can point. It can say: start here. It can bring an older story back into the light because a new one has changed how we read it. It can gather fragments that would otherwise remain scattered. It can make the magazine feel less like a platform and more like an ongoing conversation.

With a first note. With an open envelope. With the hope that stories can still travel slowly and arrive with care.

Thank you for being among the first readers of A Bag of Stories.

We will send letters from time to time: from the field, from the workshop, from the road, from the page, from Afar. Not to fill your inbox. To keep a thread alive.

And if this letter speaks to you, forward it to someone who may want to read more slowly with us.