Small Gold Objects?
A name, a noticing, a north star...
Choosing a name for this Substack newsletter took us a while.
In February of 2025, Sophie, Raghav, Emma, and I—the OMC crew—each came up with long lists of potential titles. Emma then tossed them all into a central document, scrambled up, so we wouldn’t know whose was whose. After that, we didn’t rush. We let it sit for a while. We relaxed into the process, leaving the list metaphorically simmering on a back burner. Occasionally, one of us would stumble upon something in the world that inspired a new candidate and add it to the list, but mostly, it just sat there.
As the list simmered, I reviewed it every so often. There were plenty I liked, but Small Gold Objects was the one I kept coming back to. It felt like the moments when I find a smooth beach stone in the bottom of my jeans pocket: startled at first because I’ve forgotten about it, and yet pleased to rediscover it. Of all the stones on the beach, I’d once chosen that particular one to pick up and hold onto, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. Rediscovering the stone, I realized I still liked it all over again.
It was odd, in a way.
To be honest, the list contained better titles. Ones that were mightier. More arresting, or more declarative. Titles that clearly represented what this newsletter is about and what OMC does.
But Small Gold Objects... I don’t know! When I read that phrase, it makes me feel strong and calm. “Small gold objects” could mean anything. Flecks of glitter caught in a floorboard. The small cubes of pyrite I once discovered shining in a dull driveway. The one-of-a-kind photo fob that my husband inherited from his grandfather and that, later, in a small tragedy, was stolen from him.
Less literally—and more writerly—a small gold object might be that perfect verb you happen to stumble upon and later use with great success in a poem; or a vignette you witness, which turns out to be the perfect opening to an essay. It could even be something ironic—a detail in one of your stories that’s not at all lovely or shiny in a conventional sense, yet because it was so closely inspected and respected by you as a writer, it becomes a small gold object for readers. Something remembered. Something valued.
It was Sophie who put Small Gold Objects on our collective list. According to her, she did so rather randomly. She found those three words buried in the middle of a sentence written by the Chicago writer Saul Bellow. In Henderson the Rain King, Bellow’s disillusioned protagonist gazes up at the stars and in a sudden revelation, realizes that, although to him, the stars appear as small gold objects, they’re actually something else entirely—distant, gigantic orbs of fire, gas, and energy.
By Jill Riddell
Illustration by Sophie Lucido Johnson
Small Gold Objects is the newsletter of the Office of Modern Composition, a Chicago-based writing studio that both makes compositions and fosters composers. To learn more about the compositions we make (like our podcast on nature and cities, The Shape of the World) and the work we do, visit our website.
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I love this! I have a shiny marble in the pocket of my black puffy that I picked up in a vacant lot in Sedona after a morning hot-air balloon ride with three long-time girlfriends. "Make new friends, but keep the old..." (you know the rest). We hung around to watch the partial eclipse that followed, sharing our black solar glasses with others so that we could all enjoy the tiny fleck of dark gold that was the sun.
That Sophie...leave it to her to discover a title with heart. And Jill, kudos for your telling of the Origin Story, written with heart. I'm loving the collaborative offerings of the OMC!