The Things Not Named

“That's what a storyteller's job is. What do you relay and what do you withhold? And frankly, that's the chronic illness storyteller's mode as well. What am I going to tell this doctor in front of me and what am I going to withhold?”Dr. Michael Stein, author of “A Living: Working-Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor”Michael Stein is a physician, a health policy researcher, and author of 15 books — six novels and nine books of nonfiction. He’s currently Chair and Professor of health law, policy, and management at the Boston University School of Public Health and has also taught at Brown University. Michael is a frequent contributor to The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and the New York Times. He’s also been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air and in O Magazine. In his spare time, he is Executive Editor of the Public Health Post.Below is an edited transcript of our conversation on Substack Live.Transcript:Joshua Dolezal:Welcome back to The Things Not Named. I’m Joshua Dolezal, and my guest today is Dr. Michael Stein.Willa Cather famously said that it’s the presence of the thing not named that gives high quality to fiction, drama, and poetry. So this year I’m asking that question of medicine. How might we all be more attentive to what goes unsaid in the clinic, in popular culture, and in the experience of illness from the patient’s side?Michael’s recent book addresses that question because he’s giving voice to a lot of people who normally don’t get to tell their story in popular culture or in medicine, so that’ll be a treat today. Michael is a physician, a health policy researcher, and author of 15 books — six novels and nine books of nonfiction. He’s currently Chair and Professor of health law, policy, and management at the Boston University School of Public Health and has also taught at Brown University. Michael is a frequent contributor to The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and the New York Times. And he’s also been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air and in O Magazine. In his spare time, he’s also the executive editor of the Public Health Post.Welcome, Michael. Thanks for joining me today.Michael Stein:Josh, thanks for having me. This is great.Joshua Dolezal:I want to get to your latest book, A Living, which you’ve modeled after Studs Terkel’s classic, Working. But first, I’ve talked with almost everyone on this series about craft and how they think of themselves as a writer. And I’d kind of like to start with when you first started thinking of yourself as a writer, what some of your formative influences were, any significant mentors you had that shaped you as a writer.What’s your origin story?Michael Stein:Right, great. Thanks again for having me. So my origin story is — I think the first book that influenced me as a quasi-adult was in my 20s when I read a biography of Robert Lowell. And I thought that was just a fascinating life. And he was obviously a poet primarily, and I was writing poems at that point. And I spent many years doing poetry, which I published all over the place, and came into contact with the famous editor Gordon Lish, who had reached out to me and asked me to send things to his magazine. So I started to send some things to a journal that he was running called The Quarterly. And so I wrote a lot of poems early on.At the same time, around then I had done some work as a journalist, which was not creative writing but an important kind of writing. I had done that in college and I thought of doing a career — I sort of reached the fork of do I do medicine or do I do journalism? And so, of course, being who I am, I chose both. I ended up going to medical school and was still sort of writing journalism pretty much through medical school. I paid for medical school working as a journalist for Nature magazine and went to occasional medical school classes. And I was writing a lot of poetry. Then years passed and I had children, and I started one night — when I was up feeding children in the middle of the night — to write fiction. I wrote six novels, published six novels over the next number of years. And then along the way, I just decided to come and try to start writing about medicine directly. So I went back to writing nonfiction about medicine.My writings have gone all over the place since then. As you said, I’ve written a lot of books — six novels, eight books of nonfiction — and they range from my recent book, A Living, to more straightforward essays, to public health arguments. I wrote a book called Me Versus Us, which explains to people the difference between public health and practicing medicine, because I now work in a public health school.So I’ve flittered.Joshua Dolezal:Well, so coming back to nonfiction is actually coming back to your roots. And I think I had it wrong — I thought you’d started as a fiction writer and then sort of came to nonfiction later. But it sounds like the essay form, personal form, and your journalistic training was really the foundation.Michael Stein:Yes, I think so. But very different, obviously, from journalism. I’ve always taken my nonfiction to be — having gotten to it really through fiction — a more creative form than I ever considered journalism, which I considered a public service as opposed to my personal writing. So a little different.Joshua Dolezal:Here’s an unfair question, and it probably differs because I know you’ve published 400 scholarly articles too, and all these modes are very different. But when you’re thinking more in the literary sense in nonfiction, or perhaps even in fiction, how do you know good writing when you see it? When you hear about craft, what does that mean to you when you’re making decisions in your writing process?Michael Stein:Well, I would have to say it’s a great question, and I probably see what you’re calling good writing differently at different times in my life. I think what I’ve considered good or enjoyable or meaningful to me — I’ve read different things at different times where, when I went back to reread, they didn’t appeal to me in the ways that they had the first time, which is telling me that I probably have a bit of a shifting view. Having written novels, I became much less interested, for instance, in writing — and therefore stopped writing — naturalistic literary fiction. It just wasn’t so interesting to me as a form anymore. It’s not to say that I don’t like stories, but for the moment, I’ve probably read over the past 10 years, when I pretty much stopped writing fiction, fewer novels than I read in the first 20 years when I was writing fiction. It would take a lot unless the fiction I was reading had something experimental or interesting to me. So technical format changes interest me.But I think what’s a satisfying read — which is sort of what you’re asking me at the moment — depends on my goal of what I’m reading it for. Is it just pleasure or is it something that I’m interested in because it’s a subject I’m thinking of writing about and I want to see the lay of the land?But in general, I think like everybody else, I’m interested in tension. I’m interested in pathos. I’m interested in some investment in a character or in solving a mystery. I’m interested in the theme, which is probably what’s going to draw me to something in the first place. And I’m interested in variation.And as I said, usually these days I’ve been interested in technical questions. So all of my books, as you’ve read, have slightly different forms. I try to ask myself different technical questions, which I think I did when I was writing fiction as well. Can I write a mystery and can I write it from backward to forward? I would ask myself these things and then try to set out to do them. So I think I’ve bounced around both in what I consider satisfying and therefore what I consider good. I don’t know that there is a single “good” for me.Joshua Dolezal:Well, I guess we’re all hopefully evolving — we’re not stuck in our sensibility. But so the book we’re talking about today, A Living: Working Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor, is really kind of unique stylistically for your books. I had my suspicions as I was reading it and then discovered in your closing that you did, in fact, intentionally style it after Studs Terkel’s classic oral history, Working, which I think was published in 1974 — people talk about what they do all day. And so in this kind of form, you’re not doing the typical thing that a nonfiction writer does, which is act as a friend to the reader, as Henry James said, as a guide that frames things, contextualizes things, analyzes things. You do that a little bit around the edges. But really, this is a book where your patients tell their own stories in their own voices, much more like a curated or edited oral history form.So I’m curious why you chose that style. What about Terkel’s project felt necessary for you now to revive? And why is your voice so absent from this book compared to all the others?Michael Stein:So let’s put the Terkel comparison and the absence aside for a second and just give you my context for this book. A Living came out in 2025. Four years ago, I wrote a related book with a related structure called Broke. And Broke was similarly about talking to patients about money. So I’m a primary care doctor. I work in an inner city and I see people who are broke. That’s the primary focus of my work. The patient group I’m best known for is taking care of people with HIV or people with addictions. So I’ve naturally grown to populations that are vulnerable and generally poor. And people were just talking to me all the time about money. It was just a constant part of our conversations. And I just thought, nobody writes about how money influences the lives of people.And so here enters two things with Broke. One is I’m in a public health school — poverty is the primary driver of public health in the United States, so there’s a political angle for me. Number two is to go back to your earlier question: I used to write poetry. So I’m drawn to short forms and pith and adjacency of people talking about things that are bouncing from here to there. And like poems, or poetry books in general, I sort of believe in accumulation — which is, while poets will tell you they write books and spend a lot of time organizing their individual poems into some order, the truth is you can dip in and out of a poetry book on any page. The order usually doesn’t matter to the reader. It matters much more to the writer. But what the writer wants, I think, at the end of any of these accumulated books — which I consider Broke and A Living to be its ancestor — is accumulation. They want a sort of overall powerful impact.Okay, so that’s the context. A Living came from Broke. The population of having no money turns out to be, in our world, a population that does manual labor. So a lot of my patients talked about their work, and they do physical work. And I thought, no one ever writes about physical work. And along came — interestingly — two things I wasn’t aware of when I started to write the book.One is that we would have a MAGA movement, which has strong feelings about physical work, and that was an important dimension I didn’t see coming. And the other part I didn’t see coming is what AI would mean, which I think is going to have a profound impact on what we mean by work. And then I happened to read that it was Studs Terkel’s Working 50th anniversary. So I thought, I can get my book out in time to mark his 50th anniversary. So that’s the context — it was sort of a follow-up to Broke, it was a topic that had both health and political interest to me, it was meant to be poetic in its accumulated format, and it happened to fall on the 50th anniversary. So those things are what led me to write A Living.So let me answer the final part of your question, unless you want to interrupt. The other part you asked is why I’m absent. Is there something else you want to ask first, or should I just keep talking?Joshua Dolezal:No, let’s finish that. I mean, I understand you want normal people to tell their own story. These are voices that fit my series — these are the things not named, the people not named. They get these perfunctory social histories. Since the 70s, there’s supposedly been a biopsychosocial method used, but a lot of times it feels perfunctory. You ask a few questions to fill in the section on the chart, but you’re taking a much deeper dive into personal lives that you see as really intellectually linked to health. And so I assume that’s one of the reasons why you pulled yourself back — just to let the reader connect more of those dots, listen to those stories without as much of a filter. But what are some other reasons?Michael Stein:I appreciate your reading of it, thank you. I think you’re right on with that. I guess I would say — and then we could talk about how it’s different from the Studs Terkel book — what I tried to do in A Living was what a primary care doctor does in their office, which is: the story when you come into my office is not my story. It’s your story. My job is to do observation and at some point make a judgment, and then share that judgment with you and then discuss what the options are based on my judgment. And so frankly, there’s very little room for me in the best medical encounters — the doctor’s not there talking about themselves. So it seemed to me, in the representation of people that reflected the actual setting, I should let them talk. And while I could guide them, I didn’t need to have much about me in the book. You’ll get little bits of me guiding the conversations and you’ll have a sense of me from that. But once I start inserting myself with large swaths of judgment, it becomes a very different book. It becomes a memoir, and it wasn’t meant to be a memoir.And so my job was really to take years and years of patients talking about their lives of physical labor, organize them, not really talk about their medical illness at all because it’s not so relevant to the story. And if you’re seeing people with physical labor who have, let’s say, arthritis — a common thing among physical laborers — how many times is it worth me saying this person is here with arthritis? So it seemed irrelevant. I really pretty much removed all medical diagnoses from that. It also helps de-identify the person. And then I just let them talk and guide them. And the job of the writer, therefore, is to create an organizational schema that allows the accumulation. So I divided the book into some themes that people talk about around physical labor — working with their family, what’s the structure of the day, how does physical labor give you identity, et cetera. The structuring was the structuring part.Now the risk — the risk of doing this — so Studs Terkel, first of all, didn’t only do physical labor. He did a lot of office work in that book, which was relatively new in the 1970s when it was coming along. And so mine is just physical labor. His sections are pages and pages long and have much more biographical detail. Mine are what I call scenelets — tiny little scenes. And they’re really just: can you capture the life of a person through their one little story? And so it asks, as you said, a lot of the reader. It says, you have to see why I’m putting these all in one place. And then you have to be interested in some of these people and think, that’s an interesting thing they said, I wonder what that means. The downside to this as a writer and as a reader is that it’s frustrating. You go, I want to know more about that person, and Michael just moved on to the next person. And so I get that frustration, and it asks a lot of the reader to put together a larger story. But to me, it was a form that could hold what I was trying to do.Joshua Dolezal:I appreciate your description of it as like a book of poetry. A favorite point that I used to make while teaching medical humanities is that people are more like poems than they are like puzzles, and getting comfortable with ambiguity is the secret to getting comfortable with people. So to not force homilies or neat takeaways from each of the stories fits with how we interact with people generally. And I like how each of them is self-contained, but then also part of a whole that accretes, that accumulates, that builds up to something bigger. There’s a sense in which this could be a stage performance. I don’t know if you’ve thought about adapting it.Michael Stein:Somebody said that to me afterward. I had never thought of that. But yes, people said, do this as a play, have people come in and speak.Joshua Dolezal:Yeah, or it could be in film, where the scene or the camera changes. I’m curious — and just so if you haven’t seen this book I’ll hold it up — there are these facts that are also in large type.So in this one it says, “In the United States, about half the labor force is employed in working class jobs, defined as manual labor, service industry, and clerical work, and fewer than two percent of members of Congress worked in such jobs before being elected.” So there’s a fact, there’s no real context for it, there’s no real conclusions drawn from it — that’s something the reader is invited to do with what they will more or less. But it does add a little bit of texture as we go.Michael Stein:Yeah, it gives you some sociology, but it doesn’t give you an argument. This is not an argument book where at the end of the day you go rah-rah, here’s what I believe. It’s not meant to do that. Now is there a hint of that through those bits? Yes, because I’m a political person and I do public health. So I took advantage of my platform and allowed myself those bits. I had little introductions to the sections and then I put in these factoids. They’re not meant as arguments. As you said, they’re not even causal. They’re not high science. They’re just notes about the world that you should know when thinking about a group that is pretty invisible to most people of a certain class.And I have the good fortune of working with them and hearing about their jobs. I mean, part of this really had to do with — it’s just interesting to hear people describe what they do. Like, to hear a person describe the making of a sailboat or a wind turbine, or how you actually cut veal from the bone or groom a dog. I’m a weirdo, but that sort of interests me. And it sometimes quite directly affects their health. And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it comes up because as a respectful conversationalist who has the time in an office with people he knows well, it feels like a way of connecting to somebody.If you came in to me and said, I can’t breathe or I have a terrible sore throat, I’m not going to talk to you about your physical labor job — let’s deal with the immediate medical issues. And other times, people come in because they have vaguer complaints, at which point trying to understand who they are is a matter of doing good medicine. And if they spend 10 hours a day working, if you don’t know about their work in detail, I don’t think you can do my job particularly well, or at least part of the job.Joshua Dolezal:Excellent point. Michael, there’s a line in your intro — and I think this provides just that little hint of guidance that a reader needs to make sense of the excerpts to follow — but you’re trying to kind of interrogate what’s lost besides a paycheck when work disappears.And this was something that I hadn’t thought about directly. I knew it because I come from a working class family in Montana. My uncles were loggers. My father was a civil engineer. I’ve done firefighting with the Forest Service. One of my great-grandfathers is in the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. The typical narrative is that work is hard on your body — that breaks your body down, and that’s the source of all your ailments when you go to the doctor.But you really point out how the absence of work, because work is a source of identity, a source of structure, a source of connection — when you don’t have work, that actually creates pain. The people that are not employed are much more likely to be on pain medication. And it also contributes to illness in ways that are not typically observed. So what else can you say about how these stories taught you about what’s lost besides a paycheck when work is taken away?Michael Stein:I think work is fundamental for most people — some form of work. Obviously people who find work meaningful or have a purpose in their work, that’s very important. Some people don’t find their meaning in their work and do it because they need the money and they’re just getting through the day and doing a paycheck. And I think writing about how people find their work respectable — or not — is a way of respecting them. And I do think that the loss of work for people who have worked their whole lives — because of a change in their industry or an injury to themselves — is devastating. And I try to tell those stories among people who lose jobs. We know from a public health point of view that mental health symptoms are related to not only the stress of work, of which there are many other stresses in life, but that’s certainly one of them. Certainly the loss of work is something that affects people’s mental health dramatically. And that’s often where things land in my office. There are direct injuries from work that one has to deal with. And there are very indirect pieces of life that have to be evoked or brought up in conversations.We talk about medicine as a history and a physical, and the providing of that history is a form of storytelling. And the storytelling of medicine is really about the question of why. So if you come in to me and you have broken your hip — you fell and you broke your hip, maybe at work, maybe at home — the immediate question for most doctors, rightly, is: you broke your hip, now what do we do? Does it need a pin? Does it need a hip replacement? What does it need? That’s so uninteresting — well, it’s important to the patient and it’s the doctor’s livelihood and the outcome is obviously super important. But for the storyteller, the question is, why did you fall down? That’s where the story actually starts. And so until you get into, well, what was the job that you were doing? And, oh, wait, you fainted on the job? Why did you faint? Or, oh, you were drinking before work?At that point, the story is — as in all good stories — what’s relayed and what’s withheld. That’s what a storyteller’s job is. What do you relay and what do you withhold? And frankly, that’s the psychology of chronic illness. That’s the chronic illness storyteller’s mode as well. What am I going to tell this doctor in front of me and what am I going to withhold? I could break my hip and never tell you that I was drunk at the time, but there are going to be consequences to not telling, and you’re not going to be taken care of. But the way we tell a story to a doctor is a way of telling about yourself — how you want to be seen and understood, and what you believe are the laws of cause and effect. And those are important things to know as a doctor and as a human. They are the essential elements of all storytelling in fiction and nonfiction: how do you want to be seen and understood, and what do you believe the laws of cause, effect, and motivation are? To me those are the elements of storytelling. I’m lucky enough to see that with patients, and if you’re open to it and have the time to do it — which we don’t all do. And let me just say, there are plenty of patients who don’t want to tell you these things. And you’re missing their story, and that’s okay. And there are plenty of doctors who don’t have time to take the story. And that’s usually not okay in chronic care. It’s okay mostly in orthopedics, but it’s not great in primary care.Joshua Dolezal:Let’s take one of your characters. Most of them are one-offs — we hear from them once and then they’re gone. Some of them reappear. But one runs from beginning to end and you call him Dennis. Presumably not his real name. And he had this job for many years — I’m not going to be able to pronounce the quahog term or whatever it is, but he was a clammer. He had a boat. And he would bring you clams when he came to see you. And then he loses that — he can’t fix his boat or he hits a series of problems — and so that work is taken away from him. And you seem to be invested in getting him back on the boat, which seems challenging to do. So why did you emphasize Dennis’s story so much in the book? And what do we learn from Dennis that’s representative of the cohort of working class patients the book covers?Michael Stein:Thank you so much for asking that. So there are a couple of things. Let’s talk about the technical part first, then we can talk about Dennis. The technical part is: one of the risks of having 150 people telling 150 stories is, because I’m a reader too, well, what’s the connection across all of this? Give me something I can carry through from beginning to end. People read novels — having written novels, I know — because they want to see a character move from beginning to end. They want what’s called a story arc. And so to me, putting one character in over time gives you a story arc. If you’re interested enough in that character, you’re going to get a little ping every time Dennis comes back. And you’re going to realize that he’s the only one really who’s coming back. The original version of the book, frankly, had nobody’s name in it. And I gave one person a name — Dennis — and then I decided, let’s give everybody a name. It makes it more human. But the truth is that Dennis was a technical, crafty device: give the good reader a narrative arc.So things happen to Dennis. We have a longitudinal timeline. We have things happen within the stories he tells about himself. And one could imagine this book being written as: I choose six Dennises and tell six stories over time. And many books do that. Most classic nonfiction books by journalists always start with a character or a family and carry them over time. Even though you’re interested in eviction as a subject, you better give me four characters who’ve been evicted so that I can humanize it. That’s the classic approach. It’s never been a great appeal to me. So I sort of strip it down to: I give you one character over time. We call him Dennis.So why Dennis? Dennis had a lot of qualities that I personally admired that came out through his work, and as you noted, through periods when he didn’t work and what that did to him. So Dennis was a guy who did quahogging, clamming, and also drove a tractor, and was very dependent on motors and money to actually get into his job. If your snowplow doesn’t attach, you’re not going to make money that snow, and if your motor’s out, you’re not going to get paid. So part of it was that things actually happened in his life over real time.And he had these qualities — he was extremely prideful about his work. He loved his work. He had no sense of that work being problematic at all. It connected him to people in his family. He had no regrets about the work. He was essentially an optimist — as anybody who does fishing, you know, if you throw a line into the water, you’re essentially an optimist. He was a total optimist. I liked that. He was a little confused about himself. He was a bit of an unreliable narrator. He had some self-knowledge. He drank too much at times in his life. So he had obstacles. Between his obstacles, his personal vulnerability, his pride, his ability to do things I didn’t know anything about — and learning about bay water, where you find clams and how one does that and how cold the weather is and how you use a very long rake to get to the bottom — I think there were personal things about him and then also the aspects of change in his life that I could portray in a number of episodes over time.So that’s why I chose Dennis. There were a few others that I could have chosen, but he was the one that appealed to me.Joshua Dolezal:And to link Dennis to some of those factoids that you give — a couple of them that are interesting: 20 million jobs in 1979 in manufacturing versus 12 million jobs now, but 50% more population. So more people, but roughly half the same number of jobs. And then also, in 1950 a third of Americans belonged to a labor union. That became one in five by 1983, and then one in ten by 2019.So these are kind of standalone things. You do teach at a health policy institution, so I’m assuming that you do have arguments to make about these things, but you don’t make an argument in this book, as you’ve said.Would there be changes in health policy that could benefit someone like Dennis? Are you talking about more holistic reforms in labor law? Are you talking about things that average citizens could do?Maybe there’s no cure exactly, but is there any kind of legal or policy change that you think this book could help encourage or inspire?Michael Stein:Well, there are many, and I don’t know that we want to go deep into it, but the simplest one is — unlike every other industrialized, high-income country — we should have paid sick leave. I mean, that’s a simple — well, not simple, because we can’t seem to do it — but paid sick leave would be very good for people. They would not come to work and make us sick because they didn’t want to miss their paycheck, and it would be humane. That’s the simplest health policy piece that’s important. But there are obviously broader issues. The Broke book that I wrote is a bigger issue — I think it’s very clear that poverty is the primary driver of health in the United States.One of the very fascinating and underappreciated things about COVID — which was obviously disastrous in many ways, and which we’ve almost completely forgotten at this point — was that due to federal government policy, we had the lowest poverty rate in 50 years in America. So in the middle of the biggest health disaster on earth, the United States had its lowest poverty rate. There’s this weird silver lining in the middle of COVID. And it was dramatic — childhood poverty went down by something like 80%, which tells you that we have soluble problems in the United States that are very large problems and that drive health — and much else — and that are soluble should you decide to act on them. So these public health problems are problems of public will or political will. Be politically involved. I’m not sure you want this to be a political broadcast, but that’s my feeling about some of these things.And the physical labor book really speaks to — sick leave is the most obvious one. But what’s interesting is I started writing this and watching AI come along. Because what we worry about with AI — or what the AI boosters are telling us — is that the jobs that are going to disappear are white-collar jobs. So it’s interesting that these jobs that we considered most fragile, most difficult, most demeaning are probably going to be the last jobs to be hit by AI. It’s hard to have an AI robot plumber. And that’s interesting to me — that these people will be more secure than my lawyer friends five years from now.Joshua Dolezal:Yeah, well, the jury’s out on that. But a lot of the AI stories also warn of this so-called permanent underclass — if you don’t adopt AI, you’ll be left behind.Michael Stein:Or that there will be no jobs left in America and we’re all going to be unemployed. And what’s the health going to be like then?Joshua Dolezal:Right. Related question, also possibly too big to really tackle. I just wrote last week about the fantastic show The Pitt, which really exposes the burnout problems in American ERs. And also the same thing that pushed me out of higher ed — the corporatization of the university — is plaguing hospitals. So you have an attending physician, the director of the ER, saying, hire more nurses. And then you have an admin, the chief officer, saying the budget comes first. And there seems to be a bottom-line mentality that’s strangling the hospital in the same way that it’s strangling the universities.I don’t know if there’s anything from a policy standpoint that can change there. I don’t understand why it’s so inevitable that we have to be limited by budgets and by this idea of scarcity when the public good is a clear necessity and when the cost of sacrificing the public good is so great.Michael Stein:Yeah, so those are big questions. So let me put on my public health hat. When you’re a doctor like I am who’s worked in the academic medical world for years and then jumps into a public health school — which I did, and eventually became dean of the public health school — it’s a very different world from medicine.So let me take you into the world of public health, because we get very stuck with medicine. We get stuck with it because we have shows like The Pit that tell stories that take place in the world of medicine. It’s very hard to tell public health stories. In fact, I wrote a book about this called Me Versus Us, which explains why we talk about medicine and not public health — why medicine has so dominated the public conversation — whereas, in fact, the only thing that will improve our life expectancy will be public health. So public health is a completely underfunded, underrated, under-discussed ethos, essentially very different from medicine. And the book Me Versus Us explains about nine reasons why medicine has beaten up public health. They’re good reasons and they’re bad reasons. It’s a complicated story.But the notion is this — my analogy is soccer, for those of you who love soccer like I do. Medicine is essentially the goalkeeper. You want a really good goalkeeper, but the game is played on the field by the other ten people. And in fact, if you never have to use the goalkeeper, you’re probably going to win the game. So public health are the other ten players, and medicine is the goalie. Great to have a good goalie, better never to use them. And so if we actually had a public health system, we wouldn’t have these ongoing conversations about medicine. So I always start by taking people away from medicine, because their eyes immediately go to the shiny object of medicine because it’s so much of our economy. And because it’s so much of our economy, the things that you’re talking about — the corporatization of medicine — are really money questions.So if you want to talk about money questions, it gets complicated. In some ways, the answer to medicine and its expense in the United States — which is really driving in part the main issue of medicine in the United States, which is access to care and why 10% of our population doesn’t have access to care — is important. Okay, so it’s a long way around to say: here are the issues. There’s the access issue. There’s public health that prevents you ever from going to a doctor.Okay, now you’re 80 years old and you have to go to the doctor. You want the best doctor at 80 years old. In fact, in America, the best part of our health care is for people who are over 80. If you get to be 80, you want to live in the United States rather than any other country in the world — that’s completely clear to me. Until 80, I’m not sure that you want to live in the United States if you’re the average person in poverty. It’s not so great for you. You’d rather live in 25 other countries than here.And so the issues around the United States really come down to price and economics. If we lowered the price of things in medicine — which is really a price problem, from drugs to ERs — you wipe out the jobs of a lot of people in their communities. So if we take medicine and bring it down to a lower share of our GNP, you’re going to have a lot of unemployed people who now work in medicine, which is the major employer of most cities in the United States.So it’s a complicated question, the interaction. All of that is to say: at the personal level, the doctors who are taking care of you have to make some personal decisions about how they want to interact with you and how they want to deal with being told they have to see people every 15 minutes and rush. That’s a separate question. I’ve always considered it a very personal question — how you deal with the corporatization around you and whether you want to comply with it or not.Joshua Dolezal:That’s good. I love the soccer analogy, and the separation of public health and medicine makes perfect sense. I love your metaphor for that. To wrap up, maybe two questions here. And I want to tie this back to your other recent book, Accidental Kindness, which we’ve almost entirely run out of time to talk about. But no matter what the limitations are in terms of price or time — when you’re talking about limits and how many patients you can see in a day and so on — the argument that you make in that book is that kindness doesn’t cost more. Kindness doesn’t require more time necessarily. It can be a default setting that is simple and that, for reasons that seem elusive, is not obvious to all doctors.When I was reading Accidental Kindness, which is an argument book very different from A Living, you open with your experience as a medical student and a kind of stoicism that you were taught — this kind of machismo or indifference to cadavers and an almost unfeeling approach that your professor was trying to teach you. And it reminded me of a scene in Patch Adams where the dean of the medical school gives the first-year students a speech about how human beings are not worthy of your trust because they make mistakes and get tired — so our job is to ruthlessly train the humanity out of you and make you into a doctor.And it seems almost identical to your experience, that the humanity was being trained out of you, and along with that was kindness being trained out of you. I don’t know if you would agree with that, but why does that keep happening when kindness remains so essential to effective care?Michael Stein:Oh, we have how many minutes? That’s its own talk, Josh. That’s its own conversation. So let me just say, first of all, Accidental Kindness is a series of essays. It’s much more memoir-y — it’s really about me and some experiences I had where I said things or did things that I didn’t know at the time were either kind or unkind. That’s why it’s accidental, because I didn’t know until after the fact that I had done something that was quite unkind or not. So that’s the framing of the book.I always start by saying I’m a lover of kindness — it’s a spiritual act. But I also want a doctor who’s decisive, efficient, and competent. So I’m not interested in a completely kind person who doesn’t have those other things. Let’s always separate what we call empathy from actual competence, because you can be deceived as a patient where a person’s really nice but just really not a good doctor. So let’s start with that.Does it have to keep happening that kindness is trained out of people? I’m mixed about that. I do think that there is a selection bias — you take certain people into medical school, and most medical schools look for an array of people who are going to do different things in medicine, which require different attributes. So not everybody’s going to be what I would maybe call naturally kind. And then something happens to them in the training, which we know happens to people under great pressure, duress, and sleep deprivation. It changes people.For doctors or clinicians of any kind — social workers, physical therapists, nurses, not just doctors — how much are you able to be vulnerable to others and what they’re saying to you and asking of you? And I think that’s a hard task day in and day out for anybody, even with the best intentions. And I think awareness — am I seeing this clearly? Am I feeling this directly? — is a very important part of the self-awareness game, and we’re good at it sometimes and not good at it others. If you’ve been up all night with your screaming child or you have a child sick at home, you’re going to treat others differently when you have to go to work the next day.I also think that notion of paying attention — that largeness of spirit — is an important and a spiritual act, and we’re all imperfect. And I think patients have to accept this. And I also think they really do want kindness. They remember unkindness, but they really want kindness. And unkindness is never acceptable. But we’re lucky when we get real kindness. And I think that’s true everywhere in life, and unfortunately sometimes true in the office. One of the essays I wrote about is this notion of: can you be overly kind in the office?Part of what I think when you talk about burnout in medicine — I want to put a nice spin on it — is that people who are very compassionate, who are very kind, get fatigued. And that burnout, which we think of as negative, really came from a place of people being involved. You wouldn’t have burned out if you weren’t burning in the first place — I always say that. And that burning is what kindness and compassion is. It’s that tolerance and indulging of other people where you can say to them, and feel it yourself to a degree: a sad thing has happened to you, and I’m here in that sadness with you, and now let’s do some things about it. So that’s what I would say — a complicated, not sentimental, view of these things.One of the essays in Accidental Kindness is: is there any evidence that actual kindness matters to patient outcomes? And it’s very hard to find, frankly, because it’s a hard thing to test as a scientist. But spiritually, it’s the right thing. And as patients, we all love that feeling and that covenant we have with these providers who save our lives.Joshua Dolezal:We don’t have time to dig deeper into Accidental Kindness, but I’ll be sure to include that in the show notes. Final question, if we have time for one more. My series for the podcast is called The Things Not Named. It fits your latest A Living, which is an act of kindness in its own way, listening to these untold stories. So I’m curious — I’m sure you have other book ideas and maybe you’re superstitious like other writers and don’t want to talk about them — but what are some other things not named in medicine that you might explore in future books or that would be worthy of exploration?Michael Stein:Well, I have a book that will be out next year that is tentatively called Will Science Survive?, which is about that question and what we mean by science and what are the attacks on it and what are the unexpected pieces of it. So that’s something I’m writing about in sort of a larger philosophical vein. I’m also interested in this idea of: is health a human right? Which is sort of out there in the world. I don’t quite know what that means, and so I want to try to explore that a little bit. And I have a variety of other projects that I’m in the middle of that I won’t tell you about. But yes, there are lots of things to write about.Joshua Dolezal:We will stay tuned. Michael, thanks so much for joining me.Michael Stein:Josh, thank you. A great pleasure.Joshua Doležal:Michael Stein’s latest books, A Living, and Accidental Kindness are available wherever books are sold. You can learn more about his writing at michaelsteinbooks.org, and I’ll put links in the show notes.The Recovering Academic is made possible by the support of readers and listeners like you. Thank you.Save the date for my next Substack Live. On Tuesday, May 19, at 1pm Eastern, I’ll speak with Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Director of Medical Humanities at Georgetown University.That’s the thing not named for today. Until next time.The Recovering Academic explores the messy intersections of medicine, culture, and storytelling. I write three new essays a month, hold live interviews, and produce a podcast about the things medicine leaves unnamed. This is all made possible by paid support from readers like you.More episodes of The Things Not Named ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

“Some things can’t be healed. They just need to be held. Narrative medicine does a great job with this — sometimes the healing is in the holding.”Kimberly Warner, author of “Unfixed”Thank you to Mr. Troy Ford, Annette Laing, , Jill Swenson, and many others who tuned into my live interview with Kimberly Warner last week. Kimberly Warner Bio: Kimberly Warner is a filmmaker, author, and patient advocate whose work explores what it means to live fully in a body that doesn’t always cooperate. After studying pre-med and biology at Colorado College and pursuing graduate training in naturopathic and classical Chinese medicine, she left a clinical path for a creative one. In 2015, a rare neurological condition upended her sense of balance. That experience became the seed of Unfixed Media, a multimedia platform for chronic illness storytelling that has been recognized by PBS, Harvard Medical School, and the Invisible Disabilities Association. Her debut memoir, Unfixed, was serialized on Substack, picked up by Empress Editions, and earned a Publishers Weekly Editor’s Pick and a Kirkus review calling it “genre-defying.”Kimerly is a member of the Global Advocacy Alliance, the PPAA (Patient and Physician Advocacy Alliance,) and a visiting faculty member with Global Genes. She also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Health Design and is an ambassador for the Vestibular Disorders Association).The full transcript of our conversation is available below.Transcript:Joshua Doležal:Welcome back to The Things Not Named. I’m Joshua Doležal, and my series this year is titled for a phrase from Willa Cather. Cather famously said that it’s the presence of the thing not named that gives high quality to fiction, drama, and poetry. So this year I’m asking that question of medicine: How might we all be more attentive to what goes unsaid in the clinic, in popular culture, and in the experience of illness from the patient’s side? My guest today is Kimberly Warner. Welcome, Kimberly!Kimberly Warner:So great to be here. I love that you are exploring the white space, the unnamed, and that you’re putting that into the realm of clinical care this year. That’s fascinating to me.Joshua Doležal:It seems appropriate for illness and especially for your story. So, lots of mouthfuls there in your bio. You’ve been really active, it seems, in medical communities as a patient advocate and also as a storyteller.Kimberly Warner:Yeah, it was not intended. I certainly didn’t set out to go that direction. Although I do remember even in high school when I told my parents I’m going to medical school. And my parents said — well, my father was a physician and they said, do you really want to work with patients all day? And what’s the reality of that? And I said, no, I want to be a high school health teacher. And they’re like, how are you going to pay off your school loans? And I’m like, I don’t know, I’ll figure that out. But it’s interesting to look, you know, 35 or 40 years later and see how education has become a really big part of the way that I work with healing. And a lot of that has come through my own personal struggles and personal insights through living with a body that doesn’t always feel great.Joshua Doležal:I mean, it’s great that you’re using storytelling as a form of advocacy because I think it’s underutilized. And we were talking before we went live about narrative medicine and how it began at Columbia University. But there’s a long tradition of doctors writing about medical practice and really giving voice to things that can’t be said in the examining room or in the operating room. And I first came to this in graduate school. I was learning about deconstruction theory and this idea that all reality is constructed by language. And I kept wondering, well, what about the body? You know, the body has a kind of grammar. The body has a way of making sense of things and finding balance. So it’s not all relative, as Derrida and others would say. So I got into medical history and wrote a dissertation on the medical humanities and taught for many years courses like illness and health and literature, where I would have loved to have featured your book. It’s nice to be sharing that with folks on Substack this year.But I want to get back to your memoir, which is the first in this year’s series of illness narratives. I’ve been mostly interviewing doctors who are either in the process of writing a memoir or have written memoirs. My conversation last week with Damon Tweedy centered on his second book about mental illness and integrating mental health care into general medicine. So you’re the first author of an illness narrative. And before we dive into that, could you just give us a brief synopsis of your book for anyone who hasn’t heard of Unfixed or doesn’t know anything about it?Kimberly Warner:Yeah, I’d be happy to. I’ve got the little dust jacket summary here, and I can read that to you. But I’ll preface it with — it’s not your classic illness narrative in the sense that it’s a weaving of two different types of narratives, though they are both about identity, because anybody that’s lived with chronic illness knows that that really can crush our identities. There is — it’s not — true in the sense that I have a stack of favorite illness narratives here, and a lot of them are just like, this was the diagnosis, and this is the journey with that, and this is the resolution. And mine is much more complicated, let’s say.But here’s the dust jacket summary for those that don’t know. Unfixed: A Memoir of Family Mystery and the Currents That Carry You Home, is a haunting exploration of identity, loss, and the unsteady ground of becoming. When a midlife DNA test reveals that the man who raised her isn’t her biological father, Kimberly Warner is drawn into two parallel mysteries — one excavating the silence surrounding her beloved father’s death, the other tracing the absence of a stranger whose blood shapes her very being. As she unravels the secrets hidden beneath her family’s story, another rupture emerges, this time in her body. A mysterious illness takes hold, leaving her adrift in dizziness and a growing awareness that her body knows truths language cannot hold.Joshua Doležal:Nice. And I’ve got my copy here, so I’ll put a link in the show notes for anyone who wants to order it. So you are braiding two stories. Why did you not tell them separately?Kimberly Warner:Because they were completely linked, to the point where I think that the DNA revelation when I turned 40 was very much a catalyst for the disassembly that was happening in my neurology at the same time. And I think many — anyone listening that knows about vestibular disorders, especially ones that are neurologically related instead of within the ears, can often be heightened or triggered by extreme states of panic. And I was definitely going through a protracted panic attack and a real disorientation to who I was and who I had known myself to be for 40 years. So while I don’t think it was a direct link, I think there are a lot of factors that were happening. It was definitely a piece that pulled the rug out from underneath me and quite literally created the sensation of living on water, which is what this Mal de Débarquement that I have — that is the actual symptom. The experience of it is living on water. So you can’t really disentangle the illness from your life circumstances and it’s all part of the same fabric.Absolutely. And I don’t know if that’s always the case. I’m not going to say that everyone gets an illness because something psychological shifts in their life story. But for me, it did play a huge role. And I think, unfortunately, because of that, I also wasn’t diagnosed for five, five and a half years. And a lot of that was because of the multifactorial events that were happening. Based on which doctor I saw to try to figure out why I was so dizzy, they were either looking at the psychological issues and doing trauma work and brain spotting and everything under the sun, or concussions on the other end of the spectrum. So it made it very difficult to diagnose what was going on.Joshua Doležal:All of the people I’ve interviewed so far are doctors, and in a doctor memoir, doctors write about patients. The patients don’t always have the chance to write back. Your book is coming from the other side of that. When you’re going through your diagnostic journey — years of dizziness with no explanation and so on — I’m wondering if you really struggled with other people’s stories being projected onto you. I know with neurological conditions, it kind of literally is in your head, right? And there’s a kind of condescending form that that takes. So did writing Unfixed feel like you were reclaiming the narrative for yourself instead of being a character in someone else’s story?Kimberly Warner:Yes. And I’ll say that when I started writing this, it was 2018. So this was still pre-diagnosis, but it was also right on this precipice of me being so tired of pursuing cures. So I was resting in this place of trying to, like you said, reclaim all of what had just happened to me — including the DNA discovery and the dizziness and all the subsequent things that happened because of that. The loss of job, the loss of friends, nearly the loss of my relationship. And I was trying to just piece it all back together for myself. This was not intended to be something to be read by the world. It was very much just, let’s get this down on paper as much as I possibly can so I can remember the details.So as you know, when you read this, there’s certainly trauma in this, but there was also so much magic and love that was happening throughout this. And that was a really important part that I didn’t want to forget. And so in the writing, I think I was trying to weave those two together and maybe find a way for them to coexist, because I knew that what I had been doing — which was just chasing cures and living as if I couldn’t be happy unless I was fixed — was not working anymore.Joshua Doležal:One of the frustrating parts of your condition is that it’s invisible. I think you’ve even used that word in some of your advocacy. So what you experience is constant dizziness, this sensation of, like you said, being on water. But you don’t look sick. And I don’t know if this is true — correct me if I’m wrong — but when you’re in an examining room, everything has to be kind of reduced to puzzle pieces. So it’s the tests, the clinical signs, lab results, imaging, and so on. So I’m wondering, in your case, what’s lost when a doctor can’t see what’s happening? They can only see what’s measurable. And what did your doctors miss because they were looking for the wrong things or just not able to see?Kimberly Warner:Oh, gosh. Well, I actually just finished another illness narrative, and it’s called Dizzy. And of course, I picked it right up because this woman is my age. And I had to email her and say, we have siblings because our stories are so similar. She was dizzy for 18 years. And the parallels between her story and all the other vestibular patients that I’ve talked to around the moment — because there is lab work. There are classic vestibular tests. And you will, first you’ll get the Epley maneuver for the crystals in your ears. Then you’ll go for extensive two-day lab testing in the vestibular lab that’s designed to stress your vestibular system. But so many of us, especially with the central nervous system disorders, will go back to get the results after this hopeful duration after the test and — oh my God, they’re finally going to figure out what’s wrong with me. And the doctor hands you the paperwork and says, congratulations, there’s nothing wrong with you.And that is the most disheartening experience. And I remember that moment. I had already been living with it at that point — I think it was eight months. And I thought, I mean, I was going day by day thinking, I can’t live another day with this. Counting the days to his answer for me. And then for him to pat me on the back and high-five and, you know, you’re great. What they’re missing is that we’re not. And this was a dizzy specialist — a dizzy neurologist. And unfortunately, a lot of the central disorders are the last to get diagnosed. So when they’re checking the boxes, they’re going for — he eventually diagnosed me with cervicogenic vertigo, which is structural. He was saying it was in my neck. They want the quick fixes and they want to be able to medicate.And so I know there are so many vestibular patients out there that have to go through 20, 40 doctors before they end up getting to the one that’s going to address the central issues. And those are a little bit more complicated. And it’s tricky because it is in your head.And often they are treated with SNRIs and SSRIs. But the patient has to be coached enough to know that the doctor’s not saying you’re crazy because he’s giving you an SSRI or an SNRI. He’s not saying, oh, you’re making this up. He’s saying that the world is too much for your brain. Your brain is acting like a scared cat right now. And we need to dim the lights and we need to turn the volume down. If someone had told me that when they handed me the prescription for diazepam, I would have said, yes, that makes sense. But if they hand the diazepam to me and they say, you know, I think you have too much anxiety — well, of course I do right now because I can’t even walk across the street. So I think a lot of it just comes down to how it’s communicated.Joshua Doležal:I wonder if you might reframe that phrase. You know, it’s not in your head — it’s in your head and your heart and your nerves. I mean, it’s in your life, basically. And I want to ask you about your training because it’s a little bit non-traditional. You trained in both Western pre-med but then also in classical Chinese medicine before you turned to the arts. So that’s kind of an unusual combo. And in the book you write about the body knowing truths that language can’t hold — which is ironically how I got into medical humanities, right. The body knows things. It’s not all language. So I’m curious how that dual medical training shaped how you think about illness, but then also how you told this particular story.Kimberly Warner:Oh, well, instantly — thank you. Classical Chinese medicine is fascinating because so much of it lives in metaphor and symbolism, even down to the elements — categories of illness and any sort of medicine or herb is either earth, fire, metal, water, air. And it makes me think of — so the way that I experience the dizziness, like I said, is as if I’m on water. In Chinese medicine, there are lots of different ways that they might look at this, but let’s look at water simply as a kidney and bladder function — not in the classic organs, as in kidney and bladder, but what those organs represent in the universe. And there’s a lot there to do with death and grief.And what was happening for me when this experience of being at sea started, I was reliving another big seismic shift in my life around the loss of a father. I had lost my adopted father — the one that raised me, who I thought was my real father — when I was 18. But then here’s this other father that appears through a DNA test and, through some discoveries, he’s no longer available either. So there was something on a cellular level for me that was happening in the realm of grief. And I can’t separate the physiology with the metaphor. And I feel like that is a perfect place where Western and Eastern medicine can come together and can actually be really informative.And the physicians that are able to bridge that, I think, can penetrate a lot deeper into the true experience of what the patient is going through. Because we can’t separate mind and body. The body certainly does lead the way with symptoms. And I know for myself, my body was leading the way with symptoms. Heightened anxiety — I had never experienced anything like panic attacks before all of this was happening. What my mind was trying to do was to bring certainty into the experience. And the way I was doing that was by manically asking everyone how I should be experiencing this story. I would just tell strangers about what was happening to me in my life. And what my body was telling me was, this is too much and you need to slow down and process this information. I have said I even would have done really well had I been sedated, because I was becoming manic with the information and some gentle sedation so that my nervous system could catch up — this influx of information that was coming into my life that was changing the bedrock of my being — that would have been really, really helpful. So yes, I think there’s a real sweet spot between Western medicine and Eastern medicine that bridges metaphor with physiology.Joshua Doležal:And part of the Eastern tradition, as I understand it, is ceremony. So there’s nothing ceremonious about going to the hospital. It’s almost as disembodied, ironically, as it could be. I was speaking last week with Damon Tweedy about what happens when someone who is uninsured or underinsured goes to the ER looking for help. If they took some pills, you know — a cry for help, I need help, I’m a danger to myself. Well, if you don’t have the resources and you’re not in the bourgeois club, then you get escorted in handcuffs to the state hospital. How does that help your mental, spiritual condition? It’s like the worst possible ceremony, the worst ritual that you could undergo.You’re reminding me of one of my favorite novels, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, which is about a war veteran. It’s a classic. I love teaching it. But this half-Laguna, half-white man comes back from the war — World War II — and he’s trying to tell his doctors that he feels like white smoke, and he’s narrating his own story in the third person. So he’s that detached from himself that he’s narrating as if he’s outside of his own body, but he sees his body as white smoke. Which is a perfect way of capturing that kind of shell shock — though it’s not shell shock. It’s not PTSD. It’s a spiritual illness that he’s carrying. It’s the image of himself and the Japanese soldiers, the kind of kinship between indigenous people and other Asians that he’s seeing and wrestling with. And a pill isn’t going to solve that. Four white walls in a hospital are not going to be the right environment for that. So it’s through traditional ceremonies that he finds his way back, and he has to kind of sing his way back. He has to find the story. He has to go to the place where uranium is mined to actually complete the ceremony for himself. And that’s just not how Western medicine thinks at all. So when you’re dealing with grief and you go to the hospital, there’s no ceremony for grief. It’s just sort of like, well, get over yourself — or here’s a pill to sedate you or something. But ceremony activates the body and the spirit traditionally. And I just don’t know that Western medicine has any idea what to do with that.Kimberly Warner:No, but it’s interesting. I’m sure you’re familiar with Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen. And she thought when she went into medical school and became a clinician that she could cure everything. And what she realized after years and years of practice is that some things can’t be healed. They just need to be held. And I love that so much. And that’s, to me, connected to what you’re saying around ceremony, because ceremony is a place to hold. And sometimes — and I think narrative medicine does a great job with this too — sometimes the healing is in the holding. It truly is. And I will say that for myself — I’m still dizzy sometimes. But I have been tremendously healed on this journey because I feel that while I didn’t have physicians that were holding me, I feel like I learned to hold myself in the dizziness. And that is a kind of healing that is lasting. It’s a deeper healing. It’s a spiritual healing. It’s something that allows me to be able to live with this experience of dizziness and still feel quite peaceful and joyful. Is that the role of the doctor? I don’t know. But I think that there are physicians out there that are able to recognize that maybe their greatest power isn’t in finding the physiological cure, but to still be able to hold the patient.Joshua Doležal:A commenter noted: healing is not always a lack of symptoms. I mean, really, you have to hurt to heal. That’s true of grief. If you don’t hurt, your love wasn’t real. The more deeply you love, the more deeply you hurt. And that’s something you have to feel, and there’s no way to release it except to feel it. And that’s not something that there’s a lot of patience for in traditional medical contexts either.Kimberly Warner:Yeah. And unfortunately not. My father — the one that I write about in the book — he was a heart surgeon. And I think he really was an unusual heart surgeon in the eighties because he wanted to access that deeper energetic healing with his patients. His favorite time wasn’t when he was cutting them open. It was when he was doing rounds. And he was a big, six-foot-six physician, but he would kneel down at the patient’s bedside and just rest his hands on them. And that was his favorite, favorite work. And I remember even as a daughter going around the hospital with him doing his rounds. And I could tell that there was healing happening in just that touch and in just that contact — the wordless contact even. I think some of this healing really happens beyond words.For me, writing the book was — even though it’s a book of words — I think largely the healing is what was happening in between the words. So much so that the last poem in the book talks mostly about how I am less the words and more the page. And to me, that is often where the real healing comes from. Kind of like what you were saying at the very beginning about the white space and the unnamed. Maybe the unnamed is really where the healing is coming from.Joshua Doležal:The thing not named, yeah. Part of what’s complicated about your condition is that it’s not fixable, really. Unfixed is the title of your book. And it’s a little bit unusual in that regard from a typical illness narrative. Because an illness narrative usually has — like the inciting incident, it’s like an episode of House M.D. I know that’s an obsolete show now. I’m dating myself by mentioning it. But in a House M.D. episode, there’s somebody in their normal life, and then they have a seizure, and that’s the beginning of the illness, and then you have to figure out what the diagnosis is. So there’s an onset, there’s a kind of crisis that leads to some kind of diagnosis, whether it’s satisfactory or not. And then it ends kind of one of two ways — either you recover or you don’t. Maybe you learn to accept that you’ll never recover. In some cases, you die, like Christopher Hitchens in Mortality. That’s the end of that illness narrative — death from cancer. But your book kind of resists that arc. And I hear the title, Unfixed, as a kind of defiant — I don’t know if it’s a thesis exactly, but it’s a kind of defiant message.Kimberly Warner:Philosophy, yeah.Joshua Doležal:Yeah. So I’m wondering if refusing resolution in the book is a craft choice, a philosophical stance as you’re saying, or something your illness forced on you. If you had been cured, would you have written a different book, do you think?Kimberly Warner:Yeah, this is a life lesson for me. And I can honestly say I’m glad that I hadn’t been cured because — well, first of all, I love one of my favorite bits of feedback that I get from people that read this book: they sleep really, really well when they finish. And at first I was like, what? Like, is it boring?Joshua Doležal:Yeah.Kimberly Warner:And there’s a nervous system reset is the way it’s been communicated. And I think our culture, our collective, is needing more of this nervous system reset. I couldn’t have written that nervous system reset had I been cured because then it’s just following that nice linear arc of, you know, the hero needs to get to the resolution. And I finished the one I just mentioned, Dizzy, the memoir. And I was a little bit re-traumatized reading it. And it was fun and it was gripping and when’s she going to get the answer and all of that. But it engaged me physiologically in a way that felt so much more stressful. And the way I had to — and where I was even when I wrote this book was a deeper settling with, and a deeper allowing with, the experiences that I was having. And I did not know that when people read that, that’s what they would be picking up. But it’s really cool to hear that there is kind of like a nervous system reset in people. Finally, they get to let it all go. They get to let down that struggle, that achievement, that self-actualization — all of those things that we are trying to achieve — and they get to just be.So it wasn’t a choice. I didn’t think that that was going to be an experience that my readers would have. I wasn’t even writing it for readers. But it has been my experience, and that’s lasting no matter what now happens — even this last month, since I’ve had some higher dizzy symptoms. I feel just kind of peaceful in the midst of all of it. So I feel like those are some good lessons for all of us right now in our overstimulated population.Joshua Doležal:That’s an interesting effect of the book. And I wonder if you could give us a taste of it. We were talking about — there’s a chapter that we flagged that we could possibly read a bit of. I think this is the diagnosis, or it’s kind of where you understand that there’s no cure.Kimberly Warner:Yeah. How much would you like me to read?Joshua Doležal:Chapter 29 is the one that you mentioned. Why don’t we start on page 184, beginning of late summer, and kind of on to the middle of 186, so a couple pages.Kimberly Warner:Okay. My beginning on Chapter 29 is “Reality Strikes: Damning Red Inks.” Do we have different page numbers?Joshua Doležal:Well, on 184, the last full paragraph here begins —Kimberly Warner:Oh, late summer. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you.Joshua Doležal:So give us kind of the lead up to this.Kimberly Warner:Yeah, so this was the dizzy doc that I was mentioning earlier that eventually diagnosed me with cervicogenic vertigo. So at this point, the early dizziness had started in February just erratically, and then it was consistently dizzy by May. So May, June, July, August, September. And those months were just — hell on earth. I did not know up from down, constantly being pulled in these sensations of being pulled in different directions, like walking in a bouncy castle, the sidewalk dropping out, to the point where I just couldn’t — I didn’t leave the house. So I was desperate.[Reading from Unfixed, Chapter 29:]Late summer, I finally meet with a neurologist, Portland’s leading dizzy doc. I enter his office, certain he has an answer. Hope is hard. I’ve been carrying it in my pocket for months. The possibility of this doctor not having answers is inconceivable and crushing.After listening to me convey, for what feels like the hundredth time, all my bizarre experiences and sensations, he orders two days of extensive testing at Legacy Hospital’s vestibular lab. “It’s not going to be fun, I’ll tell you this right now, but we may get some answers.” I nod obligingly. I’m quick to tell a doctor he’s right or she’s helping me even when I feel like I’m dying inside. I project all my absent father issues on male physicians. Maybe he’ll think I’m so smart and so sweet that he’ll go the extra mile to make sure I get better. He’ll look forward to the day when he sees me out in the world succeeding and think, I helped her. He’ll be proud of me.But he was right. Two days of vestibular tests designed to put maximum stress on all the visual and auditory connections to one’s inner balance are not fun. He was also right to use the conditional verb may, leaving room for no answers at all.“Kim, you passed your tests with flying colors. Your vestibular system is working great.”Ordinarily, this kind of daddy high-five would projectile shoot glitter from my eyes. But instead, I am deflated and in disbelief. So, that’s it? But what do I have? Are you saying nothing is wrong with me? Maybe I haven’t conveyed how dire this is. Maybe I tried too hard to look okay, to be pleasing. I can’t go on like this. Does he think I’m making it all up?“You may have cervicogenic vertigo.”Cervic — what? It takes me a moment to realize he’s not talking about my vagina.“I’ll prescribe you 12 sessions with a great vestibular PT. She’ll work on your neck. And you may feel some improvement. And if that doesn’t work, we can start drug trials. Benzos, anti-seizure drugs, anti-anxiety drugs. They all have side effects that you’re not going to like, though.”Contempt smolders inside me. You may feel some improvement. You don’t even have a definitive diagnosis. I can barely hear him anymore as he rattles off drug names, possible complications, dependencies. He starts to read my face. I am no longer speaking, only shuddering. With an attempt to comfort me, he says, a tincture of time.I stand up, the floor trampolines. He reaches out his hand, and my misinterpreting heart leaps towards it — a gesture of warmth and support delivered on a scribbled prescription pad for diazepam.“The body heals itself, and doctors take the credit,” he chuckles as I walk out the door.I hate his flippant remark and the kernel of truth that suggests. Time can be the ultimate healer, at least in the most broad sense of healing — the kind of healing, or post-traumatic growth, that may not cure bodies but can sometimes heal spirits. A person becoming more virtuous, more brave, more connected because of illness or tragedy. But I don’t want my spirit to grow. I want to be fixed.I wobbled home thinking about his parting words. If this is true, are all treatments, protocols, and dollars spent along the way just buying time? Time is also the ultimate killer. What if time makes this worse? Not everyone has access to resources and support. Sometimes time destroys us.Joshua Doležal:Thank you so much. So it’s indeterminate. And instead of trying to resolve that or tie it up in a bow, you just kind of leave us in that predicament — which I think is a powerful place. We have to finish that story within ourselves.Kimberly Warner:It’s a very true place, too. I’ve been working with Unfixed Media now since 2019, and I’m constantly working with patients and their stories. And most of us don’t have cures. It’s interesting how the medical system is designed to — you know, fix things — it’s emergency care. We’re really, really good at emergencies. And largely, a lot of people are walking around with things that can’t be fixed. And there’s not a lot of narrative around that in media. And so what it does, I think, for patients is it leaves us feeling isolated. And then when we read stories or we watch films that talk about that isolation and that unfixedness, the uncertainty, there’s a settling that happens that’s like — oh, my God. Like I said earlier, maybe I won’t be healed, but there’s a new emergent self that can still live her life within this.One of my favorite people I’ve worked with over the years — we started in 2019 doing a documentary — and his name is Dylan Shanahan. He wrote Liberation of Being. Lives with ALS, very, very late stage. But even when I met him in 2019, he wasn’t able to communicate with his mouth, only with his eyes. A young person. A beautiful gentleman. And I helped him write his memoir a couple of years ago. And he is quite a shining example of how that life force can continue to thrive and exist within an extremely compromised state.Joshua Doležal:You mentioned your films. Maybe we could end there since we’re getting close to our time. So you’ve made films that you screened at Harvard Medical School. You’re doing films as part of your advocacy work, and you’re on advisory boards that really are contributing to that advocacy. Do you think illness narratives like yours actually change how medicine is practiced, or is the power of it mainly for patients to feel solidarity and that nervous system reset that someone gets from reading your book? Is that for other people in your shoes, or is that actually something that you think doctors and other caregivers will absorb and then change?Kimberly Warner:Yeah, the goal would be to get these in medical schools. I think patients seek this stuff out. Even with social media, they can find it now. So that’s great. But to me, the real work is getting the films into medical schools, getting them into curriculums, getting them in front of physicians that are already practicing. My episodes are all eight to ten minutes long. It doesn’t take long for a physician to really just grasp a sense of humanity within the voices that I feature in these stories. And I really stay away from, let’s talk about what your treatments are and all of that. It’s more the deeper themes around hope and purpose and meaning.One of the episodes towards the end of the first docuseries asked the question: would you give up everything you’ve learned since your diagnosis in order to be healed? And there was no right or wrong. I wasn’t looking for some sort of glitter rainbow from people. And it was a wonderful mixed bag. But a resounding no came from a lot of people, including Dylan — this gentleman with ALS — because he had gotten to the point where he felt like ALS had become his ultimate teacher. And he wouldn’t want to take away those lessons.So I think that kind of level of humanity — when a physician can, in 10 minutes, they’re just looking for bullets and ways to attack what is coming in at them. But if they can hold a little bit more of their patient’s story, I think it just opens the potential for an additional kind of healing if they are unable to heal them with the magic bullet.Joshua Doležal:I know from speaking with physicians that some of them are fighting the common enemy of the patient, which is the corporate bureaucracy. So it’s not that they’re unconvinced of the need for more healing. It’s just that they’re not given opportunities to spend that quality time or show anything that’s not a billable hour — or they just can’t, within the system that they operate, perform that way. And that seems especially harmful in the case of chronic illness because it’s the contextual things that make it worse or even spark the onset of it. And so it’s more of the contextual human story that a doctor would need to be able to respond to. And yet the constraints of the 15-minute visit, or if they are running behind all day and they can’t get their 40 patients in because some admin is telling them they have to do that — I think sometimes the culture and the corporate environments that are created within hospitals work against that too.Kimberly Warner:Yeah, and I think, to me, there’s a solution to that. If 10 minutes is all they’ve got, have resources for your patients. Give them your time for those 10 minutes and then hand them a resource — with a link to one of the Unfixed docu-series videos or for, you know, my dizzy doc — hand them the pamphlet to the Vestibular Disorders Association that’s literally in the same town so I can connect with support groups and additional physicians that are working within — I mean, have resources. We live in a world where there are so many resources. And I think maybe that’s a lot of extra work for the doctor, but maybe there needs to be an additional staff member that just gathers resources for those patients, because a lot of that time is just going to be taken up by gathering data and writing a prescription. But if the patient’s sick, they’re going to go home and they have got lots of time. I guarantee you they’ve got lots of time. So give them something to do with that time.Joshua Doležal:Tell me a little bit about Unfixed Media. So you’re telling other people’s stories — are these oral histories? Are they interviews? What would someone see in your films? Can they go somewhere to watch some of these?Kimberly Warner:So there’s a great channel called the Disorder Channel, and that was started actually during the pandemic by two gentlemen that were running a rare disease film festival on the East Coast. And then because the festivals had to be shut down, they started a channel, and it’s accessible through Amazon Fire and Roku. But I also have everything for free on YouTube and on the Unfixed Media website.It originally began just as a documentary, a feature documentary. But like I said, we started filming in 2019 and the pandemic happened. So I was three subjects down and then we had to shut everything down. So I had 20 individuals that were already signed on and I thought, let’s just use smartphones — I’ll send them equipment and see what we can get done in their living rooms and bedrooms. And it ended up being such a successful model for patient narratives because I found that they were actually even more comfortable than the ones that had the film crew in their living rooms. And very vulnerable. And so we filmed for two years where they, every month, would answer a question I had. And then they were edited into a docuseries, a two-year-long docuseries. And then that snowballed into another vestibular series through the Vestibular Disorders Association. And then another one through Solve M.E., which was all about myalgic encephalomyelitis and long COVID-19. And then I did one through Harvard Medical School and Dr. Annie Brewster that was on all mental health. So it keeps going — every year I sort of respond to what organizations might feel like there’s a need for this type of education. There are always willing ambassadors and patients to participate and support. And it’s really easy. It’s been an easy way to gather these stories.And I’ve always — I’m very picky about how they’re edited. So they’re beautifully done and staged as well as they possibly can. And ultimately someday — I’ve actually applied for a Guggenheim grant and I’ll find out next month if I got it — but I would like to go back to those original 20 subjects, or at least a smaller pool of those subjects, and finish the feature documentary. A little bit like the 7 Up stories, the films that were done over a period of, God, I don’t even know, 49 years. And see how these subjects are doing seven years later, because chronic illness is chronic. So how are they doing seven years after our first interviews? So I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life.It feels really satisfying to bring these stories into a little bit more of the general audience. But I’ll tell you, it’s an uphill battle to get people to watch it. I think we have to find our niche populations, and medical schools would be a great place for that. But a lot of the time, as soon as somebody says, here’s chronic illness, they’re like, no, I don’t want to hear it. Sounds sad. And the irony is that so many people, when they watch these, they feel uplifted. They are stories of human resilience, mostly.Joshua Doležal:Absolutely. Best of luck with your grant. And we’ll end with a plug for your memoir, Unfixed, which is available from Empress Editions. And I’ll point everyone to your Substack, unfixed.substack.com. I’ll put the links in the show notes.So that’s the thing not named for today. Thank you, Kimberly, for sharing your time and your book with us.Kimberly Warner:Thank you so much, Joshua. Take care, everyone. Bye.My 2026 series explores medicine and storytelling. Come think with me about how narrative bridges gaps between doctors and patients and the public, and why we need writers like Kimberly now more than ever.Paid members get two in-depth essays each month, on-demand interviews, and full archive access.More episodes of The Things Not Named ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you Kae, Lori, Michelle Ray, and many others for tuning into my live video with Damon Tweedy! Damon Tweedy Bio:Dr. Damon Tweedy, is a psychiatrist, author, and leading voice on race, medicine, and mental health. He’s a professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and a staff psychiatrist with the Durham Veterans Affairs Health System, where he co-leads an integrated primary care mental health team. A graduate of Duke School of Medicine, he also earned a law degree from Yale Law School, focusing on health policy and medical ethics before returning to Duke to complete his psychiatric training. Dr. Tweedy is the bestselling author of Black Man in a White Coat, which takes a hard look at racism and American medicine. The book was a New York Times bestseller and was named a top nonfiction book of the year by Time Magazine. His latest book, Facing the Unseen, explores the struggle to center mental health within medicine and was recognized by Nature as one of the best science books of 2024. The full transcript is available below.Transcript:Joshua Dolezal:Welcome back to The Things Not Named. I’m Joshua Dolezal, and my series this year is based on one of Willa Cather’s famous passages. She said that it’s the presence of the thing not named that gives high quality to fiction, drama, and poetry. And so for my series this year on the medical humanities, I’m applying that principle to how we might all be more attentive to what goes unsaid in the clinic, in popular culture, and in the experience of illness from the patient’s side.My guest today is Dr. Damon Tweedy, psychiatrist, author, and leading voice on race, medicine, and mental health. He’s a professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and a staff psychiatrist with the Durham Veterans Affairs Health System, where he co-leads an integrated primary care mental health team. A graduate of Duke School of Medicine, he also earned a law degree from Yale Law School, focusing on health policy and medical ethics before returning to Duke to complete his psychiatric training. Dr. Tweedy is the bestselling author of Black Man in a White Coat, which takes a hard look at racism and American medicine. The book was a New York Times bestseller and was named a top nonfiction book of the year by Time Magazine. His latest book, Facing the Unseen, explores the struggle to center mental health within medicine and was recognized by Nature as one of the best science books of 2024. So thanks for joining me, Dr. Tweedy.Damon Tweedy:Yeah, it’s a pleasure.Joshua Dolezal:So Damon, maybe we can start with your family origins. If I’m not mistaken, you and I are both first-gen college students. So it was kind of a long road that you took from where you were born and raised to Duke and then also to Yale.Damon Tweedy:Yeah, so, you know, growing up, it didn’t feel that way. But now, looking back — I’m 51, almost 52 — it does feel like, yeah, you know, it was quite a journey. So I grew up in a two-parent home, mom and dad, both of whom traced their families back to America’s origins, right? Back through segregation, even back to slavery — because I have an 1860 census my dad showed me of some of his relatives. And so they grew up from Southern Virginia, grew up during the time of segregation. My parents are still living, they’re elderly now, and literally, you know, the things that we read about in textbooks were their lived experience. The Civil Rights Movement came to them when they were in their early 20s. So their whole first 20 years were in that space. And so that undoubtedly impacted how they experienced the world, see the world.And so for me, I grew up — so my dad worked in a grocery store, a food store. Mom worked in a sort of government, kind of administrative secretarial type work. And I had an older brother and we were in a community that was all Black, literally 100% Black, a very working-class sort of Black community outside of Washington, D.C.Back in those days, busing was still around. And so we were bused to a neighboring district that was all white. And so those are probably my first earliest kind of signs of, okay, you’re different. And what do people make of you by being different?And so for me, that difference was that, you know, I was kind of really into math and numbers — I was sort of an odd kid in that way, really into that. So I excelled in math, but I was also one of the Black kids bused to a school that was all white. And there were a lot of perceptions among teachers there about the Black students not being capable or being somehow, you know, a problem — things that we sort of all hear about. And so for me, I was finding myself in a space where, at the same time, I was a top student. And so people didn’t know what to make of me — the teachers and sometimes my classmates — because there were all these perceptions about what it meant to be a Black person, you know, largely negative, right? And so I experienced that sort of duality at a very early age.When I got to high school, my middle school was a local Black neighborhood school, but then I tested into a magnet program in high school. Little did I know at the time how powerful a school it was in terms of some of the people who went there and what they achieved. But it was a magnet school that was pretty much all white and Asian within a school that was otherwise Black. And so I was in these magnet classes with white and Asian students, but the rest of the school was mostly Black. And there was always this sort of tension between — where do I fit in in these two worlds?And so that was sort of a common theme, and it played out in a lot of really kind of crazy ways. One story I can tell real quick that will encapsulate this. In high school, in 10th grade, I was in a chemistry class — literally the only Black student in a class of 30 students. And one day, our school was a school of excellence, and so they brought in several leading politicians to sort of talk about our tech program and how great it was. And so at that time — given my age — this was Governor Bill Clinton before he was president, and several people across both parties. And they sort of took them around our school to the tech programs. So here I am, the only Black student in that class. And before they get to our particular classroom, there’s suddenly four or five other Black kids in the class who are just sort of there, positioned. And then you see where I’m going with this? And then suddenly, as soon as these political people leave, those kids are just kind of told to leave. And so I’m back here as the only Black student in the class. And I’m looking around like, what the hell just happened? And no one had any reaction. It was like no one else seemed to get what had just taken place.And that sort of in some ways encapsulated my perspective of being different, you know, and having to navigate two worlds. So my first book sort of starts with me being a medical student, but that’s sort of the backdrop to that. And so when you get to medical school at a place like Duke, that’s just accentuated — that whole idea of two worlds. The world of the doctors, you know, mostly white and Asian. Then there’s the world of patients and the community that you’re around, which is largely Black. And how do you navigate those two worlds? And so that was sort of the tension that I experienced at a young age, but it just really was accelerated in a medical setting.Because for me, you know, part of what attracted me to medicine was the idea that it was objective, that it was concrete. It was data-driven. You know, it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside. A bone is a bone. A blood vessel is a blood vessel. And so that’s part of what appealed to me. It’s like I could contribute to society, but in a very concrete way. And so it was really kind of a shock to the system to get into medicine and realize that it was sort of in some ways the same old thing in terms of those problems that I’d experienced as a young person.Joshua Dolezal:Yeah. One of the philosophers that I used in my dissertation was Helen Longino, whose iconic book is called Science as Social Knowledge, kind of questioning this idea that science is just objective because it always takes place in a context that is social, and that certain questions get privileged and certain research gets funded and all of that. We’re the same age. So I remember Clinton when I was in high school and all of that.Two questions came up as you were telling a little bit of that story. One — you said that you tested into this program. I know that recently there’s been some debate about whether standardized tests are actually exclusionary, whether they set arbitrary barriers for diversity in college. And I know during COVID, a lot of those standards were just taken away. And yet I’ve heard other writers talk about this — Thomas Chatterton Williams is another one who felt like standardized testing was the only way that he got noticed at all, that he would have been lost in the cracks if it hadn’t been for some kind of merit-based way of breaking through. So I’m curious what your thoughts are on that, whether standardized testing is actually a way of bringing more diverse voices into medicine or whether it’s been kind of exclusionary.Damon Tweedy:I think it’s a mixed picture. I think it depends on how you use it. I think that if it’s used — like, a number in and of itself — it has to be — it’s going to sound crazy to some people, but a number has to almost be contextualized. Like, if you take, let’s say, an SAT score — let’s just say 1,200, right? Now, 1,200, depending on what your background is leading up to that place, that could be a not-so-good score, that could be an exceptional score, depending on what your background is and what you sort of had to overcome and deal with.So you think about my situation. First, you know, parents did not go to college. Despite my mom’s best efforts, I was sort of like anti — you couldn’t get me to read a book. I was kind of anti-intellectual, because that was sort of what was cool, and that was sort of the internalized message as a Black person — that these books you’re learning about in school, about 18th century England, that’s not for you, so why even bother? And so in some ways you’re kind of — it’s easy to sort of go down that path. And so you think about me getting a score like that. You know, given my background, that score may show a lot of potential. But if you compare it to someone who has had all the tutoring and — I was even told when I was in middle school and early high school that you couldn’t even study for the SAT. Like, I was like, really? I mean, looking back now, I think, really? People told me that? But that’s what I was actually told. Obviously there’s a whole testing industry that would prove otherwise.And so if you compare people — again, the score in isolation — if you’re comparing someone like me with that score to someone who has had a much more privileged background, and putting us on the same footing, then I would say no, that’s not great. But if you sort of contextualize that person — what is that person’s distance traveled to get to this place? Then I think the scores could be potentially very useful. So again, it’s all about how you choose to use it. But if you just use it as a blanket number and say this is your value, then no, I think it could be more harmful than good.Joshua Dolezal:I heard Scott Galloway talking about that — you know, that it used to be that you could be kind of average and then get into an environment where you could become exceptional over time. But a lot of elite universities now seem to screen for these superhumans that are already superhuman at age 17. And yeah, it’s a problem.The second question from your background — you’d mentioned feeling kind of caught between two worlds. You didn’t know quite where you fit. And there’s a saying about comedians, right? That they’re all damaged people. And I think there’s a similar saying about memoirists, which is that we felt dislocated or marginalized somehow, and that we try to write our way back into normalcy. I don’t know if that is true for you — that the impetus to write your first book came from that sense of wanting to bridge the two worlds. Is that accurate?Damon Tweedy:I never heard that exact saying. I heard about comedians, but not about memoirs. But I will say, it was an effort to make sense of what I’d experienced. Like, I would have an experience — it all started — writing not even with the intent that I would one day be writing a book for a public audience. It was more about writing for my own sense of like, how do I make sense of this experience internally. You know, I spent eight weeks in a hospital setting — again, patients often all Black, staff the opposite. I’m the only Black person in it. I would always find myself caught in these two different kinds of spaces and not having — as I put in the book — one foot in both worlds but not two feet in either. A sort of dislocation. And so it was kind of just a way to make sense of what I was experiencing initially. That’s how it all kind of really got started.And then as I began to write a little bit more, I began to realize that there were aspects of what I was writing about that other people could connect with. And then it just sort of built upon — often Black people, but even beyond that, because in so many ways, as you learn, there are so many ways in which someone can be othered, right? And I was able to feel like I could connect with people in other ways as well. So that’s sort of how it kind of all sort of evolved. But it started as something to make sense for myself.Joshua Dolezal:I had the pleasure of teaching Black Man in a White Coat. I used to be an English professor in Iowa before I pivoted to independent writing and podcasting, but I loved teaching it, and students resonated with a lot of your stories and learned a lot. They appreciated the research that you brought to it and the historical perspective. What really struck a lot of them was the opening, so I wanted to talk about that first scene that really hooks the premise. And I’d like to also maybe get into some of your influences — people that shaped you as you were writing this or models that you had for the book — because the book doesn’t come out of nowhere. You join a conversation about what it’s like to be a doctor and there’s a great body of literature on that already.Damon Tweedy:Yeah, so, you know, just to quickly start that last point. As I got into medical school and once I was there, I started getting interested in stories. Like, it was fascinating to me that, you know, in some ways a story — like a doctor could write a 750-word essay about an experience in a clinic with a patient, and you could learn so much from that. And it was a sort of way you could connect to that. And I found it ultimately became more interesting in some ways than, say, the latest New England Journal study comparing this drug to this placebo. And it was like, wow, these stories are fascinating.But what I noticed — and there were many books, many writers who were really successful, and I drew on many of them, I have a whole library of books over here that’s nothing but medical memoirs in one row — what I thought I brought to the table, looking back, is that those stories were set in big cities often, but there wasn’t that dynamic of what is it like to be a Black person, given our country’s history, to be in these same rooms? And what were the tensions between patient and doctor that maybe someone who is not Black and didn’t have my experience growing up could sort of understand? So that’s sort of how the book situates within that literature of medical memoirs.But as for that opening story — so I’ve already kind of laid out for you some of the dislocation I felt and how medical school would start to be this space in which I could kind of escape that. I initially started medical school thinking I’d become a cardiologist or an orthopedic surgeon — very, from my mind, very concrete, objective enterprises, you know, a blood vessel is a blood vessel, a bone is a bone, right? And that was sort of how I was thinking about medical school when I started.So in the background, of course, in the mid-90s, Affirmative Action was — there was an earlier attack. There’s always been attacks on it, right? There’s always, you know, history repeats itself. So there was always a sense of, you know, you’re in this place like Duke — man, do I really belong here? You know, my parents didn’t go to college. I’m a Black guy here. This guy next to me, his dad’s the dean of this law school. This guy’s mom owns a company. They’re driving Mercedes to school and like, man, you know, I don’t belong here. Right? And they’ve all gone to Ivy League schools, Princeton and whatnot. And so what am I doing here? So there was always that there.And then there was this early day, first few weeks of med school, where basically I leave the classroom for a break, come back between lectures, and the professor confronts me in the room and says, “Sir, are you here to fix the lights in the room?” And I’m looking around like, who’s he looking at? He’s looking at me. And I’m like, well, no. And he’s like, “Yeah, but I mean, I called about this last week. Why haven’t you done it?” He sort of got irritable about it. And he really kind of doubled down. I’m like, whoa, what’s happening here? Why is it me? And I’m not someone who wants to just jump to the idea that race is always the reason why someone treats you a certain way. But I couldn’t come to anything else. It’s like, wait, why else — I’m dressed the same, everything’s the same as everyone else except the obvious, right? And so I was like, man. It always comes back to this.And so how do you deal with that? I’m a really big, tall guy. Am I going to come back with anger? Is that going to — how is it going to be received? Am I going to be some, you know, angry Black guy who’s looking to make everything a problem? And this guy was small — so I could visualize how that could have gone south so quickly. And so what do you do? I mean, just based on life experience, that could have gone south really quickly. And so you kind of retreat and you’re like, man, this guy thinks I don’t belong here, right? So I had to — it was like a test for me. Do I belong here? And so I really kind of internally just — maybe he’s right. Maybe all these things are true. And so I just really kind of tapped into something I didn’t know I necessarily had at that point in my life, where I doubled down and I studied like hours around the clock, basically, almost literally. Ended up at the very end getting one of the highest grades in the class.And the way it worked back then is that you would meet with the professor at the end of the course. And then it was a weird thing because, you know, I knew that at this point I’d done well. But then the professor — when he saw my score and he saw me — he did this double take and started getting nervous and stumbling. And it was weird because it was like in some ways I vindicated myself. I’d shown him — I stuck it to him, if you will. But at the same time, it was like, you know, I’m different, right? And people are going to see me differently. And no matter how much I just want to be like everyone else, I just want to be a medical student — I have to navigate this reality that people will see me differently. And I have to figure out how to make that work. And so that was sort of the opening salvo to that journey.Joshua Dolezal:And he, as I recall from the book, offered you a chance to join his research team, and he wanted to be part of that.Damon Tweedy:It was like a patronizing kind of thing, right? Because I think he remembered the first encounter in retrospect, and I think it was just so awkward. And it was like, no, we just need to move forward.Joshua Dolezal:What you’re describing — being seen a certain way by professors — it didn’t stop once you started practicing. And one thing I love about memoir writing and your book in particular is that our lives happen to us in chronological order, but we don’t have to tell everything that way in a memoir. We can choose how we’re going to order things. And so sometimes the way you place two stories side by side is enlightening. And in this case, you had a self-admitted white supremacist named Chester, and then in the same chapter you had a Black man named Robert. And neither one of them wanted you as their doctor. That was a really interesting contrast — for both of them, coming from very different backgrounds, to draw the same conclusion. So why did you juxtapose them like that in the same chapter? And what did you learn from that?Damon Tweedy:At that point in the book, I’m an intern, a medical intern, which is the — people have probably seen TV shows — busiest year in a doctor’s life, you know, all those stories about interns. And so, yeah, you just want to be dealing with all these other challenges: the 3 a.m. call, you know, the heart attack in the room, whatever. And so you’re dealing with — can you cut it, right? And so that’s the context of every intern. And so in some ways, it’s extremely stressful. And you want to feel like you’re just like every other doctor, but then these things happen and you’re reminded you’re different.So one is that you have a white supremacist patient and his family who sort of embodied all that. And I saw all these Confederate flag tattoos and outfits and inward slurs and all that. And you’re like, whoa, obviously they didn’t want me to be a doctor, right? And then — but the irony was that I was the only Black doctor of that whole sort of medical team, like 20, 30 doctors, only Black person there. And so I’m the one who gets assigned to this white supremacist.And then in that same year, I had another patient — the Black patient you talked about — who had internalized that Black people were less, you know, successful, right? Less, were inferior in some way. So he’s like, I didn’t come to Duke to see a Black doctor. I came to see, you know, this Jewish doctor, this Asian doctor — all the stereotypes that sort of kind of come in there. I didn’t come to see a Black doctor. Why are you trying to give me inferior care? And so it’s like, wow. And so it just shows how deep that cuts, right? It shows how deeply the racism cuts into how people perceive a Black person in a white coat, in so many ways.And so what I had to do — you know, I always kind of circle back to the idea of what do you do with that? Anger is always what you feel first. Defensiveness — that’s the natural reaction. But is that going to get me anywhere, or is that going to just make things worse? And that’s always the thing that I’ve had to kind of navigate, right? There’s a downside to that — we’ll maybe get to that later. But I’ve sort of been able to navigate that anger by not expressing it and trying — I’m going to prove someone wrong, right? I’m going to just show them how competent I am. And that’s sort of been my approach to things.And in both cases — I mean, I guess I don’t want to give it all away — but in both cases, I was able to sort of overcome tremendous obstacles, and to have both people agree to have me successfully treat them as their doctor. But it did come at a cost, right? I mean, so on one hand, that’s a great story. I was able to overcome racism and do the good, right? But I think the downside is that, you know, for me to internalize all that — I think it actually impacted my health, right? Physically. And now I’m a psychiatrist and I think about the mind and the body and how much they are intertwined. And so when I was in my twenties, in that era, during that period of life, I had significantly elevated blood pressure that I only kind of later unpacked. And I had high blood pressure, and I also went to a doctor and they told me I had some early signs of kidney-related problems, which were related to high blood pressure.So you think about those things that I was experiencing — and now I’m much older and those problems have gone away. But I think what was happening was that I was internalizing that stress, and it was showing up in that way. So I think there’s a cost to what I did. But looking back, I think I also still did the best thing that I could in those situations.Joshua Dolezal:Yeah. You’re making me wonder — and I’ve talked about this with other guests too — whether writing is an underreported way of releasing some of your experiences as a doctor. And this is my pet peeve: that always gets framed as a kind of catharsis — you know, you just sort of let it all out. But I think the real healing that writing offers is that you get to reframe things, you get to make sense of things, you get to shape them meaningfully. So what I love about Black Man in a White Coat is you’re not just telling these stories — you’re capturing a moment when you’re immersed in the confusion and the anger, and that’s your voice of innocence sort of in the moment. But then you come back with the voice of experience and layer over some insight. And in that case, you said you had sort of pegged this guy Chester, the white supremacist, as less than you. You know, you’d sort of absorbed all these attitudes about “white trash,” you know, Confederate flag. Trailer parks, you know.Damon Tweedy:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.Joshua Dolezal:So when you’re writing about something and you’re releasing the stressful part of it, but also layering over a kind of insight about yourself that you’ve gleaned — to me, that’s where the real power of writing comes out.Damon Tweedy:No, I agree. And I think also in both those stories, it also shows, you know, because not only did I make change, but they were able to make change, these patients, right? So I think it also makes us think about — it can also address a sense of hopelessness that people can’t ever, you know, change or improve or be better than where they are. And I think those stories also can shed light on that, right, as well.You know, so much of our world is framed by — someone always says, you don’t know what you don’t know. And you think about this — this may be a broader topic — but you think about how Black people have often been framed, right? And you think about the ways by media, by different stories and things of that sort, and how we all kind of ingest that, Black or white, or otherwise. And there’s a certain poison to that. So what my book hoped to do is — how do we continue to challenge that? How do we continue to help people get to, you know, see the better side of themselves? Because so much of this, the default can be the negative. And so that was one of the other things that I thought these stories also helped with. Not only for me, but also showing how other people beyond me can grow. So it wasn’t just about my own growth. It was about how others can grow as well.Joshua Dolezal:Absolutely. I want to shift to Facing the Unseen, your second book, which begins with a surprising premise — that you had all these other options open to you, had this prestigious law degree, you could have made a bunch of money as a surgeon, but you instead chose psychiatry. And you seem to have this kind of thesis in the book that mental health care gets kind of shunted off to the side, it’s marginalized from general medicine, and that really what should happen for everyone’s sake is a kind of integration of the two. So tell us a little more about how you came to write that book and what was different about it from Black Man in a White Coat.Damon Tweedy:Let me start with what’s similar. So the title of the book is inspired to some degree by a quote from James Baldwin from back in the ‘60s — an essay in the New York Times where he says something to the effect of — I always kind of butcher it — but basically he’s talking about the state of the civil rights movement and how we can move forward. And he says something to the effect of, you know, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. You know, the idea that we can’t change the fact that there was segregation, there was slavery, but how do we move forward? We have to take an honest reckoning, an honest look at how they impact us today.And so I think there are a lot of parallels — now he’s talking about race and civil rights, but I think if people look back 40, 50 years from now, they’ll wonder about some of our treatment of mental illness and mental health, and they will see real parallels. Because some of the things that happened then — for instance, you know, back in the ‘40s, ‘50s, there were separate hospitals, right? And Black people were literally denied care. Honestly, one thing I didn’t tell you is that I actually did — there’s a podcast called Unhealed that my colleagues and I did at Duke where we talk about a story from Duke during that time. I should have sent it to you ahead of time. It’s a really interesting story. But it talks about — so that was the past, right? They literally had segregated hospitals, people being denied care.Nowadays, that happens in mental health, where people will come to a hospital, to an emergency department, and if the issue is identified as a mental health problem, they have to be sent somewhere else, right? And often hours and hours away to inferior settings. I think there are real parallels. And so that’s sort of what I say is the similarity. And that’s sort of how it kind of came to me to think about — because the first book is exploring how race puts people as an other. But I think the second book is more about how mental illness and mental health is an othering factor.I started my medical school clinical year. I started in surgery, which was at the main hospital. And you think about surgery, medicine, ER. My second rotation was in family medicine, primary care in a regular setting. My third rotation was in psychiatry. And so for the psych rotation, they put us into a state hospital 30 minutes away from everything else, which is already separate. And when you drive to that hospital, you would pass signs for a federal prison, a juvenile detention facility. And you think about this — think about how you’ve already sort of separated out mental illness as something completely different, even in that geographic and sort of symbolic, metaphorical way. And so that’s sort of your introduction to psychiatry for many people. And I think it already sets it off as a very different sort of thing that you’re engaging with.So that was sort of the frame. And that’s sort of how it all started. And I think that persists through training. But then as you get further through training, you realize how much the two overlap — mental health and physical health are intertwined. But that’s not how you’re taught. You’re taught that they’re totally two different things. And that comes out as harm to patients and doctors, as I talk about in the book.Joshua Dolezal:And there is an aspect to mental illness that’s just scarier than other kinds of disease. You know, if somebody comes in with a broken leg, you’re not dealing with the same kind of behaviors that are — “abnormal” is a kind of loaded term, right? But, you know, it can be frightening. And you kind of face that with one of your friends or acquaintances, the guy you played basketball with. So tell us about Scott and why that was so unnerving for you early in that rotation.Damon Tweedy:So once again, people should know — I went to med school to become a surgeon or a cardiologist. I am very much in that medical model. I actually looked down on psychiatrists, like, why would anyone do that? And so that was my sort of — and a lot of people, that’s how a lot of people sort of came to it. And it got reinforced with the way we were taught in med school. So in my intern year, I’m on the path in general medicine to become a cardiologist. That’s the path I’m on.And so one day we get a call to come to the ER, and there’s a young man who’s acting strange. And they said acting crazy. And so the way that works in medical settings is you have to make sure that you’re not missing something else. So if you’re on a medical team and someone’s acting strange behaviorally, you want to make sure there’s nothing underlying that’s causing it. Like, do they have some kind of infection or some kind of, you know, cancer, something that can explain this behavior? You want to make sure that you’re not missing something medically. And so my goal was to come down there and do that medical evaluation and then send them to psychiatry if everything turned out normal.So I’d done that before. But on this particular day, I go down to the emergency department, and I see the person I’m supposed to evaluate, and I just stop in my tracks because it’s like somebody that I recognize — someone I’d known years earlier. He was an undergraduate student. We’d played pickup basketball and done a lot of, you know, bonding over that. He was a really smart guy. He wanted to become a lawyer, politician, etc. Really bright guy. And so, you know, I’d seen him one way, and now he’s in a state where he’s like basically manic and disheveled, and like — who is this person?And so I think that really speaks to the idea — when we think about mental illness, as you just said earlier, it can be an us-versus-them aspect to it. The “us” is the land of normal people, as we might want to think of ourselves — people who sort of can conduct ourselves in a normal way. The “them” are people at those facilities, like at a state hospital, or homeless people. That’s the “them.” And so we have this sort of separation. And so for me to see someone that I know in one way, as an “us,” now as a “them” — it was like, whoa, what is happening? How can this be? Because when you see someone at a state hospital, by the time you’ve seen them, they’ve already been in that “them” state for so long, you can divorce the idea that that person may not have always been that way, right? Or that there are people in their world that care about them. In that way, it’s easy to sort of separate yourself from all of that. And I think that’s part of what happens in our society to a large degree.And so when I called Scott’s mom, that was really jarring. I didn’t know her before, but just to call her — because what you find is that when people have those issues, a mental health issue, people want it to be anything else because that’s so frightening. It’s so scary. Like, could it be anything else? Could it be cancer? But you want to hold onto something that’s tangible. And that’s what you see. And so that’s what I saw in that experience with Scott. It was really just a totally mind-bending experience for me. Coming from a world where I didn’t think about mental illness as a real thing. It was a mind-bending experience to sort of see that up close. And then having a personal connection made it more complicated because then he’s paranoid that you’re kind of manipulating your connection with him to sort of sell him out to somebody else.Joshua Dolezal:Yes. So that dynamic — can you be a patient’s friend, or does that actually harm the care you give them? — kind of comes up there.Damon Tweedy:Yeah, it was very complicated. Yeah, for sure. Because he’s like, man, you’re part of it. Because, you know, he was paranoid — they brought me in as part of the conspiracy to prove that he was crazy. Yeah, that was sort of his thing. And it was really difficult. And it was a very emotional experience to sort of see that. But it made me think about it in a different way. And as I began to go back onto the medical units, I began to see how pervasive it was. You know, there were people I was seeing all the time who had, quote, medical issues, right? But there was a mental health issue that was either the cause of it or was making it a lot worse. And that’s how I began to really kind of get more interested in this idea of how do the mind and body sort of really connect and interface? Because we had been taught they were two different things. But I was just seeing in practice that it really wasn’t. And so that was sort of really kind of gradually steering me more away from this sort of cardiology world and over time into this other world.Joshua Dolezal:I have an ethics question for you because all doctors who write about their patients have a kind of liability. You know, you have to protect privacy, HIPAA is a concern and so on. So how do you take — so this guy that we’re talking about, his real name must not be Scott, right? And there must have been some other identifying details that you concealed. And we’re seeing how memoirs can lead to lawsuits by people who feel like they’ve had their story co-opted. How do you protect yourself and how do you do right by the patient so that you’re not sort of cashing in on their suffering, as some critics might say?Damon Tweedy:Yeah, no, I mean — several things. One is that, you know, in these stories, I never present myself as — well, at least I don’t think I do — as some sort of heroic person. I really talk about my faults and all my shortcomings. It’s not exhibiting narcissism and like, oh, I’m great and I’m saving it. I’m not immune to screwing things up. So that’s one, you know, and learning along the way.I think the other thing — so I think there’s a sense of humility there that I think is important. I think it’s also important to, you know — these stories aren’t told just to be salacious. These stories are told because it’s really to put a human face on these issues. Because I think a lot of times it’s too abstract. People can’t understand what mental illness is, they can’t understand what racism is. But putting a story — this is what it looks like, and this is how people are affected, and this is what we can do to make this better. Because there’s always the other piece: what’s changed? What’s gotten better? How can we make this story turn into something that’s helpful, that’s actually going to help people? So those are the things that I think are really important for me as I think about story.But in terms of details — no, I’ve never had any situation where someone said, oh, you wrote about me and why did you do that? There’s definitely ways to sort of protect yourself from that, whether it’s, you know, changing names or where somebody’s from or some aspect of their physical appearance — maybe they’re 6’3”, maybe they’re 5’10”. There are all sorts of ways to sort of change that to make it so it’s not like, oh, you’re talking about this particular person, and that kind of thing for sure.Joshua Dolezal:Is that a case-by-case basis with your editors, or do you have a method that you use when you’re protecting someone?Damon Tweedy:I have a method I use, but then there’s also sometimes editors will have additional input. But it’s never been presented as an issue. I mean, and again, I think a lot of times — what is your intent? Are you just trying to tell a salacious story just for shock value? But me, no, I mean, some of these stories are difficult, but the intent is — how do we learn from these things? How do we make things better? And where do we go wrong?I think one of the things in medicine — like you go back to the race topic — you know, I think if we just look at history and say, oh, well, people in the past were bad and we’re better now, I think that’s really dangerous to do. It’s easy to do that, right? Because, you know, we don’t have segregated hospitals and all that. It’s easy to do that, but it’s also very dangerous. I think there were people in that time who thought they were doing the right thing but we underestimate how much the surrounding world influences us. I think there’s things that people are doing now we know that people will look back on and think wow how do we allow these things to happen and how can you be someone who sort of helps speak out against that.Because even in the ‘50s, there were doctors who wanted change, but maybe they didn’t have the place to do it, but they were speaking out. And how can you be the voice that helps that conversation? And so I think it’s a certain humility — recognizing your own shortcomings and your own potential to do bad. Me, all of us — to me, that’s a starting point.Joshua Dolezal:Yeah. And a really good example of that in the book is you experience kind of your own burnout, breakdown. You have to take a break, sort of get some counseling. And that’s kind of a staple in doctor memoirs — to flip the script and become a patient and then see things from the other side. So in this book about the importance of integrating mental health care and general medicine, your own story seems really key. So walk us through that. What led up to this — I think you snapped, you were trying to drain off some fluid and you couldn’t get the procedure right and it kind of blew up, but there had been a lot building up to that. So tell us about that scene, if you would, and then the process that you went through and what it taught you about the importance of everyone seeking care.Damon Tweedy:Yeah, I would say the brief part is this. So doctors are kind of indoctrinated — at least they were when I was in training. You got to be tough, right? You know, especially intern year, there’s no time to be — you know, you got to just do everything. It’s all about the patient. No time for whining. The worst thing you could do is be seen as soft, you know — that sort of mentality. And, you know, I was on board and I was doing well and I was good with my hands. And then there was one night where things just — stress built up and I couldn’t do this one thing. And, you know, rather than think of that as just a difficult moment, I got really upset, in front of a student and then my colleague. And then the next day, I wouldn’t talk to the chief resident because I was worried that, you know, they might have heard about me losing my cool.And the chief resident was like, “No, I think — man, you seem really stressed and I’m concerned about you.” And my defense, my wall went up: no, I’m good. I’m good. I’m good. And he’s like, “No, I’m really, you know, I’m really kind of worried about you.” And I kind of got a little bit defensive. But then I don’t know what happened — something clicked inside of me and I just started crying. And for me, I grew up as a Black guy in a lower-class, middle-class world. That’s not what you do. You got to be tough. Life’s tough. My parents would tell me life’s tough. You got to be tougher. There’s no time for whining. That’s sort of the world I kind of experienced. And so I probably cried like two or three times in my adult life — once in a high school basketball game when I missed a shot at the buzzer, and once when my grandmother died. Other than that, you know, crying was not — that’s not for little kids. And so for me to cry was just a jarring experience.And then I went to an employee health person a few days later before I could go back to work. And walking into that employee health space to see a mental health person, which I’d never done before, was mind-boggling. I realized how vulnerable people could be in a way that I never appreciated. Because here I am going to see this guy who doesn’t know me. He’s going to do some sort of evaluation. He’s going to be able to determine whether I can go back to work or not. And I recognized — you know, because when you’re an intern, life is built, piling on you. You get so many patients, so many calls. You can begin to think that you’re the victim, that you’re the one being punished. And you can lose sight of — man, there’s a patient who is so vulnerable. You know, this may be the worst moment they’ve ever experienced. This may be the scariest thing that ever happens in their entire life. You may have seen this medical condition a hundred times, but this is the first time this person’s ever experienced it. And so I never really fully appreciated that until I was on that other end, in that room with that guy. And things went well. I talked to him for 45 minutes. It was great. And I felt better. And I said, wow, maybe this counseling actually does help people. That was my first thought, because I was still in the medical model at that point.The vulnerability. So now when I talk to — I teach students and residents — I say, when you go into that room to the ER, take a deep breath. You may be so tired, you may be so irritated, whatever may be the case. But this patient — this may be the most vulnerable moment in their life that they will always remember. And so you have to honor that. And so I’ve carried that forward. And I would probably never appreciate it the way that I do if I hadn’t been on the other end as the patient.Joshua Dolezal:Yeah. So a lot of this book is making an argument for change. And some of that, I think you make through these really painful stories. So you had a patient that you call Stephanie, who comes in because she needs help — I think she tried to commit suicide, or it’s a cry for help. But she’s deemed a danger to herself. And she’s not aware that because of her income level or lack of insurance, that means that she’s been escorted by police in handcuffs to the state hospital. And no matter what level of compassionate care you bring, you can’t change that. That’s just the law. So I’m curious — and you’re raising awareness of this in your book, but you have a law degree yourself — if you could rewrite the laws about mental health care in situations like that, what would be some changes you would make?Damon Tweedy:Part of it is that it already has started to be rewritten. And so I think what my story is trying to show is that sometimes you have to kind of bear witness to suffering. There’s a certain moral injury to it. I feel like the natural order of things is that I think sometimes people conflate advances in technology — because we undoubtedly continue to advance with that, and we always will — with a sense of moral advancement. Which I think is just — I think some people think that we’re supposed to just become more morally attuned and better over time because it’s just the natural order of things. But that’s not true. I think it has to be made. You have to make that happen. And a lot of times people have to, unfortunately, suffer, or bad things have to happen, for that change to happen. I think that’s a terrible truth, unfortunately, based on my own experiences in life and others.And so this particular story — so basically the upshot is that you have two different women who both had a similar problem. One has health insurance. She’s white. She gets the kind of care that you’d want to get in that situation. The other woman is a Black woman without health insurance. And what happens to her is — even though she came to the hospital, called 911, was ambulanced to the hospital — the laws at the time were such that any mental health patient who was going from one hospital to another had to be involuntarily hospitalized, no matter whether the patient wanted that or not. And so that meant police. That meant — man, think about this — this is your first time ever crying for help, getting care. And what happens to you is you’re treated like a criminal. Again, it goes back to the idea — how do we see mental health? Do we see it as like a criminal thing, a sin thing, or is it something that’s medical, right? It goes back to that whole central question. If you think about it as a crime, then yeah, handcuffs, police is the way to go.But she had taken a handful of pills because she was dealing with a lot of grief and she had no sort of way to process it. A lot of us might be in that same situation, but why is that a crime? But that’s how the system sort of treated it. And so she was taken in handcuffs to a state hospital. It was a dreadful thing. And so enough of us had seen that happen that we began to say, we got to do better. We got to change this. And so some of that change happened at the hospital level, but some happened at the state level. And so we began to advocate for the change. And so now that wouldn’t necessarily happen today. So nowadays, that same woman would come to the ER, and the laws have changed such that now there’s discretion. You know, I could have evaluated her and said, no, she’s fine, and the ambulance can take her to the next hospital because this is a medical condition. And so that has changed.And so part of my — again, are you telling these stories just to sort of be gratuitously depicting suffering, or are you trying to tell these stories because you’re showing this is what happened and this is what it takes to make change? And so that was the goal of that story. A terrible story, but one that would not happen today, thankfully.Joshua Dolezal:Yeah, and the reader takes the lesson to heart for sure. So a lot of Facing the Unseen is stating the problem, as in Stephanie’s case. But you do talk a little bit about integrated care and you work presently on an integrated team at the Durham VA. So I thought maybe we could end with that, because that’s maybe the kind of change you’re living — being the change that you want to see, to some extent. What does that integrated team look like? And what are some of the barriers to making that more widespread and reducing this binary between mental health care and general medicine?Damon Tweedy:Right. So the traditional model is it’s all separate, right? You go to a medical doctor and they make a referral. You go across town, you go to the basement, you know, somewhere different. And that’s where you get your mental health care. And so the whole premise of integrated care is that, you know, medical is all the same in some ways, right? And so the model is that the mental health providers are situated within the same medical clinic — whether it’s primary care, whether it’s oncology, you name a medical specialty — the mental health doctors are in the same space. So a person comes in for their medical condition, there’s a significant mental health issue connected to it — which we shouldn’t be surprised about. Think about how stressful physical illness is. I mean, it’s like — why are we surprised that they’re connected, that one relates to the other? It’s all connected, right? Why is that such a shocking revelation? It’s not, but in practice it is.And so we’re there physically. And so that reduces wait times, because it increases the likelihood of the person being seen in the first place. Because if you take someone — I’ve had to take off work to get to a medical appointment. And now you’re telling me I got to take off work again to go across town to see someone else. And you’re also saying that I’m just crazy, that this medical problem is all in my head. It just sets up barriers. And so the whole point is that we sort of break down those barriers and meet people where they are.So, yeah, I supervise a team of several social workers, psychologists, other psychiatrists, and some nurses — a multidisciplinary team. And we need to meet people where they are. And there are a lot of great stories I talk about in the book — I don’t have enough time to go into them — but how this integrated care model can help save lives. And it helps the doctors on both ends as well.The other thing I think is really important for me moving forward is also how do you train the next generation to have a better perspective on these issues? I told you my training was very separate. So I teach a course at Duke where the whole purpose is to teach doctors who are not going to be psychiatrists to really appreciate mental health illness in a different way. Maybe this one story will really illustrate it.So several years ago, I had a student who was in this class. I took these students to something called a clubhouse. And clubhouses are places where people with severe mental illness are treated in a non-medical way. It’s about how do you build community? How do you learn to eat better? How do you get job skills training? It’s very non-medical, but it’s very important.And so in this space, he saw a young woman who he had seen months earlier in an acute hospital setting, where she was acutely ill, paranoid, getting injections and medicines and that sort of thing. He saw her in this space several months later, and she was like a different person. She was doing well. She was going back to work. She was going to school. And he told me — as others have told me — he said, “I didn’t know that people with schizophrenia could actually ever get better. I thought they were always that way.” And I think that’s how a lot of people feel.And so for him to be able to see — so now he can see a label in a chart and not only have that image of the hospital person, but he can also have the image of this person who is doing well. And I think that does so much, because a lot of times in the medical system, you get a label on a chart and you base it on what you’ve experienced. And if all you ever see is the worst of a particular thing versus the whole spectrum, it conditions you to sort of take shortcuts and maybe not give the patient the care they deserve. And so he wrote me years later — he’s an oncologist now — saying how important that experience was for him to be able to see both sides of a particular illness. And so that’s what the course really seeks to do.Joshua Dolezal:Thanks so much. That’s, I think, a great note to end on. And I can’t wait to hear more in your next book. I know writers are superstitious, and maybe you don’t want to talk about what you’re working on, so I won’t push you on that. But I so appreciate your insights and your time today. Thanks for joining me.Damon Tweedy:Yeah, and I thank everyone who joined and listened for all this. I know I can ramble at times, but, you know, if you haven’t checked out my books, there’s certainly more in them. And also that podcast I told you about — that’s something we didn’t discuss at all. I think there’s a lot of storytelling in that. That’s a whole different form of writing. Maybe that’s something we can talk about another time. But I think that’s really a story worth being told as well. How does the past connect to where we are today and how do we learn from that to move forward to make things better?Joshua Dolezal:Thanks so much, Dr. Tweedy. That’s the thing not named for today. Next time, I’ll speak with Kimberly Warner about her book, Unfixed, from the patient’s side. And we’ll dig into what illness narratives are all about. So until then, take care.Damon Tweedy:Thanks so much.Thanks for supporting The Recovering Academic. Your paid membership makes this podcast possible.If you’re working on a memoir or trade book, my personalized coaching and editing can help you craft your story.More episodes of The Things Not Named ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you Natalie Lago, Michelle Ray, and many others for tuning into my live video with Istiaq Mian, MD yesterday.Istiaq Mian Bio:Dr. Istiaq Mian is a hospitalist (an internal medicine physician who works exclusively in the hospital) in Madison, Wisconsin. His Substack, The Substaq of Istiaq, explores narrative medicine through memoir and essays about what it means to care for people at the most vulnerable moments of their lives. His essays have also appeared in the New York Times.Before medical school, Istiaq spent a year as an AmeriCorps volunteer at Joseph’s House, a hospice in Washington D.C. for homeless men and women dying of HIV/AIDS. That experience shaped everything that came after, and it’s the subject of a memoir he’s been writing for years. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to The Things Not Named. I’m Joshua Doležal. This year I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. My guest today is Holly Starley.Holly is the author of “Holly Starley’s Rolling Desk,” which she writes from her DIY van, AKA Vivian. She’s got solar panels on the roof, steadily changing views out the window, and community wherever she lands. But before Holly was roaming the countryside she was an award-winning journalist in West Virginia and the managing editor of a cycling magazine. She’s founded a radio station, taught courses in person and online, and rebuilt a van with her own two hands. Holly has also been a freelance editor for twenty years. When she’s not chronicling her van life, Holly works one-on-one with authors as a “self-editing coach.” She is a co-founder of the Caravan Writers Collective, where you can find on-demand courses, write-ins, and many other resources for your writing practice.   This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Things Not Named. I’m Joshua Doležal. This year I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. My guest today is Sam Kahn. Sam Kahn writes literary-minded essays, short stories, reviews, and political commentary at Castalia and is an editor at Persuasion. He is also Founder and Editor of The Republic of Letters. Sam has worked as a documentary producer at Netflix, Paramount+, and other studios.I should mention that when Sam and I spoke, he was in a café in southern Kyrgyzstan, where he is helping to establish a new college. So you’ll hear some of that background noise as we go, but I hope it adds a note of authenticity, which is one thing I’ve come to associate with Sam’s writing. I hope you enjoy our conversation.On Literacy, The Soul, And The New IntensityJoshua Doležal: It’s funny, Sam, you’re so prolific. And yet you’re kind of an enigma online. I tried to do a little bit of research on you, and it’s like you’re a spy or something.Sam Kahn: So the throughline is basically that I get paid for the stuff that I care the least about.There’s an almost perfectly inverse proportional relationship between the thing that I put time and effort and love into, and the things that get monetarily rewarded. If that makes sense, everything else kind of follows from there. So I’ve had one life, which is just basically trying to earn a living.And essentially I’ve been going through a career change the last few years. So for about 10 years I was working in documentaries first as an associate and then as a producer. There were some things I liked about it, but at the end of the day it wasn’t really for me. And then I was doing kind of a career transition to trying to figure out something to do with print media that could actually make money. And what ended up happening was that I worked for Persuasion, which is based on Substack.So I’m an editor there. It’s been really a nice job to have. And then in the middle of that, I moved out of nowhere to Kyrgyzstan to teach at a university, which somebody I knew offered me a job for. And actually right now I’m involved in setting up a college in Southern Kyrgyzstan, which is wild and is a very exciting thing to be doing.But my real life story is basically just trying to be a writer and trying to get better at it, to be a quality writer. And then secondarily trying to get things out there. And that’s mostly been long, endless frustration of just having lots of things in my laptop, no real outlet, a little bit of outlet for the stuff I care less about, which is journalism and criticism. But very little outlet for the stuff I care a great deal about, which is plays, which is fiction, both novels and short stories.Substack for me has just been a godsend. It’s been an unalloyed good in terms of taking all this material that was just sitting in the black hole of my laptop and sending it out into the gray hole of internet space. That’s really why I’ve been so evangelical about Substack and where you and I differ a little bit, is that for me it took this hole in my soul that I’d had for about 10 or 15 years, and then flipped that into a productive outlet.Joshua Doležal: It seems like the thing that you really care about is the thing that you get the least engagement on. So what you are known for by most people on Substack and in your freelance writing is this electric and really just shockingly creative take on history, on criticism. The way that you write a review, you’re not really a journalist, but the way that you write that kind of think piece is really unlike anyone else.And so that’s how you’ve made your name on Substack.Sam Kahn: I’ve been serializing something the last few months, which has much less engagement than hot takes on other stuff, and that’s just the way it is. I mean, that’s just a fact of the internet age and probably something about the human psyche in the 21st century. But thank you for what you’re saying about the criticism.I guess the philosophy on this is a few things. One is that I feel very strongly that writing is basically closer to speech and to thought than a lot of people tend to think. So if we’re talking about craft, I always have this idea in MFA land and these kinds of things, I tend to feel that everybody’s talking about creating a wicker chair, creating this immaculate product. And to me, that’s not really what it’s about. What it’s really about is just connecting to your thoughts and your instincts at a given moment in time.If you’re accessing that honestly, then it’s always interesting and it’s always valuable, and so I get frustrated with most social interaction. I don’t really like talking to people that much. Because there’s just so many layers and so many filters barring you from what anybody really wants to say. And in writing you just don’t have that problem. If you have the guts to say what you want to say, then to me that’s automatically interesting and true and of value. I partly train myself to do this through some complicated inner journey, but I think I also believe in this more than a lot of other people do.That it’s okay to just put a lot of stuff out there. You don’t need to have a brand. You don’t need to be that structured in it. If it’s true to you, it’s worth saying. And then it’s other people’s problem if they want to read it or not.So that’s my worldview.Joshua Doležal: I don’t mean this to be as glib as it might sound, but in some ways you’re kind of like Susan Sontag, right? Who had this vision of who she really was as a writer or wanted to be, and then became known for all these essays that she kind of wrote in her mind with her left hand, but that was her legacy, Illness As Metaphor. I don’t know of any of her novels that I’ve read that I think of as more influential than that.Sam Kahn: I think if I kind of strip down to who I am, I have a pretty analytical cast of mind. I’m not a super creative person. Sometimes you’ll meet these people and they become writers or artists, and you ask them what their lives were like as children, and they had these imaginary friends in complicated worlds. My inner life as a child was baseball lists, I mean, over and over again.But I really loved reading. I loved writing. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I kind of knew from fairly early on what I was lacking in, which was really imagination and a certain degree of social nuance, social understanding. And I feel like I went through a whole journey to basically develop that in myself. And so I think being able to write plays opened up for me when I was in my mid or late twenties.Being able to write a short story opened up when I was towards my mid-thirties, and I think novels really opened up for me a few years ago. I mean, there’s still this thing that drives me crazy, which is that this novel that I’m very fond of, that I’m posting, if I post a chapter of it, it’ll get about seven likes. If I post something on the Israeli conflict or something about Trump, which fundamentally I know nothing about, I’ve never met Trump, I know it’s going to get about 70 likes, something like that. And it’s just the way it is. It’s not really something I can fight.I mean, there are these limitations to Substack about it being maybe at its heart a social media. But to me it’s close to being a miracle because everything in the culture was going towards shorter and shorter form b******t for a long time. And I mean, that’s just what it seemed like with Facebook and Twitter. And the fact that people’s attention spans are getting longer again is amazing.And then that creates the possibility for something else to happen for a renaissance and people really appreciating fiction and really appreciating deep stuff. And that’s what I’m here for. I want a flourishing literary culture where people have pride in their inner lives and in essentially their souls and in the stuff that matters.Joshua Doležal: This is always happens when I read your work and then when we talk, I feel like we’re kindred spirits. But then I hear these, for me, irreconcilable tensions in some of what you’re saying. So all of my life, when I became a serious writer, the writing itself took place out of sight. And the only way that you had engagement was when you worked through this laborious process of revision and you had this longform piece or poem that you’d really crafted as carefully and beautifully as you could. And then you shared it and then you would amass a body of work and then publish a book and you didn’t really show much mess behind the scenes.I don’t write longform as much as I used to because I think there’s something fundamentally antithetical to the real-time engagement and the work that it takes to produce longform writing. Longform writing happens over sustained solitude. It’s not something that is improved by commentary.The soul of my creative life that I followed for 20 years with the literary journal scene...it’s not gone, but it’s antithetical to everything you’re saying about Substack, the hot take, the shorter post. All those things are what get engagement and you sink more time into the longform work, you sink more of your soul into it, and that’s not what moves the needle.To me Substack is really the opponent of that kind of creative work.Sam Kahn: This might be close to I think where the pivot of our usual disagreement is.I’ve had a turn in the last few years where I’ve really become kind of a McLuhanite in terms of really believing that the technology shapes the communication and that that’s kind of the way it is. And that basically in the collective memory of all of us, everything has been done a certain way for a couple of hundred years. We have this very stable form of the book, and then we have this distribution of the book. And I think that that whole system is really evaporating in front of our eyes. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing actually.And I think part of what’s happening is that the internet is bringing us back to something that we haven’t really had since like the 18th century. Now that I come to think of it, that’s probably why I was in part calling it The Republic of Letters, was that it’s just a little bit more dispersed.I remember a line that John Barth had. He was talking about a novel that he was writing in the sixties and he said he wanted to make an end run around Madame Bovary and when I came across that line, I thought that was very interesting. It was like there’s a solid form of the novel or really of the book that’s in our heads or of the print journal. But if you go around that, on the far side of it is something that’s a little bit looser and a little bit freer and is not for everybody, but it fits my sensibility in certain ways. It allows you to be fast. As you know, I don’t really like to edit. I just feel like the first take is basically the best take. That’s just sort of my disposition and a little bit my belief. And so I think where we are creates some possibilities to drive out in that direction.And then I think some things become really interesting that in a way almost never existed before, which is the ability to compose in a crowd. I don’t know if there’s any law that says that writing has to come from solitude, that good writing has to come from solitude. I think good writing can come from being part of a vibrant community.My writing has changed in some ways since I’ve been on Substack and in some ways that I’m grateful for. But you know, at the same time I’m also a creature of the old ways. And so for me, it’s like the mother of arts is to sit down and hammer out a novel that probably nobody will read and that is maybe a bad idea to do for the rest of my life or even my career. And here I’m totally with you. Like that’s the thing that matters most. And then the Substack schedule and all this other stuff is kind of an unfortunate distraction from it.Joshua Doležal: What was your major, if I can ask?Sam Kahn: I was a humanities major, which only exists at Yale. It was actually a creation of Harold Bloom when the English department had kicked him out in the seventies and he was sort of trying to revive a classical study, so they kept him on to do this. But it suited me.I mean there were a lot of reasons for the ambivalence about Yale. So one thing that was going on was that I shut down as a writer to some extent as an adolescent. So there was a point when I was about 11, when I kind of decided I wanted to be a writer and I wrote a lot and all just kind of for myself.And then I switched schools in middle school and I was at this new school, which is a very good school. But I suddenly had all this kind of social pressure and I felt like I had to conform. And part of the conformity was to basically write a lot less. I wasn’t trying to produce novels as a teenager which is something I’m still sort of sad about.And in college that feeling of retreating a little bit from a true self was very much there. So I wasn’t writing as much freely as I wanted to write. I was a little bit scared of taking writing classes. I mean, I would write a lot of academic essays and I did do one writing class, which was kind of a big deal for me.It was Daily Themes with William Deresiewicz who’s now active on Substack and who left Yale in a very dramatic way, pretty much at the end of the semester that I was there. And Daily Themes is really very close to what I’m doing now, or what Substack does. It’s a famous class. It’s what it sounds like. You’re given a bunch of prompts for the week. Everybody writes a piece a day. When I first heard about that I was like, this is impossible. I haven’t written anything in years. A short story is a huge sweat in labor. But it’s actually, you kind of wake up that muscle and you can really do it. I mean, anybody in the class can do it.I didn’t necessarily love the stuff I was writing for it, but in retrospect, I think that was a precursor to what Substack has been for me, which is really about pushing yourself out of the comfort zone into basically writing when you don’t even think you have anything to say.I was trying to be a writer afterwards, and there were a couple periods of being really stalled and it had to do with some expectations. It had to do with thinking I had to write the greatest thing ever. It had to do with undoing a certain undergraduate voice that had been kind of overdeveloped in essays, and so I felt like I had to go through this process of freeing myself from that. Which I think probably started in my late twenties. So in a way I think of my lovely, expensive education as being a psychological block that I had to get through. And so I’m much more comfortable now feeling like I’m on the outside or in this sort of weird wild space of just people writing very freely.And that’s where I’m happy to go back to something you said earlier. It would be nice to have more readers and it would be nice to be written up, to have a certain kind of respectability for writing. But for me, the big inner battle was writing more or less in a way that I wanted to write, or in a way that I could be proud of myself.That’s the lifelong struggle. Having readers is a secondary thing.Joshua Doležal: Well, my assumption is that Yale was a stand-in for the canon: you enter this very selective environment, there are craft standards that you have to meet. There’s a strict hierarchy of expertise and you’re satisfying gatekeepers to an extent to get in and then to perform admirably once you’re in. I mean, you have a series called Curator where you fill that role yourself, but you really are against curation largely. You’re more for open doors and open gates. So those are some interesting tensions.I mean, there are two posts [of yours]. One of them is among your most popular, if not the most popular, “Everything About How Writing Is Taught Is Wrong,” which to me reads as a reaction against that Yale mentality and maybe some things that you were taught there about workshops.But I’m trying to reconcile that with other things, like a piece (I’m forgetting where you had this) “Novelists Have Forgotten Narrative.” A lot of what you’re pulling on in those critiques is things that newer writers have lost. There is a, not conservative, but more traditional vein in your expectations, your sensibility for that piece. But in the other one you’re really pushing back against that.So on the one hand, you have a fairly traditional literary sensibility. That sense of what craft is and should be, what high level of mastery looks like, comes from writers who did, in fact, go through many drafts and painstakingly write in solitude. A Solzhenitsyn, for instance, might fall into that category. I don’t know what your opinion of him is, but I think of you drawing from that long past. But then in your own practice you feel that you don’t fit there. And so you’re kind of saying both things at once.Sam Kahn: You’re right that what I am saying might be totally contradictory.I mean, and there are a lot of points of tension that I’m not sure resolve. You said a couple things, so I’ll go through them. I mean, Yale was very complicated. Like a lot of things were going on there, and I sort of haven’t…there’s a post in my head that I haven’t written up yet that maybe I should do soon.But there were a lot of things about Yale that weren’t what I expected going in and a lot of things that were changing very rapidly. So at the beginning, I did this directed studies the first year, which was kind of reading through the canon, which I loved. It was a great program and in a way was kind of the culmination of a fairly classical outlook that I’d always had. But Yale, there was a whole pseudo-MFA side to Yale. The writing workshops were pretty different, and I was a little bit leery of them. The student culture was kind of its own thing, and I had an ambivalent relationship to that.And then in retrospect, this was in the two thousands, but the woke turn was kind of happening there. And it was on campus at that point and it hadn’t really moved off of campus yet. And I was kind of influenced by it. So by senior year I was writing critiques of directed studies my freshman year that in retrospect, I’m kind of like, what was I thinking? Like that was a great program. So there were a lot of different things going on at once. The other main point you’re talking about are these different tensions. I’m kind of getting ready to launch an aesthetic movement called the New Intensity. And my idea with it is basically that writing our art is a way of connecting to the capaciousness of your own soul. That fundamentally it’s a religious experience, but deeper than a church or a creed, that you’re really supposed to talk to your soul. And then whatever comes out of your soul is the truth. And usually people can feel when you’re lying to your soul. And people can feel when you’re speaking the truth. And so what great literature is can look totally different. I mean, what Céline looks like is totally different from what Whitman looks like.And I love them both almost equally. So I wouldn’t necessarily construct these things as a binary between say Solzhenitsyn writing in solitude and, I don’t know, somebody like Alan Ginsburg really believing that the first thought is the best thought and being connected with this downtown scene.I think Solzhenitsyn and Ginsburg lived very different lives, and they’re connecting with themselves in different ways. And the way I write and the way you write are always going to be different and neither one of us is right or wrong.What it is possible to do is it’s possible to be wrong within yourself. It’s possible to really limit yourself to let other voices get inside of your head. To me, that’s the enemy. The enemies are the different emotional psychological blocks. And so the process is getting past. And to get something that’s closer to your truth. And your truth can be many different things, and they can contradict each other and they can change over the course of your life. But I think usually you know when either you’re lying to yourself or somebody else’s voice is constricting your text. And for me what’s been exciting as I’ve written more and gotten more and more experienced is the feeling of expanding range.There were different points when I thought like, oh, like this is a Sam Kahn story, this is a Sam Kahn piece. And then I realized, oh, wait a minute. There are actually a lot of different things that I didn’t think I could do that I could do.Joshua Doležal: Well, I think we connect because of soulfulness and because of that fundamental integrity that we’re truth-tellers, and we will tell the truth that hits us deep and true or we’ll tell the truth that resonates in what you’re calling the soul.I don’t mean to be too much of an academic, but how do you define the soul? How literally do you mean that?Sam Kahn: I mean it pretty literally, and I mean it actually not that mystically. I mean it as inner life. I mean it as the stuff that sits inside you. That whole vast world inside a person that is pretty different from whatever their social presentation is.We can talk about what that inner world is, and different religious and mystical traditions have different interpretations of it. But for me it’s an uncontroversial thing. It’s a very simple thing. And basically like all of our thoughts, all of our feelings, all of our emotions, all the stuff you never got to say to anybody. All of your dreams, all of your impressions, all of your imagination. The sum total of that is your soul. And that becomes basically the domain that you can write in or create in, is all of that, as well as basically the imprint of anything that happens in your life as it’s left on your inner life, which is a huge f*****g domain. What I’ve kind of learned to do is basically to think about my domain as a writer as being basically anything that’s left some kind of an impression on that internal space. And that’s a lot of stuff. It would take me several lifetimes to write it all down.So the challenge is first of all choosing and then having the discipline to do it, to write enough of it down that I feel satisfied. So that’s where I am.Joshua Doležal: So earlier this year you wrote a post that was essentially a question, “Are Books Finished?,” which has been haunting me ever since. Books were a technology that served a purpose for a time, and you’ve kind of alluded to similar thinking about Substack as a disruptor, not just of publishing, but of literacy itself and that goes with another post that I think was spot on. And you’re ahead of the curve with a lot of these things. And sometimes I push back and sometimes I feel like I can’t argue with what you’re saying. And that was the essay, “What Was Literacy?” – past tense.So I’m wondering, do you still feel that books are an outmoded technology? And similarly do you see literacy as it was defined through sustained and solitary attention as also obsolete? And if both of those are true, what gives you hope for the future of writing and the future of literature? Because you are definitely a lifelong devotee of literature.Sam Kahn: Well, it is a really good question, and to me these are two pretty separate things and one I’m fairly optimistic about and one I’m deeply pessimistic about. So if books kind of disappear, I mean printed books in binding disappear, and the main communication is digital writing, I have really no problem with that. It’s just an adaptation to new technology. It’s cheaper. It opens doors for all kinds of people who don’t get to go through publishing. That’s what Substack is. That’s very exciting and I’m very bullish about that in part because I just don’t have any alternative. I don’t have access to a traditional publishing market. And so that side of it I’m kind of excited about.The idea that literacy is actually sort of disappearing, like in our time, in our epoch – that to me is deeply, deeply depressing. I see how my kids are, I see how younger people are. And it’s like, man, the way they’re taking in the world is basically through these digital images. And to me, this is just bad news. I understand that they can survive in a world where everybody else is doing that. But it does mean that that takes away a certain connectivity with your deep self, it takes away a connectivity with language. Probably the bigger one is it takes away a certain continuity with the past. If somebody’s watching, like TikTok videos, their whole world starts with the digital era. They almost can’t conceive of anything that has happened before the advent of video. And if you do that, suddenly you’re cutting yourself off from 4,000 years of human…how we talk to each other across 4,000 years.Joshua Doležal: Or is there a restoration of a more ancient… I agree with you effectively, I would add critical literacy to that, the ability to determine what’s true and what’s not. You know, how you trust information sources, how do you do actual research? Research has become almost a meaningless term. I believe in a scholarly method that almost no one uses anymore. And that’s part of the literacy that you’re casting in the past tense.However, some say that TikTok and other forms like that are actually more ancient. Do you see that as a return to something fundamentally older, part of that human history, or is it really, like you say, a sharp break and something totally new?Sam Kahn: Yeah, I do. I mean, in a way there’s something very unnatural about literacy and I think something we may be coming to terms with is that literacy never really went as deep into the population as we sort of think. Look, it’s possible to be a really intelligent, really successful person without having passed through reading or literacy. I mean, we have all these stories about illiterate people doing fabulous sums in their head and memorizing all these epic poems. Probably most people I’ve met in film are like this. Their brains don’t really work through reading, but they’re like really f*****g smart and they can do all this stuff just in other forms.So in a way, it’s not that much of a problem for humanity as a whole, but it’s a big problem for me. It’s a big problem for you. And it’s a problem for people like us because there’s some stuff that is just very hard to do without literacy. It’s very hard to do history without literacy. It’s very hard to do with a certain kind of internal excavation into that soul stuff that I’m talking about because film is always on the surface, it’s always dealing with images. It’s much harder to get at thought with film.The first port of call for film is the visual plane. It’s the senses. The first port of call for literature is your thoughts. That’s where it’s connecting. So if we lose that it’s bad news for interiority. It’s bad news for continuity. And it kind of seems to be happening. And, and to be honest, this was something that in my wildest nightmares, I never thought would take place. I mean, I knew that everybody in school preferred to play GoldenEye than they did to read a book.I’m sure we both had the experience of feeling a little bit apart from reading. But it always felt like there was going to be a stable mass and that being good at reading carried a certain social weight to it. And I do have a feeling that may be going away within our lifetimes. And that is deeply depressing. That I really don’t know what to do with exactly. I’m teaching students right now and I’m actually pretty reluctant to give them reading assignments because in a way I feel like it’s going to be a waste of time. They’re going to kind of break their heads on [it] and they’re not going to get very far and they can get the information other ways.So this is something I’m wrestling with with my students. I’m a dinosaur in this way. I love writing. I’m just going to do it as long as I can. And if literacy falls off a cliff during my life, I’ll be sad, but it won’t affect the way I do things fundamentally.Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned next week for another craft essay.Most of my content in 2025 is free, but I appreciate the support of readers who make my writing life possible. Monthly installments of my memoir-in-progress are only available to full members. For access, please consider upgrading your subscription. I’m also proud to be a Give Back Stack. 5% of my earnings in Q4 will go to Centre County PAWS, a no-kill shelter focusing on adoption, education, and community assistance.See my accountability page, with receipts for Q1, Q2, and Q3 here.More Things Not Named ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Most of my content in 2025 is free, but I appreciate the support of readers who make my interviews possible. Upgrading your subscription unlocks my monthly essays from a memoir-in-progress, as well as the entire archive. I’m also proud to be a Give Back Stack. 5% of my earnings in Q3 will go to the State College Food Bank.See my accountability page, with receipts for Q1 and Q2, here.The Things Not Named — With River Selby Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Things Not Named. I’m Joshua Doležal. This year I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. My guest today is River Selby (they/them).River is the author of Hotshot: A Life on Fire, their first book. River worked as a wildland firefighter for seven years, stationed out of California, Oregon, Colorado, and Alaska. They are currently a Kingsbury and Legacy Fellow at Florida State University, where they are pursuing their PhD in Nonfiction with an emphasis in postcolonial histories, North American colonization, and postmodern literature and culture. River has spent nearly a decade researching the history of fire suppression in the United States, Indigenous fire and land-tending practices, climate change impacts, and ecological adaptations across North American landscapes. River holds an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University and a BA in English and Textual Studies from the same institution, where they served as a Remembrance Scholar.Visit their website at www.riverselby.com and find them on Instagram @riverselby.As you might know, I was a wildland firefighter for many years, so I was delighted to see this new release. I hope you enjoy our conversation.Joshua Doležal: It sounds like you grew up reading a lot and you describe in your book about firefighting a kind of journaling habit that you were chronicling your life as it was happening more or less. But it doesn't sound like you started writing seriously until near the end of your firefighting career. So when you look back to some of those early influences, before you even started consciously trying to write what were you reading? Or what were some of those early guideposts for craft, when you responded to literature powerfully and you knew that what you're reading was high quality?River Selby: I had an unusual upbringing. I was born into Scientology. My mom left when I was two and she was very into new age things, and she read a lot. She had dropped out of high school. But she was very smart and her bookshelf was filled with new age books of the eighties persuasion and also a lot of true crime.And then some Pearl S. Buck and Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold, who she got from my grandmother, who I also lived with for a while when I was younger. My grandmother had left her wealthy family in Texas to marry my grandpa, who was a Marine. In World War II she was a nurse and they met during the war.And my grandma's bookshelf was also filled with true crime and all kinds of pulp, fiction and nonfiction, but also all of the Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. She loved poetry, loved renaissance poetry. Read to me a lot, encouraged me to read beyond my grade.I talked really early. I read really early. I was very verbal when I was a child. And too verbal according to many of my teachers. And we also moved a lot. And so reading was my way of connecting with the world because I didn't connect with my peers very well. I was also autistic and didn't get diagnosed until a few years ago.And so I kind of read all of the stuff they give to kids like Laura Ingalls Wilder. But I also would go to the library and go to the bookstore. I started out reading beyond my age with Stephen King, Dean Koontz, stuff like that because I really loved the genre of fiction and horror. And then started reading more nature writing. When I was a teenager, I read Mary Karr’s, The Liars’ Club and really became a fan of memoir because it was a way that I could imagine myself out of my life in a way, because memoirs are almost always writing from a place in the future narratively.Joshua Doležal: When you started to think about writing your own memoir, I was curious about who some of your influences were, but it sounds like you discovered the literary memoir pretty early. So there was kind of a period there where it was very much a scene that was emerging as you were a teenager. What spoke to you about Mary Carr's book and how she made literature out of her life?River Selby: It's interesting for me to reflect back on my reading life when I was a teenager because I ran away for the first time when I was 12 and was homeless on and off throughout my teens. Sometimes I was encountering books and sometimes I just wasn't because I wasn't living in a home. And I think that when I was encountering books, they were almost like, I almost just picture someone climbing up a cliff and they were the handholds for me. And Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. Yeah, my childhood was really unstable and my mom had mental health issues and was an alcoholic and she had this kind of cycle of boyfriends coming through who also were not very stable and then married an alcoholic when I was 13. And so her book felt like being seen because so much of what I had read felt very constructed and far away from me, whether it was fiction or nonfiction. But because of her voice in that book she really inhabits her younger self.And I think that because that voice was so strong and there wasn't really a narrator that was placed outside of the time of the book, that made me feel like I had a companion almost in my own experiences, so it was really special to me. And I don't think at that time I was thinking, I want to be a writer. That thought was so far away, but I do think that subconsciously it was planting a seed of, oh, well this person lived this life and now she has this book and she's a writer, and so maybe that's a path that I could take.Joshua Doležal: For a lot of years, I'd associated memoir with autobiography. Ben Franklin's autobiography is very chronological. There's not a lot of layering that happens with it…sort of this happened and that happened.But literary memoir, as I understand it has more fictional elements to it. And also some layering of what we call the voice of innocence and the voice of experience. The younger self immersed in moments that that self can't see or understand, blinded by impulse or just naivete and the voice of experience that can make meaning of it or see a bigger picture—read against the grain of some of what the younger self saw.So I liked the texture of that and it really fit my own life story because I'd grown up in an evangelical home and I'd left that faith tradition. So there was a lot of before and after distance for me to use. And I think that's true for you as well, because in your memoir, Hotshot, you use she because your name was Anna then. And so you've since rediscovered or evolved in your identity. The voice of experience is quite different, in a very literal sense, from the voice of innocence in that book. Is that fair to say?River Selby: I needed to have a certain level of authority narratively embedded into the prose. That was a huge process personally, psychologically, because so much of memoir for me, and I think for some others as well, in that reflection for me, I had to go back and re-experience those things and essentially not re-traumatize myself, but I had to be in that space and it was not a comfortable space.I would write from that space, and my authority wouldn't be there yet because it was so still in the past. And so part of the revision process was having to work through so many things personally and kind of parse through things so that I could write about my past self in a way that was not judgmental, that was not scared.That was where I could really bring myself forward in all of my flaws, while also bringing forward a lot of the cultural issues I was trying to engage with. And also pulling out things. As far as my non-binary identity, I look back at myself then and I see myself trying to inhabit an identity that didn't fit me.Joshua Doležal: So last week I pulled out one tool from your book because I really admired how you'd used it. And it was signposting, which I really first understood in radio form, where you would get a teaser clip and then it's almost flipped from academic writing.In academic writing, you always identify the speaker ahead of time. I spent a lot of time working with students on signal phrases and seamless integration of quotations and things like that. And in radio it's completely the opposite. You want to let an audio artifact build suspense or intrigue and then identify it almost immediately after.So it’s an intuitive thing where you anticipate a point of need for the listener, and then address it at that point of need. In your book, I thought it was especially evident because firefighting is such a subculture with its own arcane language. And that's a real barrier for readers coming into firefighting, not knowing what a trunkline is or what a Mark 3 pump is, those kinds of things.You could have done it very tediously. But instead you just told the story in an immersive way. You set the scene and then would name the thing. Piss pump, for instance, was one of the examples I used. And in the very next sentence, you would then describe either the tool or you would just show how it was used or you would address what surely was confusion for the uninitiated reader. And I don't know how conscious you were of that, if that came through the editing process as you're working with your commercial publisher or if that was something that you learned along the way in your coursework.River Selby: So thank you. I really appreciate that because like I said, I teach writing, but usually when I teach it, we are looking at something and taking it apart. And it's also an intuitive process, so I'm seeing what my students are seeing and then I'm helping them draw things out. So for me, it's very helpful when someone like you is able to say, oh, here's something you're doing. Tell me how you did that. It was partially the editorial process and partially it was a mix. I mean, of course when you come from any sort of community that has its own jargon, like wildland firefighting is mystifying. It's a whole world. And also before I wrote my book, I read every single wildland fire memoir that existed and also was reading a ton about just the history and everything.And so I saw how other people had done it that maybe worked or wasn't working for me. And I think that first of all, when my editor would flag things and say, what is this? What does that mean? What's that? It would've been very easy for me to just put things in parentheses or define things in the moment.But because of my fiction training, that's not how I want to do things. I want to create an immersive experience for my reader. Sometimes it would take me a while to figure out like, how do I explain gridding to a reader? And then, it occurred to me that you don't only do gridding in fighting wildfires, you also do gridding if there's a search and rescue or something. And so that's the example I used so that a reader could understand what that looks like. And so I would think about ways that I could put it into context for a general reader, things that the general public would know, how to bring the reader into a moment so they can see it in action and how it's working.I think depending on the person's exposure to fire there can be more than a moment of confusion and I'm okay with that. I'd rather have them have like a little moment of not knowing than to take them out of the text with an omniscient voice coming in to explain something in a way that doesn't fit into the text.Joshua Doležal: I have a related question because this is something that every memoirist deals with: how to write ethically about others.So there are some pretty clear-cut moments where there are some jerks on your crew and it's pretty obvious why certain characters would be portrayed as they are, and I assume authentically and accurately. So there are other more private moments that involve relationships where there are particular details about other people. And so I wonder how you navigated that. How did you make some of those choices, especially with people that you'd had brief or longer-term relationships with?River Selby: Can you give me maybe one example?Joshua Doležal: Well, I think Colin is someone that you had a longer-term relationship with. There's some other guy, I'm forgetting his name. There were some details about his teeth chattering during intimate moments and things. So I'm wondering how you made those choices.River Selby: So basically all identifying details are changed of people like that. Of the people I worked with, there is certain background information has been changed a little bit. Physical appearance changed, stuff like that. And that was protective for sure. And also, as far as the relationships I was in, like Colin and Lewis, those aren't their real names obviously. But there's a lot that I didn't share and there's a lot that I didn't say about those relationships. And I think that really what I was writing about was my experience of them. And I also think that this is one of the reasons that at the beginning of the book and in the introduction I was like, memory is a tricky thing. These are my recollections. I have journals, I have conversations I've had with people. I have my memories, but also memory changes. Each time we remember something, it changes and it's fallible. And so I am one of those writers that I don't really, other than changing details to protect people, I'm not one to add things for story. I don't do that with nonfiction. And so I just wanted to be honest about my experiences and I think that anyone reading a memoir who is not in their twenties anymore, knows what it's like to be in your twenties.I also really wanted to write about the kinds of dynamics that create some of the behaviors I see from crew members in the book in a way that doesn't excuse them for those behaviors. But that explains why those behaviors are accepted. Why they're even encouraged sometimes. I'm talking about sexual harassment, gender stuff, and firefighting. Why it's a systemic issue, not an individual issue. That's one thing that I really wanted to engage with craft-wise too, so that the reader would see it from a zoomed-back place and not say, this person is the problem. It's this system is a problem. Even with my superintendent of the first crew, he's not the only person behaving in that way. It's a system.Joshua Doležal: I don't know if you'd agree with this, but when I was working with students trying to navigate the ethics of writing about others, one of the pillars to me is that whatever scrutiny others are subjected to, I have to subject myself to. And so in those moments with Lewis, it's not just his lack of availability or his particular quirks with lovemaking or whatever that's the focus.It's also what you seem to recognize as maybe unhealthy impulses in yourself, almost irrational desires that after one or two encounters, you had this urge to just marry him. And revealing those kinds of things to show imperfection both ways, I think, is one of those pillars of writing about others. We don't just point the finger or subject others to scrutiny or embarrassment if we're not willing to put ourselves under the same microscope.So I felt like in those segments it was even-handed. Even with some of the power dynamics on the crew, the ways that you had been perhaps conditioned to acquiesce to the systemic forces or moments when you were disappointed in yourself for not being stronger or more forceful or proactive, that was all part of the picture, I thought, rather than just as you're saying, vilifying an individual or presenting a kind of hopeless picture of the…you're trying to expose all layers of it, not merely, say, the perpetrator's role. Is that fair?River Selby: Absolutely. I think, and there was no maybe about it. I mean, anyone who grows up in a traumatic abusive environment, anyone who's been sexually assaulted more than once is going to come into experiences with a lot of baggage. And I hadn't yet been in therapy. And yes, that was really important to me.And it was also one of the hardest things about writing the book — I had to go through those experiences again mentally. Psychologically. Actually, I have chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. And so what happened is that I went into emotional flashbacks, and I didn't know what those were at the time.And it lasted for a long time while I was revising. And then my therapist finally figured out what was happening and was like, do you know what emotional flashbacks are? And so I had to go through that. And I think that in those first drafts, it's easy to see on the page that I am protecting myself from the reader's judgment. And that's an instinct I think all writers have when you're writing about yourself is being fearful of what the reader's going to think of you, how they're going to judge you. Because often, I'll speak for myself, because I was judging myself and seeing myself on the page as I would think the reader would see me.I think that in order to expose the truth of any situation, truth is a subjective thing when it comes to our personal experiences, like how we're interpreting things. And so I had to show the reader how I was interpreting things and how I was rationalizing things without trying to justify my behavior or explain away my behavior or make excuses for my behavior.That it is a very complicated thing to do, but I definitely put a lot of thought into how I wrote about other people and what I wrote about other people and making sure that they're protected as individuals.Also, a lot of this happened a long time ago. But I do think that's why I felt, especially in the last drafts, very comfortable just laying it all out there because I was like, this is about something bigger than myself. It's about something bigger than individuals.It's about trauma. It's about the psychology of human beings and systems. And so I don't think I could have done that if I hadn't done my own psychological work through therapy and really shown up in that way. And that was the most challenging thing about writing the book was clearly looking at myself, being honest about myself and my own many shortcomings.And how it was all part of the way the machine worked—the machine of the experiences, you know?Joshua Doležal: You wrote this book over six years. It took a lot of years of lived experience before you even got around to writing the book.But then over that period of time, you were able to get the Holy Grail for a writing career. You got an agent and you got a commercial book deal that came with a $50,000 advance that was paid in installments, but no one would really expect to live on $50,000 for six years. Even for one year that would be seen as low.And you're doing this while you're studying for PhD on poverty wages. So I guess I have a kind of crass question: is it worth it? Has it been worth it for you?River Selby: There are a couple different ways that I can think about that. And one is on a personal level, another is on what I'm contributing to the world. And I think that if this had just been a memoir, first of all, it would've been easier to write. But second of all, I'd probably say no if it were just a memoir.I sold the book, $50,000 advance. I was paid $20,000, which was the most money I'd ever had in one time in my entire life. Like by far, like way far. I didn't inherit money from my mom when she passed. My dad died without any money. I do not have a safety net as a person. And I had a lot of ideas about things when I got my advance. I also didn't realize that an advance is a loan. I won't make any money from this book directly unless I earn out my advance.And that's okay with me. I have accepted that reality. It wouldn't have been okay with me a year ago. I would've lost my mind. But I chose to start a PhD program. Had I known what that would look like, I might have chosen differently. That's not a reflection on the program that I'm in. It's a reflection on the way that graduate students are treated and paid across the board pretty much. I think an advantage that I see myself as having is that I’m very adaptable. My level of what feels comfortable financially is much lower than some people's. And I think that in a way, my work right now as a person is seeing my own potential for how I can not be in poverty anymore. What I have to offer, what's the worth of what I have to offer, how can I frame that in a way that feels authentic to other people and feels authentic to me?Joshua Doležal: We're at a real inflection point with the defunding of higher ed at the federal level, with attacks on programs precisely like the one you would want to go into, arts programs or MFAs, the things that your credentials would fit. So, is there a future for you as a writer…how are you thinking about those things? I don't mean to be depressing, but it's kind of a weird mashup of success on every level that a writer could hope for and a sobering reality that some of that success is perhaps illusory.River Selby: It's really important to talk about these things because I don't think that we talk about class enough in general, and definitely not in academia or in writing spaces. Because of the experiences I've had, I never have just one plan for myself. I have like seven plans for myself, and that is where I am right now. So I am going on the job market. I see very few jobs coming up. I know the reality of that. And I also know that I would regret it if I didn't at least put myself out there and really give it a shot to get an academic job. That said, I'm not going to take a job unless it's a unicorn job, and I really want it. I worked as a nanny for 20 years and I love nannying. I truly do. I love working with kids. I love working with babies.When I decided to leave fire and become a writer, I made a commitment to myself. And I'm not saying this in like a stubborn way. I made a commitment, I'm going to do this forever, but it still feels true to me that this is what I love doing. I love writing, I love creating worlds and narratives. As long as I love doing that, I'm going to do whatever I can to sustain myself and being able to do that.Joshua Doležal: Let's say you get this unicorn job and you're teaching at a program that can afford to not require a four-four teaching load, students would be paying a lot for that experience and would assume that you would have the same level of affluence that would go with the means to afford it. And that's just not the case. I think it's one of the best kept or worst kept, not a positive thing, but it's one of the secrets of higher ed that many people don't understand. And a good reminder that the commercial book deal is not going to save you from all of that.River Selby: If I could give myself any piece of advice when I was working on my proposal, it is…don't count on making any money from the book, do not count on making any money. Like, if I could go back in time, I would've just put that $20,000 straight into savings and do a high-yield savings account or something and not touched it. If you come from poverty, it's almost inevitable that you'll develop some sort of magical thinking strategy for surviving. Yes, let yourself believe the best things for yourself, but ground yourself in reality financially as much as you can, especially if you come from poverty.Because our society offers no safety net for people that don't have one in the first place. So we gotta take care of each other and ourselves, you know?Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in a few weeks with Sam Kahn. Stay tuned next week for another craft essay.More Things Not Named ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Most of my content in 2025 is free, but I appreciate the support of readers who make my interviews possible. Upgrading your subscription unlocks my monthly essays from a memoir-in-progress, as well as the entire archive. I’m also proud to be a Give Back Stack. 5% of my earnings in Q3 will go to the State College Food Bank.See my accountability page, with receipts for Q1 and Q2, here.The Things Not Named — With Eleanor AnstrutherJoshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Things Not Named. I’m Joshua Doležal. This year I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. My guest today is Eleanor Anstruther.Eleanor was born in London, educated at Westminster School but distracted from finishing her degree at Manchester University by a trip to India. She travelled for the next decade before settling down enough to write her debut novel, A Perfect Explanation (Salt Books) which was listed for The Desmond Elliott Prize and Not The Booker Prize. Since then she has built a career teaching and publishing as an independent artist, using her Substack, The Literary Obsessive, as a platform for serialising her work before taking it to print. These works include her acclaimed memoir, A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries (Troubador), and her second novel, In Judgement of Others (Troubador). Her latest novel, Fallout (recently acquired by Empress Editions) is due for publication April 2026.I hope you enjoy our conversation.Joshua Doležal: We were early Substack pioneers. I don't know that we were on the cutting edge, but we've been doing this for quite some time. Three years, I guess. How long have you been Substacking?Eleanor Anstruther: I think I joined in 22. And that feels to me like an early adopter. I mean, obviously it was founded in 2017, but I'm not sure how many fiction writers were there before 22. And I felt like quite a lot, quite a lot of the cohort who have become friends, like you and Kim and a whole bunch of people, we all joined around 22, 23, so there was definitely a moment there. I'm really glad I landed then because, I don’t know if you've noticed, but in the last year, there's been an explosion, which has changed the nature of Substack, which is fine with me.I'm all about change and evolution, so that's fine. But it definitely isn't what it was in 22 as an experience.Joshua Doležal: Yeah, totally agree, it's hard to even remember writing life before Substack because it's become such a staple for me over the last four years, but all of us who had a writing life before have brought that sensibility to our platform even as we're evolving. So I'm curious h ow you were shaped as a writer in your early days, when you knew you would become a writer, some of your early influences and how you began studying the craft.Eleanor Anstruther: Sure. Well, I come from a family of writers, so I think that was one of the blessings and privilege of becoming a writer and forming the craft, that I was already swimming in that sea, and it didn't seem a complicated or even impossible leap to make. I think it was more about realizing the thing I've always done, which was write, was something I could do as a career.And I didn't realize that until the idea of my debut was handed to me by various events. My debut is a fictionalized account of how and why my dad was sold by his mother to his aunt. Which was obviously an absolutely golden piece of storytelling to be handed, but also a difficult one to cut your teeth on.So I think I was about 34 when I embarked on that novel. It took me twelve years probably to write, fifteen in all from start to finish, from first word to on the bookshelf. I was mentored by the late Sally Klein at Cambridge which was amazing.I met her on a plane. It was one of those, again, completely serendipitous moments. We sat next to each other on a flight to Colorado, and by the end of it, she'd offered to be my mentor. So I learned the craft then. It was a difficult book to write because it was obviously based on a true story. So I had all the facts, but I was stringing emotional content between the facts, which was complicated.And also I think you and I perhaps have also talked about the complications because it wasn't memoir, but there were still living people whose lives would be affected by it. And it was just one version of a story. But of course, my version has become the version. So that came with a lot of complications.I got a book deal off that, and I was completely like every single emerging writer. I just assumed I'd write a book, it would get a deal, and I'd be famous and I'd win the Booker, and that would be the end of it. And there'd be no more effort to go into it. Which wasn't exactly what happened. It took twelve years to write it. It took almost a year, eighteen months, to get a deal. The last publisher that we submitted to said yes. Very small advance. Salt, brilliant indie publisher. And it did do well. It got listed for a couple of prizes and it did fine. But then after that I assumed, great, I'm done. But my next three novels did not find a deal.It was a one-contract deal and the next three novels were turned down by everyone we sent them to. Which was how I came to Substack because I just was at my end. I was on my knees.Joshua Doležal: Well, and you've found your way back after self-publishing a bit. I understand that you have a deal with Empress.Eleanor Anstruther: I've done two since then. I serialized my memoir and two novels on Substack: In Judgment of Others was the first novel I serialized there and then published that myself, which was amazing experience. And actually I've built a career on teaching and publishing as an independent author. And that could never have happened if I hadn't gone through the mill of having been declined by so many publishers.So now I look back and think, great, I've built this arm of my career where I know about publishing as an independent. But Fallout, which was the second novel I serialized on Substack, I really did want to, again, be handheld by a publisher. Because it's a very different experience and there's pluses and minuses to both.But Empress Editions publishes midlife women's voices. And I'm the first of their literary wing. Mostly it's been nonfiction and romance, but I'm the first, so that's absolutely amazing. It's coming out 26th of April next year. Couldn't be more happy. They're an American publisher based in Cambridge, but it will be global.Joshua Doležal: Well, congratulations.Eleanor Anstruther: Yeah. I'm really excited.Joshua Doležal: Going back to Sally Klein and your mentorship with her. So what were some of the particulars? Not to put you under the microscope too much, but in terms of craft were there particular techniques you learned from her or a discerning sensibility when you were learning from Sally what good writing meant and how it was distinguished from mediocre writing? What were some of those things you learned?Eleanor Anstruther: Well, Sally, as everyone knew, was incredibly strict. She was the very first person to tell me to murder my darlings. I'd never even heard the phrase before. And she insisted. I took my manuscript to her every month as I grew pregnant with twins. I would get on the train every month getting bigger, fatter, and fatter with twins, and take her my manuscript and sit in her office in Cambridge.And she would strike through what wasn't good enough. And I remember one time I'd been reading a lot of Virginia Woolf, and I remember saying something about how basically I'd aped Virginia Woolf and it was probably some sort of stream of consciousness throwing all the rules away, et cetera, et cetera.And she banged the table and said, but you are not Virginia Woolf. And I remember that being like. Okay. What she means is I have, not only will I never be Virginia Woolf, but I have to go away and learn the rules. And the rules as I understand them are…and I suppose this is how I lean towards my own writing.I favor brevity. So where one word will do instead of ten , I'll use one. So I'm very straight to the point. I read my work out loud, absolutely every word of it. A finished novel, I will have probably read out loud to myself at least twice, if not three times. And when I hear it out loud, if I get bored listening to it, I know it's dull.If I feel that it's pretentious or I'm falling over the sentences, I know I've complicated things. If I'm showing off, if my mind drifts. I think one of the things I learnt, which was incredibly useful, whether it was from her or it was just from practice in plotting. If you have a brilliant idea in a plot, don't save it up as some magnificent reveal somewhere near the end.Because if it struck me at the beginning, if I try and fool the reader and reveal, you can bet your life—every discerning reader will have figured it out right at the beginning. And what you're not doing is having faith that the novel will reveal something even more brilliant if you just give that reveal at the beginning.So I learned to not think I was cleverer than my reader. You're never cleverer than your reader. So always give it away at the beginning of the first draft, obviously, because something else brilliant or more brilliant hopefully will turn up.I made a note of the writers that have really influenced me before we spoke and all of them, they're very plain speaking. They're mid-20th century female writers. There's no artifice. I think because they're women and because there was no sense of their ego being pumped culturally. Do you know what I mean?They were just women who were bringing up children. They were living in the kitchen, and if they were lucky, they were finding five minutes to write and they didn't have time to be pompous to show off. They just had to get the story down. And they didn't think about anybody thinking they were great.And I think you can always tell when a writer wants you to think about them instead of their story. Right? It's a bit like when you go and see a play and your eyes are slightly wandering to the wings or the rest of the auditorium. And these women, and for instance, Edna O’Brien, Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley Jackson, when you read them, their focus was absolutely on the story they were telling, and they were not thinking about how clever they were, what their reputation is, whether people will think they're brilliant, any of those things. So that as a piece of craft advice to really, really put the story first. And I was talking to Sally Reid the other day and she said something brilliant.If she reads a story back and if the message is more important than the plot, she rewrites it, because the story is the thing, and if there's a message in it, readers tend to take all kinds of different messages from your work. But I've noticed that when a writer has got some big message to tell the world and they hang a plot on that message, it's usually quite dull.Joshua Doležal: It's too didactic.Eleanor Anstruther: It's like, cool your boots, man. We'll take whatever message we want to get from this. And maybe you're not God Almighty, and maybe the message you want to tell us isn't so unique and new. I write, small domestic kitchen dramas, but against big political backdrops.Joshua Doležal: It's fascinating to hear you speak about the difference between story and message, because for all of his sophistication in style, that was one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's weaknesses and he even admitted it, self deprecatingly. A penchant for allegory was one of his faults – his stories will come to the end and then there's this tidy bow tied on them.Whereas The Scarlet Letter is haunting and enduring largely because of…Eleanor Anstruther: Because of its minuteness.Joshua Doležal: It's the indeterminacy of some of those relationships that makes them compelling.Eleanor Anstruther: Right. I try very hard not to gender this but, just to gender it for a minute, and this is really in defense of men, because men, male writers of the 20th century tend to fall for this, getting high on their own supply, much more than women.Because culturally they are given every reason to think they've got something important to say. And so it doesn't really help them as writers to think about plot because they are encouraged everywhere they go to think about the message.And I think that that plot, which is not easy, and writing, which is not easy, gets slightly sidelined because they think, well, the message is the important thing. and it absolutely does a disservice to them. And I think there are plenty of brilliant. Male 20th century writers who began to just fall over themselves around that because their egos were pumped up out of proportion and we lost great writers.Joshua Doležal: Would you put Philip Roth in that category?Eleanor Anstruther: I would put Philip Roth. I wouldn't put Cormac McCarthy there.Joshua Doležal: Right.Eleanor Anstruther: I think he escaped. Remind me who wrote Rabbit Run? Updike, he’s right on the edge. I loved the Rabbit Run books. But he was done no favors. So that's why I read mostly 20th century women. Not because either gender has the potential to be as brilliant, but because they, for all that was tough about living under the caution of the patriarchy, it did mean that women wrote much cleaner to the page because they weren't being pumped up to think they had something important to say.Joshua Doležal: Well, this might be an academic distinction and possibly a difference between British and American literature, but I think 19th century American women’s writing is perhaps the opposite of what you're saying, because much of it was explicitly tied to women's rights. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, for instance, “The Revolt of Mother,” Kate Chopin. Many of those stories I think are driven as much by message as by character and plot.Eleanor Anstruther: I think you're right. I mean, one could argue that if there was ever a time to be driven by message, it was then, but that doesn't necessarily make it a great read. I'm not fantastically familiar with that genre, I have to say.Joshua Doležal: Well, you'd mentioned this list of other 20th Century women writers. So what are some of the names on your list?Eleanor Anstruther: Well. Dorothy Hughes, I read In a Lonely Place again this summer. I really hate the word genre, but they all are working in different genres. So obviously it is a crime thriller. Shirley Jackson, who I'm reading Ruth Franklin's biography of her at the moment, it's so good. Penelope Mortimer, who wrote The Pumpkin Eater, Elizabeth Taylor. The toughest thing that Elizabeth Taylor dealt with was that she was called Elizabeth Taylor exactly at the same time as Elizabeth Taylor. So she really did not get the credence that she should have got for Angel, which is absolutely one of my Desert Island books.It's short. It's about a writer who's just awful. There's not a wasted word. I would say the sort of contemporary of that level of art is Claire Keegan, who wrote Foster, who I think is probably one of our greatest contemporary fiction writers. Edna O'Brien and Rumer Godden, The Black Narcissus.They all are telling me the story and I'm not thinking about them. We can dress it up in a million ways, but we are storytellers. I really understood this this year actually from reading Anne Tyler as well, and Elizabeth Strout. It is supposed to be fun, and I use that word slightly guardedly because it seems such a simple, silly word to be using for such a vast range of subjects. But ultimately it's a pleasure. It's something we do for fun and something nice and do you know what I mean?And so I've started thinking much more about my reader in the next couple of books I'm writing, just being kinder to the reader. And I think that loops back into this idea of message. The other thing that I certainly fell for was writing as my salvation. Like it was going to turn me the person, the author, into something , which is crazy and far too much to ladle onto what is just simply a story. And the writers that I really love, it seems to me none of them invested such weight on their books that they had to achieve something for them. They achieved something for the reader, and that is where the weight should be, but not for them as a person.Joshua Doležal: Let me be specific about technique for just a minute. So when you're thinking about the reader and serving the reader, pacing is part of that. I've used a term, the accordion of time, to talk about how sometimes you draw the bellows out on a scene and sometimes you squeeze them together to fast forward through days, weeks, months. Knowing when to do that, how long to linger before it becomes dull, is an intuitive judgment call. The balance between the drawn out and the squeezed together moments. How do you judge that or how do you think about that? Is it just a sense that you feel your way through a story? You don't want to stack a bunch of drawn-out scenes on top of each other. How do you balance the pacing of your stories?Eleanor Anstruther: Yeah, well I've been thinking about that just today because I've been editing a novel that I wrote about three years ago for serializing, and there's two things I noticed about me, the writer three years ago, versus me now around pacing. One of them was that I constantly used the past perfect. They had sat down instead of they sat down. Which was a way of slightly distancing myself yet again from the action so I didn't have to feel so much. Which slows the pacing down because the reader isn't right there: they sat down. So I've noticed, I've done it all the way through this novel.I'm taking all of that out and suddenly it's sitting up and it's alive again and it's moving, even though it's, I don't know, 80,000 words, which is long for me. The other thing I've noticed, yes, is there is an instinct to exactly how long you draw in the breath before you let it out again.I think I was, there was too much exposition. I often front-loaded novels with far too much exposition at the beginning, rather than just getting straight on into the action, which loops back into, let's serve the reader here. We need to get going. And once you're in love with the story and the characters, then we can give a little bit of backstory and that obviously affects pacing as well.So what I've done is tighten, I know with In Judgment of Others, which was the first novel I serialized – when I came to edit that for Substack, I took the third chapter, which was the breakdown, and moved it to the beginning because we needed to get right in on the action and then get going.It's an instinct I think. And I think, again, reading it out loud, because if I've got to read that novel out loud, I can absolutely feel when it's dragging.When I'm like, okay, we get it now. I mean, my agent often wants me to spoonfeed a bit more. I assume the reader is going to get it and they're going to fill in the gaps. So I like to really pull back and let them fill in. But I think ultimately for those listening, thinking about pace, you’ve got to read the work out loud and feel it.You should be able to read your novel three times and not get bored.Joshua Doležal: So, as I'm hearing you, number one is concision in your craft sensibility. Number two is story over message. And part of that is keeping things moving, getting into the action, not frontloading a lot of reflective narration, a lot of meaning-making for the reader, but jumping straight into the inciting incident or the problem that drives the story forward.Eleanor Anstruther: Yeah.Joshua Doležal: So let me ask, would there be a book that maybe you didn't finish or something you didn't add to your list of worthy influences?Eleanor Anstruther: Well, no, I can answer the opposite because I just don't tend to read things that I don't like. There's been plenty of books, which, and I won't name any of them because it's hard enough to get a book to stand up, so I'm not going to do that. But there've been plenty of books that I've started and just absolutely like, nope, not for me, or have various feelings towards it.But I will say. I recently read Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright, which it could easily be argued, puts the message above the plot. I think it's 900 pages. Maybe it's 700. It's 700. It's massive. I would normally never touch a book of that size.It was Sean McNulty who put it in front of me. Who runsAuraist: picking the best-written books on Substack and with whom I've had many conversations about what literary fiction is. He's a brilliant thinker. But he said, you have to read this. Alexis Wright is an aboriginal writer, a woman from Australia, and it is both a comedy and a tragedy.It's about a town called Praiseworthy, where the apocalypse is coming. The main character is a guy who becomes obsessed with going out into the bush and kidnapping donkeys to bring back and set up a donkey company. It's nuts. The writing breaks every single rule you can possibly imagine. And it's one of the best books I've ever read in my life. It's absolutely phenomenal. It blew my mind and I recommend it to everybody. So I think you could argue it puts the message above the plot. But it works on every single level.Joshua Doležal: So what makes it work?Eleanor Anstruther: I think her skill as a writer. I would say it's better actually than Ulysses. It's what Joyce was trying to do. That's what I felt she succeeded at. I know that's a bold statement, but I really feel that that's the case. I mean, I don't like Joyce, so everyone's going to be up in arms, but someone like Joyce was attempting and plenty of emerging writers will think stream of consciousness is easy. I just sit down and I just write a whole load of s**t and I call it stream of consciousness. You know what I mean? But what they haven't understood, they don't have that dance with language and words. They haven't understood it on a deep vibrational level where they are riding so high on that language that they're just dancing with it and it's like taking a drug and you dance with them and it's much more than the sum of its parts.Something magic happens when you read someone like Alexis Wright. Yes, there are words on the page and yes, there are characters and yes, there's a plot, but it's so much more than that and that's the only way I can describe it. It's a magical mystery land. And I can only dream of having that competence, it's phenomenal.Joshua Doležal: Obviously principles of good writing change over time. So the modernist emphasis on concision or brevity, the idea that less is more, doesn't hold true in the case of a novel like Praiseworthy, it sounds like. And in some ways we're living in a time when the soundbite or the clip, there is brevity, meaning the content is short, but sometimes it's excessive. It's flamboyant. It's what would've been called purple prose in a different time. And so it's not concise.Eleanor Anstruther: Doesn't mean what it says.Joshua Doležal: But it's bite sized.Eleanor Anstruther: Which is the worst of all worlds.Joshua Doležal: But it sounds like there's also a parallel development where, it's almost a David Foster Wallace aesthetic, where the sprawling story is, there's a place for it. There are writers who are publishing books that are large, that…Eleanor Anstruther: And I think there's no place for it. Unless you're Alexis Wright. There's no place for it. If I can jump in here, there's a massive difference between writing some incredible dance with language and just sprawling all over the page, and the amount of novels I have come across contemporary novels that just weren't edited properly—somebody should have got in there with a red pen and said, all right, we get it already. You can cut at least 400 words. But again, every time I read a or come across a book that I never finished, I always think to myself, this writer who has a degree of talent or an enormous amount of talent, they had a very good idea.That's what Alexis Wright did. She had this brilliant idea and she stepped off into thin air with it, and the world caught her. And that's what made it magic. And you can feel that. You can feel you are constantly walking on a bridge that only exists as you throw sand in front of you one step at a time. You know? And it takes that sort of courage. My concern because I'm not particularly concerned about AI at all, actually. I'm a proponent. I think it's going to be okay. I think it can be a very useful, copy edit tool. It can save a lot of time. For Fallout we're putting a QR code at the end and people can go in and it'll link them to a whole load of resources. And also, the great true magic of writing simply cannot be recreated. By a program. It can get as near as dammit. And if you want to produce a million, a million middle grade, not, not school, but middle, average, just literally beginning, middle, end, fine.But everybody, you read a book with your heart and your knees and your arm, you know what I mean? You read it with your body and you can't recreate that with an AI program. The really great, if you think of the novels that you love so much that you would take them away to Desert Island, and you could read every single one of those, they affect your body, not just your love of words. Do you know what I mean? And that's the bit that absolutely cannot be recreated. So I'm not concerned at all. I've got friends who are screenwriters, and I think there's been a real issue for them. And I do understand that that's an industry that's being very negatively impacted by a lot of the rise of AI.Joshua Doležal: Well, one of the parallel concerns with AI is that if there is a marketplace for commercial publishing that's driven by units, AI is perfectly aligned to that. So AI could produce content that's optimized for all of those metrics. Right? And in fact, in some cases is cutting into authors’ book sales. So if you had a high enough profile and you had a book coming out, then on Amazon there would be all these pirated, imitative versions of your book or books by you a nd they compete with your actual book sales. So there are some pernicious sides of that.Eleanor Anstruther: But it relies on the idea that people are idiots.Joshua Doležal: That's I suppose a faith that one has to have. Willa Cather said art and religion are close kin. And so to me, craft is one of those things that you really do have to believe in. You have to be a true believer in art, to persist and to find other true believers. Because the experience of writing can't be replaced. Whether or not there is a commercial outlet for it is almost beside the point. We'll probably keep doing it anyway.Eleanor Anstruther: That's definitely the school that I sit in and absolutely craft is the church that I pray at, and that is my religion. And anybody who comes and works with me knows that I consistently ask people to raise their standards – lower their expectations when it comes to the publishing industry, but raise your standards absolutely to the highest point when it comes to craft.Do not let anything out of the gate that isn't your absolute best because I think that's beholden on all of us. If we do want to see a change in attitude, then each and every one of us, it is absolutely beholden upon us to produce the best work we can and not shortcut and not just send out any old s**t because it does the entire industry a disservice.Joshua Doležal: Your craft sensibility was forged in the traditional way through print books, through all these other traditional structures of discernment andEleanor Anstruther: And reading, of course.Joshua Doležal: Right, but what you were reading passed through a traditional curation, and then you had a mentor who was steeped in the same tradition. Writing for Substack and being part of the Substack community is a very different thing, and I'm wondering if it's changed your writing fundamentally, if there's anything different about your fiction as a result of having been writing on Substack for three to four years.Eleanor Anstruther: Yes. I think it's opened my eyes to how to make that slight shift into being slightly more commercial. In the past, and I think this is one of the problems with the books that I was attempting to sell apart from the first one, was that they weren't commercial. They were very literary fiction in that sense, that chapters would be different lengths, I would frontload them, all that stuff. Whereas writing on Substack and serializing really taught me this view of commercial fiction – I thought it was slightly beneath me – I apologize now to everybody. That was a terrible opinion to have because there's an incredible skill at commercial literary fiction, which is what I now endeavor to do and the commercial bit is very simple. Get in on the action right at the beginning. It's okay to follow a known structure, okay to start with a bang, get people in. It's how it works. Chapter length should be the same length. It's very simple. For me it's like 2000-3000 words a chapter.So serialization has opened my eyes and got me off my high horse and said, this is how you are both literary and commercial, which is what I need to be. And it's exactly what Fallout is. There's an integrity to it, which absolutely is of the standard that I believe I want to put out. But it meets certain commercial criteria and they are to do with pacing and length, literally word count. So there's that.The other thing that I've discovered on Substack is that my obsessive diary, which is exactly how I wrote my memoir, which is just writing little tidbits every day, really not giving it too much thought. It should never take more than a couple of minutes to read. It never takes me more than half an hour to write.So I do these quite off the cuff things every day pretty much. But what I get as feedback from people, because they are so low risk and I don't embed them with any sort of expectation that they're in some way going to make my name or win me some prize, they have a lightness of being to them, which people really love, and I'm trying to take that lesson into my novel writing.To hold novels a little bit more lightly, not embed them with saving my life, Eleanor Anstruther, right? Like this is going to be the one, because that weight stops them from being light to the touch when people read them. So that's something I've really been thinking about lately and something I've definitely learned again in the format of Substack and the way that we write there.Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in a few weeks with River Selby. Stay tuned next week for another installment from my fatherhood memoir.More in The Things Not Named Series ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Most of my content in 2025 is free, but I appreciate the support of readers who make my interviews possible. Upgrading your subscription unlocks my monthly essays from a memoir-in-progress, as well as the entire archive. I’m also proud to be a Give Back Stack. 5% of my earnings in Q2 will go to Centre Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic for those with no health insurance and annual income under $38K (individual) or $78K (family of four).The Things Not Named — With Mark Slouka Mark Slouka: These were people whose lives were over. These were people who were going to be tortured and killed, and the last thing they thought to do was to write something in those days and weeks they were waiting. To me, there's something fundamentally human about wanting to express and express something well. And that need isn't going to just die overnight.Joshua Doležal: That’s Mark Slouka, author of the Substack Thought Salad. He’s my guest today for The Recovering Academic Podcast. I’m Joshua Doležal.My interview series this year is called “The Things Not Named.” It takes its title from a passage in Willa Cather’s essay “The Novel Démueblé,” one of her craft manifestos. I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. Today you’ll hear from one of the finest stylists I know.Mark Slouka’s books have been translated into sixteen languages and his stories and essays have repeatedly appeared in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories and Best American Essays. A past contributing editor to Harper's Magazine, his work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Agni, The New Yorker, and Granta. His forthcoming novel, For What It’s Worth, is a sequel to the award-winning Brewster. Mark currently divides his time between Prague and a small cabin in upstate New York.I hope you enjoy our conversation.Joshua Doležal: My series this year is mainly about craft, and I suppose I have a kind of defiant mindset about it because I invested about 20 years in honing my craft, and you've invested much longer than that. And my feeling has been that it's almost become kind of irrelevant as a market principle and that the institutions surrounding teaching of craft, the communities in which craft is discussed are falling apart. And so for me, craft is one of the only reasons to write. It's the high standard that we're all striving toward, to get better as apprentices to the art. And so to feel that it's becoming irrelevant has been hard for me.So I don't know if I'm just grieving that by talking to other people looking for commiseration or if there is in fact a future or writing that includes craft as a cornerstone.Mark Slouka: You’ve kind of started off with the with the big question.I'm trying really hard not to be pessimistic because, you know the pendulum tends to swing and it may swing back somehow. But I would say that first of all, I think craft has almost disappeared from the publishing industry as we as we know it today. It's almost unrecognizable from the industry that I knew only 30 years ago when I started publishing.I'm sure there are plenty of editors who would argue that passionately and say that they care deeply. The truth is that all the editors I've known are moving so fast. They're on such a treadmill that I can't recall getting a craft-based edit in decades. That's not what you get. You get sort of product placement advice. You get advice on how to streamline something, how to make it more reader friendly how to move product more effectively, ideally. But I think there's a larger issue, which is that up until say 20, 25 years ago, the universities were still teaching literature in the sense that basically there were generations of students being trained to admire, respect craft.And at some point the writing itself was subordinated to ideology, to politics, right? Certainly true in theory. There was a time when you could publish a literary criticism type piece and let's say the New York Review of Books, and it would be discussed broadly, you know, among people who read the New York Review of Books.But still, you know, it would be, oh, hey, did you read the latest da da da? Well, them days are gone. So in the university, the first step was that craft, as I said, was subordinated to ideology, to politics, to whatever particular political axe you had to grind, which meant that over time that the craft element of it, the fact that Faulkner could write a certain kind of sentence that somebody else couldn't, and you'd want to study how that was done, kind of fell by the wayside.And at the same time that was happening, students were morphing into customers, which is another kind of – all of these things kind of converged together to create a new climate, a new atmosphere in which, frankly, I feel more and more adrift, as do a lot of authors I happen to know, including yourself, maybe. Not just people my age, but younger as well, who are saying, well, we went into this for this reason.It's not, of course…a book can be entertaining, but literature also used to aim for something like wisdom as well to say something about justice or truth as we perceive it, and so on. As the industry is being squeezed financially, as the smaller fish gets continually eaten by the bigger fish, that kind of work is no longer wanted, we need to try to thread the needle and get that big hit. Hopefully film rights are attached. Bing, bing, bing. And you're off to the races. If you don't do that, good luck.Joshua Doležal: Part of our purpose then is to think about what a future looks like for people who are not on that track, who don't want that particular lane, or whose values don't align with the values of the gatekeepers right now. But I'd like to go back a little bit to origins. So when you think of when your apprenticeship to craft began, when was that?Mark Slouka: I grew up in a family where reading was a big deal, where reading mattered, where books mattered, where there was a kind of an inherent respect for the writer. It was a very old school attitude in some ways. And frankly, a kind of a, not just Old World, but New World too. Up until recently.Yeah, my dad was a professor. My mom was a librarian. It's like, man, books were a big deal. As a kid, obviously, it was all about the story, you know, it's like I was just immersed in stories. I couldn't tell you a good sentence from a hole in the ground.But then at some point, you know, my mom was always talking to me about, you know, this or that Somerset Maugham story and like the motivations of the people involved. That was nine years old, you know? And she's asking, well, why do you think he would say that when that's contrary to his best interest? Like, why would you, if you were in his shoes, what would you do? You know, da da. And so we'd have these great conversations and because Mom was taking me seriously during those conversations. It was kind of heady stuff. My real awakening to craft came at university. I mean, there was some inklings of it in high school, but really it was, it was at Columbia and I was blessed with having two or three, which is about all you can ever hope for, one in particular, just extraordinary teacher.And I vividly remember…you asked the origin, okay, so here's my origin thing. I remember I was flying to Fresno, California, from New York to take a job working on this crew, this trail crew in the High Sierras. I was 19 years old and I had brought Camus’ The Stranger with me because I'd heard somebody had said, you know, some professor, some other student, because books were a big deal. They’d said, oh man, this is really good. You gotta read this. So I took it with me and the plane was delayed for four hours. So I'm sitting in Kennedy, I read straight through, I read straight through the flight, we're landing in L.A., and my life was changed. It's like, I don't know what he's doing, but I'm fascinated. I didn't fully understand what Camus was accomplishing, but this world of ideas just opened up to me. And then, you know, then it was like step follows step. Back then going down this path wasn't quite as fraught as it is now.Joshua Doležal: I remember your story about when you completed your PhD. I think your mother-in-law wondered if you were going to open a what, a philosophy store or something. So I mean, that's been…I was advised rigorously against the English major and then also against the PhD, which even in the year 2000 seemed like a real fool's errand. And of course, all of that has gotten steadily worse. But it's never been what anyone would see as a responsible adult kind of choice.Mark Slouka: Especially in America. I mean, you and I both know that two and a half century-long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America. I mean, there's books written about it, right? The Hofstadter book is called that: Anti-Intellectualism in America. So yeah, we we’re all, we've all been immersed in that, you know, those who can do, those who can't teach, all those old saws.Like, I'm talking to you from Prague. You don't get that here. That's not, that doesn't exist here. That's not to say it doesn't, that there aren't elements of it, but in general, there's still a kind of a vestigial respect for the life of the mind.Joshua Doležal: Well, so as we're going back to this, Camus had this effect on you, and you were responding to something that even then you recognized as good writing, even if you didn't have language for it.So I'm assuming that your apprenticeship, which must have begun shortly after that, steadily gave you language for what good writing was and that it's not so difficult for you to explain what that is now when you see it. So when you're reading a work or an author that you admire and it hits that same note, what are some of the things that you're responding to that you would be able to identify as craft principles or aesthetic qualities that define good writing to you?Mark Slouka: I mean, the Holy Grail of writing is the voice, right? Everybody talks about the voice. Well, the voice is simply the fingerprint on the page. It's the thing that makes a particular person's writing unique, recognizable.I remember a professor of mine at one point – I was, must have been 19 or 20, maybe a sophomore in college, and he gave me five different paragraphs. One was from Thomas Mann, one was from Robert Musil, one was from, I don't know, Kafka. One was, who knows? And he said, okay, match 'em up. Like, who wrote this? Who wrote that? Who wrote that?And I knew, I could tell. And he said, how do you know? And so it forced me to go down to the level of the lexical level, the level of word, the sentence structure, et cetera. And identify oh, this is what makes Robert Musil, Robert Musil, and this is what makes him different from Kafka or different from Thomas Mann. Or, I still, when I pick up a book, let's say Tobias Wolff, you know, if you pick up In Pharaoh's Army, there's a voice there, there's something in his prose that makes me, I'm just plugged in. I'm interested. And that raises the question, well, why am I exactly interested? I think I'm interested because for me, the writers that I admire, the writer that I try to be, still try to be, is someone who combines precision and soul.I don't know if I can put it that way, But I think I can. Those two terms, precision and soul, for me, kind of say a lot. It's not enough to just emote and it's not enough just to be precise. You have to blend those together in your own way and when you hit that sweet spot, when you are able to do that, and to do that requires a big heart. But it also requires discipline. Like you actually have to interrogate as you do as I do. It's like every writer you and I admire, no doubt does. You have to interrogate what you've done. If you're just sitting there sort of like writing at speed, admiring yourself, it is a matter of honing, polishing, reducing, refining, struggling.It's supposed to be struggle. Yes, there are those moments when you're just in the zone and you suddenly get up and it's like, oh my God, three hours have passed and my back is all locked up because I was in that space. But even in that space, when you're unaware of anything around you, and it doesn't happen often, even in that space, the critical faculty, the refining faculty, is still on.You're not just feeling endlessly. Yes, of course you're feeling, you know, you could have tears running down your face because of what you're writing, but at the same time that those tears are running, you're shaping what you're putting down.Joshua Doležal: It seems that this idea of refinement, shaping, the precision part of that equation is, I think the heart of what we're talking about with craft. You know, there is a method that assumes also a discerning reader who is responding to that.I know for myself, when I'm in that zone, it's not a zone where I exist in solitude. There's an imagined communion with a reader and a particular kind of reader that I respect, and that has a respect for craft in its highest form. And so when we're talking about the apprenticeship to the craft and how we do that in solitude, I think there's an implied communion with that discerning reader.There was an intro that you wrote and you're basically scoffing at the whole idea of the essayist introducing his own collection, because if you'd been doing this long enough, you sort of knew what pose to strike and you were sort of acknowledging that there's a performative aspect there, that voice is not really your authentic soul. It is a kind of selective recruitment of personal qualities combined with effects and stylistic techniques that you know are effective in achieving soulfulness. But it's not necessarily authentic and true in every particular, that there's a kind of performance there. What I'm getting back around to is the sense that when you're in that zone, you're doing it for someone, not purely for yourself. Is that fair?Mark Slouka: Yeah, it is. It is. I think a lot of us would like to think that we would simply keep writing and have to keep writing, even if we had like a written guarantee from God that no one would ever read it. Right? I'm not sure that's true. And I'm learning to my surprise that it's probably not true for me. I don't need a lot of readers, but I need to know that I have some, that I'm communicating with somebody, somebody ideally who can stop at a sentence I've written and say, okay. Okay. Wow, that's good.You know, that's what I'm aiming for. I want and need that approval because, let's face it, like most writers, I'm out there to move people. I'm out there to affect people, to touch people. Not just by the entertainment value of the story I'm telling, but the way it's told. That matters to me. It matters supremely to me as it does to you. That's why I write, that's why I admire some writers more than others, because I admire that largely indefinable skill, which we were just talking about. But your question raises a larger question, which is, is that community of readers still there?Is there a community of readers capable of appreciating what I do? I have a good friend of mine, the novelist Brian Hall. I mean, he's a good novelist and he and I have been joking for years about how we're basically roof thatchers in the 21st century. You know, we're pretty good at thatching a roof, and every now and then we pass a house whose roof we thatched and we think, man, that's my roof. And that's not too bad. I did a really fine job of that.The bitter little joke being, of course there's not a whole lot of need for our craft anymore. It's like not a whole lot of roof thatching to be done lately. That used to be funnier 20 years ago than it is now. Because now I feel like it's come back to me and I feel like a goddamned roof thatcher sometimes. I really do. It's like I can thatch a pretty good roof. Does anybody give a damn, I'm not sure.Joshua Doležal: Two parts of this that I want to kind of drill into. One is what you were saying earlier about universities. You know, they used to be places where craft was taught, and I think for the 20th century in particular, I don't really have as good a sense of this for the 19th century because I think there were, I guess there still were popular outlets for writing, so there were writers in the 18th century and 19th century who sold a lot of books and became kind of celebrities in that regard, but probably weren't being taught in the universities and quite the way that the modernists and postmodernists were.And so you could get on syllabi across America, and that was a way of gaining a certain status and reputation. You could be taken seriously by experts who were in that position of curating style and curating taste and setting some of the baseline for that. So with the shift that you're describing from ideas to politics or ideology, a lot of those gatekeepers shifted their metrics. So the institutions were no longer supporting craft as the benchmark for quality literature. So that, as you've said, that world is gone. That world was also one in which institutions could be sanctuaries for writers. So you could sort of take the money question off the table, you could focus purely on craft, and that could be sort of, you're a north star, right?So that's, that's gone as well. So in this world, without institutions with the roof thatching sensibility and skillset, what's the future? Is it just a kind of defiant practice of the craft in increasing obscurity? Or is there something more substantial to hope for?Mark Slouka: Well, I take heart from something which is difficult to understand, which is that as all the things that we're talking about are kicking in, as the universities are becoming primarily centers of business, I mean, Columbia is not a university. It's primarily a corporation. It's a $10 billion corporation or whatever. That's not to say that there aren't some really intelligent, wonderful people teaching there, good students da, da da, but as a whole, it's a corporation and it conducts itself as such. As that's happening, as publishing houses are becoming what they always were to some extent, but moreso places of business, bottom line institutions.Even as all this is happening at the same time, it seems we're having more and more people, young people, interested in writing. They want to write, they're drawn to the idea of writing. They're drawn to the idea of expressing something essential to themselves, and sending it out into the world. They may not have been trained for it. They may not have not have been prepared for it. But Melville said, you know, a whaling ship was my Yale and my Harvard. You don't need to go to Yale to learn how to write. In fact, it's probably a hindrance. There's something going on if you have this many people in this age, just like on the verge of AI and what all the rest that's coming down the pike, still interested in writing.Now, the flip side of that optimism – I'm Slavic, so there's always a flip side to the optimism – the flip side to that is that I worry sometimes that writing is becoming kind of a fashion statement. It's like when I used to walk into the School of the Arts when I was teaching at Columbia, and you'd have all these students standing downstairs smoking their unfiltered cigarettes, dressed in black, they look great. They all look like Paul Oster, with those soulful eyes flies and the hair and this and that. And it was great. But I think sometimes the notion of actually writing is becoming kind of a more of a pose than the actual thing itself.If you're a man, you think you have this like romantic vision of yourself on the porch in Cape Cod, and you're sitting there with like three-day scruff of beard and you're looking really good in your black sweater. And you know this pretty girl comes walking down the beach and sees you clacking away on your typewriter writing your novel.And so there's this whole sort of romantic encrustation around what's really very simple, very unromantic, very basic. It's just one woman or one man sitting in a room by themselves, writing isn't done by committee, trying to say something, trying to say something that's essential to them, and then hoping that by some miracle, by some alchemy, it'll be essential to somebody else.That's it. What I used to say to my students, it's not about the goddamned shirt. It's not about the shirt. It's not about how good you look. It's about that sentence. And so you answer like, where's hope? Well, I think there's some hope in the fact that so many people still want to write, they're interested. On the flip side, it's like, well, why? I would love to know, how do you see writing? Do you just see it as an answer to the increasingly soulless options out there? I don't know. A lot of people are interested in writing, but then when I talk to them, I realize that they haven't read. And so I'm wondering, what do you think it is that you're doing here?Joshua Doležal: I think what you're describing, and because we're both on Substack, where this interview will be shared, there's a premium on soulfulness or rawness. There's this sense that the thing that is most authentic is the thing with the least precision and that you shouldn't second guess yourself. The zone that matters is the zone of creation and that it is a kind of way of claiming your voice.I think that soulfulness goes, it’s kind of like the Jack Kerouac school, there's a kind of revival of a Beat sensibility about it. That to me is not about craft at all. It's more, as you're saying, it's like an accessory. It's a cool thing to do with your time, but it's not an apprenticeship to anything. It's not a calling. It's not a tradition that you're joining with deference to those that have come before. In fact, there isn't really a long arc from the past that you're trying to follow or add to or contribute to. It's really very contained in the present. Recency is part of the currency of that kind of soulfulness.So that's the downside I suppose of it. I'm German and Slavic and so I don't know that I see the upside as often. I get kind of a double dose of the other.But one of my guests last fall, John Pistelli, who self-published his novel serialized it on Substack and then got a deal with Belt Publishing. John's idea is that there is no universal readership anymore or broad readership. It's sort of symptomatic of the shift from network television to cable to streaming, that everything gets kind of fragmented. It's on demand. You can't sit around a campfire anymore and with a guitar and sing songs that everybody knows because everybody's got their own little playlist. So his idea is that increasingly the people that we're writing for are small coteries. And that that's the best that it can get. And the idea of a broad reach is kind of part of what we have to let go in this brave new world. So there are implications for that that are financial, but I think there are also implications for craft because there isn't a shared sensibility of what real achievement looks like in writing either.So it's kind of everyone's retreating inward to their own sensibility and then trying to find a tribe that kind of rallies around it, rather than doing what hooked me on writing, which is taking my life or ideas. I'm not as much of a fiction writer, but bridging the gap between myself and a stranger who would think if they saw me on the subway, that they had nothing in common with me.But there's this kinship that forms on the page. And that's not what happens in a small coterie, but that's that's what Pistelli is saying is the future. I'm not sure what your thoughts are on that.Mark Slouka: I think that, and maybe he's an example of how people will find ways of kind of tunneling in, you know making it work. It may not work the way it did, but you have to stop and, I'm really suspicious of that kind of Golden Age thinking. I could make an argument that higher education was significantly better, different and better, than it is today. I'm not as sure of publishing because at least for the last 30, 40 years, because you had these gatekeepers who were, even then, already sort of aiming for kind of that big, fat, middle of the consuming culture, right? This is how, this is how sales work, this is how capitalism works. Whatever it is you're selling, you're not selling to a minority audience, by definition. You're trying to aim for the big middle where you'll get the biggest numbers, the most customers and so forth.But that militates against originality, against difficulty, against innovation, against a whole lot of things. You know, you go back to1851, when Moby Dick, you know, Moby Dick was, it's still arguabl, the greatest novel in American history, but it was reviled as this mad thing. I mean, he had like four readers in England who actually said, my God, you've done something extraordinary. The rest of them thought he lost his mind.He and Hawthorne were b******g about the women “scribblers” back then. Which was partly jealousy. Partly misogyny. The fact is that there were popular writers back then as well who were, you know, selling 400,000, 500,000 books. Whereas The Scarlet Letter sold what, 1500 or something. And Henry David Thoreau ended up with a library consisting of 900 copies of his own damn book, Walden, and made jokes about it.So I think that the new ways of cutting the cake, whether it be self-publishing, whether it be serializing on Substack, whether new avenues will begin to creep up, whether independent, kind of low overhead publishing houses will begin to assert themselves.That's not necessarily a bad thing, considering that what I see at the publishing houses right now is an ever more desperate clawing for the bestseller. There's a wonderful line. It's probably apocryphal. That the late actor Heath Ledger was at the Oscars and he was sitting next to somebody, and I forget somebody else had won the Oscar, and he felt he should have, and he turned to the person next to him and he said, “Well, I thought this award was for the best acting, not the most acting.”Well, I think that right now what we're seeing, and it pisses me off because I can't do it. I'm not that kind of writer. We're seeing the most writing, not the best writing. We're seeing loud, we're seeing, hey, more zombies, more Nazis, more this, more that, more bells and whistles, more loudness. Whereas everything in me tends toward, tends in a different direction toward that. Again, it can be entertaining as hell. It can be something you can't put down. But it has to be good. It has to actually say something that I hadn't thought of already. It has to move me, shake me, affect me in ways that a lot of the contemporary stuff doesn't. So I'm trying to be positive here.I'm trying to think of like, okay, maybe the good work will begin to come up through different avenues, and maybe yes, maybe we won't have that big audience we dreamed of, but that big audience usually came at a price. I mean, there were exceptions, extraordinary novels that sold a lot of copies, but they were always the exceptions. The stuff that sold a lot of copies was Michael Crichton. It's like, you know, try reading Michael Crichton. If I had hair, I'd pull it out. It’s just bad sentences. He could write really good plots. That's why they were all made into movies. Good for him. I'm sure he did very well. But that's the kind of stuff that's been published for a very long time. The Good always had trouble coming up through the system. It may be having more trouble now than ever, but I'd like to think that people are an inventive lot. They may come up with new avenues.And I personally, for one, I would love to take advantage of them.Joshua Doležal: So you are a Substack writer. I was pleasantly surprised, but also just surprised to see you join, given that it's another one of those places – you came to it with no platform, with no favors to call in. You're starting from scratch after a fairly decorated writing career. You know, writing for venues like Harper's and publishing with Norton for most of your life. And so you're doing that for a much smaller readership on Substack. And part of me is curious why you're doing that. And part of me would love to know also what else you're working on, if you're willing to talk about it and why you're working on that given all the givens that we've covered in terms of craft in the marketplace and what the hope is or not for something like that coming to fruition?Mark Slouka: Well, I'm too old to b******t. I mean, honestly, I came to Substack partly out of desperation, out of a need to articulate some thoughts, some ideas. It's not enough to write in my journal. You know, I've kept a journal since I was 17. But that's a different kind of writing. I never expected to fork any lightning.I expected to be writing for a handful of people and to try to get something down every week or two that satisfied me, which said something about the world we're in. The reason I came to Substack was. Again, without getting sort of unduly confessional, that I finished a novel, a sequel to a novel of mine called Brewster, finished it to my satisfaction.You know, but it's not a particularly loud story, but I think it's a pretty good story. And it talks about a couple in America who have their own ghosts, both the husband and wife, that they carry with them. And it's about their life and the obstacles they run into and how those obstacles are eventually surmounted through the kindness of strangers. So really it's a book about sort of the better angels of our being, of our nature in America. And I was proud of that for that reason, that I wanted to write a book which wasn't about the serial killer in the trailer park – often written by people who've never been in a trailer park in their lives. So it just annoys me.But I gave it to one agent who's very good. And then I gave it to a second agent who's arguably even better. And I ran into a wall. I realized that for 25 years, I simply took for granted that whatever I wrote would find a home. It just would. I would write a novel. Or I'd write a collection of stories or collection of essays. And it might not be Knopf, it might not be HarperCollins, it might not be Houghton Mifflin. It might not be Norton, but it would find a home. And I just took it for granted. I was incredibly spoiled that way, I think.What I didn't realize is the landscape was changing under my feet quietly. And so this book was finished and I sent it off, and both of these agents started, as I said, they're really very good agents, and they started receiving replies in some cases from editors who didn't even want to read the manuscript. In some cases, editors I've worked with successfully. And the reason they were given, which just shocked me, it sounded like some right wing propaganda nonsense, but the reactions they got were—there's the question of a sales record, which is lousy, but more mportant is the fact that he's a middle-aged white man. He's just not interesting. We're not interested in another novel by another middle-aged white man. And I was shocked by this, absolutely shocked by it. And I thought, well, that's just this editor, or that one. But I heard from both agents who don't know each other, and the story they gave me was almost verbatim and they were shocked by it.And the long and the short of it is that I was, that I found myself sitting on a novel that I worked on, off and on – I wrote another book in the middle of that one – but off and on for, what, eight years. And it hasn't found a home. And so some point I was actually was thinking of it as a trilogy. I was thinking of writing a third one. But now with the second one mired in the mud, it was kind of come to Jesus time. It's like, well, okay, what do I, nevermind the financial hit, because I didn't expect to make a lot of money, but I expected to make something, some small advance that would kind of feather the nest a little bit.And so it was a time to really reevaluate, rethink. And I wish I could say I got very far. I'm not really sure how to, how to finesse this.Joshua Doležal: In some cases it might be a principle of justice and others it might be the shifting priorities that we're talking about earlier.And if craft doesn't play into it, you know, take your demographics out of it. If the main thing that you offer is a high command of craft, but there's a low premium on that because it's roof thatching, then maybe it's less personal in that way. It's more about the sensibility that has fallen out of favor or it was not a loud enough book, it didn't have grievance at the heart of it.There might have been other ways that – you know, Jake Tapper just published a book. It's not as if demographics are stopping everyone. So I think that some of what we're talking about is a shift in sensibility, and that's why I said this series that I'm doing is a bit defiant in the sense that for me, because I can't do those other things – not that I can't do any of them, because my Substack was founded really on a series of polemics about higher ed. And I think if I had just really embraced that and become a jeremiad preacher on Substack, there's definitely a market for that. People like reacting to things. The playbook I've heard for going viral is that you speak to one tribe while speaking against another tribe. So if you have something that's polarizing in that way that makes both of them upset, that's something you can ride for a while. I don't find that satisfying. I was writing out of a particular angst and kind of shock of my own, but I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life.I wanted to actually recover from that and find something that was more soul-affirming that was meeting my standards of craft. And that would be less limited to particular moments in time and something that might be more enduring.So when I'm talking to people about craft, it's, for me, the principle of writing that transcends the political, that transcends all the vagaries of any particular fashion. It connects me to a writer like Hawthorne. It connects me to a writer like Phyllis Wheatley. I feel that I can go back in time and find kindred spirits in the literary tradition. And there's a lot of meaning that comes from that and thinking that I'm striving toward the same goals that they were more or less.It's almost like a religious tradition of artists and that we share a set of practices and a hope and desire and yearning for nirvana or enlightenment or salvation or whatever it is that experience of good writing feels like. That's the thing that to me, gives meaning to the enterprise.Mark Slouka: I used to tell my writing students, you know, there are kind of two parts to this racket. There's the writing and then there's everything else. It's like when you're sitting in your room, when you're working on this thing that you're writing. That's, to me, that's it. That's the world. And then the reason we have other people, editors, publishers, publicists, all the rest is because they're better at that other stuff. That's not for us.Well, more and more I think it's becoming, marketing is kind of where it's at. Well, that's a problem for people like me, because I'm not a marketer. I can't sell anything to anybody. So, Substack in a sense, what I love about it is that I get to hear back from readers. I don't hear often, but when I do, I get to hear back from readers quickly. Right? Back in the old days, I published an essay in Harper's or The Paris Review or whatever, and maybe two months later they'd get a letter in the mail and they forward it on to me. And I always get a kick out of that.But it was, it was rare and few and far between. Now there's something like a dialogue happening. The flip side of that are the numbers, the metrics, the, oh, you know, I worked hard on that piece and I got six likes. And you find yourself thinking, well, what did I do last time because I got 10 likes. What did I do wrong? Well, I didn't do anything wrong necessarily. Don't worry about it. Just write your thing. So I'm still negotiating this new world, trying to figure out how to work it. Mostly right now I'm grateful for having a venue in which I can simply express what I want to express this week about this increasingly complicated world we find ourselves in.Considering that my other, other venues have largely closed off, you know, you go where you canJoshua Doležal: If you look down the road, even five years, if there were some of those glimmers of hope that you're describing that were to continue to bear fruit, what would be some good things for yourself personally and for book culture generally that you'd like to see?Mark Slouka: I think that literature is…it's about growing the self. It's not just a product. It's what makes human beings human beings, in some sense. It grows the capacity for empathy. That's not going to just end, I don't believe that. It's a fundamental, it's some kind of a human need, still, even in this age.My favorite anecdote is kind of a grim one, but it's also kind of memorable. There's a place out here in a city called Brno, here in the Czech Republic. And during the Second World War, the Nazis took over this university, it's called Kounicovy koleje, and reformed it into an execution yard. It was a horrendous place.When that place was liberated in the spring of 45, the troops coming in found crammed into the cracks in the bricks, they found bits of toilet paper with poetry, with bits of writing, with stuff on them, jammed in there with whatever they had available to them.These were people whose lives were over. These were people who were going to be tortured and killed, and the last thing they thought to do was to write something in those days and weeks they were waiting. To me, there's something fundamentally human about wanting to express and express something well. And that need isn't going to just die overnight.It's still there on some level. It's just trying to find its way through this thicket of difficulty having to do with media, with marketing, with what's happening to universities, da, da, da. I'm not sure what form it'll take or how it'll come out the other side, but I do believe it'll survive. I do.Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next month with a review of Dr. Rana Awdish’s memoir, In Shock. Stay tuned next week for another installment from my fatherhood memoir.More interviews in this series ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Recovering Academic Podcast. I’m Joshua Doležal and my guest today is Anne Trubek. My interview series this year is called “The Things Not Named.” It takes its title from a passage in Willa Cather’s essay “The Novel Démueblé,” one of her craft manifestos. I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. But today we’ll examine those questions from the publisher’s side — why certain books get chosen and how much or how little style factors into it.Anne Trubek is the founder and publisher of Belt Publishing. She is the author of So You Want To Publish A Book? (Belt 2020), and editor of Best of the Rust Belt (Belt 2024), and Voices From The Rust Belt (Picador, 2018). She is also author of The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting (Bloomsbury, 2016), and A Skeptic's Guide To Writers' Houses (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). She has been publishing her Notes from a Small Press newsletter since 2018.I hope you enjoy our conversation.Joshua Doležal: Anne Trubek, thanks so much for joining me. Am I pronouncing your name correctly?Anne Trubek: Yeah, Trubek.Joshua Doležal: And are you from Wisconsin originally or from Pittsburgh?Anne Trubek: No, I grew up mainly in Madison, Wisconsin.Joshua Doležal: And am I correct that you are a fellow recovering academic?Anne Trubek: Yes. I mean, I used to be an academic. I don't feel like I'm a recovering one, but yes, my first career was as an English professor.Joshua Doležal: Why did you leave academe, if I may ask?Anne Trubek: It's a complicated one. I mean, I was one of the very lucky people who had tenure and I was at a good institution. But I had a very unusual job situation. This is a lot of detail, but at some small liberal arts colleges, they split positions so that two people have one position. So I was in that situation with a halftime job and I needed to make more money and so I started to do a lot of other things. I started to do a lot of freelance writing and other stuff like that. And so the other projects that I was doing started to pick up and get more steam. And then I started this press. And then at a certain point the juggling was too much. And so I had to, I had to go one way or the other. And so I leaned into the press.Joshua Doležal: How did you end up in Pittsburgh then?Anne Trubek: So Belt Publishing, which is my press, focuses on the Rust Belt. And I was living in Cleveland for many, many years. And I had a sort of post pandemic, empty nest desire to move. The other part of the other reason why I left academia is that because of a joint custody arrangement, I wasn't able to go on the academic job market. So I was sort of in one place, but that was done. And so I wanted to move, and given that Belt Publishing focuses on the Rust Belt, and I needed to stay in the region. So I had a lot of good friends in Pittsburgh and I love the city, so that's why Pittsburgh.Joshua Doležal: Well, I hope you'll indulge one other personal question. Your name seems Eastern European. It could be Czech or Slovak. I know there's a big Slovak population in Pittsburgh. Is that part of your own background too?Anne Trubek: No, it's, it's Jewish actually. So it's sort of Russian, Ukrainian, you know, type of area. But yeah, a lot of people with the “ek” think of it as, you know, it's all generally Eastern European.Joshua Doležal: Very cool. Well, so the series that I'm doing this year is mainly devoted to craft, and I've mainly been talking with authors about their craft and how they define it. But I think it's very difficult to really pin down what it is that we're looking for when we're reading for high-quality literature and how we define our particular craft sensibility. So you're coming at this from the publisher's standpoint, and you are a kind of curator because you're acquiring titles. And so I think everyone's interested in that sensibility. You know, what does an agent look for? What does a publisher look for? And so that's one thing I'm hoping to get to the bottom of a little bit more today. But you're also an author. Am I correct in saying that your books are more nonfiction or history or journalism rather than what we think of as memoir?Anne Trubek: Yes. So I've edited a lot of volumes, but I've also single-authored, it's a weird phrase, single-authored a few books. One is A Skeptic's Guide To Writers' Houses. And another one is The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting. So both of these are a combination of research and reporting narrative nonfiction. You could call it serious nonfiction, perhaps. These are strange genre titles that we use for nonfiction. So yeah, no, not memoir but you know, reported nonfiction. Based on my academic research, obviously.Joshua Doležal: So that's a very different kind of sensibility, but, and you do acquire some books in that area for belt publishing, not just theory fiction.Anne Trubek: Right. So for, in terms of what Belt publishes, we do focus on nonfiction. So that is, the craft question is a little strange there. But we have published, as of next month, three novels total. So very few, very little fiction. But I'm still looking for a certain kind of writer. I don't know if craft is the term that those writers would be using or that I would be thinking about, but I'm definitely looking for a certain kind of writing.Joshua Doležal: Well, let's perhaps stick with literary fiction then for our purposes, to keep focused on craft. I became aware of you through John Pistelli, who's sort of a Substack gentleman that everyone appreciates. I've interviewed him for my own series a while back about his novel and the future of higher ed. But his deal with Belt Publishing was a kind of success story because he serialized first and then he didn't pitch you directly, did he? You discovered him on Substack.Anne Trubek: That's right. I reached out to him.Joshua Doležal: Yeah. So you, how did you discover Major Arcana?Anne Trubek: So, and I should say it's the only literary fiction that we've ever published. So I'm, and I'm not gonna be speaking from broad, you know, in terms of generally what I'm looking for this is very aberrant. Ross Barkan did an interview with him for his newsletter. And I was really fascinated by John's answers because it was clear from them that he had a grounding in literary history and that he was doing something based on that grounding in his novel. And that is not common these days. Or, you know, the answers that he was giving were not what most authors are saying about their book. So I thought, well, this, this sounds really interesting. And so I started to read it and the very first scene takes place about half a mile from where I live here in Pittsburgh. And so even though Belt does very, very little fiction and has never had never done literary fiction, we are open to fiction with a strong sense of place particularly if it's in the Rust Belt. And this suddenly, which I didn't realize from reading the interview with Ross, was an example of such a book and I thought it was really interesting and I thought John's decision to serialize was really interesting and so I reached out to him and that's how it came about.Joshua Doležal: So the regional emphasis was part of the appeal, but the novel had to hold up as a work of art, I assume, for you to decide to publish it. So when you started reading it, I mean, it could have been about Pittsburgh or set in Pittsburgh and really been a flop, right? So, so what was it at the sentence level or about the design of it or John's command of craft that convinced you that it was worth putting your resources behind?Anne Trubek: If I'm being honest, I don't think craft is something that came into my head or is something that I think about consciously. What I certainly am always sitting up and paying attention to is a writer who's clearly very well read. That is the kind of writing that I really look for and is really, can be very hard to find. And so the fact that I knew that John had an incredible body of knowledge behind what he was doing, that his writing was referencing what has come before and making comments about that. That's the kind of thing I really look for. And I think that if there's something that unites Belt, Belt authors, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, in terms of what I look for, it's somebody who knows their field, whatever that field is, who's really well read and is integrating what's come before into what they're doing. That's something I really value: that level of knowledge and an ability to be sophisticated about integrating it without showing off. You know, that's not what's important to me. But that we're building on what's come before and creating new things at the same time.Joshua Doležal: Well, forgive me for pushing a little bit on this, but to promote a novel like that successfully, I mean, it does have to hold up as a story. So when you're talking about Major Arcana, a book that people should buy, what is it that you think is the main appeal or the artistic, if you don't like the word craft, you know, what's the artistic depth of it or originality or the literary side of it? Someone can be very well read and also be incredibly tedious and you wouldn't be publishing it.Anne Trubek: Yes, no, absolutely. And I don't have any opposition to the word craft. It's just not necessarily anything a term that I think about in a conscious way. I love the ambition of it. I love that it was taking on a lot. I love the maximalism of it. It was putting everything in there. And those were the, you know, the well-read, the maximalism, and the ambition of the scope of the novel were the things that really appealed to me.Joshua Doležal: Would you say there's a playfulness in John's writing that goes with all those other qualities?Anne Trubek: Yeah, but I think that would be misconstruing the novel to a certain extent. It's a challenging book and it's one that I imagine a lot of people start and don't continue with. So playful makes it seem a little more fun. It's not that it isn't fun, but it's as intellectual as it is playful, and I think the intellectual aspect of it is what dominates. I love the book. I love what he's doing. I love the references and so it's playful for me reading it and pulling those up in my head. But you know, in terms of marketing this book and and publicizing it, I don't think playful is something that we leaned into too much.Joshua Doležal: Well, I was meaning that more in the postmodern sense, you know, the Thomas Pynchon vein or you know, the Joseph Heller vein where there's a kind of absurdity that's part of the whole intellectual picture and is part of the thesis such as it is in a work like that. But to return to possibly a polemical point about craft, I wrote earlier this year about craft as a principle that's just dead in the literary marketplace as a shift toward perhaps identity reasons for publishing certain authors or guaranteed book sales. Celebrities are much more likely to get a memoir deal say than someone who's trying to debut the way that Tobias Wolff did in the eighties and nineties. So, I don't know if you would agree with that.Craft — command of literary elements and a kind of sophistication of style — used to be the kind of thing that could get you on the map. Alfred Knopf was a publisher who explicitly went after authors like Willa Cather, who he thought had that kind of sophistication, and that was what he was investing in. And my feeling has been that it's increasingly difficult to be discovered based on craft alone, and John's book kind of proves that point, if it appealed to you for reasons other than what we would think of as sentence-level sophistication. Would you agree with the premise?Anne Trubek: So I think that. American publishing is dominated right now by five conglomerate presses, the Big Five, and they're publicly traded stocks, they're multinational corporations. The bottom line's very important. That's always been true. And it's also always been true that there have been other presses that are looking more for, I think, the kind of books that you're talking about and the books that I would say Belt does, whether we call them, you know, on the sentence level or just books that are doing something interesting, whatever terms we want to use. Knopf started off small. Now they're part of a multinational conglomerate. They were bought out. So a lot of this has to do with, you know, it's something we've seen all in all facets of American life. The increasing conglomeration of a few companies that dominate everything. I think one of the things that I try not to be cynical about, but I'm tempted to get cynical about is the number of authors who just seem to want that kind of contract, so they're putting the money first as well. And so it's gotta be a symbiotic thing.There are tons of small presses that publish beautiful books all the time. I mean, Two Dollar Radio is one of my favorites. Their fiction is phenomenal. They do very few titles. Everything that they publish is incredibly good. They punch way above their weight in terms of prestigious awards and all of that. And so I think that people have to be looking around, more peripheral vision. You have to go beyond the companies that have the most marketing dollars that are shoving things, you know, into the certain places to find the stuff that's out there, but the stuff is out there. I do think that the Big Five is getting increasingly focused on the bottom line. And the bottom line is gonna follow trends. And the trends lately are, you know, the celebrity memoir, the romantic, that's where the market is, that's where the sales are. And these people need to make numbers to keep their jobs. So if the market were to suddenly switch where everybody wants complicated literary fiction, well then those places would go running to the agents and say, bring me the unknown complicated writer, because that's where the money is right now.So I think that it's really important to understand the publishing landscape when we think about these things. I do think that it's also really important to look harder, to spend more time looking for those really great novels by people who are not as well known. Obviously you can't find a book by somebody who's unknown if you don't know to look for it, right? By very definition. I think it's important to focus our attention and I lost the word, but it's important to focus our attention on the places that are doing what we want to see more of, rather than complaining about the places that aren't doing it, because they're, they're just multinational conglomerates in a capitalist system, that's what they're gonna do and what they're gonna be.I think agenting is something that perhaps has a disproportionate role. At Belt, most of our books are not agented, many of our books come from me reaching out as I did with John. If you're working in a place where all you're getting is what agents are sending you, you're only gonna get submissions from people who know how to play that game. It's a very particular game that you need to play to get the agent, to get a proposal or a book in the kind of position where an agent thinks they can sell it and an agent thinks they can sell it for enough money to make the agent's time worth it, because the agent only gets paid their 15% of the contract. So it's in their interest to get the higher advance to get that early payday, which means they're going to want the book to become more and more, whatever the the trend is that maybe doesn't prioritize craft. Also, literary fiction has never sold well. So literary fiction has never been, you know, the kind of thing where people are lavishing huge book deals on.So on the one hand things are different now than they used to be. On the other hand, it's just the way it's always been. Cather is unusual. She did make a lot of money in her time and she was extremely successful, but it took her a very, very long time to get to that point. Many, many years.Joshua Doležal: Yeah, well she was a journalist at the highest level, she was a journalist with McClure's Magazine and perhaps one of the preeminent women in journalism at the time and was reading all kinds of fiction submissions for other magazines while she was working on her short stories. And she was 40 years old, I think, when she finally made her breakthrough. But she had to leave her job and jump off a cliff professionally to really devote the linear time that she needed to her fiction. So there's a whole…it's a fascinating story. Willa Cather was my primary area of research when I was teaching, so I can easily get off topic with her.Anne Trubek: No, me too. I mean, I've done a lot of reading about her in terms of her life as an author and it's an interesting one. And that McClure's thing was really a blip. I mean, it wasn't like everybody was making a ton of money as a journalist in that time either. Like there was this little moment where there were these opportunities. She was also a nightmare to work with as an author.Joshua Doležal: Well, she categorically banned any movie deals after an atrocious production of A Lost Lady. I think it was Warner Brothers who did that and wanted to cut the whole second half of the novel because it was too depressing and she was just horrified.Anne Trubek: Yeah, and she made so many changes on the proofs, the last stage before it goes, that she was charged the equivalent of $10,000 today. And if an author made that many changes on proof, I would be so livid.Joshua Doležal: Yeah. Colorful character for sure. Well, back to the bottom line part of it, I mean, so you left higher ed because you needed to make more money, and it seems like going into publishing is kind of, sorry to say it, but it seems to be one of those areas where that would be the least likely place to make to make more money. But here you are, Belt Publishing has been around for how long, over a decade now. And how do you make a go of it as a small press given those thin profit margins and the fact that fewer people are reading books? I hear these reports. I guess it was Elle Griffin who caused a splash with her thing about how nobody is buying books anymore, and all the stats about how titles typically sell fewer than a thousand copies. So it seems like as a publisher, those are really slim margins that you're working with. How do you make it profitable?Anne Trubek: Sure. Well, I should clarify that it wasn't that I wanted to make more money. I just wanted to make my rent because I needed to supplement my income. It was very hard. I did both jobs for a long time. I never was able to really live on what I made through Belt for all those years. It was extraordinarily financially stressful. In early 2024, we were acquired by a larger press. So now a lot of that is, thank goodness, praise be, is in the past and we're much more stable financially now. So it was brutal. I couldn't make it. You know, I was still doing a ton of freelancing and other things to make rent.But we have a focus, the niche that we have a focus on means that we have a very clear audience. We know how to reach that audience. We have a very clear brand. We have people who understand who we are and support us as a press and understand what we do. We have booksellers across the region who appreciate what we do and support us. So I think having a niche is absolutely key. I don't think starting a press that was just going to publish literary fiction, I don't know how you make that work because it's so hard to stand out. But the idea behind Belt was to fill a gap. And so the people who understand what we're doing is helping to fill that appreciat it and buy the books. A lot of the people who buy our books aren't readers per se. There are people who are very interested and invested in the place that the book is about. So we're not necessarily looking for the people who are the quote unquote readers. We're looking for people who have a vested interest in one of the cities that we might write an anthology about or do a history of.Book publishing is still a multi-billion dollar industry. So, you know, there's plenty of people buying books out there. It is…margins are thin. It's hard to make it work. You have to work very hard and, you know, like I said, it was very tough for me. But I wouldn't say — if somebody said, I'm thinking about starting a small press, my instinct would be say, don't do it. Which is a horrible thing to say since I did exactly that, not that long ago. But literacy rates are just huge, right? If you think about America today versus a hundred years ago, there are so many more readers. There is so much to read out there. It's still a huge increase.Any graph would just be showing a steady growth of books. Actually sales, they're pretty much holding steady. If you look at data for the entire industry. So, yeah. People are reading less. Absolutely. Certain types of genres of books may become more…it's more like opera, the ballet, than TV or radio. It's gonna become more niche, but it's still a viable industry with lots of people who are invested and for whom it can employ and entertain and edifyJoshua Doležal: Another thing that I've talked with some of my guests about is the traditional book contract versus self-publishing. John Pistelli had done self-publishing mainly before you reached out to him. Samuél Lopez-Barrantes is another author who's done that with his book, The Requisitions, a World War II novel, and there is a certain argument there about how few royalties an author does get from book publishing. And so if your production costs are fairly minimal, you might be able to break even or make a small profit self-publishing versus going the traditional route. And Substack is kind of dangling that option out there to people as an alternative and a disruptor to the traditional path. So I don't know what your thoughts are on that. Obviously you have a vested interest in a traditional publishing route. Do you think it makes more sense for some authors to self-publish versus seeking some other press to represent them?Anne Trubek: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, self-publishing is nothing new. There are people who have been doing self-publishing for at least 20 years now and making a ton of money off of it. I think if you know how to market and publicize and you like doing that and you are writing something in a genre that can be found, you should absolutely self-publish. Yeah, you will make more money, but you have to do all the work the publishing company would be doing, and that's why your portion is less because you have to pay for the printing and you have to pay for the publicist and you have to pay for the editing and you have to pay for the distribution, which is huge. But self-publishing is an absolutely viable path if you are someone who is good at marketing and organizing and doing all the parts that a publisher would do.Belt started because I self-published one book which is an anthology of writing about Cleveland.And I was like, I want to know what it's like to do this, to design an interior to go through the process to print. We did a conventional print run and I had 2000 books show up in my driveway and I kept the books in my garage. But we made a lot of money because everyone expects to pay money for a book. Thank God books have never gone to the economy free, you know. So I was like, oh wow, actually there's money here. And so then I did more of them and eventually we became a traditional press. But it all started with me self-publishing one book.Joshua Doležal: I didn't realize that part of your story, but nice reminder that the two can work together and share some of the same principles. Well to wrap up, I'm curious…we spent a lot of time on John Pistelli, deservedly. But who are some other authors or other titles that you're really proud of at Belt Publishing that some of my readers could find?Anne Trubek: Oh yeah. Thanks for asking. So we published a book last year that was a finalist for the NBCC, the National Book Critic Circle in the autobiography genre, it's called The Minotaur at Calle Lanza. And it's this beautiful, beautiful memoir, which is actually a surrealist memoir. And he pulls it off like it is a memoir, but it also has a surrealist aspect to it. And the author's name is Zito Madu. And it takes place while he's wandering the streets of Venice during the pandemic. And he writes about, he was raised in Nigeria and in Detroit. And he tells these stories as he is walking through the streets of Venice. And then at a certain point there's a Minotaur that is involved. Anyways, Zito is absolutely one of these people who, he's read everything and it comes through in this subtle, subtle way. And talk about someone who knows how to write a sentence. I mean, the prose style is just, it's almost addictive. You have to keep reading it. It's very subtle. But if you know what he's doing, you just, it's amazing. So proud of that.And we have another book that just won the Stonewall Award honor title from the American Library Association called Be Not Afraid of My Body, which is another memoir by Darius Stewart which talks about HIV and race and again is doing something really sophisticated and experimental with the essay form and drawing on a lot. It's very Whitmanesque. He's got a lot of Whitman in him.Coming up, we have a series of revivals which are reissues of sort of underknown works that are in the public domain. And we have an early Dawn Powell novel. It's set in Central Ohio that just entered the public domain, it's called She Walks In Beauty. Dawn Powell is mainly known for her sort of witty New York novels, but she was very much an Ohioan born and bred writer and her earliest novels take place in Ohio, so that comes out next month. I'm really excited about that.Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in a few weeks with Mark Slouka. Stay tuned next week for another installment from my fatherhood memoir.Most of my content in 2025 is free, but I appreciate the support of readers who make my essays and interviews possible. Upgrading your subscription unlocks my monthly installments from a memoir-in-progress, as well as the entire archive. I’m also proud to be a Give Back Stack. 5% of my earnings in Q2 will go to Centre Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic for those with no health insurance and annual income under $38K (individual) or $78K (family of four).More interviews in this series ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Recovering Academic Podcast. I’m Joshua Doležal and my guest today is Ross Barkan.My interview series this year is called “The Things Not Named.” It takes its title from a passage in Willa Cather’s essay “The Novel Démueblé,” one of her craft manifestoes:Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.I don’t know of a better description of craft. We know it when we feel it, when our writing reaches that higher level or when a book unlocks a part of us that we didn’t know was lying dormant. The thing not named is the mark we all aim at even if we can’t define it. And that is just what this series is: an attempt to catch that fugitive gleam.Ross Barkan's latest novel, Glass Century, will be published in May. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for New York Magazine. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications and he maintains the popular Substack newsletter Political Currents.I hope you enjoy our conversation.Joshua Doležal: Ross, thanks for joining me today to talk about craft. Before we dive in, can you tell me a little bit about your novels? You're a journalist and a novelist – that's what I know about you. Maybe you can fill in some of those gaps.Ross Barkan: Yeah, so I'm a novelist, I'm a journalist, I write essays as well, and opinion writing. I've done a wide variety of writing in my career, which is not as common as it used to be. There used to be many writers who wrote novels and also did essays and did reporting and so that has fallen off for a variety of reasons.I proudly work in different modes and in terms of my nonfiction, a lot of it tends to politics and now culture. I've reported on politics nationally in New York for a long time and I have some insights there and I do a lot of essays on a variety of topics and I find myself writing more and more in culture and literature.I'll be publishing my third novel this May called Glass Century, and each of my novels actually are quite different though two of them interact a little bit. The very first book I published, which very few people have read, in 2018, is sort of a genre bending literary fiction and soft sci fi book that teeters between the 1970s and this dystopian near future where corporations have enslaved people. And it's a lot of humor and pathos as well. And it owes, I would say, quite a bit to Thomas Pynchon's V, a book I was reading at the time.Joshua Doležal: Sorry to interrupt, but you're making me think of Atwood's Oryx and Crake, where there are these corporate compounds and ChickieKnobs [a bizarre genetically engineered meat] and these kinds of obscenities.Ross Barkan: It's, yeah, it's a little like that except very urban. You know, it's in New York City and people are serfs to various corporations since most jobs in this near future have been automated out of existence. And you know, it's not a novel that's intended to be predictive so much as I was very much looking to skewer our tech obsessions and sort of the corporate control of the economy. And also just have fun and write kind of this time travel literary work that sort of brings in some of the Pynchonian flair but also has some genre elements as well. And so that was my first book.And I did a second novel about a fictional murderous cult in upstate New York. Since I was interested in cults and how one joins a cult and how they function and the mass psychology of the cult. And I wrote it from a child's perspective. I was a little influenced by Donna Hughes. And I sort of took it from there, you know, I liked the idea of working from a person who's aging into adolescence, watching this compound turn into a murderous cult that happens very gradually.I should say the titles of these books. I'm being very bad about introducing myself. So the first one is called Demolition Night. That's the novel about time traveling and the corporate satire. And then the second novel also has night in the title, which was not my decision for the record, it's called The Night Burns Bright. I wanted to call it Every Side of Darkness, and the publisher actually vetoed it. Writers don't always pick their own titles.So the first one and this one are both with Tough Poets, a small press in Massachusetts. And the second one was actually with Lake Union Press, which is a subsidiary of Amazon. Amazon actually has publishing, traditional publishing imprints, and they bought The Night Burns Bright. And so they were very good to me. And I don't have complaints other than I did not really like the title.But the novel came out fine. It was well edited. I was very happy with the product itself and even how it looks. It's a nice cover. And then this one, Glass Century, is also Tough Poets. It's a panoramic social novel spanning from the 1970s to 2020 in New York City. It follows a family and sort of an illicit love affair. It encompasses the fiscal crisis in New York City and 9/11 and a lot of these other elements. It's my attempt at a great American novel, a great New York novel. I'm proudly ambitious about it and I hope a lot of people read it and I hope they enjoy it.Joshua Doležal: You'd mentioned three influences. I'm not familiar with the last author that you mentioned, but your other influences were Pynchon, DeLillo, and Franzen. So that might be a good basis for digging into craft, kind of the principles or the sensibility that guides your writing.So when you are working through a draft, and you know it's going well, kind of instinctively. Or you're going back through in revision, and you're trying to, you know, enhance the writing, you're trying to aim at a certain standard aesthetically, or at the sentence level. What are some of those pillars or principles that you follow? Are they intuitive, or can you articulate them?Ross Barkan: I mean, there's a degree that it's intuitive, but I would say when I'm writing a novel, I'm not one, I don't outline thoroughly at all, I like to have a vague idea where I'm headed. I use the analogy of a lighthouse in the fog, and you're sailing toward land, and you know where land is, and you see that light vaguely in the distance, but you can't see too much more.If I have that, I feel very confident. If I kind of know where I'm going, but I also don't stress it too much. So for me, when I'm writing, I need characters. I need people to live in. All my works are very character driven.And if I have a character and I have a voice, that is very important. I have to start there. Who is, whether it's third person or first person, you're living with people. So who are these people? How do they sound? What do they think? Look, they could take on characteristics of yourself.That's only natural. But you also have to move beyond yourself. And then I try to think through scenes, you know, what are my characters going to do? And then the writing and the characters can take on lives of their own too, and you don't have to so meticulously script it, at least I don't.I care a great deal about the craft on the sentence level. But I'm also someone where I'm not going to sit in front of a blank page for, you know, minutes or even hours, not hours of time, not even minutes. If I commit to writing fiction, and I have time, I'm going to write something.And I think you can always revise later on but you shouldn't be too precious about putting words on the pageJoshua Doležal: Let me, let me say back some of it. So character, voice, scene, those are kind of three principles that you follow. And I hear what you're saying about getting words down and first thoughts aren't best thoughts and you can't be paralyzed. But what I'm trying to drill down into a little bit more is, when you're in that kind of flow and you're writing a draft, and you know you're not just forcing yourself through it, you write something and you're like, damn, that's good. Or when you're going through revision and you recognize that there's this whole paragraph has got to go, what guides those choices? You'd Pynchonian antics or flourishes.So I'm assuming that humor and freshness are part of that. I mean, I'm thinking of names fromThe Crying of Lot 49, you know, the band that's called The Paranoids, and this character named Bloody Chiclitz. You know, those fun, quirky character names. So I assume that's part of what you're trying to bring in, is that, that edginess or playfulness?Ross Barkan: I mean, I think writing is fun. And I think you can have it doesn't need to be 350 pages of modeling you know, deeply serious. I mean, you're serious in the end and you're sincere, but I think it's okay to write humor into dialogue. I mean, dialogue, yes, you're approximating speech, but it's also fiction. And I think there's a fictional quality to dialogue you have to keep in mind, which is it's got to be interesting. It's not just people saying what's up? What are you doing? Hey, man. I think when you read over your work, you start to develop an internal sense of what is good and what is not. And I find for me, I always like to print things out.I've always had a printer, and so if I'm doing fiction, I've just written a lot of fiction, I print it out and go through it with a pen, and I find, does this work? And sometimes I'll read sentences out loud, how do they flow, because in your head versus spoken is very different, and I find that's helpful too. You need that ear, you, you need, you need that sense – that sense of rhythm, that sense of a metaphor that truly works in the brain or the simile. I find there's a danger to straining towards lyricism. I think lyricism has to come. I don't want to say it has to come naturally. I mean, you have to work at it, but, you know, it has to be something you're very meticulous about.Joshua Doležal: Yeah, it's a vibe. I think lyricism is a vibe. It's something you feel rather than something that you state explicitly on the page. I want to drill down a little bit more into dialogue. There are several schools of thought on dialogue, but two of them that I think can be contrasted are sort of the Raymond Carver modernist school, which I guess could be attributed earlier to Hemingway, where there is, as you're saying, the dialogue is interesting, but it's also almost always comprehensible.So it's a distillation. But it's almost at times a too perfect distillation. It doesn't really mimic how people actually speak. So it's often relying on understatement or implication. Tobias Wolff, of course, carries that further as someone who is influenced by Carver.And then the other school, I think, is embodied by Douglas Unger, and then George Saunders, who studied with him in Syracuse. And that school is more thinking that dialogue should show all the slippages of meaning. There should be people talking past each other, or there should be redundancies or repetitions or things that end up actually not making sense. I don't know if you would agree with those two schools?Ross Barkan: I think there's a synthesis between the two. I think there's a way you can reach an understanding because yes, people can talk past each other. Yes, there's an imperfection to human speech and dialogue, which can be captured on the page. At the same time, you don't need sort of the pretentious minimalism of a Carver or Hemingway, you know, whom I am fine with.It's not my style necessarily. I see dialogue as different than both of those. I come from sort of the Roth school of dialogue, you know, , I'm a talkative New York Jew and, and I like when people have a lot to say and when they argue and get tangled up with each other and come out on a page and really announce themselves in a bold way. Not every character is that way. You can't have only people at a certain pitch. But I think there's a time certainly for poignant scene understatement and dialogue. A novel has an ebb and a flow depending on the scene, but also I think the writer can't lose track of the fact that this dialogue is supposed to entrance the reader in some form.You know, DeLillo’s dialogue I enjoy a lot. DeLillo’s dialogue is not like real life at all. No one talks in real life that I've met like they do in a DeLillo novel, but I love that dialogue. I think that's part of the charm and part of the draw, why he's such a unique American writer. I think I'm maybe more in the Saunders school, but I'm also not too dogmatic about this.Joshua Doležal: AS someone who spent a lot of my time as a child reading…so I grew up in Montana on 25 acres outside a small town of only a thousand people. So we're talking really remote and removed. And I was not consciously observing speech so much through my childhood. I was absorbing the rhythms of language in C.S. Lewis or Tolkien, you know, the books I was devouring in solitude. And so I think as a result of that isolation, I've always struggled with capturing speech because I'm much better at landscape or I'm much better at the scene, but the cadence of speech and making it seem plausible. To me, being a writer is, you shouldn't become a writer if you're good at talking because then you get the words right. The writer is the person who gets the words wrong extemporaneously and then has to go into their hermitage to get them right. So dialogue has always been a kind of moving target for me.Ross Barkan: I agree with that. Tou're thinking it through, you know, you're premeditating all of it. So, you know, the great talker, the great charismatic linguist might not be a good writer, and the great writer may not give the best interview. And I think it was Nabakov who said writers shouldn't give interviews, and he would want to write out responses to questions and I think it's very understandable. It's hard.Joshua Doležal: That's what I'm hoping to explore more in this series is how we make those choices. What are the tools that we're using? I'm assuming that with each of your novels where you're probably more consciously applying craft tools than perhaps in your journalism and opinion pieces, each project is a new challenge.I assume that you're trying to raise the bar for yourself. So what are some ways that you're trying to expand your mastery of craft now or risks that you're taking where … it's like me trying to sing a Chris Stapleton song, like the vocals are maybe a little out of my reach, but I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try anyway. What are some ways that you're stretching yourself like that?Ross Barkan: It's a really good question because I do think about this. In my perfect world, each novel is better than the next. You know, some of it, some of the stretches in subject matter. Right now I'm sort of working through another novel. I don't quite know where it's going, but it's very contemporary. Glass Century ends in 2020. That's when I finished it. But it is, you know, at its heart it's a novel where a lot of the action takes place in the past, and I think there's a certain challenge to writing a novel, kind of like Bonfire of the Vanities type, trying to capture the here and now in a book and that's something I want to do, and that's something I'm slowly trying to do right now.What I find to be ambitious is trying to seek out new subject matter and different characters and have a different perspective. I think that's a very exciting thing about writers. I think in this era, there's been a lot of pressure to only write from your perspective. You know, if you're a man, you should write from a male perspective.If you're a woman, you should write from a woman’s perspective, or maybe you can write from a male perspective. I think the beauty of writing is to be able to inhabit different types of consciousness. So that's what I always like about these social novels and someone like Wolfe trying to capture how we live. And I think a novel can do that a lot better than an essay can or a piece of journalism can, because you have the power of consciousness. And that's what novels do. They live in, they live inside of you and you live inside of someone else. And I'm always thinking about that and how I can get at it… We live in a very strange time, and I don't think many novels get at that, or they shy away from it.Joshua Doležal: To me, craft is the only reason to write. It's the only “why” that is significant enough. I can't imagine writing purely for money or purely for growth on a platform like Substack. Those are hollow drivers and motivations for me. And yet, it seems to me that craft, in its most ambitious, maybe even formal forms, doesn't really have…it's kind of dead, you know, as a way of being discovered as a writer. Your reach, your platform, all of these things, your publicity potential seems to be driving things more often. So, I don't know, maybe you can argue back against that. Do you think I'm right that craft is dead as a market force, or do you think there will be more potential down the road for the pendulum to swing back the other way and for devotion to the long art, to literature, to pay off?Ross Barkan: Yeah, I think in the short term, if you talk about conglomerate publishing, the Big 5, definitely craft as a market force is lost. I think that's very true at mainstream publishers and even kind of the larger indies. I think, unfortunately, editors today are overworked. Some of them have been fired. The whole economic structure of it is really in a strange place. And I see a lot of ossification and stasis in publishing now. It's very unfortunate. I think if you look at the success of Substack, for example, I read so many idiosyncratic and strange and wonderful writers who, if they wrote for a normal publication, they'd be told you can't have an adjective this way. You can't structure a sentence this way. I'm launching a book review publication in January as we talk now. And part of the fun is we're bringing in writers who write very differently and I think you can succeed on the level of craft and sentences on Substack.Where it doesn't work is if you come with this sort of beautiful, bizarre writing and if you are the modern day, you know, Faulkner, Carson McCullers or Wolfe or you know, whoever, right, you come to a publisher, they'll say, what's your platform and what's the story? Can we sell it? And can it be a movie?And publishers were always commercial, but I think it's gotten a lot worse. I think with consolidation, I think with fewer and fewer imprints that compete with each other. I think editors have lost interest. The editors still are given some level of support, I think a lot of them have lost interest in nurturing new careers. Gordon Lish is a bad example of this with Carver, but Lish could really pluck writers from obscurity and make a market for them. Sonny Mehta did this, Morgan Entrekin, you know, there are a lot of examples of editors not that long ago who really would find young interesting voices or middle aged voices or anyone who just was maybe even idiosyncratic in some way and they had faith in themselves that they could over time build careers and build a market.So I think a lot of that is fading out, which is bad. I think the good news is if you are committed to your craft and you are writing, there are places for you. I do think in the coming years, there'll be more good imprints starting up. That's my sense. I think with this amount of stasis with conglomerate publishing, there's a market opening up for really good writing And I think Substack success is evidence of that and sort of the stasis of conventional magazines and media. You've got people like yourself and me and others who write Substacks and attract audiences.So that energy is very real. That ambition is very real. So I'm an optimist in that sense.I think there are a lot of people with great books out there that can't get them sold and they can't get them sold because honestly, like Hollywood, like the record labels, publishing has gone very stale. I would say on the literary side, they're making money. They don't have a financial problem. But in terms of the culture, they've got a problem. They are not finding and putting out great novels. But I think that's why Substack is successful. That's why YouTube is successful. Because the creative people are not taking it into their own hands. I've done it. You've done it. You can't sit and wait for an old school cultural power to reach down and anoint you as they used to do and do it successfully. They just can't do it anymore. I think culture will recover from this, but you know, it'll take some time. It's why it is really grassroots and that's a challenge, but it's also exciting too.Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in April with a review of Henry Lien’s Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling. Stay tuned next week for a new craft essay.See more interviews like this ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Recovering Academic Podcast. I’m Joshua Doležal and my guest today is Kern Carter.My interview series this year is called “The Things Not Named.” It takes its title from a passage in Willa Cather’s essay “The Novel Démueblé,” one of her craft manifestoes:“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.”I don’t know of a better description of craft – that elusive effect we often call voice or characterization or defamiliarization even as we know that the real thing escapes words . We know it when we feel it, when our writing reaches that higher level or when a book unlocks a part of us that we didn’t know was lying dormant. The thing not named is the mark we all aim at even if we can’t define it. And that is just what this series is: an attempt to catch that fugitive gleam before it flits away.Kern Carter is a Toronto-based novelist celebrated for his captivating storytelling in books such as And Then There Was Us and Boys and Girls Screaming. His stories explore themes of family, friendship, and the drama that can fracture those relationships. Kern is based in Toronto, where he also teaches writing, hosts workshops on craft and storytelling, and travels the speaking circuit.I hope you enjoy our conversation — and please also consider subscribing to his Substack, Writers Are Superstars . Joshua Doležal: Before we jump in with my series of questions, with this craft series that I'm calling “The Things Not Named” after Willa Cather, can you just say a little about your background, how you became a writer, and sort of where you are now?Kern Carter: Yeah, I always like to say that I'm extremely fortunate because I always knew I wanted to be an author. I was writing books since I was eight years old, and what I would give myself credit for is just sticking to that dream, sticking to that, you know, having that little boy inside of me saying, this is what you want to do and keep going.So I studied it throughout high school, studied literature in university, graduated with an English degree. And it's in university where I really started taking being a novelist seriously, so I started writing my first novel while I was in university. Self-published my first two books, and then I felt like I wanted to move away from that and get published and see what that experience was like.So that's kind of where we are now. I've been, again, grateful to be published by some amazing publishers, Penguin Random House, Scholastic and an independent publisher here in Canada named Cormorant, who's also excellent. So I feel like I've really explored so many parts of the publishing industry and I've been able to use that wealth of knowledge to help me in so many ways, including write better, which I think is, is extremely important.Joshua Doležal: One of the reasons why I wanted to speak with you today is I sensed a little bit of dissatisfaction in one of your recent posts that…so you self-published your first two books, which I didn't know, and then you were agented, you were represented, and then had access to the Power 5, as folks call them, but you felt that you were sort of pushed into the YA space, and that wasn't really your passion. Is that true?Kern Carter: Yeah, that, to a point – more so the middle grade space. So, what, and interesting that you actually brought that up. I never considered myself, when I self-published my first two novels, I never considered myself a YA author. I was just, the stories happened to be of younger people, so my first novel, I think the main character was 19.My second novel, the main characters were somewhere between like 19 and 22, like they were young adults. But I never categorized myself like that because I just felt like I was writing stories and these stories felt very adult themed. So I never looked at it like that. It wasn't until I got published and my agent is like, you know, you are a really good young adult writer.And I was just like, okay, cool. I never thought much of it, but I did understand the industry, and I understood why that label got kind of used on me and why the stories that I was telling would reflect that. So I understood that.What I was not all the way okay with was writing to an even younger audience, so writing to a middle grade audience, exclusively, let me say, like that became problematic, and I just wanted to stop it right away, and because while I was writing these middle grade novels, I got my first novel published in 2020, and my publisher said it was a hybrid, so it was like young adult slash adult.Whatever, cool. But then after that, Scholastic messaged me and they very definitively wanted me to write a middle grade novel. And I was just like, cool, Scholastic, I'm not going to turn down this opportunity. I was a little bit worried about me not having the understanding of how to write to that audience.But they told me, hey, it's, you're still writing a novel. Just, think of the basic kind of things that you would have to leave out if you're writing to that age group. So I went through the process. It was fine. Again, it was Scholastic, so I was actually really excited about it, but then they liked it.So they asked me to write another one. And then my other publisher, Penguin, was like, oh, what about writing for our Tundra imprint? You know, writing another one. So I agreed to those just in haste, I think, and without really thinking about what that meant for my career, when really, I just want to write, I want to write novels, like I want to write adult themed books and books for adults, you know, like that is where my passion lies.Those are the conversations I want to be having. So I, once I kind of caught myself and actually took years, like this just happened in 2024, where I stopped myself and I'm like, wait, and I was under contract for some of these books. And I said, no, I don't want to write any of them. So I called my editor, called my agent.And we put a pause to all of that. So it's a little bit tricky and, you know, without going into logistics, I do owe books that we have to figure out how to, how to manage, but to be honest, it was totally worth it because now I'm back to writing what exactly what I want to write and, and the themes and for the audience, I want to write for it.Joshua Doležal: It seems like your struggle – it's so emblematic of writers at large because the market reality seems to be the tail wagging the dog for a lot of people feeling that they have to demonstrate a kind of strength on social media or they have to figure out a sales strategy before they've even created a work of art. Really the reason that we became writers was to tell the stories that matter to us.So, it's really interesting that you had to kind of reclaim that, after finding your way to the inside of a commercial arrangement that a lot of writers would envy – but it wasn't what you were hoping for. So it sounds to me like you're trying to get back to craft. Is that fair to say?Kern Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. In the way that I love to do it.Joshua Doležal: Well, let's talk about what that means for you then. So when you are writing these novels that that need to be told, what are some of those craft principles that guide you sort of when you're drafting or revising and you know it's good when you see it or you feel that you've done something that you're aesthetically proud of, what does that mean to you?Kern Carter: For me, it is mostly about pace and rhythm. Those are the elements that I think about the most, how am I pacing my story. And when I say pace, how am I getting my story from here's the plot of the story, and I know my character needs to go from there to there, but then how am I pacing that throughout the novel with enough suspense, with enough tension, with enough conflict so that the writing and the story almost feels like a, so like, you know, a barbed wire, so it's kind of going around, like, here's this little tension here, then it's going higher and higher, like, that for me is everything.I think pace is so important. And then rhythm for me, which is, to me, also connected to pace. Like, what, how is the story sounding? How am I formulating sentences so that they're diverse enough so that I create the rhythm that I need for the story. And how am I playing with rhythm throughout the story. How am I making it go faster? How am I slowing the story down? How am I making this part feel more exciting or how am I building the tension in this part using the rhythm of my prose? So for me, it's a lot of pace and rhythm – those are my primary focuses when I'm storytelling. And I think that kind of guides me more than anything.Joshua Doležal: Are you talking about a kind of lyricism?Kern Carter: Yes, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes. That can be achieved through word use, for sure, like what word choices you're making, but then also through sentence structure, how are you constructing your sentences?Joshua Doležal: It's a really elusive concept to teach. I used to try to teach the lyric essay. I mean, I think I did teach it well enough as much as you can, but so much of that is about what you hear. It's a kind of intuited sense of things. I don't know if my students have good memories of this or if they just walked away thinking I was a crazy professor, but I would play examples from the band U2 because a band's sound, their distinctive sound, is similar to what you're describing as your voice, that you're constructing through pacing and rhythm. And there's something uplifting about U2's music. It's buoyant. And what you hear is typically the note goes up at the end of the chorus, instead of going down, as it did for a lot of the grunge bands that I liked, you'd always go down to the minor chord, and it had that depressive effect, whereas U2 was always kind of literally lifting you up.I would play some of Daniel Lanois’s music, he was the producer that gave them that distinctive sound, and I would try to explain that that's kind of what you're trying to do as a writer, is decide what's the effect, the emotional effect you want to have, and then how do you achieve that through, as you're saying, a combination of sentence structures.You know, sometimes it might be fragments, or you might need compound, complex sentences in the Emersonian, more jazz-like style but it's something that you hear, that you sense. It's not something that you can break down in a kind of template.Kern Carter: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of it is intuition, to be honest. And I know this maybe speaks to something we're going to talk about in a little bit, but for me, just knowing when I'm reading good writing is when I can actually hear and feel it. You know, when I could, when I could hear the writing in my mind, or like, I don't even want to say ears.I don't know how you hear it, but in my mind, when I could hear it in my mind, and when I could feel it, I think you just, it's so difficult to explain. So I think even the way you explain it was actually really well. I couldn't explain it as well as you just did. But definitely for me, it's about sound.It's about rhythm and it's about that feeling that you get to just know that, okay, this feels right. But although I'm saying that it's difficult to explain, I actually think that you can teach it. And I also think that you could get better at it. I don't think this is, you should just kind of be okay with or feel like, oh, I'll never, I don't understand this pace and rhythm thing, I'm just never going to be good at it just because it's a complicated thing to grasp. No, you could actually get better at it. You know, you could actually improve your writing if you understand rhythm a little bit more. And if you understand how to actually hear your voice a little bit more and listen to it. And then adjust it when you need to adjust it. I think it's, it's definitely something that can be taught. And just, sorry, a quick side note. I teach once a week too at a college here in Toronto and I start my classes with music. That's how I start because I think it's that important. And I'm trying to get my students accustomed to listening to sound and melody and the movement that, that comes along with music. So it's very interesting that you said that that's strange.Joshua Doležal: Well maybe there's just a close affinity between literary writing and music in that way. You give me some hope, because when I started teaching back in the early two thousands, it was a time before Pandora and all the algorithms, so people actually knew what they were listening to and could articulate why and what they liked about it. So I would do the same, you know, often be playing something before class and swap ideas, artists, with my students and, you know, got exposed to some good things that way. But I wonder if writing craft and the market realities are kind of another version of that algorithmic shift in music, where Pandora just kind of took care of the playlist in the background and you stopped being aware of who the band actually was or what the nuances of the sound were, to sort of bring that to the light and actually listen mindfully. And then try to duplicate that in writing is, I think, a great teaching approach.Kern Carter: Yeah, definitely. You actually said something that's interesting, that is true, I think, or at least the way you said it is true. Because of streaming, you actually don't listen deeply anymore. And you're not as intentional with what you listen to because you're not actually buying it, you know, you're just casually listening to it. But if you walk to the store, to the record store, bought the CD, put it in, you're going to sit down, and you're going to listen to every word. I've never actually, that seems so simple. I never thought about that.Joshua Doležal: You're talking about being able to teach pace and rhythm and these principles, these pillars that you've sort of placed at the center of your writing practice. When did you learn those? Or what were some of the breakthroughs when you think about your formative experiences in that apprenticeship to craft? When did you feel like you'd begun to master those techniques or got them to a level that you felt you could trust?Kern Carter: I've actually had a journey with this. So the first time I remember my craft being criticized when I first started writing my first novel. And there was something, there's some kind of initiative happening here where you could send in your novel to a published author and they would read it, read the first few chapters, and give you some feedback.And during my first draft, I sent him maybe the first chapter, which ended being 10, 12 pages. And he read the first two paragraphs, wrote me back and said, I can tell that you're a beginner writer. And here's why. And he listed out some craft things that I was doing that from the first two paragraphs, he picked up right away.So that was my first kind of introduction into, okay Kern, you have a ways to go before getting better. Then I would say, writing my second novel, I was reading Jhumpa Lahiri, and I'd already written about 40,000 words at this point, I was reading Jhumpa Lahiri's book, a novel called The Lowland, and that, if you read the introduction to that, so the first page, her prose are so simple, you know, like she does not waste words, but there's almost a semi-poetic value to it.And I read that those, I read the way that she was writing, and immediately went back and deleted about 30,000 of the words that I had because I'm like, wait, no, this is how you're supposed to, this is how I wanted to execute at least that book very specifically. But Jhumpa Lahiri taught me simplicity, reading her actually taught me how to how to use simple prose to get my point across or to articulate what I'm trying to say.But the biggest breakthrough happened to me probably around 2019. And to give a little bit of context, in 2018, I went to a literary conference, but it was a conference mostly for agents, where an author got to sit and present the idea of their novel within five minutes to a collection of agents. So I did that. Five of them requested my full manuscript. So, I went back to Toronto, the conference was in New York. I went back to Toronto, sent all five of them my full manuscript. All five of them ended up saying no. But the last agent said no, but with feedback. And you know that is a blessing, agents don't get feedback.And they gave detailed, harsh feedback. About things I thought I was doing well, even simple things, showing, not telling – I was filtering, like, just so many things, they were just going off, and it hurt, it really hurt, because at that point, I had already self-published two novels, I had already received the criticism earlier that I just mentioned, so I was really conscious of, of making sure that I was studying the craft outside of just writing my novel, and to get that criticism was actually really, was really hard, but, After I kind of got over my ego and that hurt, I got that email in November or so, January of that year, of the next year, which was 2019, I enrolled myself into a full time novel writing course, eight months long, two semesters, and I really just dove into craft, and over those eight months, those two semesters, my level of writing improved so greatly – just being able to see the mistakes come back to me in real time and then be able to adjust those mistakes and then have that back and forth with that author was invaluable for me. And that was the first time I would say I felt like, Oh, now I get it. Now I understand how to actually build characters.Now I understand how to manage my pace. Everything just really came together. So I would say 2019 that was working in that eight-month course with that published author was the first time I felt like I had command of my writing from a craft perspective.Joshua Doležal: I had a mentor, Ted Kooser, who's a poet primarily, but also wrote some memoir and just the constant one-on-one feedback and becoming more attuned to him as a reader and as a highly discerning reader, and even a word that he would often use, just a single word, overcooked, as soon as he would write overcooked in the margin, I would know exactly what he meant, you know, and so that kind of feedback from a reader that you respect, I think is a really important part of it.Kern Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. It makes all the difference. I believe so much in feedback from a mentor, be that an editor, however you want to phrase it or frame it. I'm not sure you can actually be great at writing without feedback. I don't even know if it's possible. You could study all you want and do it individually or independently, all you want, and you will improve, but I don't know how great you will get at writing or how much let's say how much of a command of the language you will get without feedback.Joshua Doležal: Well, how are you trying to deepen your craft now? Are you working with editors? Do you have a group of writer friends you exchange drafts with? How do you push yourself further?Kern Carter: All of the above. So I, first of all, being very intentional about how I read books and how I read novels, like, really reading them and enjoying them, obviously, but still being critical and being observant of what I'm reading to see what this author is doing technically from a technical perspective and from a storytelling perspective that works for that novel and are there pieces of that, that I could pull into my own writing. So being very intentional about, about deep reading.Still taking classes, like last year I took two classes, and when I say two classes, two classes that are day classes or one-on-one with a mentor for like four hours, like those type of classes. I plan to take more this year, so just making sure, I'm still studying the craft.Then just really leaning on my editors. The benefit of being signed to big publishers is that the editors, at least in my experience, have been really good, like my editors are excellent. The suggestions they make and their understanding of craft is high, like, they're not just storytellers. They're editors who are really good with craft.And really make my prose better. And there are times where I get a little bit too wordy. There are times where they're like, Kern, you've been using the gerund the entire time and now you're shifting away from it. They're really into it. So for me I feel like I've also gotten really lucky with editors who have acted as mentors for me.So all of the above. I want to always get better. You're doing yourself a disservice if you are not really trying to be great at the craft because it improves the way that you could communicate your message and tell your story.Joshua Doležal: It's nice to know that it's not just beginners who need that kind of guidance or discerning reader at every stage of the process. So you'd mentioned Lahiri as one of your influences, and I have two questions about writers that you're drawing inspiration from. So Lahiri would be in the first category, which is about 10 years ago. So what are some other writers from maybe 10 years ago or further back that have influenced you the most and maybe what you took from them?Kern Carter: Junpa for sure, I already spoke about her. Khalid Hussaini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which is one of my favorite novels of all time. He showed me how you can write these deeply personal stories that's still moved with pace, like there's still an excitement and a pace to them that it wasn't explicitly literary. I know your audience will understand what I mean when I say literary. He was expert at that. And I love that. He still understood pace despite these stories being intimate and personal. Then Toni Morrison, we could have an entire episode on her.It was actually when I reread her novel Beloved when I started my novel writing journey in earnest, like I was just, I had read it before, but I reread it, and when I was in university, I was just like this is how I want to make people feel when they read a book. Her just greatness overall really influenced me.And I have to say to Donna Tartt. Talk about an incredible technical writer. Donna Tartt is probably the best technical writer that I can think of, her technical ability, it's speed and density, that's how she thinks about her writing. A book like The Goldfinch or even Secret History but more so the Goldfinch where so many things are happening and she gives you so many details of setting and description.But at the same time, the story is still moving a thousand miles an hour this way, that is technical ability at another level. So Donna Tartt to me is, yeah, she's one of my favorites.Joshua Doležal: I think of you as in the cohort that began maybe in the last 10 years. So 2019 was your breakthrough, and that's fairly recent. So are there other writers who are more recent who are doing work that excites you, who are your influences within the last 10 years?Kern Carter: Yeah, I would start with some Canadian writers that are to me amazing. One is an author named Noor Naga who is just… she'll take one element of a story that and twist it, that makes it feel like that would put a wrench in everything, you know, so she had, for example, this book in verse called Washes Praise, and it's just a story about an affair. But the twist is that the main character is a Muslim woman having an affair with another Muslim man. You know, and it puts just such a wrench in everything because it really does twist up the entire plot.Omar El Akkad is another Canadian author who I think is probably right now the best Canadian author. He has a book out called What Strange Paradise that came out a couple years ago, a few years ago. And he’s able to blend genres better than like, wow. So he's actually the inspiration for the way I write now because he's able to take this deep, political stories, like these things that are happening in different parts of the world, but almost write it like it's a thriller, you know, like he's writing these political stories that have to do with displacement and immigration and stuff like that, but you never feel like that. You never feel like you're right.You're reading a political story at all. You feel like you're reading a thriller and I don't know how he accomplished that. But it's really been inspiring for me. And then also I have to mention Marlon James. Marlon James wrote another one of my favorite novels ever called A Brief History of Seven Killings, and he's able to take fantasy and blend it with literary and take risks in his writing that work. I don't know how, but they work. Like super, super, super big risks, huge risks with language and with the actual characters. I don't know how he does it, but he blends fantasy with literary better than any author I've seen.When I read A Brief History of Seven Killings, I was like, it almost gave me permission to be like, oh, so I could actually still do this and it'd be commercially successful. You know, like when I read that because it ended up winning, winning the Booker Prize and whatnot, but it really influenced me to give my writing a little bit more freedom.And understanding that I could take these types of risks and still not alienate anybody, not alienate readers or anything like that and still feel very true to myself. And one more, sorry, because she's more new, although I'm very critical of her in some aspects, I think R.F. Kuang is absolutely fantastic and exciting.I think it's very hard to read Babel and not think that is of the most incredible stories that you're going to read. It's very hard to read it and not feel like Babel is fantastic. So, although again, there are parts of her writing that I actually criticize, which we could talk about another time, but her, just overall, I've read three of her novels right now, and I think overall she is absolutely fantastic. So, R. F. Kuang for sure.Joshua Doležal: You are kind of challenging a claim that I made last year, which is that craft is dead as a market force or as a market principle. So it seems like you've found writers who are defying that, who are still performing at a high literary level and finding representation and outlets for that that are not based purely on book sales or cults of personality. But your own story is kind of illustrating that principle since you've had to back away from things that were more market driven or more guaranteed returns on investment. And so the risk taking is a lane, I suppose, that you've had to reclaim for yourself.So kind of circling back to the beginning, when we think about those initial reasons for writing. That are not about making money or getting the next contract. What are those for you? How do you answer the “why write” question for yourself?Kern Carter: Yeah, I really had to think about this question. I honestly feel that writing is a necessary part of culture. It shapes the way people think about themselves. It shapes the way the world functions. And other than the fact that writing is at the core of most creative endeavors, or a lot of creative endeavors, I think there is no more pure creative craft than books, than telling a story that's in your mind and putting it into words.I feel like the filter that happens from your mind to the page is shorter and more clean than any other art form. And I think it's important. The reason that I write anyway, because for me, I had to answer this question in so many ways, because the reason I write is just straight passion. I just absolutely love it. There’s nothing more that I could say about that. I just love it. There's a calling in me that just feels moved to write and moved to share these stories that I would do for free and I have been doing for free for years and years and years.There's a reason why physical books are still the most popular form of books, of reading in 2025. There's a reason for that. We have not found anything yet to replicate the experience of turning the page. There's nothing that could replicate that experience. and I don't think we should try to replicate it. I think we should just live with that magic and enjoy that magic and keep it with us as long as we can.Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in March with Ross Barkan. In the meantime, stay tuned next week for a craft essay on the accordion of time.More Interviews With Writers ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

The HedgehogThere exists a great chasm between those who relate everything to a single central vision and those who pursue many ends. —Isaiah Berlin He knows the shadows on the moon are deep valleys, skylines as jagged up there as these, but even in daylight, moon half erased, he sees the full arc of a sphere. If you're not done reading, you can find a meditation on Quakerism at Inner Life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,I have a few things left to say about facts and feelings after last week, but I’ll let those thoughts simmer a little longer. Today I’m sharing what will likely be the last of my 2024 interviews. John Pistelli is the author of the forthcoming novel Major Arcana (Belt Publishing, 2025) and the bestelling Substack Grand Hotel Abyss, home of a regular newsletter called Weekly Readings and the literary podcast The Invisible College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota and has been writing and teaching for almost two decades. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Many of you know that John first serialized Major Arcana on Substack. He is the first Substacker that I know of to have parlayed a self-produced serial into a book deal. But we cover quite a lot more than that in this wide-ranging conversation. As always, we’d both love to hear your thoughts in the comments. JoshI was walking around outside and I'm kind of near a college neighborhood. And for two blocks, some garbage was blowing down the street and part of the garbage was photocopies with pink highlights of photocopies from a book that had obviously been distributed in class. And I was like, what is this? And I bent over and read some of it, and it was Pierre Bourdieu, the great sociologist of taste, and his work is just blowing down the street as garbage. And I'm trying to understand my need for distinction and how I've manipulated it.A Conversation with John PistelliJoshua Doležal: The title of my series, The Recovering Academic, is a distinguishing detail between us because you are still teaching, you're still in academe. But I know generally that some of our discontents overlap, so I'm curious about your path to where you are now, how you ended up at the University of Minnesota.John Pistelli: I never really thought of myself as being an academic. The plan was always to be a writer, to be a novelist. And in retrospect, I don't really understand why I never got an MFA. And maybe I should have done that in the midst of all of this protracted education. But I always had certain…not even discontents, as if I had a critique. It was just my sensibility is not necessarily fully a scholarly one, or a theoretical one, or an abstract one. And I was never good at specialization, and so there is a way in which I did get the PhD as a way of just prolonging: I'm going to write, I'm going to keep writing, et cetera, et cetera.Joshua Doležal: So you've thought of yourself as a writer from an early age and you've really just stuck to that path and accepted some sacrifices or more modest means in order to make that art possible. You've sustained that over a decade for other projects that you produced yourself. And that leads us to Major Arcana. Now I saw this initially as a part of your Substack. So you've been a Substacker, I think, around the same time as I started. Two and a half years or so. Does that sound right?John Pistelli: Yeah. I started in 2022.Joshua Doležal: Tell me about your conception for Major Arcana and why you thought Substack was a good fit for it. Because you serialized it from the start, right?John Pistelli: I'm always looking for ways to take what worked in the past and bring it in to a kind of usable present. So I thought, well, this seems to be a good platform for serializing a novel, given that the novel has always been a serial form. Even novels you wouldn't think were serialized, like Ulysses, you know, no cliffhangers, but it was serialized. Something that was a big part of my early life was that I read comic books and graphic novels from a very young age. My father had been a fan and transferred that to me. I got away from them for a while, but then most of the classes I teach at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design are about comics and graphic novels. So I'd always wanted to do a novel that would sort of pick up where the adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon left off. That kind of ended in the fifties, but there were a lot of interesting things that happened in the comic book world after that. So I did this multi-generational saga where you have the late 20th century occultist comic book writer in the 90s, and then you have the person – She or whatever ends up being her pronoun by the end of the book – She who may be his daughter and may not be in her work as an online occult influencer in the present. So that's the basic setup.Joshua Doležal: How did it work when you rolled it out on Substack? I know that all of us are weighing these projects and trying to think about not just what we want to put out, but what our readers will find engaging and worth supporting. And I've heard that fiction is really hard to promote on Substack. It's pretty slow growth. It’s kind of a gamble. So how did that go for you?John Pistelli: So I have one piece of bad news and two pieces of good news. So the bad news is that it wasn't much of a success as far as driving paid subscriptions. I had a very hard core of readers who were very into it. And that was about 30 paid subscribers. So that's the one piece of bad news. Serializing fiction is very hard on Substack. I don't know why. Maybe it's me. Maybe other people have had better luck. I know there have been people doing different kinds of projects that seem to have had better luck. Maybe mine wasn't commercial in that way.But there are two pieces of good news, which is that through word of mouth, particularly from our fellow Substacker, Ross Barkan, who did an interview with me once I had initially self-published the novel, word got around that the people who did read it thought it was a very impressive novel. Eventually it was picked up by a real publisher the distinguished small press Belt Publishing, which is based here in Pittsburgh. And they are going to publish it in April 2025 with full marketing and it'll be in bookstores. In that sense, it's my first real novel, I guess you could say. What I've learned from the manifestation influencers is you should always have a positive attitude, but being very realistic I don't expect it to be a bestseller. But it is a real book. And that will hopefully, I believe, open some doors.And then the other piece of good news is that I started offering courses in literature on a paywalled podcast. And so far we've gone through British literature from the romantics to the modernists. We did a summer reading on Ulysses and Middlemarch. We're doing American literature. Now we're about to do Moby Dick and that has been more successful. In fact, today I reached my 100th paid subscriber. And if you consider what I'm doing, essentially I'm offering what would amount to three classes and I'm almost making the amount of money I'd make for adjuncting three classes. So it's working pretty well. So that's the other piece of good news, which is fiction doesn't work on Substack, but people want literary discourse.Joshua Doležal: Well, congrats. That's always exciting to cross that bestseller threshold. So the traditional press Belt Publishing found you, and I don't mean to be a troublemaker, but I do want to press on this question of why that's worth it. I've been wrestling with this myself, and I know there are multiple opinions about this. So Eleanor Anstruther published a post that I'm sure you've seen about why she left traditional publishing, even though she had a book deal with a traditional press some years ago.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes also has made that choice, even though he like Eleanor had a traditional book deal and chose to self-produce The Requisitions, which came out around the time that you launched your project. So the line of thinking for the independent publishing movement goes that with the traditional press, you forfeit basically 80 percent or more of your earnings. You also give up creative rights. So you can't use this yourself anymore or issue a new edition on your own – that belongs to the press. And if you flip it around, getting access to bookstores really just requires you to have an imprint and you can then go through IngramSpark and you could do it the same way that you had with your other four with very minimal overhead, have a lower distribution, but potentially a higher profit margin.And this is in some corners of Substack is being seen as kind of the new wave. This is the future for artists is to reclaim their creative lives and just take control of the means of production. So why was it worth it to you to go the traditional path, even though you're probably not going to make much money on it?You keep using the word “real” book which I assume has something to do with it.John Pistelli: I want to preface everything I'm about to say with: I sympathize with everything you've just said about independent publishing, and there's a reason I did go that route for so long, and was fully intending to keep on that path. My first three books still are self-published as of now, and I'm still selling them. So part of why I decided to do it when Anne Trubek of Belt Publishing called me and asked me to do it was – maybe this is a bad answer, but I was kind of curious, like I've done the independent publishing, what's this going to be like? There are book designers, there are marketers, apparently there are publicists. There are things I've never had access to, and I've heard maybe that it's not worth the tradeoff of independence, but maybe it is, I don't know. I thought, well, I’ll try this new experience, I'll see what it's like.I liked that it is based in Pittsburgh, some of the novel is set, I don't use real place names in the novel, I have this conceit of using comic book type names, so I call it Steel City, but part of the novel is set in Pittsburgh, as some of my earlier ones. I don't want to speak for Anne, but my impression is she had mostly been publishing nonfiction and had wanted to move into fiction and seemed to have a kind of ambition to recruit writers. And also we had a conversation about editing because, you know, Belt is a progressive publisher.The novel takes on gender identity in I think an independent and free thinking way. I wouldn't say it's of the left or the right. And we had a conversation about that. You know, I've not been in any way suppressed. So those were a couple of the reasons.You're right about the money. But again, unless I'm wrong, I don't know that this is going to be that kind of success. I think it could be a critical success or success of esteem. You're right about the bookstores. My impression is that because I am still adjuncting, I'm not totally out of academia, that having that on your CV opens certain teaching doors that weren't open to me before I have been dabbling with this idea on Substack. I don't know how serious it is, though it is something Anne and I have discussed, is that it opens doors potentially to moving into other media. So Anne has had books published by Belt that have had film options and TV options, which I don't think they're quite ready to do with self-publishing yet unless you've done some kind of pornography a la Fifty Shades of Grey.Joshua Doležal: So more opportunities opening up and you said something about a success of esteem and this has kind of been the main barrier for me, honestly. I'm producing a poetry collection this fall, largely because I believe in it. I've honed the poems over many years, many of them appeared in very selective journals. But I know it's not going to win a contest. It's about three summers that I spent as a wilderness ranger in Idaho. And I know from looking at contests and the winners, this is not something that would be seen as a winner in most of those contests. So my choice is either to leave it on the shelf or put it out into the world.So that's a fairly easy decision. My novel is a different kind of question because, as you say, when you produce it yourself, it's the sound of one hand clapping. You are generating all the buzz. You really do need to get some kind of a break with someone else signing on to it, even if they're not a traditional curator. You can't create all of that yourself necessarily. I guess some people can if they're if they're savvy enough or if they have enough of a following. But the question of esteem is perhaps the most vital one. Those of us who've come through any kind of traditional literary apprenticeship, it is the esteem of others that marks achievement. Yet artists for generations have scorned that, artists for generations have thought of their process, their creativity, as necessarily free – and free particularly of the critics. It's a convention among writers not to read the reviews because it can really screw you up. So, I guess I want to probe that: why is it that that we're so stuck on this question of esteem and need others to tell us that our work is worthy?John Pistelli: It's a good question. I don't know how to answer it directly. So I'm going to answer it indirectly. One part of my biography I kind of left out was that after I got the PhD and was adjuncting, one of the things I did was around 2012. I decided to really have a strong online presence. And so I had a website, I still do at WordPress, that was book reviews. Or really, not really reviews, they were more essays, like on classics and things like that. So starting about 2012, 2013, 2014. And I maintained that very regularly for about 10 years along with a bit of a presence on Tumblr, on Goodreads, and so I did accrue a bit of a following there so when I was self publishing the novels, I wasn't quite coming out of nowhere with them.I had kind of a web presence and a defined personality on the Internet and it's interesting because now I'm hearing from people who are much younger, who had started reading me when they were in high school and are under the misapprehension that I'm some kind of Harold Bloom or George Steiner figure because of this somewhat falsely authoritative pose I struck on this website.But my point is, I was a critic, and I sort of cast myself as a critic, and as some kind of a gadfly like critical personality that accompanied the novels. This all sounds very cynical, I didn't mean it to be that way, I'm sort of retrospectively constructing it. But like, I post my Goodreads reviews and I review the reviews, and if it's a bad review, I explain why what they've identified as flaws are actually virtues. I mean, I can't live in that 20th century world that those people lived in because we just don't live in that world. I have to be engaging at least once a week. It's funny, right before I was walking around outside and I'm kind of near a college neighborhood. And for two blocks, some garbage was blowing down the street and part of the garbage was photocopies with pink highlights of photocopies from a book that had obviously been distributed in class. And I was like, what is this? And I bent over and read some of it, and it was Pierre Bourdieu, the great sociologist of taste, and his work is just blowing down the street as garbage. And I'm trying to understand my need for distinction and how I've manipulated it. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think part of it is that the way I've handled it is I kind of – what's the phrase from Wordsworth? You have to create the taste by which you are to be enjoyed. So I've tried to do that with my web presence for about a decade now.Joshua Doležal: Well, I've wondered personally, whether in the absence of traditional publishers and volumes like the Best American series and so on, you know, how is it that we measure achievement? Are we really truly left to our own inner compasses?Is there a mark that we can aim at that is kind of universally, or at least within a certain community, recognized, or are we all kind of making up, as you said, the taste as we go? I think this is still a question. If Substack is successful in disrupting the traditional publishing industry, as it claims to aspire to do, then we might have this expanded freedom where everyone faces fewer constraints, there are no gatekeepers holding them out. It's free to everyone, but then within that freedom is a lack of coherence about how to articulate what it is you've achieved or even know yourself what the mark is that you're aiming at.John Pistelli: Yeah, I mean to get academic about it, if not recovering academic, I guess I've always accepted the view of a T.S. Eliot or Harold Bloom that aesthetic standards are essentially internal to traditions. And so and in some ways that's not satisfying because it's still very contingent, but insofar as aesthetic standards are inherent to traditions, then you are judged by the tradition you affiliate with. And so that's maybe where part of my role as a critic comes in, is that I've staked out a certain constellation of taste in which I'm inviting people to place my own work. I'm as relativistic as anybody in 2024. I can't claim it's the only canon of taste there possibly is. And I don't think it's a very exclusive one. I'm not a cultural conservative in that sense, but I've kind of demarcated where I want to be in that, and it's up to others if I've met that standard. I can't be the judge of that, but I've shown them the yardstick.Joshua Doležal: Well, I know that most of us don't spend a lot of time defining what our taste is or giving it in bullet points. Here are the four pillars of what I aspire to do as a writer. But do you have some sense of that? You know, when you're reading something and trying to articulate beyond just I like it or I hate it. Are there patterns or conventions? Are there craft tools that you're drawn to? How do you define your sensibility?John Pistelli: It's something I wouldn't want to define too solidly because hopefully it changes through your life. This term romantic realism is a term I've been using and I think a couple other people like Ross Barkan have picked it up and I kind of intended it as it seemed for a lot of this century so far, that there's been this bifurcation of contemporary fiction, of autofiction, which everybody knows about.I have nothing against writing autobiographically. It was more the style that seemed to attract this affectless, colorless, first-person monologue that to me derived from a lot of exhausted European models. And then on the other side, there's of course been the legitimation of genre fiction, which is fine, but it seemed like all novels were either about somebody inventing a time machine to investigate historical trauma or somebody who couldn't get out of bed and scrolling their phone and vaping all day or something. Some of my favorite older writers are Dickens or Hawthorne or among the modernists, ones like Mahn or Joyce, even though he does write autobiographically, there's a great deal of invention, or Saul Bellow or Iris Murdoch or Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo and if that seems like a very diverse company, what they have in common is the story is realistic, but the treatment is inventive and often on the verge of some kind of fantastical revelation. And so it's not simply a depressed autobiography nor is it a flight of fancy, but it is an imaginative transfiguration of our reality. That's really what I tried to do with all the novels I've written since Portraits and Ashes, which I published in 2017. So I would maybe try to define my taste that way. Obviously there are outliers. People are always surprised to find that I like certain things. I love Joan Didion. She seems like a depressive person who can't get out of bed, but I think she's a genius. You don't want these things to be rigid.Joshua Doležal: But you have a sense of yourself as part of a community where there is discernment that sets an artistic standard. And for you I won't recall this perfectly, but “imaginary configurations of our reality,” I think is your phrase for romantic realism.So there's a fanciful element of that, perhaps a marriage of Hawthorne and say Ambrose Bierce. But that is a craft standard. And the complaint about traditional publishing is that there is very little of that anymore. It's much more about guaranteed return on investment. It's about market share. It's about cult of personality. If you're a celebrity, you get the memoir deal — a little bit more democratic for debut novelists, perhaps, because of the potential for things like movie deals. But even there, if you have some kind of a social presence, that's an asset as opposed to being evaluated purely on craft alone. So I guess that's a convoluted way of asking what faith you have in the future of literature and publishing in the U. S. to hold new work to a high aesthetic standard. Or am I revealing myself to be a dinosaur by caring about that at all?John Pistelli: It's a good question. I try to be as romantic as realism allows because one of the problems I ran into when I started trying to get a traditional publisher in 2013 with my novel Portraits and Ashes… I got some response. I got some bites from agents. But I know there's been a lot of discourse about wokeness and ideology and things. And that's real. I think we're past the peak of that, but what I was seeing in 2013 before that was a very intense desire to compete with television. Like agents saying, I want The Wire as a book. In that sense, I agree with you that there's been a lack of concern with what literature can do that other media can't, which does necessarily involve some kind of innovation with language or defamiliarization of narrative that isn't just going to mimic popular narratives. I think people who are concerned with that are going to be more and more a coterie. This is in many ways returning to something more pre-modern where there will be coteries and courts in some metaphorical sense. I hope not a literal sense. I think the age of the big bestseller of however many copies a Bellow or an Updike sold, that's probably gone.Joshua Doležal: Is something like Samizdat too hyperbolic for you?John Pistelli: Maybe a little too hyperbolic. I think more I'm trying to think of a good model, more of a modernist model, little magazines and semi-private publishers. We could all be behind a fence by the time you release this, but I hope not.Joshua Doležal: Well, let's keep playing this out. So you have a book deal with Belt Publishing, and you will enjoy that as long as it lasts. But I assume you're already working on something new and that because this was something that the publisher approached you directly about, that you still don't have an agent. The Power 5 are still closed to you without representation. So when you have another project are you taking it to Belt? Are you hoping to replicate the same model where you serialize it on Substack, attract another interview from a fellow Substacker, and then hope that someone knocks on your door after that? What’s your plan? Or do you not game it out that far?John Pistelli: I haven't gamed it out that far. I'm not currently writing something. I have a very vague idea after disparaging genre fiction of something very vaguely science fictional. I'm not quite sure, I have a few names. I feel because I have constructed a very small, to use your earlier phrase, cult of personality I feel I probably owe it to them to serialize it first. I think my deal with Belt was not exclusive. It was more like, we'll take a look at whatever you have next. So, yeah, I don't know. I haven't gamed it out that far.Joshua Doležal: Well, let me pose a slightly more provocative question. Do you feel that Substack is the disruptor it claims to be?John Pistelli: Yeah, I do. Actually, what I'm about to say might irritate people. I hope that the mainstream is savvy and flexible enough to co-opt some of it because otherwise we're in a more perilous state of social, political, cultural fragmentation. But for now, I do think it is where there is outside energy, outside the mainstream institutions. Whether they will want to pick that up or not, I guess they will have to decide. There are no other platforms that work for writers right now. I mean, there's Instagram, but that's pictures. I tried Instagram for about six months. I couldn't figure out what I would do with it personally. I think X is still in a way where news is made, but I don't think it's a place where you can make a literary career anymore. So yeah, I think Substack is where it's at right now.Joshua Doležal: Well, how do you balance that with time for new creative work? I don't spend much time thinking about how all the little fragments that I'm putting out every week will add up to anything. I recognize there's potential for that on the platform, but often for me, and I know for many others, it's one of those examples of our lives being frittered away by detail.John Pistelli: This maybe will discredit me with those that Pierre Bourdieu would call the organs of consecration, but I write really fast. I'm not Flaubert. I'm not spending eight hours on one sentence. I've never been that. I have to get lost in the dream of what I'm writing by writing it very quickly. I do consider, and I'm perfectly ready for this to redound upon me in ironic ways, but I consider that weekly newsletter essentially a loss leader for the real work. I understand that a lot of people maybe even like that more than the real work. It’s more likely that we're all completely forgotten, but I could suffer the fate of Susan Sontag saying, look at these novels I've written, and people saying, no, we just care about these essays that you considered the work of your left hand. But I also have a lot of fun with them. I try to be amusing. I try to entertain the audience. All the experimentalism that isn't in my fiction is in those weekly newsletters. I use footnotes and graphics. I don't foresee those ever being between covers or a real book, as I was saying earlier, but you never know.Joshua Doležal: Well, I think what you just said is perhaps the essential thing and something I always have a hard time remembering myself as an artist, which is to have fun, to embrace play, to embrace the privilege of creating. Not to take it too seriously, not to feel like a modernist for whom all the structures of meaning have collapsed or Hemingway's Frederick Henry going home in the rain from the hospital. I mean, I've felt that way at times leaving academe and then thinking about how the publishing industry has basically all the same corporate flaws and influences as higher ed does. But I wonder if your answer is perhaps the best one: that if there's fun in it, if there's play, then it's worthwhile.John Pistelli: I think so. I hope it becomes as remunerative as a job, but I hope it never becomes just a job. I hope it always has that playful spirit in it.Today’s interview is free, but I hope you’ll take advantage of the Fall Special to claim 40% off for annual and gift subscriptions. More in the Literature series ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,This post is a conversation between Dee Rambeau and me about sobriety. It comes on the heels of National Recovery Month, and you’ll see that it begins with a question: can anyone claim to be sober, even if they haven’t struggled with addiction? I’ve done a few of these email exchanges, and they are a little different from a podcast interview in that we each take more time to think about and craft our replies than impromptu conversation allows.Hope you get something out of this and share some of your own thoughts in the comments!JoshCan You Be Sober If You Never Were An Alcoholic?Josh: I think I’ve told you, Dee, that a little over a year ago, the very day that my ex and I decided that we would divorce, I stopped drinking. It just seemed like an obvious choice to only allow good stuff in and focus on expelling as much of the bad as I could.I thought of it as a temporary thing, fully expecting that once I was back on my feet, through the worst of it, I'd pick up my happy hour habit again. It had always been a little escape hatch at the end of the day: an excuse to stop thinking, take the edge off. But the longer I went without drinking, the more I liked how I felt. At the same time, I started noticing how much I related to what people like you, Eleanor Anstruther, and Dana Leigh Lyons were writing about sobriety. It is kind of shocking to think of myself as "sober," since I still don't think I ever was an alcoholic. What do you think, Dee: is it fair to claim sobriety if I never felt that the terms "addict" or "alcoholic" fit?Dee: I’m proud of you for changing your relationship to alcohol. I don’t think the label “sober” is all that important. You are currently sober, but the important part is that you examined the impact a habit of drinking had on your life and decided to change it. Oddly, many people get hung up on words like sobriety and recovery, and it can impede their intention and progress toward change. With nearly 15 years clean and sober I think I have a bit of perspective. The important part is the self-examination of our own relationship to habits and things. Whether you choose to stay sober or not, you’re armed now with the information on how drinking and not drinking informs your daily life. I have a question for you: Do you speak of it to your children? And if so, how?Josh: I did once. We were all driving somewhere, and I said something about how I don’t drink beer anymore and wondered if they had noticed a difference. My son, who is 5, said he noticed that I…don’t drink beer anymore. Very literal! I wonder where he gets it. My daughters said they didn’t think I was any different. But they were probably feeling like it was a trick question. What’s the right answer, Dad? I’d like to think they’ve noticed something, but it’s possible that the change was too subtle. Maybe they’ll tell me when they’re older? I just told them that I like sleeping better, I like feeling ready for a run or a workout anytime, I like having more energy to play with them. But part of why I’m interested in talking about this with you is that the sobriety mindset — in your writing, in Dana’s, in Eleanor’s — feels so familiar. When I refer to myself as a recovering academic, I’m not really joking. I’m still unlearning a certain mindset, a predominant bias toward critique. You’ve helped me think more critically about which debates are really worth my time. Can you say more about how your own relationship to habits and things has changed with sobriety? Dee: In my opinion we've struck at the heart of addiction and recovery with that idea of our relationship to things. I'm a person who can naturally overdo anything. Regardless of whether it's fun, exercise, food, sex, reading, fast-driving—really anything that catches my fancy and trips my dopamine switch—and I can be off to the races with a smile on my face. I think the sobriety mindset is like any that involves self-discipline. Not based upon punishment, although there is a fair amount of punishment of self in the recovery process. More about maintaining the mindset of spiritual fitness. In physical fitness training there is a lot of pain and hard work initially, but once your body acclimates to the new loads and resistance, the outcomes slowly over time become more evident. Same thing holds true in spiritual training or sobriety—time and consistency being the key variables. Sobriety is an opening up and accepting of ourselves—good and bad.You have a sobriety mindset about the academic teaching life. And yet you still teach in so many ways. I still party and have fun with my friends— I just do it without mind-altering substances. In your drinking days, do you remember having a time when you literally felt like you "had to drink" in order to feel better? Josh: No, I really don’t. And that’s why I’ve sometimes resisted seeing myself as sober, in the sense that being sober means recovering from addiction. For long stretches I’d only have a drink on the weekend, and for probably five years I did Dry January with friends without any real struggle, as I recall. But I’ve been wondering if the need for rules at all — the fact that I was consciously defining boundaries that I wouldn’t stay within automatically — is evidence that I lived somewhere on the dependency spectrum? I sometimes marveled at friends who could keep a bottle of bourbon in their closet for months. If I bought a bottle, it wasn’t like I’d go on a bender or anything, but it would get slowly whittled down each day and be gone in a week. I had also slowly adjusted to drinking before dinner, because if I didn’t I’d be up several times a night. So the mere fact of carving out space for the habit probably falls somewhere on the addiction spectrum? Maybe this is part of what you mean about our relationship to things?Dee: Sure it is. You examined it and then changed it. Just as you examined your relationship to teaching in an academic setting, with all the pieces involved in that puzzle. What does it bring me? What am I fulfilling? Does it serve me anymore? Does this decision have to be for forever, or just for now? I still marvel at people who walk away from half-finished drinks or have full bars in their homes. When I had a full bar in my house, it merely meant I didn't have to go to the liquor store as often. I'm interested in what you call the "dependency spectrum." Isn't that just the human condition? Most people, with the exception of sociopaths, become dependent upon one thing or another. It could be people (parents/lovers/bosses) or food or busy-ness or achievement or feeling good or feeling bad. I've never seen anything in sober lit or addiction recovery material that speaks to an addiction or dependency spectrum really. There are defined stages of addiction and dependency certainly—​but a lot of that material relates to the long-held theory of addiction as a disease. I personally don't buy into the disease theory, but here it is from Alcohol.org.Why do you think it's important to you to find a place for yourself on some sort of spectrum?  Josh: You ask questions like an English teacher! I think the spectrum idea emerged because I was surprised to identify so strongly with the mindset shifts I could see in you and others. I had imagined, somehow, that if someone was shooting heroin with a needle or getting blackout drunk regularly, they were just a fundamentally different person from me, with my two tall boy IPAs per day. But then to hear that person speak about sobriety as a kind of worldview, and to feel a deep echo of that within myself, made me wonder.Perhaps you’re right that it doesn't matter, but I don’t want to be perceived as claiming sobriety without the mortal struggle that it requires for others. It’s not work for me. It never really was. So it’s possible that I was thinking if I fit somewhere on a spectrum, my sobriety would be more legit. What I’ve learned from you, I think, is that habitual or extreme drinking often springs from a deeper root: a void someone is trying to fill or pain they’re trying not to feel. And everyone has something like that. So if we’re talking about our relationship to others, to ourselves, to food, or anything else, we’re getting to a more universal root. And then sobriety is just one form that journey takes? You used the term “spiritual fitness” earlier. I don’t think of my own inner life as spiritual in any way, but I do identify with the idea of soulfulness, which I think is a close cousin to the more explicitly religious forms that sobriety takes. This has been a remarkable commonality between us. I often feel that we speak the same language, even though our politics and faith (or lack of it) could hardly be more diametrically opposed. Why do you think that is? Dee: I really believe it's a testament to our friendship. I wish more people had it—that they could move past their surface differences--and find some common ground. There's nuance in every issue. Rarely these days can people find the nuance that might establish that common language. I've always loved how you think and how your mind processes things. I tend to be more spontaneous and impulsive. You and I have talked about how little time I try to spend thinking about things over which I have no control. This comes directly from my recovery work and the Serenity Prayer.​ I use it to anchor myself when I find myself getting upset about some world event or action by someone else that I really cannot do anything about. As a recovering alcoholic and addict I've been told by others of my kind many times that I don't have the luxury of resentments. Hanging on to slights or ire directed at me doesn't serve my sobriety or my life. In AA we often say, "resentment is like drinking the poison ourselves and expecting the other person to get sick from it." My sobriety worldview comes from experience, from self-examination, from honesty, from moving through and past pain. Call it a healing worldview. My path just happens to include substance abuse. Someone else's path might include divorce, loss of a loved one or job, a disease diagnosis. Has your worldview changed in recent years—in addition to the choice to not drink regularly? ​Josh: I love that point about resentment. That rings so true with my experience: learning how to let go of things that don’t serve me, even if I might feel passionately “right” about a certain topic. For the past two years I’ve said that it wasn’t me who changed: it was the environment of higher ed. It was the stress of a pandemic, then the hardest life decision I’ve ever made to quit my job and leave my friends behind, then the grieving that followed that pushed long-simmering problems in my marriage to a breaking point. While much of that is true, I hear you challenging me to consider where my own responsibility and volition lies in all this. One of the mercies of being broken is that you get to decide how to rebuild yourself. I sought refuge from the rat race and the transactional culture of commerce by becoming a professor. And I think for many of those years I was able, as part of a nonprofit organization, to devote myself to ideals rather than to net revenue. But when economic scarcity creeps in, as it is for many small colleges now, some of the underlying fault lines in the system begin to grate. Now I really don’t know where I fit in a world that wants to measure me according to my skills and my profit potential. Nearly all of the things I care most deeply about are not easy to ‘brand’ or to monetize. So how do I find a way to thrive within systems that often violate my core principles?I want some impossible things. I want to share the examined life with as many others as possible, to continue examining myself on the other end of that exchange. I want to create beautiful things and help others unlock their own potential for artistic expression. I believe in craft, by which I mean craftsmanship: high aesthetic standards and intellectual depth. What you have helped me see is that resentment of systems that don’t share my values, or active critique of those systems, at some point just poisons me. How to tell the difference between principled resistance and poisonous complaint? How to water the things in my life that I most want to grow while serving others meaningfully? These are the questions I still live with every day. It has been surprising to discover that these are questions that recovering alcoholics share, that they lie at the heart of what recovery means.Dee: It is constant work to accept our own responsibility in things that happen—and it's one of the hardest things I've had to accept about myself. It's so much easier to blame that politician or political party—that system—that pandemic—that person. We all do it. We all must strive to keep our own side of the street clean. It's all that we have control over. Peace, Josh. Thanks for the engaging conversation. Read more email exchanges like this ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

A Conversation with G.V. LoewenJoshua Doležal: I’m Joshua Doležal and welcome back to The Recovering Academic Podcast. My guest today is Dr. G.V. Loewen, or, for our purposes, Greg.Greg has been one of my readers for a while, though he’s only rarely ventured into the comment threads. Before he proposed that we share our conversation with you, I only knew of him as a prolific Canadian scholar. But the more I learned about his transition from higher ed to entrepreneurship, the more intrigued I became.Here he is talking about the service that his new company, Insightful Ethics Communications, provides.G.V. Loewen: Insightful places somebody before a mirror that doesn't reflect exactly who they are now, but shows them who they could be. It shows them a better selfhood, a more mature being without the need for them to become their own philosopher.Joshua Doležal: Greg Loewen is one of Canada’s leading researchers in ethics, education, aesthetics, health, and social theory. He is the author of sixty books and was an award-winning professor for over two decades in both Canada and the USA. He began writing young adult fiction after leaving academe, including his eleven-volume adventure saga, Kristen-Seraphim, an epic narrative that subverts both the meanings and roles of traditional fantasy elements. He also spent over a decade designing analog games for educational purposes and is a principal at Insightful Ethics Communications, a tech startup specializing in health and wellness, which is now preparing for a launch in early 2025. On its streaming app, Insightful will feature a guided series of exercises allowing users to experience the benefit of philosophical ideas in their daily lives.There is some irony in the fact that at the very time universities are slashing their humanities and social sciences programs, demand for that very kind of content is growing – in the coaching services I provide, in writing cohorts, and in virtual read-alongs. It’s not that humanity ever stopped needing what literature and philosophy can offer – it’s that the structures and communities for supporting inner life are in flux. There’s no guarantee that Greg’s venture will succeed, but by the end of our conversation I think you’ll understand why he thinks his company has such potential.Joshua Doležal: So, Greg, thanks for joining me. And you mentioned that you found me on Substack as a result of searching for other expat academics or recovering academics. I don't know if you have a preferred metaphor for our diaspora.G.V. Loewen: Liberated academics maybe would be a possibility.Joshua Doležal: How long have you been out of academe then?G.V. Loewen: Well, I've been out of the classroom for, oh, it's getting close to nine years. It's definitely been a journey. The one negative thing is it's been hard on the wallet. So that would be something I would put out right away. But I haven't lost any sleep, in any other manner, over leaving the institution, leaving the classroom. I started writing fiction at that point, which I had never done before.Joshua Doležal: So you had, I mean, what looked like a very productive academic career. I'm not sure I'm reading all of this correctly. It seems almost too good to be true. You were very accomplished as a researcher. You wrote over 60 books.G.V. Loewen: I'd only written 20 at that point.Joshua Doležal: Only 20? Well, I mean, what's 40 more books? But 20 books in ethics, in philosophy, things like that. Those are not fast books to write. So you've been very prolific as a scholar. You were an expert in UFO cults, theatrical organizations, artists, health researchers. There was kind of a long list there. And then as you're signaling, the shift to some of your more literary writing, which is also quite prolific. You won two teaching awards. You were also nominated for four others you've won over a hundred thousand dollars in grants and awards and so on.So this is the kind of thing that I think people outside academe don't understand. It's not folks who are struggling to publish. It's not those who haven't published and therefore have perished in academe, it’s people who are at the top of leadership or among the most accomplished in their field who are still saying it's time for something new.G.V. Loewen: I'm kind of a bookish fellow, as you pointed out, and in some ways I think many in today's university would see me very much as a kind of a dinosaur. I mean, who is a phenomenologist these days, who does hermeneutics these days, you know he's 50, and this kind of white male traditionalist, and that might be what I would look like to at least part of today's academy. But pedagogically I was always very heavily text-centered, [a] student-centered classroom. It was a struggle to read for many, many students, probably 90 percent of the students. And this is at an R1 these are students who would have been able to get into most universities, at least in Canada.Joshua Doležal: As you said, the institutional priorities and sort of the student expectations were shifting away from excellence in teaching and learning, which was really the draw for people like you and like me in choosing an academic profession.So the values in a corporatized university shift to management, shift to administration, and you had some of that experience as a department head – it sounds like you had perhaps had other roles that were similar in leadership. So why wouldn't you follow that – follow the money, the money would lead you to more administrative positions, possibly an executive position, right?G.V. Loewen: Yeah, I mean, I sat on so many Senate committees and especially the ethics boards were a fundamental contribution to the campus.Joshua Doležal: Yeah, so why not cash in on that and become Dean of Faculty or something?G.V. Loewen: You know, ironically now I'm a CEO of two tech startups. So in that sense, I am an administrator, a manager of sorts. It's a lot more creative than it was at the university, so that's a huge draw. You know, I had a strong resume on the other two sides, but the administrative side was never something that appealed to me.When you use the word corporatized, again, hard for me to speak to that now because I'm in entrepreneurship. I'm essentially a capitalist now. It feels very different creating products to help people than managing an institution that really struggled to live up to its ideals.Joshua Doležal: Yeah. Well, I think that's helpful. So there were some questions about just satisfaction, what was rewarding and enjoyable to you in your work, where you felt like you were most effective, but then also a kind of environmental shift or climate shift. You had mentioned, somewhat quizzically, that you are now a capitalist. I hear a little bit of unease in your voice about that.G.V. Loewen: So, well, there's some irony to that. Yeah.Joshua Doležal: So tell me about your path to entrepreneurship. You have two companies that I'm aware of, Vigilance Digital Media, which is a gaming startup, and then also Insightful Ethics Communications.G.V. Loewen: Vigilance was a complete fluke. My wife and I were living on the East Coast, and there was a community college around the corner and they had a big digital media program. And I, at that point, I had recently finished this lengthy saga, which was a YA fantasy adventure saga. I mean, it's 11 volumes, so it's this vast landscape. And then I thought, well, you know it would be great to digitize it. So I just walked in cold to their program and said, Hey I've got this giant fantasy epic. Is there any interest in it? And immediately there was. So, I was gratified by that and we followed that up and I co-taught a course in game design.And then I met this young guy who was a student in that course. And the term project was to put together a pitch for the game that was supposed to bring this saga to life in a new way. And his was the best by far, and then so I just asked him, Do you want to move, do you want to push to the next level, do you want to incorporate? And he was immediately on board and he's become one of my closest friends.I met him when he was 20. He's 25 now. He's a third of a century younger than me. And I've said to him, if I had had even two or three of him in every class, I’d probably still be teaching. Because that's enough, if you're reaching some people.Joshua Doležal: Yeah, I'm mindful of a kind of irony here as well. I mean you were saying you were losing touch with younger people and yet gaming is very much part of the virtual world that they're growing up in, that they're substituting for traditional literacy. And so for you to be operating in that space, it sounds like you are actually adapting.G.V. Loewen: Belatedly, I suppose. Yeah. But at the same time if I'm teaching a course in sociology, philosophy, religion, then I want people to crack open a book or two, too. So, I mean, there's I'm not sure how far one can go with that. I mean, if I could turn Max Weber's Economy and Society into an exciting adventure game maybe that would…I'm not exactly sure how I would go about doing that.Joshua Doležal: Right, and maintaining any kind of academic rigor in the process.G.V. Loewen: Well, maintaining anything. But, yeah, there is something to what you're saying in that sense because I started writing… I mean, I don't write literary works in any traditional sense or any artistic sense. I write adventure tales for the most part. And for the most part, the age group is, at least the publisher's target market is young people. They want young people to be reading it. And so, we started working out a few small games and then we realized that there was so much more that we could be doing pedagogically and in terms of communicating ideas, and so we formed a second company called Insightful and we are hoping to be up on a streaming platform by January.And if you're familiar with Headspace, they have a little animated Netflix series, the guide to meditation, there's a sleep guide, et cetera.Joshua Doležal: Yeah.G.V. Loewen: And they were a brick and mortar, they still are, they're a brick and mortar company that came to digital very late in the day. Like they'd already been operating for something like 20 years before they got the idea that they should do digital stuff. And so we have a guide, it's the guide to critical thinking. It's kind of a complimentary Western oriented, active thinking guide, but the Headspace guide to meditation was my original inspiration. So that's the kind of stuff we're doing. We've got a cancer guy who has become a psychedelic therapist. He's doing a series on psychedelic therapy. It was kind of a cutting edge therapeutics, now has an amazing remission rate, and the FDA has been all over that of late, I'm told. And so that's the kind of thing that Insightful is shilling, is a health and wellness streaming mobile app.Joshua Doležal: If Headspace is your inspiration, do you have market research that you've done – do you have a kind of target user or client that you're appealing to? Because I know that sometimes when academics shift to the creator economy, which is what you're doing, effectively, there needs to be a clear outcome. If you're not offering a credential or you're not optimizing performance with statistics, which is another model that people have monetized outside of higher ed – the guide to critical thinking, what return on investment does a client get from that, or who are you trying to reach with that? Where's the demand that you're tapping into for that?G.V. Loewen: Well, in terms of what we know so far the self-reported rates of anxiety and alienation are at an all-time high amongst people who are 15 to 30, 15 to 35. So that's the incipient target market for the guide. And it's a very broad project in the sense that somebody you know, like gaming, we've got weeklies, we've got dailies, we've got guided episodes.So there's a number of levels, and the guided episodes also have levels, just like a game, so you're leveling up after you do level one, you can move on to level two, etc. And with each experience of one of the concepts that we're exploring together, there's a deeper, what we hope is a deeper resonance, with a person's day to day life, but also a person's character and their personhood.As an ethicist, this became a very important sensibility for this health and wellness company, is that we're trying to address character in a transformative way, very much like the pedagogy I used to employ in the classroom was transformative learning.Joshua Doležal: I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit, which may not be very nice of me. But this all sounds good, right? That there's a kind of real-world relevance of your humanities and social science background that typically one would learn in a traditional liberal arts education – you become a well-rounded individual. You acquire the ability to think critically as part of your reading, as part of your formal writing for college coursework, and you pick up some of this resilience, some of these character qualities along the way. And so now that the focus of college instruction has shifted away from that toward more transactional outcomes, like credentials, like skills, things that would optimize employability, the traditional liberal arts education that would produce a well-rounded individual is falling out of demand.So how are you certain that people who fit into this demographic would find you? Or to put it another way, let's say I'm someone who's 15 to 30 years old, and I am manifesting anxiety, or I lack the thing it is that you're offering – how would I find Insightful, and what would convince me that this was a good investment for me to make?G.V. Loewen: I think the only thing that would convince a person who's working through a guided tour of personhood or selfhood, as well as one's own humanity, is that they would notice a change in how they were thinking about themselves first in the day to day.What we're doing at Insightful is not quite the same thing as what I was doing in the classroom. There is a humanistic basis to it, but it's not discourse heavy in the sense that someone is going to have to become literate in the discursive sense before they can access our materials, quite the opposite, actually.So when we talk about dailies and weeklies, these are actual exercises. And that was another thing I took from Headspace. Obviously we're working in Western discourse, not Eastern. So all of this is proactive. This is not about contemplation. This is not a Vita Contemplativa here. This is the Vita Activa in a sense, to borrow Hannah Arendt's classifications there.They're going to look at a daily and they're going to say, okay, yeah, I'm going to try that. It's an exercise right off the bat, right? Insightful places somebody before a mirror that doesn't reflect exactly who they are now, but shows them who they could be. It shows them a better selfhood, a more mature being without the need for them to become their own philosopher, if you will.You know the host of Headspace, just to reference – I'm giving them a lot of free advertising there – but the guide to meditation, one of the things he says in this first episode is he says, well, I'm doing this so that you don't have to become a monk, you know? And that's fine because who the heck is going to travel to the Himalayas and spend 20 years in the monastery. There's just no possible way anybody's going to do that, right? Well similarly, who is going to spend 12, 13 years with big tuition hikes going and getting a PhD in the humanities or in the human sciences, or who is going to become a philosopher? And the other thing too, Joshua, is…my seminar, my fourth year seminar, we might have 7 people, we might have 12 people, might have 6 people, whatever, why reach 7 people when you can reach 7 billion? I mean, that's kind of the bottom line there.Joshua Doležal: Let me say back some of your story to see if I am hearing it correctly. There is, as you say, some irony, not just in shifting from a mission driven profession as a teacher as a kind of service role into an entrepreneurial or capitalistic role, but also that I assume that you began your career like I did with a kind of idealistic sense that you were providing something lifelong, that there was a timeless quality to the discipline that you had devoted yourself to, and that this was more than just a skill to get an entry level job, but it was something that would stay with someone throughout their life and not just be a tool to use, but also be enriching, be rewarding, be even enjoyable — reflection, the ability to participate in the unending conversation, to think of oneself as constantly growing in that way.So there was a demand just in humanity for that kind of discipline, that kind of art. The institution no longer seems to care about that. And so you're still seeing the demand in the world for this. You're seeing results, maladies that have cropped up in humanity as a result of the absence of this. And so you are, in a way, adapting. You felt like you couldn't do it in higher ed, so the place to be innovative and be a teacher, all the things that you were trying to do as an academic philosopher – it's taking a different form, but you're trying to do much the same things. The kind of mission or the value system or the principles underlying your enterprise are not that different from what drew you to philosophy to begin with. Is that fair to say?G.V. Loewen: Yeah, I think that maybe part of it is somewhat generous, but because I like to joke with my business partner – I said, well I want my Ferrari. I'm not in – this is not a selfless mission here by any means, right? But at the same time, in general, what you said, I think is reasonable because the teaching was my first vocation. I never thought I would become a writer. You know, I had 20 years in the classroom, which were incredibly rewarding and working cross culturally for many years, so there was a sense that whatever was germinating during those decades, I think it's reasonable to say that it's reached a kind of apogee now.And I think that the pedagogic tactics that were taking place in the classroom would have been greatly enhanced by the kinds of material that I've been able to develop over the past few years, but I simply couldn't have done it back then. You know, it's like sometimes they talk to musicians saying, well, why didn't you put this album out 10 years ago? You doorknob, you know? And then the musician inevitably says, well, I just couldn't – it wasn't ready. It wasn't there. Writing fiction has made my nonfiction far more accessible.Joshua Doležal: Well, I appreciate the reminder in your story that we don't have to leave a calling entirely. We don't have to think of it as a singular thing that has to exist in a particular kind of institutional structure. We can still follow our gut to some extent, follow those intuitive senses of where we fit and where we don't, continue to take creative risks outside academe, and remain true to ourselves. It sounds like you're still remaining true to yourself and your interests and your creative hunger. And so this is a privileged glimpse that we have of your enterprise before it's actually out in the world. So I appreciate that and wish you all the best with it.G.V. Loewen: Yeah, it's very kind of you to have invited me here, and I – it gives me some perspective, obviously, when you have to actually respond to a query. When you ask about this new space, which cuts both ways, there's much illiteracy, there's a potential for great literacy. What is driving that is the same vocation but not a naively held sense of vocation anymore. You know, I'm almost 60, I'm not 25. I'm hoping that the learning curve for digital will be where everything now at the beginning is in some ways overprepared. And then perhaps 10, 15 years from now, if I last that long, then what we do at Vigilance and what we do at Insightful will just be effortless.Joshua Doležal: Thanks for listening! This is the first time I’ve shared a reader’s story, so I’m grateful to Greg for suggesting it. If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more like it, please let me know privately or in the comments.And just for fun, here are a few questions for further discussion: Can a philosopher be a happy capitalist? Can comparable results to years of rigorous study in areas like hermeneutics and phenomenology really be found through guided daily and weekly exercises? What do you think?Today’s episode is free. To unlock more interviews, essays, and craft resources, please consider upgrading your subscription at joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe. I look forward to welcoming you to The Recovering Academic community. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Friends,This post is a conversation between Liz Haswell and me. If you haven’t discovered Liz’s Substack, Unprofessoring, I urge you to check it out.Liz and I both left tenured faculty positions two years ago. Liz was a Biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and I was an English professor at Central College, in Iowa. While we both left because we’d lost faith in higher ed, we know that a college education will be important for our children. Now we are wrestling with how to help our kids navigate what we know to be a broken system. Will they have the same chance at self-discovery that we did?If you are a parent, we’d love to hear your thoughts on how you plan to tackle the college search with your kids, or whether you plan to redirect your energy and resources elsewhere. JoshLeaving Academe Is Fine, But What About Your Kids?Liz: I can’t imagine who I’d be without the intellectual and social aspects of college. Those four years were absolutely foundational to my personal identity. As someone felt she was becoming her actual self through the experience of being in college, I naturally want that same experience for my child, Griffin. But…would he even get that anymore?Josh: Exactly right. Would Griffin have the same experience? Does it exist anywhere in the way it did for us just two decades ago? I was speaking to a friend recently who is a lecturer at a regional university in North Carolina. We both attended a Presbyterian college in rural Tennessee. He went on to seminary, and wanted to complete a Ph.D., but his advisor said that if he could do anything else for money, he should, and keep his studying on the side. So he went on to a successful career in IT, largely serving hospitals, and is only now circling back to higher ed. But his institution is undergoing the same cuts that are bedeviling universities everywhere, and it's exhausting him. I had been jokingly comparing him to a seagull landing on the sinking ship after rats like me had already scurried away. But I spoke to him last weekend while he sipped a bourbon on his porch, and he confessed that he felt very much like a rat.This feeling stems from precisely what you describe in your own awakening. Our little college billed itself as a place for the mind. Nobody was angling to be a Nobel winner or anything, but ideas drove the discourse all over campus. It was egalitarian, too — I never had a sense of class conflict or extreme gaps in privilege. Everyone lived in the same dorms, endured the same communal showers, ate at the same dank cafeteria. The amenities were not what it was about for us. And my friend and I both feel, looking back, that we might have been shielded too much in that environment from how the world really is, or at least how it has evolved. Liz: I had a few of those communal experiences as well, living in big houses with other women. But I entered University of Washington as part of the honors program, with smaller classes and different requirements than the rest of the students, and of course, there was the Greek System, so there was always a sense of hierarchy, one that I was (not coincidentally) at the top of. In fact, I’ve been wondering lately how much of my sense of an institutional shift over the past few decades comes from something that happened in the academy over time, and how much has to do with the different types of institutions I attended. As an undergraduate, I chose to go to a large state school where I could almost put myself through with scholarships and paid lab work. I went to graduate school at a state school, but in a program that was ranked in the top 5. Then my postdoctoral work and tenure track positions were at relatively elite private universities. So I’m comparing my experience as an undergraduate at UW in Seattle in the early 90s with what I infer about undergraduates at a small private midwestern university in the post-COVID 2020s. There’s so much that’s different between those two! I did not see many students at Wash U having the experience I did so many years ago, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t places like that. Josh: I know of no environment where my own children would enjoy the awakening that we did. Private colleges aren't offering it: they are offering paths to industry. The elite schools are so competitive that students carry that awareness of scarcity into their classes. And many of them, as I read recently in the New York Times, have to hone their personal brands as applicants by the start of their freshman year, or even earlier — some advisors recommend doing that by junior high. Many students who come from wealth feel intense pressure to replicate the success of their parents or grandparents, and so even privilege is no guarantee of freedom for self-exploration. Students who assume enormous debt don't have the luxury of following their passions the way that I did. And they are taught by faculty who feel increasingly under assault, vulnerable to a relentless drumbeat of crisis.Liz: I do think it’s harder for universities to be a place of self-discovery now; students seem far more aware of the problem of debt and many are more focused on getting job training than we were. They also seem more aware of and motivated by the problems of our world and want to contribute to solutions. I don’t think they feel allowed to follow their curiosity or just learn something for the sake of learning it.And, as you say, many faculty are distracted by the escalation of publishing and tenure requirements, and at many schools by political onslaughts, so they aren’t always a lot of help. Ironically, I get the sense that far more young people NEED that self-discovery time as Covid and post-Covid education was watered down in ways that were probably appropriate at the time but had some permanent effects.From a scene in The West Wing, where politicos try to wrangle a predictable outcome from investing in a billion-dollar superconducting supercollider. Sen. Jack Enlow, D-IL: If we can only say what benefit this thing has. No one's been able to do that.Dr. Dalton Millgate: That's because great achievement has no road map. The X-Ray is pretty good, and so is penicillin, and neither were discovered with a practical objective in mind. I mean, when the electron was discovered in 1897, it was useless. And now we have an entire world run by electronics. Haydn and Mozart never studied the classics. They couldn't. They invented them.Sam Seaborn: Discovery.Dr. Dalton Millgate: What?Sam Seaborn: That's the thing that you were... Discovery is what. That's what this is used for. It's for discovery.Josh: The Covid effect and the ongoing debate about online learning (whether it’s as effective as in-person education) is a can of worms. But I think we ignore the personal aspects of education at our peril. It’s not just that young people need that space for discovery — it’s that we see the consequences, in industries like technology, of ignoring the complexity of human experience. If humans are nothing more than clicks or financial transactions to be manipulated by marketers or SEO optimizers, then we see things like worse products, worse search results, outcomes that make money, but that leave us hollow and frustrated.This is partly what is still fueling the Great Resignation, or what some are now calling “hashtag exodus.” People with options — or people destroyed by burnout — continue to leave, as we did. Many of those positions will either be cut altogether or replaced by lecturers who can be let go as needs change. The positions that remain will likely be filled by younger academics who haven't yet hit the brick wall. But even if the teaching gets done, there is a serious drain of talent from the profession right now that bodes ill for the quality of education that your child and my children will receive. Liz: So many people, especially women my age, are leaving or contemplating it. They are just burnt out on everything that they are asked to do beyond just research and teaching and it’s just too many years to hang on until retirement. SO many committees and things to organize! This academic housekeeping doesn’t seem to fall on the shoulders of men in the same way. And for everyone, there’s just such an escalation of tasks and needed skill sets that the kernel of academic interest that got many of us into the job is just buried under everything else. And I hear generally such a sense of futility about anything that needs changing, a kind of helplessness in the face of a really dehumanizing system. I am not sure what will happen as this “leaky pipeline” drains the sciences of senior women. BUT on the bright side, I am encouraged to see so many young faculty members stepping up, young faculty who are really motivated and excited and willing to take on some of the student pastoral care that I was never very good at. They are so innovative and enthusiastic and dedicated! So I have some hope that they will be able to take over that work in the future and do a better job than my generation ever did. Josh: I was one of those young professors once — just 29 when I landed my tenure-track role. The difference then was that my institution valued me for my passion and for my disciplinary expertise. I was fortunate to have had a hand in hiring two idealistic colleagues shortly before my departure. But they both share my deep frustration with the shift in institutional priorities. They came to the profession with more than a kernel of intellectual interest! My colleague Valerie, who I interviewed for a piece on how younger faculty are setting work boundaries, is still fighting the good fight. But she has to approach her work with much more caution than I did if she hopes to make it thirty more years in the profession. Liz: It really is frightening to watch the far right systematically dismantling academia. Not that we haven’t done a lot of this to ourselves, but the pace is startling. My friends in Indiana and Florida predict a huge departure of faculty, but I wonder if that will actually happen. There are so many people who want positions that I think even these undesirable positions will get filled.Josh: There's no doubt that Christopher Rufo is out to burn the whole thing down, and he is doing this with the help of governors like Kim Reynolds and Ron DeSantis. The cover story in The Chronicle a few weeks ago was explicitly concerned with the implications for higher ed if Trump were to win in November. But the left doesn't believe in the system either — it's shooting itself in the foot with "decolonize the university" rhetoric, the same way the "defund the police" movement forfeited the public sympathy it once held. Meanwhile, the Gordon Gees are trying to corporatize everything. As one WVU professor put it, college leaders like Gee are not allowing students to have the same kind of education that they did. That is a pretty serious irony — the current generation of leadership was molded by the classic liberal arts model, but they are selling that birthright for branding. Liz: An opinion essay in the NYT called “College Students: School is not Your Job”  back in September made me think about the pros and cons of the way I revamped my main class, “Plant Biology and Genetic Engineering,”  in the 2020’s. I turned it from a class that was mostly about the biology of plants into a class about the utility of plants. I flipped it so that there were no more (or just very short) lectures and the students did a lot of the reading and preparing at home. In the end the class had very little content, and hardly anything that would be considered challenging. It went from just a handful of students to being oversubscribed every year. I really felt torn about these changes. On the one hand, it’s good to meet students where they are. As I mentioned earlier, I think students have a sense of urgency to use their education to fix things. In a way, it’s a luxury to imagine just learning things for the sake of learning them. While it’s possible that students walked away retaining more information in the latter incarnation of the course, they also walked away knowing very little about plants themselves, just the ways that we use (or dream of using) them to solve human problems. Which makes me sad, because I love plants and plant biology so much.Josh: Right – human solutions are a byproduct of plant science, not the reason for plant science! You’re reminding me of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, and his idea that some plants have evolved to satisfy human desires (like for sweetness), but only because this ensured the plant’s long-term survival. So the human was the means to an evolutionary end, not the end itself! Maybe that’s part of what troubles me so much about industry and personal branding — the individual is always at the fore. It’s like squeezing the planet for more oil. I prefer the humility of belonging to a tradition with ancient roots.For many decades, the Western canon was one of the primary value propositions that the humanities had to offer American young people. There were practical byproducts of studying the classics, like critical thinking and communication, but no one wrote an epic poem or created magnificent art in order to mold middle managers. Now even my most liberal colleagues are aghast at what their students don’t know. A friend who teaches at the University of Nebraska posted on Facebook recently that she couldn’t believe her students had never heard of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” But why would they? Industry doesn’t care about art history. The only reason you and I know about Bosch is because we were required to fulfill a distributional core.Conservatives are now trying to revive a Great Books approach. I’ve never been a traditionalist in that way — I’ve always liked the idea of a more expanded canon. But I find that my discipline has morphed away from studying the human condition expansively to affinity groups defined by historical oppression. If you don’t belong to one of those affinity groups, why would you major in English? I think the real conundrum is that neither conservatives nor progressives believe in higher education as an institution anymore. The attacks that have been so successful on K-12 are now punching cracks in the American university system, which was once the envy of the world, and could still be. My eldest daughter loves both Greek mythology and Biology. It is a shame that she will only have the opportunity to study one of those as a college student. Liz: It is a conundrum! And equally confounding are the ways in which academics are doing some of this to ourselves. Even those of us who do very basic, fundamental research feel compelled to focus on translational, problem-solving aspects when we talk about the motivations for our work. Needhi Bhalla, a Biology professor at UC Santa Cruz, called this a “defensive crouch” on Twitter and that was so evocative for me! Instead of arguing that understanding the world is important in and of itself, we buy into the idea that everything we learn must be in order to produce something, fix something, build something. Our students learn this lesson from us.And that is not a lesson I want Griffin to learn.Josh: Thanks for listening! As always, this is meant to be an invitation to a conversation, so if you have thoughts on the subject, or if you have experiences to share — if you’ve had a student successfully navigate college, or if you are still working in higher ed and feel like we are selling it short, please let us know. Goodbye for now and please do check out Liz’s Substack, Unprofessoring, where you can hear more about her own conscious uncoupling from the ivory tower. Subscribe to The Recovering AcademicUnlock more essays, poems, interviews, and craft resources. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Joshua Doležal: I’m Joshua Doležal and this is The Recovering Academic. My guest today is Samuel Lopez-Barrantes.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: We know, we feel it. You feel it when you've written something that means something to you, and it's kind of beyond... I always think of this quote by Rilke, which is, “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and there is nothing so useless as criticism. Only love can be fair to them.” Now, I don't think we shouldn't listen to critics occasionally or take advice when people give us advice, but I think the point of this quote is that we know when we're putting our love and our purpose into a work that once it's out of us, it's out of us.Joshua Doležal: Samuél is a Spanish-American novelist who was born in a theater commune in the south of France and was raised in Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina. He first lived in Paris in 2008 as a student and has called Paris home ever since. Samuél teaches creative writing at the Sorbonne and hosts the Paris Writers' Salon with author John Baxter. In 2022, Samuél bought back the rights to his debut novel, Slim and The Beast (Inkshares, 2015) and recently published The Requisitions (Kingdom Anywhere, 2024), a historical metafiction set during the Nazi Occupation of Poland.You can find his author page here. I also encourage you to subscribe to his Substack – if not, Paris – where he shares essays, interviews, and original music.  Our conversation today follows two strands – what it means to reclaim our artistic lives from relentless production and promotion, and how Samuél has accomplished that with The Requisitions. We talk about his work with an artisan printer in Paris, crunch the numbers of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, and take a deep dive into his book.One of life’s great pleasures, for me, is losing track of time while talking with friends. I invite you to take Samuél and me with you on a long walk or drive, where you don’t feel distracted or hurried, where you might even imagine that we’re all sitting on a terrace in Paris, warmed by the afternoon sun.Recovery Means Reclaiming Your Creative LifeJoshua Doležal: So Samuél, thanks so much for joining me today. And you're tuning in from Paris. It's afternoon there, right?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I am, yeah, it's a finally beautiful sunny day. It's taken a while for the spring to show its face, but the terraces are now open officially. I'm gonna actually go and sit on one after our call.Joshua Doležal: So you take advantage of the sidewalk culture there in Paris.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Oh yeah you know, there's an old Hemingway line in A Movable Feast, when the spring came, even the false spring, the only problem was where to be happiest. And when the sun is out in Paris, it's just a matter of finding the terrace that has the right amount of sun and shade and the right people watching spot, not too many cars.I mean, the whole city wakes up. It's really night and day from a long winter. It was actually the darkest winter in about 60 years, according to all the meteorologists, it was a very gray March and February, not much sunshine. So the vitamin D is basking upon us now.Joshua Doležal: We're going to probably follow a fairly postmodern arc here, but I was struck by how your query letter for your novel, The Requisitions, which we'll talk about soon, begins with a kind of fracture in your life. Kind of a cliche now, the pandemic did that to everyone, but you trace the genesis of this project to that loss of your teaching gig, your traveling musician gigs, and also your work as a tour guide in the Latin Quarter. And so I wonder if you can take us to that moment and explain how your life looks on the other side of it. Is it true that that's the origin point for this novel?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah. That is definitely the origin point for this rendition of this novel. So earlier versions of this book, the characters remain the same, structure was very different in the narrative style. Go back to 20, really 2012, 2013. But the version that I have now put out into the world that I feel like is my best effort on that page for this specific story really did emerge with the pandemic, because when I lost all of my work, thankfully the French state helped subsidize everyone really, but especially freelancers who had lost a lot of money compared to the previous years. The French state had a program to assist people like me who had no income all of a sudden. And I kind of told myself, looking at my MFA during which I had put this book to the side thinking it was kind of dead in the water. And then I see the ripples emerge around it and I say, well, if I'm going to give this book a shot this is the chance I have. I don't know how many months at the time of lockdown in my apartment. There's nothing else going on in my life, nor can there be – what a better opportunity than to really rethink why I spent so many years on this book and this subject about the Nazi occupation of Europe and Poland specifically.And so it really just became in some sense a form of self-discipline, which was that I can't just play video games and drink red wine every day by myself for three months because I will become very depressed and unhealthy if I do that. And the other realization was that it in some ways had taken a real kind of jarring shift in my perspective about myself and the world to really hone in on what the point of this book is, which is – it's a culmination of really going through a master's in Holocaust Studies having been an academic in that sense, which it's one of the things that first connected me to your work and just the idea of being a recovering academic.I had learned a lot of important things that I felt were far too obtuse or inaccessible to the rest of the world. And this novel had always been an attempt to kind of make those ideas, not so much more accessible, but just more interesting and applicable to a contemporary world instead of dusty bin of history.Joshua Doležal: I was struck by something I hope to return to a little later, you know, that you have a narrator. He's the boy at the bookshelf at the beginning and his relationship with his mother and the conversation between them, it was kind of the impetus for the story, but he can't resist sharing a lot of his research at times. So there is a scholarly bent that's at war with – at times seems to be somewhat at war with – the more creative mode of storytelling that the novel, the fictional mode that the novel normally embraces. So I don't know if you still feel like there's that tension within yourself when you think of yourself as a recovering academic; since that phrase seemed to resonate with you, what does that mean?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Well, it's very perceptive of you because there is certainly that tension and that, if anyone knows anything about recovery, it is a lifelong act, right? I mean, to be in recovery, from what I know, a lot of my friends have been to it or going through it is that it's a daily battle.And especially when you've been in an academic setting for so many years, I still very much on the research end require a lot of time to digest what I'm learning before I can put it into words that are my own. And that's something that, of course, to your point in the novel, there is still this tension because on the one hand, history is something that can be known to a certain extent. And I believe in that and also believe in it being taught and studied in a way that is responsible. And so one of the aspects of the book I decided was I have to give some historical background here that isn't just in a fictional universe, because it's important to recognize these numbers or statistics or political kind of statements I'm making in a, well, they're not really my politics, but the politics of the era.But a recovering academic to me in my literary mind means someone who is always writing the story first and foremost, and then remembering that the research comes second, versus as an academic thinking that the research came first, and then the writing came second.As a fiction writer, story is what has always inspired me. And that's kind of what in the novel – it's about this little boy who, it's the story that was inspiring from the outset and continues to be independent of anything that was learned about the story, it's the narrative itself that I find most compelling.Joshua Doležal: But you do need to have a kind of backbone of research to avoid veering into alternative facts or those more nefarious forms that truth seems to take in our world.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I'm a literary tour guide, historical guide at small groups and kind of niche subjects. Nazi occupation of Paris is one of my primary ones. And to your point, I often have clients who say, Oh, I love reading about the war. I say, yeah, okay, that's great. What do you read? And they say, well, I mostly read historical fiction.That's great. What kind of historical fiction? Without naming any specific names of famous books or less famous books. A lot of the questions I get are predicated on the stories that people read that never made any attempt to say this didn't actually happen. And that was part of why writing a book about history, I had to admit to myself and to the reader from the outset, there are things that happen and things that didn't happen in this history. Because I think people, especially with the way technology works now, and you know, All the Light We Cannot See has a TV show now where the protagonist, who's supposed to be a young blind girl, seems to be strangely attractive, as well as her German counterpart, and sexualized in a way that the book has no, at any point, really, connotation of that.And I get why that's done for television, but the fact that so many people now think the story is about this quasi romance versus what is a much deeper story in the novel is something I wanted to avoid when writing a novel about history. Because I don't call it historical fiction. If I were an academic, I would call it historiographic metafiction.Way too clunky. I prefer historical metafiction insofar as it's somewhat approachable, but it really is historiography insofar as I'm trying to understand while we're telling the story of history, the stories we tell ourselves about history and why we tell ourselves these stories. And that happened to just come to fruition and be finished at a time, of course, in history where we're dealing with major conflicts across the world and a lot of the old ghosts that we thought we were done with, we've all seen it before.And that's for me kind of the main… I wanted to put a book out in the world that just is what I learned from studying a very brutal time in human history and how I think it still is applicable today.Joshua Doležal: Your narrator says something about history being the study of our deception or the study of how we've been deceived. So yeah, I do want to circle back to that.Just to fill in some of the gaps here. So it sounds to me like from this book and also what you've written elsewhere, you're in some ways a recovering artist too, because you say this on the alumni page at the MFA program at Vermont, that I'm quoting here, “Paris has taught me to take my time. We live in an era of quarterly reports and student loans, of questions about book sales and literary agents, and the pedigree of where we received our MFA. Most writers are told to start a blog to produce more, more, more, to put themselves out there before ever having something real and honest to say.”And then you say in Paris, there's less noise than other places. But it's different also because, and I'm returning to the quote again, “As Americans, we're told to pursue a successful career. But in Paris, I've learned what it means to pursue a successful life.” So to me, part of the story of this novel is you reclaiming your life as an artist and trying to get out of that industrialist mode of perpetual production and personal branding and all of that noise. Is that fair?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: That is very fair and part of the desire to publish it the way I did which is starting a imprint with my wife, Augusta Sagnelli, was to retain control and also remind myself of what I'm doing this for, which is that even if I believed in the literary agent and traditional model, which I don't, it would still not guarantee me anything other than an inflated ego to be able to say I have an agent and a traditional publisher.I know the numbers in so far as I saw a bit of that with my first novel and I have friends who had great successes and that doesn't translate to anything monetary really. My experience as a musician with the music label also informed that decision, which was to your point, a recovering artist.We know, we feel it. You feel it when you've written something that means something to you, and it's kind of beyond. I always think of this quote by Rilke, which is, “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and there is nothing so useless as criticism. Only love can be fair to them.” Now, I don't think we shouldn't listen to critics occasionally or take advice when people give us advice, but I think the point of this quote is that we know when we're putting our love and our purpose into a work that once it's out of us, it's out of us.So whatever happens to it is great, but then that becomes a question of PR and business management and all the rest of it. And historically with the art I'd been making, it felt like the creation really was secondary to the promotion of it. And that that was whittling down my artistic soul. So that was an easy choice for me to choose how to print the book, to pick the paper myself, to sit with an artisan printer in Paris who told me about the bindings.And I learned about what a book is made of and how it is made. And now when I hold that book, it's such a different experience than if I had sent it off somewhere, which I may do in the future, but at least I have now the first object that is mine that I can be proud of and to have people like you who still are able to read it and pick it up and that's the whole goal of any writer is to be on a bookshelf, whether it's one or 1000.I kind of think that's not up to us, you know?Joshua Doležal: Well, you're reminding me of a conversation I had with Brian Mealer, who wrote what to me seemed like a fantastically successful bestseller, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, about William Kamkwamba, who created windmills out of junk parts in Africa and found his way to Dartmouth. I haven't checked in to see where William is now, but when I was still a professor, that was our common read one year. I taught it in the first-year seminar that I was directing. It was a fantastic text for a liberal arts approach. You could come at it from history, from science, from any of the creative arts, you know, it was very fertile, really an ideal book for that purpose. And I was talking to Brian before his visiting lecture, and he was just despondent about his life as an author.And I was thinking, one of my colleagues had been in Poland that summer and had seen The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind on billboards in Poland. And I was thinking, how could you do better than that? But, you know, it had to do with the advance that he earned, which was not commensurate with the hours and the years that had gone into writing the book.And he just told me, this life isn't sustainable.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Wow. And was it primarily because of that, just that the lack of financial stability that he thought would have been guaranteed?Joshua Doležal: Well, I think he got maybe a six-figure advance for the book. And I would have to assume that he earned it back, but I think it was just hours of immersive time with William and his family doing interviews. It was a work of journalism, but it was also a bit of a biography and, and so just the labor required was much more than a year and the expense, you know, for travel, none of that was borne by the publisher either.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Of course not. Maybe some ham sandwiches at the airport if you're lucky.Joshua Doležal: Yeah, yeah, so I mean it just struck me that as you're saying that the goal for professional academics is perpetual production for minimal consumption, you have a handful of, I won't even tell you the numbers of how many people have cited my peer-reviewed articles. It's not as bad as it could be, but it's also nothing like my Substack numbers. The same thing for professional writers is that the goal is to just churn this stuff out and it's not the one book, it's the one after that. And the one after that. You really do have to just be relentless to make it sustainable.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, and I think that's a choice and that's a business choice. There are writers who are capable and willing to do that. And one of the benefits I've always had as I was raised by two theater professors, a playwright and director and actors. So the financial stability that comes with art or lack thereof was never really a concern for me.It's not that I didn't believe I could make a living from my art, because my parents were professors in theater, but I always knew I would have to make a living in a way that allowed me to make art. And I do think there's a distinction there that in academia isn't afforded, because you're told, at least I was told, through multiple master's degrees, get this degree, it will allow you to get better jobs, i.e. more money. And that's just plainly not true. We know that, obviously, across the board in any discipline now, but because I pursued these degrees knowing that it probably wasn't gonna work out financially, I've never felt the stress of needing to write to pay my rent because I've worked a whole lot of jobs in my life and I continue to do that in order to write, but I don't write to do the payment of the rent.I figure out how to pay my rent so that I can write – that at least philosophically or psychologically has helped me. I mean, it took me a decade to write my second novel and publish it. And I published it independently with my wife after years of deciding whether or not I should get an agent, all the rest of it.So it was a process and a meditation on what am I really doing this for? And I'm fortunate that I can work in a way that is simple, but also gives me time to write. And that in the similar sense of COVID, it's like, if you create this time and I don't use it to write. Maybe I'll play piano, or maybe I'll read a book, but otherwise, what have I built this life for? And writing is always kind of the cornerstone answer there. It comes in different ways, you know?Joshua Doležal: Well, Substack really as a platform is both supportive of and antagonistic to that kind of life because it perpetually dangles this fantasy of monetization and growth and scale. And that's the core messaging. I guess as a startup, it's somewhat inevitable, but they trot out success stories perpetually that are hard to distance yourself from.So I found that it's taken me, you know, two years of some success and failure in resisting that. And I have to remain vigilant in reminding myself of why I'm producing content. And it's not for money. I would love to call it a primary livelihood, but there really does have to be a deeper "why" to stick with it, to believe in it, to have a kind of long-term commitment.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I really do believe as soon as the purpose of the creation is for monetary gain, it changes. Something deep within that creation, not in a bad way necessarily, but fundamentally, because then it is a job and you treat it like a job and all of the benefits and problems that come with that arise.So that's to your point, you know, even this week, I was like, I should, I've been working and I'm revamping an old essay I worked on about fascism. And I wanted to look at it for myself because I reminded myself I've written a lot that I haven't ever looked at since I was in school and why should I be paying off my student loans and no one ever see these, what I consider to be valuable insights into some ideas. But even then, I was thinking I have to put this next one out this week. It's been two weeks. I said, next week, I'm going to put it out. What if I waited 10 days, two weeks, nothing's going to happen.And that at least remind myself why I'm doing it versus…cause it's not like I'm charging for it. So am I hoping that it's good enough that someone will then start paying me? And do I really care if they do? I'd love if they did, but that's not why I started Substack.Joshua Doležal: Well, you're making me think about all kinds of possibilities for my own work. Part of what's drawn me to this conversation is I have an unpublished novel. We're somewhat similar in that I followed a traditional publishing route from my memoir, which was placed at a solid university press, University of Iowa Press.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, that's more than solid. That's the top of the line for writing, right?Joshua Doležal: So, that was – at the time I thought of it as a real win, but it really was only for those status reasons because to this day I've only made $50 in royalties. So a nonprofit press, you know, they have different margins for justifying, for covering their costs, right? So it didn't take them a lot of sales to cover and for them to feel like it accomplished what they wanted to.And it accomplished what I wanted to more or less at the time, which was just to have a book in the world and have it read as you're saying. But I've really been thinking differently about this novel and weighing an offer from University of Nevada Press—with revisions they might consider publishing this novel and I'm thinking, how much work do I want to put into contorting myself into their –Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Are there other visions that you agree with?Joshua Doležal: Some of them, no, I think it would change, it would change the work. So there's the premise, the main character is in his mid 20s. He's not sure what to do with his life. He's living in Iowa working as a bicycle mechanic and he's left his family behind in Idaho... This is a mistake, writing about two places that New York publishers don't care about: Idaho and Iowa.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: They're coming. They're gonna come. New Zeitgeist. Idaho and Iowa.Joshua Doležal: That’s right. That's right. But his uncle goes missing and is found dead in an Idaho wilderness, so he has to travel back home to the funeral. And his cousin, who is much younger than him, has no dialogue, no quoted lines. And so one of the reviewers was commenting on this as a flaw. But it was completely intentional, you know –Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Right. Lo and behold, the author of this novel had chosen this for a reason.Joshua Doležal: So yeah, I've been weighing that. As a former academic, it's really hard to let go of those benchmarks of success and the American –Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Well, and that's also, I mean, no offense to that reviewer, who is that reviewer? And even if they're a really famous reviewer, you know, famous, was it Michiko Kakutani, who's the infamous New York Times reviewer, that if you get in her good side, you're great. And if not, you're also kind of great because that just means you pissed her off.It's for me, that's it's been a nice long process of like, I am sure you know at least a hundred people in the world who would want to read your new novel. And I am sure you have a Substack following of which a percentage would also want to. And that's what I recognized with printing, especially having been in the game, so to speak, of at least knowing people within those games.Do you know good editors that are friends or people you respect? And arguably moreso than some random editor who was working for the offshoot press that is associated with this press that is actually connected to Penguin. It's like, what about this professor of mine, this editor, whoever it is?If you have editors, if you have illustrators, you have a printer, you have a layout, I mean, that's the book. And that's publishers, I realize are just usually outsourcing that work anyway somewhere else because of the way the structure is going. So my friend who does cover illustrations at Penguin said I'd love to help you with a book cover.My editor in Paris, former editor at FSG for my first novel – happy to help you edit. And yeah, you pay out of pocket, but you get 100 percent of the profits, which means you can cover your costs very quickly. Again, what's the point of it? If you want 10,000 distributions, sure. Then it's not what's going to happen, but you know, I printed 300 first editions and there are 79 left.I'm going to do some book events in the spring, summer, hopefully sell the rest of those. I made more money selling 70 books myself than I did selling 1,300 through a small publisher that actually gave me a good deal.So all these MFA programs and professionals telling us, you really should, you have to go through the traditional model. It doesn't, it's a lie. I mean, there's no business reason that I can tell unless you don't have any context or willingness to make them to outsource everything to someone else at the expense of 88 percent or whatever that is of wholesale.Joshua Doležal: I want to hear a little bit more about Slim and the Beast, your debut novel. I think Publishers Weekly describes it as a “bromance set in North Carolina,” which I assume is not how you would put it prefer to characterize it.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, they had a fun little single paragraph. That's what you get for Publishers Weekly, you know. I mean, it is a, yeah, I don't know what bromance means. I know what people think it means, and during that era, certainly. It is about a war veteran and a UNC basketball player, and it's about their friendship.I was missing my twin brother a lot at the time, and so I wrote a book very quickly about male intimacy and the connection between men. I was 23, 24, working through that for the first time in my life, so it's certainly a young novel in the sense of I was young when I wrote it. But yes, it is a bromance to the extent it's about men who love each other.And a lot of it takes place through dialogue. It's narrated by a bartender who has these two guys come into his bar and they're waiting out a hurricane. And so that's kind of the pitch. They are heading towards somewhere in the future, but the past is also chasing them through an antagonist and they find reprieve in this bar outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, talking about where they've come from.And it really was just a story that came to me and classic never thought anyone would ever look at it. And I think I queried a couple agents and, you know, polite rejections. And then I heard about this small publisher out in San Francisco and they said, we don't do novels, but we'll try yours. We like the manuscript. You're going to be our flagship. So raise 10 grand in three months. And I emailed everyone I ever knew and said, would you like to buy my novel? If you do, you're going to also be the person who helps make it a reality. And then that worked out. Got to go on a little book tour and read at McNally Jackson's in New York and do the thing I thought I really wanted to do, and it was awesome.And then I came back to Paris and had to find a job, another job, and start writing another novel.Joshua Doležal: So that's interesting. It's not really that you followed a traditional publishing route. It was somewhat adjacent to self-publishing because there was some startup involved and I think Inkshares is described as a crowdfunded publishing house.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, it's like a hybrid crowdfunded model where they essentially just put the risk on the readers. They say, if you believe your book should be read, you should get enough readers to guarantee a print run, which I didn't use Instagram at that point or Twitter. I had no social, I mean, I used Facebook, you know, but that is one thing – writers, if we believe in ourselves, it's also because we believe in our communities. If you want your book to be read, presumably there are people in your mind that you want to read it. And that's the key, I think, is being able to interact with those communities in an authentic way.That Substack is great for, as well. I mean, this conversation is proof of that, right? We just get to speak to people that we feel comfortable with. And I just heard too many stories. I had friends who were represented by huge agents. Years went by with their book being agented, but no publisher picked it up.And then a publisher picked it up, but it was a year and a half later where the book would be printed. And then to your point, royalties were just shocking. I mean, not even shocking, just kind of like made you question what the whole point was, which oftentimes is ego. And that's great. And then you can get past the ego part and rethink it for the next one.I don't mean to besmirch the entire publishing industry. I just think it's a broken model that doesn't…it is a for profit model, which means that the books generally speaking that are selling the most are the ones that were written to sell the most. Now there are exceptions to that, but to your revisions, I would never have written a book of historiographic metafiction if I had an agent, maybe because they would have said this doesn't work and you have to change this and that, and maybe for the right reasons or not.Joshua Doležal: Well, help me, Samuél, help me understand why the Inkshares experience was, I mean, it sounded like, at the time, you felt like it was a win, and you don't have huge regrets on it looking back. You purchased the rights to Slim and the Beast, so you have complete control over it now, but what about that left you feeling like you wanted something else for your next project?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Part of it was the constant need for self-promotion from the crowdfunding standpoint of selling myself before… I didn't want to go back to people saying, well, you pre-order this cause I need your help to publish the book. I wanted to say the book is out and if you want it, you can buy it.That was just kind of a psychological desire for me so that I didn't have to ask for money in that sense. And the other aspect of it was just simply that I saw the numbers. I mean, even Inkshares gave me a 50/50 split on royalties based on wholesale, and I was making around, I think, you know, $2.50 per sale, which, cool, you know, great, you sell 1,300 books.And I'm candid about it because I think authors should be, and especially the ones who are making good money because everyone is kind of looking up to them in the sky as if they've reached the pinnacle. And I think a lot of them have better stories than that. You know, I made around $2,700 and I bought back the rights for $1,000, so I had made total $1,700 on 1,300 sales, and I was like, if I consider myself a professional, and the definition of a professional is making money off your craft, right, then surely there's a better way to make money off of books than selling them for the equivalent of like $1.40 or whatever it is. So from a strict financial standpoint, I was tired of seeing a book sale on Amazon where I didn't get anything. You know, I wanted to be able to say, this is my book, here it is, now you give me a $20 bill or whatever it is. Just that simple interaction.No author can do that for the most part. Even great big authors cannot sell you a book themselves. They can give it to you, but they say, go to this bookstore, go to this website. And I don't think in the future that model will exist in the same way because I do think you need a lot fewer readers if you're making 100 percent of profits than if you're making 7-12 percent before the agent takes the 15 percent and all the other numbers, you know.Joshua Doležal: I wonder if some of it is, as you're saying, cultivating a sensibility as a professional and reaching a point where you trust your sensibility, you're confident in it. You don't feel like you need to be molded by an agent or by an editor. I don't know if that involves a certain amount of hubris because I know many writers have expressed appreciation for their editors, you know, Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King both have written about that – that their work was improved by that partnership with an editor, but –Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Well, and I, to be clear, I do think every writer needs a good editor. It's just a matter of you paying for that editor yourself, instead of a publisher covering that cost, and then you taking the cut, you know?Joshua Doležal: But part of the confidence required to just take ownership of the whole production yourself is you trust your sensibility. You trust that the metafiction idea that you have in mind has a certain integrity and that it's going to hold up and that even if it's not trendy, even if it's more niche, you are going to double down on that.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Right. Yeah, and that's again, I had no illusions about getting onto a bestseller list for novels specifically, but like any book can get on the bestseller list. I didn't think of it as worse than any other one, but I knew that I wanted it to write it in the way that I wanted. And really, honestly, more than anything else, once I finished it in last year, and I thought of the prospect of doing what you need to do when you query agents, which is anywhere from what, 20 to 100. And wait those six-month windows to hear back from them and some say 10 pages and then another two weeks, three weeks, okay, 20 pages, the whole process, right?And then they say, okay, we're going to represent you. Congratulations. Publishers now. Another year, two, three years. For me, philosophically and psychologically, not moving on from this book, whether that meant having to think about the PR in the future or still talking about it because it's new to everyone else…I needed to move on. That's why after 10 years writing it, I was very happy to decide to do it myself. It took a year to find the editors and the cover designers, all the rest of it, and then really move on again, because I didn't count on it to pay my rent.Joshua Doležal: Let me ask quickly how much you sort of invested in the production and so on. And also why you chose to absorb the risk of inventory rather than going with a print on demand service like Amazon's KDP.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Sure. So I invested in total for print costs were just over two grand for 300 copies. So about $7 a copy and then editorial and illustration, you can add another say a thousand, $1200. I think total, I spent around $3,200-3,300 dollars. And if you do the math, obviously, if you're selling 300 books at 20 bucks. You can still make a decent profit on that.I knew from what I'd heard that print on demand, while valuable for large scale distribution, the quality of the print and the paper is just not the same, and that was something I also knew for myself. I mean, it's worth stating, I do live in Paris, in a city where a lot of Anglophone authors in the 1920s, including the Hemingways and Joyces of the world, were printed by either micropresses or really, I mean, Sylvia Beach was the owner of a bookstore and printed and published Ulysses.So it was self published by James Joyce. Who got Sylvia to help and he had editors, including Samuel Beckett, but you know, that's just friends in the community. I don't think I have the level of choice nor friends like Samuel Beckett. That was done in Paris before. Hemingway's first short story collections were just printed small scale, less than a hundred out.And I like that idea of just having an object for myself that I could be proud enough of to not really be worried – if no one ever read the book again, my community will have it. And I did believe that I could sell 300 books between the people I know here and Substack.Slow and steady, you know, I started in late December and there's 79 books left. Walking clients occasionally will buy it. It's a trickle, but I definitely made back what I invested and made profit on that. And if nothing else, I made more than I did on my last book, which from a rudimentary business standpoint is progress. Now what I have to do with this book is go to maybe KDP or IngramSpark, have American distribution, so that your friends in Iowa can go online and click it. And while they won't be getting an email from me directly with a signed book and saying this is one of 300 books, I don't also have to do that anymore.I can send 300 books by mail. I don't think I can send a thousand. If I sold a thousand with this American edition that I'll be putting out in the summer, great. But if I didn't make any sales, I would have already achieved my goal, which is to move on from this book and be proud. And I'm proud of it.Joshua Doležal: So imagine, we're having a drink in Paris, and you're telling me about this book. What would you say it's about, or what's your elevator pitch for it? Sidewalk pitch. I mean, the sidewalk pitch, since we're in Paris.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Sidewalk pitch is it's a novel primarily set in Nazi occupied Poland, and it's about trying to understand how to move on from the past while also acknowledging its effect on the present. I mean, that's the philosophical pitch. It's really, the narrator is a son moving or going back home to help his mother move out of her, their childhood home, and he recognizes her inability to move on from an important part of her life. And his memory is really attached to when he was a child and his obsession with another part of history that we cannot really move on from, and it is the Second World War. I think we can't move on for good and bad reasons, but it is a subject that continues to inspire me.And befuddle, really. I mean, people still don't understand how that happened, the entire history of it, not just the Holocaust, but also the war and the atomic bomb and the effects of post-World War Two on the human consciousness. So how do we get past that moment when we seem to be creeping back towards a similar scenario again?It's kind of a central theme of that book. And I don't know if I answer that question.Joshua Doležal:  Yeah, that was another question I had is, I mean, perhaps no historical moment has had more ink spilled about it than World War II, and because I'm an Americanist, and am somewhat more fascinated by the 19th century and earlier periods, I sort of wonder, I mean, you've got Schindler's List, you've got The Pianist, you've got, I mean, how many works, those are just films, but how many works devoted to this subject, and the narrator and his mother aren't Jewish either, so there's another layer of the “why” question – why return so often to this moment out of all other historical moments?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah. It's a good question. So one of the big aspects of this is it's set in a city that very few people are familiar with in the history of that war, which is Łódź in Poland, and it is unique because it was both where the Nazis wanted to build their frontier city – they thought of it as a Nazi utopian city, and they really called it the city of the future – as you see in the book is a is a real term for that city.In the same city that was of the Nazi totally deranged idea. They had a hermetically sealed ghetto within it. So it was really a living concentration camp. And the juxtaposition I think of modernity and what we think of or thought of modernity up until that point. I think there was no better example then and very few people know about it.And one of the reasons I think that is also true is because of the extremely complex history of the Jewish councils, which existed specifically in ghettos in Poland to supposedly manage everything within the ghettos. But the Nazis, of course, used the Jewish councils to their own destructive ends. So it blurs the lines and asks a lot of really challenging questions about human behavior and how humans react and adapt to extreme violent and cruel scenarios.And I was always surprised in reading anything that you mentioned, Schindler's List or even The Zone of Interest just came out – Auschwitz is the primary theme. There's so many parts of that history that no one talks about, and Łódź especially was for me just kind of one that during my studies, and that is the academic in me, I don't think I would have studied Łódź that long if I hadn't been an academic in that sense. I just don't think it's a part of that history that anyone knows about and for me that is the kind of the point of returning to even the most written about subject in history, is a lot of people that I didn't know about. This let alone mobile German killing units going behind enemy lines.I mean, this is why I'm a tour guide. I could write 10 more novels on it, if I wanted to, I don't want to, but this is the danger of academia. There's always something else that is just a world unto itself. So I wanted to give a different lens to a very known story, or at least thought of to be known story. Because I do think it confronts some questions that are uncomfortable.Joshua Doležal: Well, and the same could be said about layers of historical narrative that are waiting to be discovered in, you know, the boarding school history for indigenous people in North America or industrial mining camps across the West. I mean, all of those have their own troubled histories and discoverability, but your personal connection to this through your studies seems to be significant.And you've kind of answered one of my questions. So the narrator is having this conversation with his mother early in the narrative in the section “the boy at the bookshelf.” And she says, “Son, be careful what you decide to forget. Getting it back isn't as easy as you might think.” So I was planning to ask what you might expect to have been forgotten or what might've been in danger of being forgotten without this book? And it sounds like that particular community, what it represented, the lack of understanding of that city in Poland, is part of the reason.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah. And you know, the Polish people in general…I'm not Polish. The setting of the book is Nazi-occupied Łódź, Poland, but that's not the theme of the book. That just happens to be where the story plays out. And the story from a fictional standpoint really is about three characters trying to survive in that scenario.So from what in Holocaust Studies you would call the perpetrator, victim, and bystander positions and it's a number I often tell people – there were 11 million people killed in the Holocaust, 6 million of them were Jewish. This is not to say that the 5 million other people were just as important or not as important, it's just a historical fact that most people forget. There's 11 million people.The Polish people were annihilated very similarly to the Jewish people in the early days, not in the same systematic way. But this is a subject we don't talk about. Russians as well, of course, millions of Russians were killed systematically. It is not to take away from the importance of the Jewish aspect of the Holocaust. It is just to remind ourselves that if we think of it as just a Jewish thing, which is the classic trope of antisemitism, which I think in some ways is one of the great nefarious horrors that the Nazis continued to influence our thinking, is that…as if it were a Jewish thing. And as long as we're not talking about Jews, it was okay, right? That's shocking to me. We don't think very clearly about what happened to 11 million people, 6 million of whom were Jewish, because it's much easier to just think of the Holocaust as a Jewish thing, and Nazism as a kind of caricature of itself. It was popular with a lot of people, and that's what's scary.And I do think in this era of populism, we're never as far away from sliding back towards a situation where genocide seems to be a solution to something. I have a lot of faith in humans. And I also, because I have that faith, I want people to remember that people had faith in humans in 1939 and 1940. There were things that could have been done and weren't done.That's where I'm a fiction writer, not a historian, because counterfactual history is anathema to any historical discussion.Joshua Doležal: Well your reminder of the statistics, which is a callous way of putting it – the number of people who were killed, the number of casualties, reminds me of some of my own travels in the Czech Republic two years ago. And I'd never visited any World War II sites, so one of them was the city of Lidice, which was not a Jewish community per se, but was just annihilated out of revenge for the assassination of one of the German officers.And the river that ran through was redirected just out of spite. A school was bombed. The statues there are just really arresting. And there's a monument at Lidice. There's a giant rose garden, which is very moving. And near it, there's this monument of all the cities in World War Two that were bombed. And just thinking about how many cities across how many countries had this awful thing in common was a different way of thinking about it. Because I grew up learning about World War II largely through the Jewish experience, the Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust.And so this has been something, a truth, I suppose, that has been kind of suppressed in history. The second site that we visited was Terezín, which was one of the concentration camps and home to a lot of artists. There was even an artistic life there. It was leveraged heavily for propaganda as, you know, things aren't so bad or, look at this community –sporting events and musical performances and things.And so that was also moving, but to see it as part of a bigger, more nuanced, story and not just as the genocide, it changed the way that I thought about it.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: That's a huge part of the book. I don't go anywhere near the camps. They are rumors just in the way that historically they were rumors because I didn't feel comfortable nor capable of explaining that experience and I was very clear in my timeline, the book starts in 1939 with the arrival of the German army, and it ends in the fall of 1942, which for the Łódź ghetto was really the end for a majority of that population.And I chose that – it took a while to figure out the timeline in that sense, but part of that desire was also to acknowledge that there are certain aspects we'll never understand in the sense that unless you've lived through it. And that's part of why I also had to have this metafictional narrator to speak of the diary of Calel Perechodnik, who was a Jewish policeman in a ghetto, or Dawid Sierakowiak, other people, diarists, who I don't, I don't think anyone really hears about.And I wanted to have a vehicle to at least remind people there are stories about this place that exist in the real world that are far better than mine. Because how could I possibly write about life in the Łódź ghetto? For me, it's a portal towards a different realm, but that realm exists in everyone's head themselves.Joshua Doležal: Well, so your narrator wonders later in the narrative, this is at the beginning of your fourth section, which is titled "identity." He wonders what gives him the right to invent historical characters in hopes of approximating personal truth. And I wonder, because you're not Jewish, or your narrator is not bringing that personal connection to the story, have you answered that question for yourself? Are you still struggling with it? Do you have a sense of what the personal truth is that the book's trying to approximate?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: For better and for worse, that question, it was the first years of writing this where I really struggled with should I even think about writing a book that is written from a non-Jewish perspective. But of course, in the novel, the character is called Jewish by the authorities, even though he doesn't define himself as Jewish.And so that allowed me to recognize as well that we are labeled always by other people and even in an extreme scenario like the Holocaust not everyone who was killed because they were Jewish thought of themselves as Jewish, so it was easier for me to put myself in the mindset from a fictional standpoint of someone who was called Jewish because it happens to me all the time. My dad is from Madrid and our name was changed during the Inquisition so it is possible that we have Jewish roots going back to the Sephardic peoples that we can't locate that because the historical record doesn't show it.And part of that comes out, and I think the narrator's voice is this question: if I find out in two years from now that I actually have quote unquote Jewish blood, which again brings up this very problematic idea of to what extent is someone Jewish from a DNA standpoint versus a chosen identity, what would happen?Would that book then be much more valuable, much less valuable? It's an interesting question, right? So I've thought about that a lot because I live in the Jewish neighborhood in Paris, and I'm often asked if I am Jewish, I give Nazi occupation tours, I've always been interested in the history. For me, that personal truth is to decide for yourself what your identity is independent of the external.And that's a very existentialist argument, obviously. I am a Parisian, after all. I do believe, down to the core, we must have the freedom to choose how we identify ourselves. And to write about what we want to write about. I don't feel any responsibility to write or not write about certain characters. I just do it and make sure I do it due diligence to the extent that I can. But of course I'm a flawed fiction writer, like every other fiction writer. So that personal truth is that it's trying to figure it out for who are we independently.I mean, Viktor is the fallen from grace academic, both in his own mind and then he's stripped of all his titles the second the Nazis arrived. So what remains of Viktor, this esteemed academic, once all the lights are off and the diplomas are ripped off the walls? For me, that can even permeate questions of ethno identity, ethnic identity, as well as religious philosophical identity. Who are we really individually?I mean, it's an open question. I don't have the answer to that. I'd like to think Viktor has an idea who he is when he gets to the end of the book, but...Joshua Doležal: So you refer to yourself as a Parisian. And I wonder if your exploration of identity somewhat independent from or in defiance of identity politics is influenced by your Parisian environment, because in America, certainly in the United States, if you invent a character from a different ethnic background or racial community from your own, questions of privilege, questions of power, historical, inherited trauma, all these things come to bear, and there are certain lines that a lot of American artists will not cross. And it sounds like you don't believe in those lines. But they do come with consequences, right? How much of that is just your individual perspective? How much of that has been shaped by your Parisian influences?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, of course. That's a good question. I do believe in those lines to a certain extent. Clearly with this novel, that line is not someone defined as Jewish by the Nazis, because that's the character. But Jewishness isn't really much of a question in this book in part because I don't, the characters that are experiencing the trauma that is, you know, committed upon the entire community are trying to deal with it independent of their own idea of who they are because Viktor is confused about who he is, right?I do think there is one of the great benefits of writing or art in general is exploring different peoples and ideas of different cultures and if white authors from North Carolina only wrote about white guys from North Carolina then A, I'd have a very boring book. B, I would presumably be criticized for not writing white women, and by extension, any number of other characters, and that would make for a very boring story.So I do kind of think it's absurd to not write about people that don't look like you or don't have their background as your background explicitly because you can learn a lot about other people through writing them. I do think there's a responsibility writing diverse characters insofar as you have to investigate that diversity and that cultural background, but I am in kind of a, to your point of the Parisian sense – identity politics is not the same question here. There's not the same preoccupation with ethnic, cultural, and religious heritage as there is in the U. S. And I think part of that is because America is such a diverse country of immigrants that the desire to find an individual identity is at a fever pitch now because we are so fractured as a society.And so you have the benefits of identity politics, but also the dangers, which is, you know, white nationalism is a form of identity politics. It is on the other side of that spectrum. I don't think identity politics should not exist because there's white nationalists, but I do think we should recognize white nationalism is a part of identity politics.And that's what's scary to me about about the era we live in. And why I wrote a book about Nazis is because when you convince people that your type of person and your group is different and different in X, Y, or Z ways, and especially if it's different in a better way, then you've created a divide that…that has been created and that division tends to only get larger.My father is a gay man. He grew up in an era in fascist Spain where to be gay, of course, was extremely dangerous at least to be openly gay. And I've always admired him because while he is a gay man, in the same way that I am a straight man, his identity isn't defined by his gayness either.And he knows that because he's also a theater professor and a dancer and a great cook, and he likes to read Levi Strauss and he's, that's part of the identity, but that's not the entirety. And I do think in this era the preoccupation with specific aspects of identity has created a situation where we feel alienated from each other and also from ourselves.I do believe there is a certain responsibility, yes, in writing characters of any background, but I feel like writers who are gonna take that risk at least will learn something about themselves and about the people that they are writing about.My next book might be about a Vietnamese baker living in Paris. I could, that's what kind of makes me curious as a writer, is I could do all the research, I could spend years speaking to Vietnamese bakers in Paris. I could also just, it could be a guy who's from Vietnam who's a baker, and that's not the entirety of his identity, and also, he also likes to play piano, and that's where actually I find a much more connection to him, and in the same way my Spanishness isn't really a huge marker of how I define myself, maybe this Vietnamese guy is also like, yeah, I'm Vietnamese, but that's not the extent of my identity, you know.Joshua Doležal: I want to nudge us a little bit toward one of the uncomfortable backdrops, I suppose, of The Requisitions and your production of it and your release of it. So I kind of feel like we have to talk about October 7th and the ongoing Israel Hamas war in Gaza.So you'd completed The Requisitions before the October 7th attack, and you went on to publish your open query letter to the Substack community that December.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I did.Joshua Doležal: And maybe I'm missing this, but I don't think you made any mention of Israel in your query or in any of your content since then.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I did not.Joshua Doležal: So I don't know if it's a stretch to say this, but I feel like The Requisitions and the Israel Hamas war have to be read together. And I don't know if you've made those choices deliberately, but wouldn't reading your book in isolation from its echoes in the Middle East right now require a different kind of forgetting?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: 100%. And it, the synchronicity of it happened. It was, again, I'm a novelist, so I don't believe there's really such a thing as coincidence. It wasn't deliberate to the extent that, you know, up until October of 2023, I knew this book was at the finalized draft with my copy editor and then a secondary copy editor, and I wanted it out before Christmas.And then of course, the events transpired after October 7th and following. So I specifically didn't mention anything in my query letter because this politicization of everything is already, I think caused a lot of people to categorically dismiss very important stories from one side or the other because they think they have a moral stance on that.And the Israeli Palestinian conflict, going back to its very inception, and I do think this is from a historical standpoint, a fascinating moment in history, that after the greatest genocide, greatest in the negative sense, largest genocide in human history, a state was…Zionism had existed before, of course, World War II, but the state of Israel was created after the Holocaust.I don't think you can talk about the creation of Israel without understanding the history of the Holocaust specifically. And I do think witnessing over the next 70 years what amounts to one of the largest occupied ghettos in the history of the world, whether or not you agree with the reasons for that occupation, is a real illustration of the complexity of human trauma and human experience and our ability to forget very quickly how we've been treated and how we treat other people.Again, from a political standpoint, I didn't feel it necessary to mention that for the query of my novel. I think it's so fresh and so raw for a lot of people, whether Israeli or Palestinian or Jewish or Arab. What scares me, of course, is the conflation between all those terms and then many more. And it seems to me more in the U.S., at least from afar, that there is a clear division between people who are one side or the other. And then there's lack of understanding of a lot of the language around it.I mean, I have a friend in New York who is a Jewish man, who's secular Jewish, and he’s studied that history more than most people. And there was a "From the river to the sea" sign across the way in New York. And it was his neighbor who, he's a super cool neighbor. And he spoke to them and had a great conversation where he said, this is why it makes me uncomfortable. I know you're not advocating for Hamas terrorists killing innocent civilians, but this is how I feel sometimes when I see this way it's been coopted.That dialogue is essential, and I'm not convinced that making this book about that would benefit the dialogue, because I think you can read this story, which is about an occupation, and understand independently. It's very different types of occupations, very different types of scenarios and histories. But we're still talking about groups of people who fundamentally think the other ones shouldn't exist in one form or the other. And for me, that is the through line, that whether it's Israel and Gaza, whether it's Russia and Ukraine, whether it's some people's rhetoric about Mexicans or Native Americans, I mean, this is constant.And I think that's the fundamental import, is that it is a conversation that people should be having without yelling at each other because we all are human and nobody likes seeing humans killing other humans en masse. Once you get into the numbers and people start comparing types of atrocities and traumas, then we've lost the humanity of it.Joshua Doležal: And of course school shootings, you know mass shootings the number of deaths to gun violence are…people are exposed to it, but it's sort of not acknowledged or not dealt with. I heard someone say once, I'm losing the source, but… America is perpetually losing its innocence. And it's sort of this willful denial of certain realities that I think is part of that.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: As an American, there's a whole lot of guilt that we deal with, especially as white Americans and as a puritanical nation, guilt has been a very powerful force. And I think a lot of people try and sublimate their guilt through political movements very quickly and that becomes…once the politicization of an internal challenge that needs to be confronted by oneself and looked at and understood.I think it's very easy during moments of crisis to become kind of a flag holder for a certain cause to ignore some of the deeper kind of psychological issues we as Americans have about our own sense of identity and white identity specifically and the generational trauma that so many people with skin slightly darker than yours and mine continue to face in white…America is still segregated. I mean, when I go back to North Carolina or Vermont or LA, there are diverse communities, but oftentimes those are still segregated from each other. And that's something you don't have in the same way in Europe just because of the different history. A lot of white Americans especially will say that outwardly, but then you ask them how many people of color do you hang out with or what types of communities you interact with on a weekly basis and it becomes almost like a competition, it's a cliche of the token person of color friend.That still exists today, especially in the States. We should be reading more James Baldwin about this perpetual idea we have of skin color in America. We're far from innocent in that sense, and I think it's hard to confront that. So it's easier to take one side when it seems like innocent people are being hurt, because we want to also be innocent, but we're not. Americans are not innocent, and individually we're not innocent, and that's what Baldwin teaches us, is we have to actually accept that and understand that. Otherwise, we perpetuate that system, you know.Joshua Doležal: Well, two more questions for you about The Requisitions. I think these two flow naturally from that point about Baldwin. So you mentioned this earlier, there are three types that you studied in your Holocaust studies, the perpetuator, the victim, and the bystander. And so that helps me understand a little bit – I was curious why you created a love triangle of sorts between a professor, Viktor Bauman, a German woman, Elsa Dietrich, who returns Viktor's affection, and Elsa's estranged fiancé, Carl Becker, who is an SS soldier. What effect did you hope to achieve or what truth did you hope to eliminate by creating that rivalry or by placing those three characters in tension?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes:  I love that you said “perpetuator.” It's perpetrator, but perpetuator is also a very interesting and apt idea. So perpetrator or perpetuator, victim and bystander. What, just one thing to mention here, this is an idea by Raul Hilberg, who's a great political scientist and historian, but one of the important things about this is that you can inhabit roles within each of these three during the process of destruction.So it's not necessarily you are one and then not the other. It's a cycle. The first reason that I wrote these three characters is very simple. I was finishing my master's thesis and I was studying three thinkers who had three distinct ideas about the human condition. So I thought, oh, what better way for me to make sense of these three ideas than to create three characters. A character who pursues pleasure and avoids suffering at all costs, which Carl is that basic idea. There is then the character who pursues power. And that's the idea that we all want to achieve greatness and something of ourselves. That was at the beginning, Elsa. And then there is Purpose, and that's a character who believes in finding a meaning in life is what we should be doing, independent of if it hurts us or if we are weak because of it or whatever. And that would be Viktor.Now, all of those characters evolved from that. It's not as static as Pleasure, Power, and Purpose, but I did see the story that way. I mean, it's quite simple in the sense that if I spend 10 years on a book, it's because it's an idea I just can't stop thinking about.And the idea was this guy sees this woman across the terrace and it's the moment of possibility on the precipice of one of the most destructive moments in human history. What would happen if I saw a woman across the terrace that I was really intrigued by hours before the world started to crumble? So that was the initial vision. And of course the past comes back to haunt us and Elsa's fiancé, as well as Viktor's in a different side story, their past relationships are also representative of the trauma of history and whether or not we can move on from it certainly with Elsa, but even Viktor too.The first was the vision and then it worked for me. I will tell you, it was a pain in the ass to write that narrative style, because I'm writing a limited third person on each of them, which means that it took me a while to get it right. And so far as I like the idea of three people in the same scenario, seeing the situation very differently.As you know, in the book, the lines approach each other, but the rule of three always has been interesting to me. I saw it in my head. I said, there's this narrator, and then there's these three interwoven narratives, but they also, of course, represent, these schools of thought that I thought were important and I think they're so interesting.I don't know if I subscribe to that holy trinity anymore. Perpetrator, victim and bystander. I certainly saw myself in each of them.I could see Carl as an ordinary policeman who's based on a book called Ordinary Men. How does someone who's relatively ordinary become a mass murderer? I mean, that's the question of Ordinary Men and without spoilers needing to be stated, it's a book about murder. So things happen in the book, but I have to accept and acknowledge that I could be any one of those three. I want to better understand how that happens. So Carl allowed me to delve into a really dark aspect of the human psyche that I am afraid of and hence wanted to look at in, in him and in myself and in us in general.Because if I thought he was just a monster, then I could have written a monstrous character. But if he's monstrous, it's just exactly because he's human. I don't believe in monsters in that sense.Joshua Doležal: It's helpful to think about how we plan and design a narrative and sometimes something like the rule of threes as abstract as it sounds, it plays a role, right? It shapes the story. So I have a kind of related stylistic question.And I don't, I don't mean it to be glib and I don't think it is, but I feel like this would have been the kind of thing that an agent or editor would have killed. And it's your penchant for including strikethrough text. And you do this on Substack posts. Sometimes just a word here or there.You'll show a word and then you'll have the strikethrough through it, and then you'll show right after it the word that you chose. And so there's something very postmodern about, you know, the first draft and the later version. But in The Requisitions, you have a longer example, so you have an epigraph from Kasper Hauser at the beginning of one section where you strike that through and replace it with one from Rilke, but then you begin telling Hauser's story at the beginning of that chapter, only to cross out that entire first paragraph. So this seems to be a kind of signature stylistic pattern. Why not just make the deletion? What do you want to show by juxtaposing deleted text with the words that you settled on?Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah great question. And it's definitely a technique. I actually just started using it on Substack because I felt like it, I would write a word that wasn't actually as good as the next word. And then I thought, well, sometimes it's valuable to see where the thought came from, especially from a linguistic standpoint.The main function of that in the book is because there's street names that are changed. So I cross out this Polish street and replace them with the German, but I didn't want to just put German street names because they used to be Polish. So I wanted to show that in a way that history, in fact, can be changed very easily.I mean, with a simple deletion, if it's not in the book, it's not a fact anymore. Kaspar Hauser's story specifically, it was at a late draft. I decided to cross that out because Kaspar Hauser, just for those not familiar, was a character in Germany, a boy that was found around seven years old and did not speak any language we could understand, but was studied by a philosopher or a linguist and was studied as this kind of feral child in an attempt to understand kind of where our baseline subconscious or psyche is. And Kaspar could never tell his own story because he never had the language to do it with.And so part of the desire to cross out Kaspar's aside from the obvious – this is an author crossing out a text. Remember, you're reading a book, which is part of the book. I'm okay with that. In this era, I don't think anyone ever really forgets they're reading a book, which is a bummer, but that's just a nod to the reality of the world we live in.It was also to show how quickly we can just, I think, it depends, but I think a reader who sees that paragraph may just not read it. And I find that interesting, right? That it's crossed out, therefore it's not important, or that it shouldn't be considered as important. What about history have we crossed out?An agent shouldn't or editor that wasn't my editor certainly would have crossed it out or said, Why don't you just delete this? But I like it. I think it shows the unfinished nature of history. The unfinished nature of writing and also the relationship between reader and writer. It's a dialogue.Joshua Doležal: It shows your earlier point about studying history is studying how we've been deceived. And, you know, at some point there is no amount of research that's going to get you any closer to the truth and you have to sort of decide what story you're going to tell, find the core of its integrity, and tell it and make some of those choices.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, I didn't want it to become like a gimmick. There were, it really is street names and there's scenes with the president of the Jewish council Chaim Rumkowski, who's an infamous character in the history of the Łódź ghetto.And in the process of writing this book, I really wanted it to be clear that when I was quoting Rumkowski, these were direct quotes. But in a fiction novel, unless if you could do a footnote, you could cite it, but then that would require footnotes, which is way too academic. There were a lot of strategies… How do I get the reader to understand that this guy actually said this, even though this is a fictional scene, these are the real words coming from this guy's mouth? So the only other time there are words crossed out is "he really said this" and I cross it out because I didn't actually want to add that in.But again, the facade, the fourth wall is broken.Joshua Doležal: It's a kind of seasoning. Without it, the narrative would taste different.---Joshua Doležal: Thanks for listening. If you’d like to thank Samuél for sharing his story, please check out his Substack – if not, Paris – where you can also order a personalized copy of The Requisitions.Today’s episode is free. To unlock more interviews, essays, and craft resources, please consider upgrading your subscription at joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe. I look forward to welcoming you to The Recovering Academic community.I hope you’ll join me this Friday for the next installment of my Willa Cather Read Along. I’m  hosting conversations on My Ántonia every Friday through the end of May. You can find the reading schedule and updates at The Recovering Academic. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

I’m grateful to Brevity Magazine for first publishing this essay in Fall 2005. A Hot Bath in AprilThis cold snap in late spring has brought much needed rain, and it has given me back my morning ritual. All winter, I rose early and drew a scalding bath first thing, smothering toast with apricot jam while water drummed in the tub. When the weather warmed then turned hot, I began sleeping beneath a sheet and the footsteps of heavy dreams, craving only a cool washcloth against my skin. Night and day converged in a stream of heat and half-waking.Thirty degrees this morning, cold for late April. I am up early, ravenous after a brisk seven hours beneath a quilt. Water tattoos the porcelain tub, muffled by the half-closed bathroom door. I spread apricot jam over the butter, watching them melt into the toast. The kitchen tile chills my feet, bumps rippling across my back.Before long, I will plunge both feet into the steaming water, grimacing at the burn climbing from my toes to my shins. Then will come the ohhhhh of sinking in up to my waist, the sides of my thighs tingling. Soon enough, I will bend my knees and slide my shoulder blades down the slope of the tub, the water creeping up along my belly until I catch my breath as my chest goes under.Better than all of this is stepping back into the frigid air, my body buzzing with heat, veins bulging along both ankles. After drying, I will stride across the kitchen tile like I have always wanted to walk through my life, this skin of mine now the seam where fire and frost collide.Subscribe to The Recovering AcademicUnlock more essays, poems, interviews, and craft resources. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit joshuadolezal.substack.comDon’t miss the latest at Inner Life, where James F. Richardsonshares an excerpt of his forthcoming book “Our Worst Strength: American Individualism and Its Hidden Discontents.”A Conversation with Leslie WangJoshua Doležal: I’m Joshua Doležal and this is The Recovering Academic. My guest today is Dr. Leslie Wang.Leslie Wang: I mean, for me, honestly, like my tagline underneath the tagline of “I'll help you write a book” is, “I’m going to help you feel better about your life.” That's what it is. I'm going to help you suffer less in this career.Joshua Doležal: Leslie grew up in Palo Verdes, California. She followed the coast south to UC San Diego for her bachelor’s degree and then many hours north to Berkeley for a Ph.D. in Sociology. Leslie’s undergraduate honors thesis on the adoption of Chinese children by American parents began as a way of understanding her own roots. The response to her research was so positive that her next step felt almost inevitable.But then the reality of graduate school hit, and her personal passion turned into a grind of constantly trying to prove herself. After a postdoc at the University of British Columbia and brief stint at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Leslie landed what looked like a dream job: a tenure-track position at UMass in Boston. But what looks idyllic on the outside doesn’t always feel that way in the trenches. The turning point for Leslie came the very year she earned tenure, when she also completed certification as a life coach. After several years of experimentation and reflection, she finally made the leap into full-time entrepreneurship. Leslie is now the Founder and Principal at Your Words Unleashed, where she coaches clients on academic writing. But her services go beyond the nuts and bolts of wrangling research into a published book. And no matter your background, I think you’ll identify with her larger mission, which is to make work work better for us. Joshua Doležal: Leslie, let's kind of go back to the beginning. I don't know if I'm reading this correctly. It's always dangerous to assume too much from the bare minimum you see on a LinkedIn profile, but it seems like you grew up in California. Is that correct?Leslie Wang: I did. Yes. I grew up in Southern California by the beach.Joshua Doležal: Were you in San Diego or…what was your hometown?Leslie Wang: So I grew up in a city called Palos Verdes. It's like South Bay. It's basically part of LA County.Joshua Doležal: Did you feel like your family was part of the region, part of the place?Leslie Wang:  Yeah, I think so. I mean, everyone I know kind of has a period of time where they reject to where they grew up. A lot of times I think that happens around high school. So, I grew up in a very affluent area that had a fairly high percentage of Asian people. It's even higher now, but it was maybe 20 percent when I was growing up. But I would say that it's still operated according to a very kind of mainstream upper middle class white set of norms. And so in terms of who you wanted to be, like who was popular, all those things. And so I never felt like I really fit in there. So I think that there were some seeds planted for me around racial and ethnic inequalities, class inequalities. I grew up in a really sheltered kind of environment up on a hill, separated from Los Angeles, and how that kind of impacts people. So once I went off to college, I really sort of rejected this whole idea of trying to really set yourself apart from society. And a lot of these sort of hyper competitive social status sort of things that can happen in areas that are more affluent.Joshua Doležal: Tell me if I'm wrong about this, but I grew up in a blue collar family in Montana and a rural Montana town of less than a thousand people. And maybe 20 percent of that population lived actually in town. Everyone else was scattered through the hills above town.And I grew up with a sense of deep connection to neighbors, to a kind of civic life – hunting culture, the idea that you would share tools or, you know, somebody needed to preserve food, then equipment gets kind of passed around between families, and all of that. And so for me, going into higher ed was a real shift because I was now part of a culture that was much more about I guess, even then, more about personal branding or sort of maximizing professional potential.And so the idea of a place or belonging to a community was not really the priority, you sort of would dip in and dip out of that as you needed to, but the real focus was on, I guess, the Army slogan: Be all you can be. And so that was a real adjustment for me, and I think, as you were alluding to, higher ed forces us to make some of these sacrifices or choices.And so that's a roundabout way of saying my perception of affluent communities is that there is less of a premium on togetherness and on community, and there's much more of a premium on what you described as hyper competitiveness. So you're sort of against the neighbor as far as competitors to get into Harvard, Yale, or something. And you don't really expect to end up back where you started, you expect to go somewhere else.Leslie Wang: A lot of my peers have like their dream was to move back to where we grew up, because they want to raise their kids in the same way that they were raised. So no, I think you're right, though, in terms of like belonging. I'm not sure that I felt belonging to the local community, certainly not like in a neighborly way.Houses were really far apart. And we weren't part of a church or anything like that. But I would say I have a very strong identity as a Californian, as someone from California, who really identifies with I guess, region, as opposed to like neighborhood. Of course, I have my friends, but not so much like community that I grew up with.But it was always, and still is, the goal to move back there, to move back to California.Joshua Doležal: Okay. So you still identify as Californian. You're not a Bostonian. Never will be.Leslie Wang: I don't think so. It's been very good to me out here. I've been here for 10 years now and I wouldn't be the person I am with the family that I have and the job that I have without it. So I have deep gratitude. And then there's also the reality of like trying to raise kids when you don't have any family support and your lifelong connections with people are across the country. Or international too. So that's part of the connection to region too. I think most people have the option usually to live closer to their families. And that's one of the things that's really unique to academia and the military and maybe clergy is you just don't have that choice if you're really going to do it a hundred percent.So I did it and now eventually move back.Joshua Doležal: I'm just curious what defines being Californian to you when you think of that as a regional identity, something that gives you a sense of belonging, what does that mean?Leslie Wang: I think it's actually about environment, like being close to the beach, being close to the Pacific Ocean. It's like topography. It's like sort of what constitutes nature for you, I think, is different depending on where you grew up. So I don't identify as much with like mountains and forests, but like the beach is really a place where I feel like I'm connected to something much bigger than myself.And I associate that more with the Pacific Ocean than other oceans. And I just think the lifestyle is preferable, it's warm. I've experienced a lot of other things. And now I want to go back to what I knew.Joshua Doležal: Yeah. I’ve found as I get older, those native places pull more strongly on me for sure. Well, let's talk then about your decision to go into academe. So in these competitive environments, there are all kinds of professional futures available to you. You could have gone into tech, right? I mean, that's a big part of California culture. You could have done anything. Why did you go into sociology and engineering? And go beyond an undergraduate degree to go on for a PhD?Leslie Wang: So interesting reflecting on this now. I'm 46 and I made that decision when I was 19. But thinking back on it. I think I started as a Psych major, not knowing what that was, and then took some Psych classes, realized that wasn't for me. And I took my first Sociology class. It was just a big 101 survey class when I was a sophomore, and it was the very first time I felt like things that I had thought before were actually appearing before me in lectures.I thought I had created the idea of, like, a self-fulfilling prophecy, or like, I don't know. I had all these ideas, and I didn't know if other people thought the same things. And then I realized there's a whole discipline that thought in a very similar way. And after that, I was like, okay, something's clicking for me here.And I just became really sort of hungry to learn more about different aspects of using a sociological lens to understand gender and family and I became really interested in my ancestral roots during that time as a lot of college kids do. I studied abroad in China, and so I brought that into the things I was fascinated by as well, trying to understand things in a more global fashion.And so the reason I ultimately went down the path of research is that I did like an undergraduate honors thesis. And it was on the adoption of Chinese children by American parents, which at that time, it was around, I guess, late 90s was sort of hitting a peak and I hadn't seen much research on it. So I just embarked on interviewing adoptive parents and trying to learn about both sides of it, the Chinese side, the American side, and I was like, oh, this is a way for me to kind of understand my own roots as a Chinese American person. And then I remember at the end of this summer sort of research scholarship thing that I had gotten, I think it was like a McNair Fellowship – kind of sets students of color and first generation students up for grad school success if they want to pursue it.And so we had to give a research talk at the end. And I remember I gave a talk maybe 15 or 20 minutes on what I've been studying about Chinese adoptions. And someone came up to me later and said, That was my favorite talk of the day. That was the only one where I really felt like I learned something.I learned something new. And I think this was maybe a faculty member and it just hit me, Oh, I'm really good at this. And I really enjoy it. And I'm someone that only does things, is really only motivated to do things, if I’m intrigued by it. Otherwise I'm not going to do it.And so it was like, okay, let's see. And then many people, I think one of my instructors, one of my professors really encouraged me. One or two of them actually were like, are you going to go to grad school? I think you should pursue a PhD. I think you'd be really good at this. And so I did, but you know, I spent two years in Japan teaching English on the JET program and then I started grad school because I didn't want to go directly.I wanted to have some amount of life experience before I started.Joshua Doležal: You find that you're good at something and you get encouraged by your mentors and you follow that path. And there's a whole lot of, I guess, what you're committing to that is not apparent to you at the time. And so I guess going back to that decision, would you tell your younger self anything different from what your mentors were telling you then?Leslie Wang: I think that's so hard. My mentors didn't tell me much about anything. They were mostly just encouraging what they saw as like a promising young mind without any indication of what that path looks like. And I never asked them what the life was like, because all I ever thought about was grad school is grad school. I didn't think much beyond it. Honestly, I didn't think about becoming a professor. I thought that would happen at the end of this long process. And so I didn't have to worry about it yet. And I was like 22, 23. So it's interesting. I had this inflection point a year or two into grad school where I almost quit my program because I felt like why am I killing myself writing these papers, doing all this work, feeling so much imposter syndrome, so much stress and anxiety in such a hyper competitive space when like only one person reading my work is the instructor of my class.I'm like, I don't see the purpose of this. It's not applied. And I want to do something that's applied, that actually makes some sort of difference in someone's life, and what I'm doing right now is not doing that. And so I was investigating other options. I talked to my mentor and he was like before you do that, why don't you talk to another professor of mine who's really good at helping students.And so she was like, you haven't taught yet. Teaching is the applied part of sociology. Wait. And so I did, I waited and I started teaching and it never got that much easier to be honest, but at a certain point I just sort of dug my heels in and was like now I'm in it. So I don't know, I feel like I did really question the path, I questioned the life but I didn't know enough about it and I think that's one of the things that professors probably could do a much better job of sharing with their students is that it's not easy, that there's so much hidden labor. That, in the grand scheme of things, you're really not compensated that well for what you're giving and that there are many sacrifices involved unless you happen to sort of hit a jackpot, which very few people do.But, of course, I was coming out of the University of California system. They were all superstars, like it had all worked out for them. So I think for them it was like, well, it's all worth it. So I don't know that they would have said anything different to me.Joshua Doležal: There's a kind of confirmation bias there. Well, I asked this partly because I've been sort of puzzled by how little has changed in the credentialing process. There's this huge exodus from academe by people like me and like you who were successful, who beat the odds, got the job, earned tenure, and even with all of that left. None of those stories are being told, I don't think, to prospective graduate students. And I know in my own case as a professor and as a mentor, I felt some shame in admitting to my advisees some of those conflicts I was having with my work. I don't know that I'd fully accepted that I wouldn't be in it for the rest of my life.So I would sometimes caution them about the job market Yeah, you could go on and get a PhD. I'm sure you could get into a good program, but just be aware, if you can say no, or if you can take no for an answer, then you should do something else. Like you have to be the stubborn kind of person who's really going to just grind it out and not care about the odds if you're going to make it.But that was only part of the story. Because, as you said, the life, even if you do make it, even if you do win at that game, the value proposition is steadily eroding, and I don't know how to have that conversation with students who are contemplating this, but maybe later we can circle back around to it, because you and I both serve people who are still part of the system. Like we have separated ourselves from it to some extent, but I coach graduate school applicants. I help people with personal statements, and you are coaching faculty with their actual research, and so we're still connected in a way but I just feel like the credentialing process has not really adapted much to the reality that there's this hemorrhaging of talent happening. And a lot of it has to do with the life. It has to do with the eroding sense of purpose. And I guess the overall value proposition of being a professional academic.Leslie Wang: And the material scarcity of positions that pay you enough to survive on. And where I was UMass Boston, we had an MA and a PhD program. And the PhD program started the year that I started, and it was always intended to be an applied program.So the idea was to give students research skills that they could then apply in research based positions. So they could have a current job and then be promoted in that job. For example, what we found was like a third to a half of students still wanted to become professors. So it was almost like, even though we weren't a ranked program in any way, the purpose was intended to be different, we still garnered students that were like, I'm going to be the exception. And I'm like, but this is not Harvard, right? This is not Berkeley. This is not Stanford. There's no guarantee of anything tenure-track wise at the end of this.A few of them beat the odds and did get tenure-track positions. And then when I spoke to them later, they were like, I'm teaching a four-four, I'm living in a high cost of living area. We don't know anybody here. I have no time to spend with my kids. And I think were basically looking for an exit.I think I'm similar to a lot of students in the sense of I had to figure it out for myself. And I think, even if I had known all the statistics and how terrible things were, and how this enrollment dip is coming and how many Sociology departments are being eliminated and will be in the next 5 to 10 years, I probably still would have been like, I could do it, or I want to see if I can do it.And I think that's part of it, was this inner desire to be like, can I do it? I want to prove myself. And I think that's a big part of what drives academics, right? It's, it's a constant proving of yourself, but it kind of never ends. So you know, I think for me and perhaps for you, I reached a point in my career where I felt like I had proven myself enough and I still wasn't happy. So it was sort of like, Oh, okay. If I'm looking for external achievements to bring me a sense of inner satisfaction and self-worth, that's actually not working. So then I had to look for a different way.Joshua Doležal: I like how you framed that: availability of information is no guarantee. Even if you know all of the information, you might not choose differently. And I know for myself, all of this looked just so different from the vantage of a 25 year old with no other responsibilities or commitments. And later, you know, as a father, and thinking about money in a different way than I would have as a single person in my twenties. That's the kind of thing where the value proposition doesn't age well always as you move through your life. And you can't be too hard on your younger self. You have to be compassionate with the decisions that you made, given the information available to you at the time. I just, I don't know if there's a better way of telling that story.The way that I try to do it with my clients who are applying to medical residency or applying to PhD programs in the sciences or in the humanities is to really focus on fit, to ask them to go through a rigorous process of vetting the programs. To see if they're going to get the kind of mentorship that they need and not feeling like they have to play the game to be part of this elite brand or insider club, because you can gain access to those things and then be very miserable.So I really try to help people think about relationships, do some cold emails with would-be advisors and just see how you feel about the reaction you get. But I kind of wonder if that's enough. Aand perhaps as you're saying, everyone has to just learn for themselves and you can't totally protect anyone.Leslie Wang: No, I think that's definitely the case, although there are tools you can give people to help them assess their situations better. And I typically don't coach grad students, but I took one on recently because I'm friends with her mentor, her mentor is really impressed by her but very concerned about her lack of progress and is actually paying for her coaching.And I'm very invested in students of color, in particular students from immigrant backgrounds, really being able to thrive in the Academy. And through coaching her, I think, what I always want to offer to people is that they have options, and that one very good option is to leave their program.I think that that's something that people do not get from their advisors, right? That especially once you've been in it 5, 6, 7 years. And in my program, it was very common for people to take 10 years to finish, because they did these very detailed, lengthy, ethnographic projects that they're trying to turn into books. And there's that sunk cost fallacy that goes along with leaving academia, but it also hits grad students too. And that infantilizing quality of grad school where you could be 35 years old but still sitting on the ground in the hallway, waiting for your advisor to show up. Like it doesn't have to be you, right?Like you can make a different choice, but if you do choose to do it, you can have a certain a certain I think clarity of mind around why you're doing it. So it really depends on your core values, making sure that the things that you're doing actually align with those. So that the research that you're doing feels like it's somehow being internally motivated and not just, I have to do this for the sake of my next whatever or getting a job or getting an article.So I feel like a lot of that realignment can happen for folks at any stage in academia, maybe not at the stage where they're applying. Because they don't know yet. They're not in it yet. But once they're in it, if they're really feeling like this is not right, then it's really good to investigate, like, what about it is not right. And what can you change in that? And in what ways can you put yourself first through all of this? And then also recognize that it's a system that's not set up for you to individually thrive per se. So then you have to take other measures into your hands to make sure that that happens.Joshua Doležal: Yeah, for sure. So you've answered one of my questions about your PhD program, because I was wondering why it took eight years for you, but it seems like that was part of the culture of your discipline and in your program. But then you went to the University of British Columbia for a postdoc and then got the Holy Grail of a tenure-track position at UMass. And you were there how long?Leslie Wang: Oh, before that though, I took one year tenure-track position at Grand Valley State University in Western Michigan. And then I got the UMass Boston job. So I bounced around.Joshua Doležal: Wow. So British Columbia to Michigan to Boston. But then you made it, you made it to the big leagues in Boston, essentially, and you made it through the tenure process. You were an Associate when you left, correct? Yeah, so tell me about that process, because I assume that was a very exciting thing for you to get that appointment initially, but then enough of it faded by the end of it that you left. So tell me that story.Leslie Wang: Oh, where to start? I mean, this is why I don't believe in the concept of dream jobs. I think that it's very misleading to describe things in that way, because it sets up a very narrow idea of what success looks like. And then when it's not that it feels like your world is crushed. So that was basically the job for me was…Boston was a really good move for me.I already had friends here. I was familiar. There were a lot of people from grad school that were in the area, tons of universities around, easy to network, easy to set up like research collaborations and that sort of thing. I think where I got really disenfranchised though, was with the really dysfunctional structure of my institution. And seeing how little care there was for workers, whether they be staff or faculty, or the many, many adjunct lecturers that teach most of the courses on the campus. It just felt like there just wasn't an ethic of caring for people as human beings and the emphasis was on overwork for not really any particular reasons, because you didn't get rewarded for the overwork. You didn't get higher pay for it. At the end of it, you hope you get tenure. So it was like a very dysfunctional sort of structure in a very dysfunctional department, of which there were many folks who'd been around for 25 or 30 years and had these intense personal grudges against one another that they would pull new faculty into.And so every hiring committee became highly politicized, pulling people into closed-door rooms to have these chats about… I was like, this is not what I signed up for. Why am I so stressed out all the time? And why is no one helping me figure out how to do things here? And why am I left to my own devices? And so part of it was the department, but I think part of it was just – here's an institution that wants to be more of a research-based one moving away from a teaching service model, but still maintains all the same standards for teaching and service, the same expectations. And now you've got these mega research expectations. There's definitely not enough preparation given to people, because they're not going to say this place is super messed up – good luck. But that's really what it is. And I think many places are like that.Joshua Doležal: Yeah, I'm sorry to be laughing, because I know that it's really miserable to be part of that. I mean, it's a desperate situation to work in that kind of a department. I'm laughing because it seems humorous to me from a distance now. I mean, I tell this story sometimes…my first semester on a visiting position at the liberal arts college where I eventually earned tenure, there was this longstanding grudge between two of my colleagues and, you know, they were both nearing retirement age. So this had been simmering for many years. And one of them came to my office and asked me what I thought about him proposing to the Dean that he take partial retirement, if somebody else took partial retirement, so they could create a full position for me, like they wanted to keep me.And I was like, whatever, you know, I didn't want to really have any part of it or make demands on anyone. And it turned out that he blindsided this other colleague with this proposal in a department meeting and asked him, Hey, so and so, aren't you prepared to make a sacrifice for your friend Josh here?Leslie Wang: Oh, goodness.Joshua Doležal: And it was really meant to be a gotcha kind of moment. And I'm sitting there as a completely contingent visiting person thinking, Oh my God, this other guy's going to think that I collaborated or colluded or something. And I mean, it was truly a kind of panicked week or two after that, but from a distance now it just seems absurd.And so there's more than a grain of truth in like the Netflix series “The Chair” or the AMC series “Lucky Hank.”Leslie Wang: Totally.Joshua Doležal: That seems just completely hilarious from afar, but when you're living it, it is the worst. It's a kind of hell.Leslie Wang: I mean, it feels so life or death. And that's the thing is like, okay, the stakes are low from a distance. But when you're in it, it feels like everything.  The summer before I even started my position at UMass, I was put on a hiring committee.And our annual conference is in August and I was asked to go interview candidates. I hadn't started the job yet. So here I'm trying to answer questions about a department I hadn't joined yet. I mean, it's like, what? Why? It's like a waste and it was also very stressful for me because what do I have to say about this place yet I had visited once for my interview. So of course I'm like talking it up and all this, but it's those asks that you're like, what a waste of effort. It's not purposeful.At a certain point I think it was like, every new thing became like another notch that I was keeping like this very long list of grudges. And at a certain point it was like, there's too many grudges. I can't do this anymore. And of course I was trying to pivot out of my position. I had applied to other ones and I'd even interviewed elsewhere. I don't think I want to leave Boston though. So that does really narrow things down.Leslie goes on to describe how getting trained as a life coach changed her thinking about the future, how long it took for her to feel ready to leave academe, and how she helps others either make work work better for them in higher ed or prepare for a better life beyond it.

The marriage was a shovel so full it broke. Tell the children, so they may know strength can snap in the ablest hands when a load is too eagerly thrown. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Joshua Doležal: I’m Joshua Doležal and this is The Recovering Academic. My guest today is Dr. Kate Rogers. Kate is a psychologist by training. Her B.A. is from Wake Forest, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, and she was Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga for four years. Her story is a little different from others in this series, because she didn’t leave her faculty job because of the corporatized university, dissatisfaction with her pay, concerns about being denied tenure, or any of the other symptoms of burnout that have defined the Great Resignation. If her partner had not found his dream job in Seattle, Kate would still be teaching in Tennessee. Unlike other academics who spend months translating their research and experience into industry language, Kate transitioned smoothly into a role as Behavioral Scientist with Zillow, a real-estate marketplace company headquartered in Seattle. Since joining Zillow in 2019, she has been promoted four times, holding some positions for as little as three months before moving into a new leadership role. Kate is now Senior Manager of Behavioral Science and Experience Measurement at Zillow.Today we talk about how industry allows Kate to continue her research into human behavior, how the “why” that drove her as a professor — helping people get to where they want to go — remains at the heart of her role as a senior manager. We talk about current trends toward jobs-based curriculum in higher ed and whether a traditional liberal arts degree still meets the needs of our time. And we reflect on how our professional lives often uproot us from the communities that shaped us.Today’s episode is free. To unlock more exclusive interviews, essays, and craft resources, please consider upgrading your subscription.A Conversation with Kate RogersJoshua Doležal: So I have to ask where you're from originally, because you have quite a winding path on a map.Kate Rogers: Yeah, I did tend to move diagonally cross country, but I grew up in western North Carolina outside of Asheville before going to the middle of the state-ish for undergrad. And then to Canada, Vancouver, for grad school, then Tennessee as a professor, then Seattle for my job now.Joshua Doležal: I was going to ask if you picked the geography of any of those places or if they were degree related. So Wake Forest is the only one you chose for that reason?Kate Rogers: Vancouver was a wonderful place to live for a lot of reasons. It's beautiful. And it's where I ended up meeting my husband. So that seems like a great thing. It was difficult moving that far away from my family and moving to a different country. Even if it's still Canada, you have to get the bank accounts, the different phone and all that kind of stuff.Then, admittedly, moving back to  the area I grew up, I actually had family in Chattanooga. So that was really amazing. And I got very lucky with that and it was kind of nice being in that type of place again, around those types of mountains and knowing what that's like.When I was in Canada, people would give me a hard time for my southern accent. When I moved back to the South, people gave me a hard time for sounding Canadian. But it was nice to be there. Nice to have some of the Southern food around again, not gonna lie.Moving to Seattle also felt like kind of coming home because it's so close to Vancouver. I love having the mountains and the ocean here. So I think it's been okay. My parents loved having me just a couple hours away from them, and I enjoyed being closer to family. But at the same time, this is where the job opportunities were. And that's kind of how it goes.Joshua Doležal: Well, I'm still kind of lingering in your academic chapter because it seemed like you were a very high-performing student at Wake Forest. You graduated with honors and you were a double major, if I'm reading that correctly, in Psychology and Religion. And I'm curious if you chose Psychology because you loved it more or because it was the more practical professional route.Kate Rogers: It's mostly because I loved it more. I think the parts of religion that were particularly fascinating to me were people who changed religious beliefs, like you hear a lot about like new religious movements which we commonly will call cults and people talk about you know that process of people joining those is this wacky thing, which is probably not fair, but I think it's really fascinating to think about people who make a choice between denominations, because I think you could have similar things going on there and as well as thinking about trying to step back and look at religious beliefs. Growing up in the South, I was raised in a very Christian kind of environment, and so that feels very normal to me, but if you try to step outside of that experience, thinking through is that any more normal or reasonable than other groups that we maybe think of as being not reasonable? And so that was fascinating to me, but Psychology was always my first love.Joshua Doležal: As a humanities person, I'm curious if you're still using anything from your religious coursework or your religion training in your professional life now?Kate Rogers: So, one, I had a specific ethnography class that I think has served me well at times. Not that I am much of a qualitative researcher, to be completely honest, but I think that's been helpful. I think some of it is otherwise hard for me to separate from what I did in psychology, because I think between both of them, it's that thinking through, oh, people are different. People think about the world differently. People have different views and different beliefs. They're all equally valid. That I think comes from both. I just will happen to think about it from a religious context.Joshua Doležal: So you, I assume, were mentored by professors you loved and wanted to be like them, and that's part of what pulled you into that academic path. And you beat the odds – you got a tenure track position. You weren't part of this purgatory of postdocs and perpetually contingent lecturers or adjuncts. You taught for four years at UT Chattanooga and you were getting close to tenure, the Holy Grail really for academics. So I'm curious why you pivoted to industry in 2019, partly because this was before COVID and the Great Resignation that I was part of and that is still going on.So what changed your attitude toward the profession that your whole path had led you toward – and that you were winning at, right?Kate Rogers: In my particular case, to be very honest, my partner found his dream job in Seattle, so he came out here, I stayed in Chattanooga and then I taught and ran my lab remote for a semester. And then I took a leave of absence for a semester, which they were kind enough to grant me. So during that time I applied for some jobs and happened to land the Zillow one and it ended up being a great fit, because…I was not unhappy in my job.I think if this hadn't happened, I would probably still be at UTC, because I had really great colleagues. I enjoyed the research I did. I enjoyed the good parts of teaching. I think if you've taught, you know, there's not necessarily all good there, but this opportunity, once I was there, there were things that just kind of clicked in a way that I hadn't experienced in academia that made it worth that switch.Joshua Doležal: A common story for a lot of folks who've gone through this transition even when they've made it voluntarily has been a kind of grieving process. You seem like a very upbeat positive person, so maybe that wasn't as hard for you. But you probably didn't expect to ever get tenure again when you gave it up, so was there anything emotionally hard in that for you?Kate Rogers: Yeah. I mean, I think it was really hard to shift from that identity, because my partner, when we got together, he knew I was an academic, he knew we would move where I had a job, and then this kind of happened. And so, I will admit, there were some tense months there. I don't know if grieving is the right word, but certainly reconciling identities and the extent to which I am still an academic – there are things in me that I think will always be that piece of it. But also pivoting to be like, hey, your identity is more than your job, I think is a big piece of that.But I talked to quite a few other folks who had made that jump beforehand and I think that was really helpful and talking with them about what this looks like, what this could be, in preparing me for at least some of those things that were going to come up.Joshua Doležal: So when you think of Kate Rogers as more than a senior manager for Zillow, what do you fill in there for your identity now?Kate Rogers: Wow. Yeah, those are hard questions. It is just thinking about it as a whole, a whole person. I am a person outside of my job. So that means I have the energy to have hobbies outside of my job instead of feeling like you have to work all the time or when you go on vacation, not having to take work with you is amazing.Probably a lot of people would say dog mom for me, because I do post a lot of pictures of my dogs, I'll admit that. But there are other facets to my life where I can spend more time and more energy, and I don't have to be tied to this single thing that defines me anymore.Joshua Doležal: Let's talk about that transition, then, because it seems, for anybody moving from academe to industry, the first leap is the hardest. So my colleague Aditya Mahara compares a professional path to swimming between islands, and the island of academe and the island of your first industry role are the farthest apart, often. So how was that switch for you? Because I'm looking at your title and it seemed like Behavioral Scientist was pretty similar to what you were doing in academe. So was that not much of a leap for you?Kate Rogers: Yeah, I can't honestly imagine an easier transition. That's not to say that it was super smooth and perfect. But as far as it goes, I transitioned to a role, but did pretty much everything I was doing before. Like, we did end to end research. So I just didn't have to teach and I didn't have the service aspect required of me.I didn't use personality psychology as much. I was using more broad theories for that. But otherwise it was very, very similar to what I was previously doing and I was also really fortunate.When I joined, I was the 1st person on my specific team. So, it's really just me and my manager for several months, which was intense, but also great because I got a lot of feedback that way. But the broader team had a lot of academics on it, including my manager. There's also some culture shock that goes on there, the language that you use, how you communicate, all of those little things.And so they also got it and gave me maybe a little bit more grace than other people would when I'm sure I did things that industry in general would be like, what are you doing? One of the things that my manager said was you can't take a week or two weeks to respond to an email.We know in academia, it could take months to get a response, and pointing out some of those very specific differences, I think also is really helpful in setting you up for success. Because I think if you don't have a manager who gets some of those cultural differences, it just takes you that much longer.Joshua Doležal: You mentioned some of the shifts in discourse. So learning a new vocabulary, some of these are acronyms like KPI, or…what were some of those that were foreign words to you initially?Kate Rogers: Part of it was just the communication style. So the specific work I was doing was very heavily methods, quantitative. So like, if I did a presentation, it was a 15 minute presentation, probably 10 minutes of it was on methods and diving in really deep to the stats. Don't do that in industry. They do not care. And so that was a huge shift and figuring out how to communicate to them the same way – you figure out how to communicate to students when you're teaching. That kind of thing, or keeping emails really short and concise.The thing that's still kind of is mind blowing to me is the fact you can just look at people's calendars and put meetings on there and it's just done. Because I was used to sending Google polls or Calendly things, so having that calendar visible and just being able to put it on there. I don't know, it's just very strange.Joshua Doležal: You're bringing back memories of long, drawn-out faculty meetings where we're talking about the academic calendar, right? And trying to carve out an hour for something new, and then it butts up against everyone's labs and there's this howling chorus of complaint. So, yeah, we're not very efficient. I say “we,”…I'm not in academe anymore either.So tell me a little bit more about the roles that you've held at Zillow. This is one of the big differences, I think, between industry and academe, is that you were an assistant professor for about four years, and then in just one more year you've held five different positions at Zillow, right?So you would have only had three titles, basically, if you'd stayed on the tenure track. You would have become an associate, eventually a full professor, maybe you would have been an endowed chair or something, but that's about it. So tell me a little bit about those roles that you've held. What was the difference between Behavioral Scientist and Senior Behavioral Scientist, and on up to your managerial roles?Kate Rogers: So Behavioral Scientist, Senior Behavioral Scientist, and then Principal, were all those individual contributor, like, IC roles. You're not managing other people. And so moving up through those was basically just doing more complex projects, working in more abstract kind of ambiguous spaces, getting more visibility and who your stakeholders are. So who the people are that are really using the research that you're doing and who you're talking to as well as the type of research. So sometimes you're going to be doing very tactical, so very focused on this one particular problem or one particular change.And as you go up, you're more likely to do projects that are going to influence instead of one part of a product or an experience, a whole product or a whole experience. So that broadens as you go, but at the same time, the work you're doing is similar. It's just kind of growing in complexity and breadth of impact. Once you get to that principal world, there is more expectation in terms of at least informal kind of leadership. So you're not in charge of folks or managing them, but a lot of times you're kind of a leader in your space or in your discipline.And so you have kind of that role model expectation, mentoring types of expectations, that come with that. Part of this happened because we had some re-orgs. So re-orgs don't really happen in academia very often, which is good. But in industry they can be very common.And so for me, the behavioral science team was on the econ research team. And then we switched to be part of Zillow research and insights, which has basically all of the research disciplines joined together, which is really cool. We have UX research, basically, a market research team and population science, all pulled together.And part of that experience opened up new opportunities for me in doing those changes. But yeah, that's pretty much it.So now I do very little to no research. I do occasionally do some internal surveys. We're in the design org, so I'll run some for them primarily because I really like making pretty graphs, so I get to play with art and make those graphs when I do that.So that's fun. But otherwise my day is spent more thinking about what do I need to be doing for the behavioral science team? I also have a second team now of experience measurement. So what do I need to be doing for that team? The infrastructure and how that team operates, that type of aspect, as well as helping the folks that report to me figure out the work that they should be doing, unblocking things for them, thinking about their career development in that aspect.So it's a lot more, honestly, thinking type of roles in much less hands-on being able to check stuff off a list, which can be really nice when you're doing research. You can feel very accomplished and complete because, hey, that project's out. A lot of this stuff is much more kind of ambiguous and squishy now.Joshua Doležal: I was going to ask you to describe your most recent project, but it sounds like in your current role as a senior manager, the projects are kind of ongoing if they're people related.Kate Rogers: We have what we call Z Retreats, because we are fully remote, so they'll pull, like, orgs and teams together in person, so, it's basically an onsite type thing and I run surveys for the design org on that. That's the main type of project that I have done in the last year or so, just their surveys about how effective was this.Joshua Doležal: I'm fascinated by the fact that you work at Zillow because I don't think of Zillow as a multifaceted company, you know, it's just a website that I've gone to to look at real estate. There's apparently a lot below the surface there. So I would never have pegged Zillow as a place where a behavioral scientist would work. Or I would think of it more as a kind of techie company where people would be needed to code or, I don't know, figure out the algorithms or look at data from search results and whatever.So help me understand better how your training has really benefited the company?Kate Rogers: Yeah. And so I think I'll talk kind of broadly about the folks that have been in behavioral science. So I think, one, your perception of Zillow as a place where I go and look up homes, like a Saturday Night Live skit, is very, very common. But there's a lot of different parts to the business.We have the agent side of the business. We also have Zillow home loans. We have a rentals business. There's a bunch of different arms there among others, but typically the way that I think about how our team, what our team does, it's helping people make the best decisions for them about moving, finding a new home, buying or selling their home, whatever that looks like.And so sometimes this is running experiments to help agents do their jobs more effectively. Other times it's helping figure out the best ways to present and frame information to folks to make the decision that is going to be best for them.So some of that is on platform types of things that you experience as well. And so, like, on the team, we've had psychology, political science, sociology, behavioral economics, information, I think that's every, all of the degrees we've had. And so people are coming from an experimental background, typically have experience writing surveys or doing survey experiment type of work.And that's really what we're leveraging a lot of in terms of the methods. But one of the things that makes us really unique is we are really explicitly testing the theories of human behavior. The theories that we all learned in grad school is what we are very explicitly taking into context to test the effect because a lot of times if you read behavioral economics, they'll be doing loss aversion or something like that, and it's with a dollar pencil or a five dollar coffee mug, which is fairly different than hundreds of thousands of dollars for a home. And so it's kind of translating that and testing it in that Zillow environment to see, does this still play out the same way? How should we be thinking about this? How should we be using this information?Joshua Doležal: Am I right? I mean, what you're telling me is kind of mind-blowing. But I don't know if I'm understanding it correctly. None of what you're doing now would be published in a peer reviewed journal, but it sounds like original research.Kate Rogers: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you are correct. We haven't had any research publications. We have had external publications. One was, I did a  study during peak COVID times of realtors wearing a mask – when you're looking at a home, they're in the pictures with a mask on, that kind of thing, because we happened to run across that.And then we've also got some paint research that Zillow has published and used that's available externally, but aside from that, yeah, everything is very good internal competitive intelligence types of things. But it is absolutely original research start to finish, working with the business to identify what are some of these key questions that we need to address, but aside from that starting point of where the question or the issue is coming from.The process is the same as in academia except for also a much shorter timeline.Joshua Doležal: Obviously some of your research is proprietary or all of it is. So it's protected within the confines of Zillow. But then people are getting degrees in behavioral science that really don't include, so they are being taught theories that may not be consistent with the human behavior that you've observed.Do you think there are real gaps there between how people are being educated and what people like you who have different tools and are obviously looking at a narrower human pool for your experiments or your research. But do you think there's knowledge that you have access to as a corporate researcher that would change how certain methods are being taught in academe if it were available?Kate Rogers: I think that's an interesting question. I don't know that it would change how anything is being taught. One of the big differences between the basic and applied science is testing it in these specific situations. So, in general, loss aversion works this way. However, when you're faced with such a complex decision, like buying a home and moving and all of that, it may or may not work exactly the same way. I don't think that actually changes how we think or use the theory.Another thing that's often in the back of our minds is everything around the replication crisis. Making sure we're aware of the things that have and haven't replicated and how we may or may not see that play out the same way in what we're doing, as well. But ultimately our goal isn't theory building. So we're applying these theories, but we aren't going to try to figure out that much if it doesn't work, or if it does work really digging into why it works.Joshua Doležal: I want to go back to your transition, because there's a whole cottage industry out there now for coaching people through that transition to get to the first role. And then once you're part of the club and industry, then all these other opportunities unfold and you know, promotions proceed at a kind of alarming pace. So it seems like once you're part of a team as a PhD, your competence becomes immediately apparent and then leadership opens up and lots of good things happen. But the first leap is the hardest one.And so it was not hard for you, it doesn't sound like, but when you are counseling other people or looking at applicants, what are some big mistakes people are making? And what do you suggest they do instead?Kate Rogers: One, reach out and talk to as many folks as you can. And you can do this by looking at your network. You can also do this by searching on LinkedIn or something like that, just searching for jobs that sound interesting to you and finding people that way and messaging them. I think a lot of times folks have the hardest time with identifying the right jobs or what might fit for them.I think this is especially true for humanities. I think psychology, often, the default assumption is either data science or UX research, to be honest, outside of maybe some niches in psychology, but there's certainly a ton more out there than that. And that's where talking to folks who are in industry or in government jobs or a nonprofit jobs and getting a sense from them about, hey, what types of titles should I be looking at, I think is really helpful. Really putting the time and energy into your resume. Really translating what you did in academia to how that aligns with what you're wanting to do in industry and really focusing on the impact of what you did.Whereas I feel like a lot of times, at least in my area of academia, we focus a lot on the methods that we use to get there or that kind of thing, but have the impact. Depending on the role you're looking for, the method you use may or may not matter at all.Just apply to everything. You don't have to fit 100 percent by any means.The other thing I encourage people to do a lot is to really sit down and break down the parts of what they're currently doing that they love, and maybe that they dislike, whatever that looks like, so being really thoughtful and splitting apart the different components of what it means to be a grad student or a professor because there's so many different things that you're doing with that and looking for that type of match.Teaching is huge, because when you're teaching you've learned to communicate to a different audience. That is exactly what you're doing in industry. If you know how to tailor to one audience, you can learn to tailor to the other audiences. So I really encourage people to highlight that piece and how that is effective and useful for them. Because a lot of times when you go academia to industry, you know how to do kind of the hard skills of the job. What you're learning to do is be in business and work in that way. And if you have a track record of, well, I know how to, change in this way to meet this need, you can probably do it again.Joshua Doležal: I want to shift to the bigger picture of higher ed, because even though you've left, I don't know if you have kids or plan to have kids, but I have three children and I find myself caring almost more about some of these trends and systemic problems in higher ed as a parent than I did as a professor.And so in your case, it sounds like you didn't grow disillusioned with the job and leave because of a values mismatch. It was just your spouse's job and personal reasons that caused you to move. But why do you think it is that Ph.D. programs are still credentialing people in fundamentally the same way, when there are so clearly fewer jobs and many more of them are becoming outsourced to adjunct, contingent type positions? Like it's over 70%, I think, of people who, are teaching or hold academic positions are now either adjuncts or lecturers. Why do you think PhD programs are still operating with business as usual and not adapting?Kate Rogers: There's a lot more acceptance and awareness of people doing industry internships throughout grad school that I think is super helpful and it's making a big difference. It's not necessarily a big bad secret if you're a PhD student wanting to go into industry compared to how it would have been when I was there.The system is big and old and change takes a long time. Assuming you aren't going into massive amounts of debt for your PhD, if you want to do a PhD, you should have that opportunity. I would not recommend doing it if you're going to go into debt, but going into it with your eyes wide open and having that awareness of yeah, this probably won't result in a tenure track job for me, I think is a key part of it. But I don't think there's necessarily anything bad in learning for learning’s sake.Joshua Doležal: When I began teaching, I felt like the institution valued what I brought as a humanities expert. By the time I left, I didn't feel like that was the case at all. I felt like the curriculum was shifting toward job skills, not what I would think of as lifelong benefits of humanities education. So there's a current climate of stressing employability as the primary good of a college education. And I don't know if you were reverse engineering your own education to prepare yourself for the role you're in now, do you think the current trends are a good thing? Or was the more conventional education you received actually better for the work you're doing now?Kate Rogers: I mean, for the specific stuff I'm doing now, we require a PhD. So that was the right thing for me. That being said, yeah, I went to a liberal arts undergrad. I think it is very important to have that well-rounded piece. I think it does make it harder to be immediately employable, right, because you just don't have that translation right away, but at the same time, I wouldn't trade it for the world.One of the things that I realized is, I love psychology. I love it. But most of what students get out of my classes is not going to be related to psychology facts. It's going to be that general…people are different. We should think about how we communicate and that. And one of the most important values or things that I tried to actually train students to do was learning how to learn. And so I spent a lot of effort and time designing my courses so that they would learn how to learn, because I think that is one of the things that can best serve them forever. And I think that is a skill that not everybody knows. You do come out with skills. It's just figuring out how to make that clear to other people.If I had a kid going into undergrad right now, I would encourage them to major in whatever it is you are interested in and want to do, and maybe minor in one of those practical things, that type of thing to get a little bit more to make that jump easier potentially for them. Especially since I don't know what it's like to get an undergrad degree and then go get a job, but absolutely still value that liberal arts, humanities education piece.Joshua Doležal: I've been thinking about this and have a theory that I think is fairly simple, that a lot of people who've made the transition, when they're translating their skills, they are making the kind of case that typically something like an internship makes by default. If you had an internship as an undergrad, that is your bridge into industry, that's your first industry experience. You don't have to do all this unwieldy translating or not as much of it because there's not a big gap. You've already built that bridge across.So instead of trying to teach Shakespeare for employability, instead of reframing the purpose of a humanities education with employability as the higher goal, I wonder if the more traditional model still holds. And it's just a matter of in the junior or senior year finding some of these more practical pathways. It wouldn't even have to be a minor in communications or a minor in business. It could be something like an internship with a nonprofit or an internship with Principal Financial in Des Moines, which was one of those places where a lot of our Econ graduates or business graduates went to work, and there's no reason why an English major couldn't have an internship at a place like that in their senior year as well.I don't know if that passes the sniff test for you as an industry insider, if it would be as simple as, instead of reframing the whole conventional curriculum with industry in mind, just creating more industry-specific bridges like internships?Kate Rogers: Yeah, I mean, I think that's very viable. And I think I know at least UBC had some really strong programs for that. And I think UTC was also doing more with that. I think the part that gets tricky to me with internships is the unpaid versus paid part and making sure that they're not just unpaid so that everybody who wants to have this opportunity can actually afford to have the opportunity. The financial component to everything related to undergrad, is a key part of that conversation to me, because too many people are going into massive amounts of debt for it. That's not great. And it's keeping people who would love to go to school from being able to go and all of that. And so making sure that when these opportunities are available, that they are equally available, so someone who needs to work or is supporting a family or going to school at night still has some of those same opportunities for them.Joshua Doležal: I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this for myself to borrow Simon Sinek's phrase, the “why” of things. Professors have a why. People who naturally gravitate to business have a different why. And I'm curious what your why was as a professor, what your why is now at Zillow, how the two overlap or differ?Kate Rogers: Something I was worried about going into industry was, you know, would I still find these questions interesting. But answering these questions is hugely satisfying to me. The other kind of why that is actually between both of them, too, is still that mentoring and helping people grow in their careers, how it looks is different between when I was a professor and working with undergrads and grad students. But that's been I think a big piece for both. I really enjoy helping people get wherever they want to go. I don't care. Where did you want to go? Let's see how we can find the ways to get you there. And I love finding opportunities for people to shine and succeed and grow in those skills. And that was something that I could do as a professor – I can honestly do it a lot more now, because more of my job is that now. But for me, the whys have stayed, honestly, pretty similar. It's just how it's translated in action that's been different.Joshua Doležal: Thanks for listening. And big thanks to Kate for sharing her story.Today’s episode is free. To unlock more exclusive interviews, essays, and craft resources, please consider upgrading your subscription at joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe. I look forward to welcoming you to The Recovering Academic community.If you enjoy this series, you might also like the Recovering Academics Roundtable, where Gabrielle Filip-Crawford and I host conversations with industry experts for academics who are in transition or who are contemplating an exit from academe. We meet most Wednesdays on Zoom at noon, Eastern time, and you can follow me on LinkedIn for weekly updates.Goodbye for now, and I hope you’ll stay tuned for Friday’s discussion thread, where we can unpack my conversation with Kate together.More in the academe to industry series ⬇️ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Sap is running in the sugar bush, the ground is loosening with rain and warmth, and I’m soaking my first round of garden seeds. I have observed the rites of spring planting for most of my life, and I know of no more hopeful ceremony. There is always some dreaming involved, a little picture making about the patterns I’ll create with Black Magic, Winterbor, and Redbor kale. How I’ll train the Sashimi cucumbers up a trellis, so the gherkins can fatten in midair. How a white hibiscus might look against the side of the greenhouse. This week I’m dreaming about peppers. They grow slowly, so I start them first, soaking the seeds overnight and planting trays the next day. My favorite is Joe’s Long Cayenne, an heirloom from Seed Savers Exchange that a friend calls “witch’s fingers.” These peppers dry up nicely for red pepper flakes, but I especially like them for homemade hot sauce, which I make in such large quantities every year that it feels a little like sorcery.If you’d like to brew your own batch of Louisiana-style sauce, read on for my recipe. But I also want to think a little about the food arts and why even something like hot sauce, a culinary afterthought — a condiment, for God’s sake — strikes such a deep chord with me.Part of it is that growing food ties me to a place. Even if gardening requires ripping out the old, making it new, imagining how it could be, a fresh growing season reminds me of the longer arcs of natural history, what shaped the soil and streams, and of human communities, how many hands the land has passed through. And so my garden moves forward and back in time, recalling how it was and who entrusted this ground to me.I know from neighbors that the previous owner of my new home was also divorced. But before he and his wife parted ways, they built a garden together. He tended the vegetable beds, pieced a greenhouse together from salvaged materials, and carted in rocks for a koi pond. She reclaimed huge swaths of yard with perennial beds, with the daffodils and ferns now sprouting new shoots, and many other grasses and shrubs that will reveal themselves slowly, like panels opening in an advent calendar, all through the spring.After she left, he tended the grounds alone, plying the neighbors with surplus zucchini and corn, as I surely will do. I wonder if the hardest part of selling the place for him was leaving the garden behind, wondering whether a new owner might till it all under, turn it all back to grass. Call me sentimental, but I found a way to get word to him in his retirement community that I was excited to pick up where he left off, that he could rest in the knowledge that his vegetable beds had fallen in good hands.I like knowing that this garden was a place where two people carried their hurt, where they each grew beautiful things out of their pain, and where one of them carried on alone, as I will do. I feel a kinship with that pain and also with the impulse to transform it into flowers and potatoes and beans. My Iowa garden once belonged to the estate of the town’s founder, Domine Scholte, who brought his young wife, Mariah, from the Netherlands to the frontier, where he built her a large house and placed the rest of their acreage in her care. But their relative comfort did little to ease Mariah’s loneliness. She was a reluctant pioneer. Her china was smashed in transit, so she lined her garden paths with the shards of those teacups, saucers, and plates. She also suffered many miscarriages and buried the remains among her roses. I unearthed Mariah’s china fragments while turning my own garden beds, and I kept them in a row on the window sill. I’d think of Mariah while watering my zinnias, while picking green beans, while pruning my golden raspberry canes. Those shards reminded me that gardens are good places for grieving. You can trust your deepest hurt to the shade of an apple tree. You can postpone your wish for death by digging a furrow, filling it with purple potato cuttings, and mounding it like a grave, knowing that the end of the story will be resurrection. My peppers tell the same tale. Joe’s Long Cayenne went by a different name in Calabria, Italy, for hundreds of years before immigrants brought it to Toronto. A man named Joe Sestito (for whom the heirloom is now named) carried the seeds to Troy, New York, where Dr. Carolyn Male discovered them in 1996. Seed Savers Exchange has now kept the variety alive for nearly 30 years. And so it is hard for me to think of my hot sauce as a condiment. It is a story to tell, a touchstone for history, a tradition to pass down. In that way, my sauce is not even mine — if it belongs to anyone, it is to a gardener yet unborn, or to the craft of husbandry itself.How to Make Your Own Hot SauceI’ve experimented with many recipes, and if you like smoky notes in your sauce, Chantelle’s recipe at Naked Cuisine will make a tasty blend of tomatoes, garlic, and chiles. But the most savory sauce is fermented, and I learned that particular sorcery from Robb Walsh’s Hot Sauce Cookbook. Since I can’t hand my extra zucchini over the fence to you, I’ll share my method for making a year’s worth of my own Tabasco-style sauce.The first step toward the best hot sauce of your life is the pepper itself. You want the fruit to turn red, perhaps even to soften a little on the bush, before you harvest it. Even jalapeños will turn red if you let them ripen long enough, so patience is key.If you live in a warm place with low humidity, you might spread your peppers out to cure in the sun. But I live in a rainy place with high humidity, so I leave my peppers in a bowl by the window for a day or two until the flesh begins to soften. Then I speed up the process by baking the peppers at about 200 degrees, removing them just as they begin to wrinkle. Once the peppers are soft, coat them with salt in a big mixing bowl and use a potato masher to crush the flesh. Mash everything up good, until you can see some liquid gathering in the bottom, cover with a towel, and leave overnight. After the pepper mash has cured for at least one day, pack it into Mason jars. Cover the mash with water, leaving at least 1” head space. I like to use pickle pipes (pictured below), but any solid lid will do as long as the gas is vented every day or two. Robb Walsh recommends whittling a cabbage core down and stuffing it into the mouth of the jar to keep the pepper mash submerged. Pickle pipes come with glass weights that can serve the same purpose. Leave the jars at room temperature for two weeks. A shorter fermentation time would yield a milder flavor, and fermenting longer (up to four weeks) would do the reverse. I prefer the flavor notes at two weeks.Whatever fermentation window you choose, you’ll need a blender, a funnel, bottles (or jars), white vinegar, and peeled garlic for the next step. I prefer a 1:1 mash to vinegar ratio. Adding slightly more vinegar would work better if you use a dropper in your bottles. If you prefer a paste-like texture, like sriracha, add more mash to the mix. Transfer the fermented mash directly from your jars into the blender (no draining, because you want to keep the salt). Add vinegar based on desired texture. Add 1-2 heads of peeled garlic. Puree until no chunks remain. Swing-top bottles work great if you plant to refrigerate the batch. Canning jars in a boiling bath works fine for longer-term storage. Or do some research on Plastisol lids and hot packing if you’d prefer a more elegant shelf-stable option.I close with a meditation on how hot sauce making, like every other food tradition passed down through generations, is a form of memory. Every step of the process, from saving the cayenne variety that somehow picked up Joe Sestito’s name, to the simple implements required (a glass jar and funnel), to trusting nothing but air, water, and microbes to transform the flavor of the mash, adds to the ritual. Some say we die a second death the moment we vanish from the memories of the living. I like the idea that I’m linked hand-in-hand with everyone in this historical chain from Iowa to New York to Toronto, all the way back to Calabria, Italia. That sense of connection is why gardens are good for the grieving. The core of grieving is remembering, and gardens are memory shrines. We go there to shore up our ruins, to restore our faith that something bright and beautiful can still rise from our ashes.Please consider subscribing to The Recovering Academic to unlock more essays, interviews, and craft resources. If this essay resonated with you, or if you found the recipe helpful, you can also leave a tip in appreciation. Thanks in advance! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

I was driving back from Maryland to Pennsylvania on Black Friday when I tuned in to Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics podcast. Typically I don’t associate my mood or the setting with podcasts the way I do with music. But that changed as I listened to Levitt and his guest, Michael D. Smith. Smith is the author of The Abundant University, a smart-sounding book about how to save higher ed that turns out to be alarming upon close reading. I think I will always associate the stretch of I-83 from Baltimore to Harrisburg with this book, because the warmth I carried with me at the beginning of that drive quickly turned to anger. Some might say that my emotional investment in the topic clouds my judgment, makes me less objective. But our bodies always shape our meditations. Feeling often is understanding. On that day, there was no way I could uncouple my recent reunions with two friends from what I was hearing. The short version of Smith’s argument is that digital education represents a revolution in higher ed, even a “new golden age,” comparable to the shift from CDs to mp3s in the music industry or the replacement of cable TV with streaming video. He believes that this abundance of access will solve abiding problems of scarcity in American universities. But education is ineluctably different from consuming entertainment. And as far as I can tell, Smith’s remedy — in which MasterClass and Southern New Hampshire University bring virtual education to the masses — elevates a few celebrity educators while pushing even more PhDs into contingency and squalor. I’ll return to these problems presently. But first I must explain how my mood affected my comprehension that day.I began the week in a vulnerable place. My 12-year marriage was ending, and it was the first Thanksgiving in thirteen years that I’d be observing as a single person. We had a nesting arrangement for the holiday, so I made plans to meet my undergraduate advisor for a hike earlier in the week and accepted a high school friend’s invitation to join his family in Maryland on Thanksgiving Day. Reuniting with a teacher is like embracing a parent after a long absence. In some ways it’s more powerful than that, because blood is no guarantee of kinship but the bonds between a teacher and apprentice run to the bone. In current parlance, our favorite teachers become part of our chosen families.It had been 26 years since I’d last seen Stephen Woolsey, the professor who introduced me to Willa Cather in an American Literature survey at a little college in eastern Tennessee. He left that college soon after I did and finished his career at a similar school in western New York. We had been emailing for two years since I’d moved to Pennsylvania, resolving to meet halfway between our homes to catch up, and that week it finally came true. In the years since our last farewell, I had completed my graduate degrees, earned tenure, and then surrendered it. Stephen had left an unhappy workplace for a more nurturing one, which carried him to a conventional retirement. I had cycled from single person to married man, father of three, and back to bachelorhood, not a hair remaining on my shaved pate. Stephen had raised a daughter with his wife Linda (also one of my beloved professors) and now spent his days volunteering, hiking, and honing his photography. We picked up where we left off, walking miles of trail in Elk State Forest while recalling our time together and marveling at how the profession had changed. Stephen recalled a dean naming him in a faculty meeting, comparing his teaching method to hammering gold, which turned out not to be a compliment, since the point was that the college needed more “blacksmiths.” In fact, Stephen illustrates Michael Smith’s point that unlike other professionals, professors haven’t grown more productive over time. Professors are like violinists. Just as string quartets require the same amount of time to practice and perform live that they always have, so the professor who hammers gold continues to produce at the same rate as his forebears did. Accordingly, the cost of education steadily rises relative to industries where prices fall as productivity grows. Access to professorial expertise is one of the scarcities Smith believes higher ed must redress. But his definition of abundance means fewer artisans, more blacksmiths. It’s hard to imagine seeking Stephen out after twenty-plus years if all he’d done was pound me into a crowbar. Doesn’t each of us approach our education as an expression of our very lives? And don’t we all deserve teachers who shape us with craft and care rather than blunt instruments? It had been nearly as long since I’d seen my high school classmate Josh. It was a popular name back then, even in our rural town. There were so many Joshes that we went by our first names and last initials. I was Josh D. He was Josh P. And we both ended up getting PhDs. Josh P. completed his degrees at Boston University and Cornell, both in Physics. He did a postdoc at Los Alamos and has held a variety of adjunct faculty positions, but his full-time role is Physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I don’t pretend to understand much about his work, which often seems Matrix-like, but we both came of age in Montana and we represent the past success and enduring promise of public education. In fact, I don’t think Josh and I would still be friends if it had not been for the transformative teachers we had and the constant encouragement from our peer group to embrace our intellectual ambitions. Our teachers included many characters who flouted the metrics now used for academic assessment. Mr. Nermeier, who taught Algebra with nerdy humor, was also our tennis coach (Josh and I both played tennis because it was the fastest way to earn a letter, so we could order a leather-sleeved jacket). Ms. More, who convinced me I could be a professional writer, kept us laughing with her rapier wit. Mr. Bara taught AP Chemistry, AP Biology, and Geometry. He also sported a handlebar mustache, rode a Harley Wide Glide to school, and played bass guitar. When we drifted off task, he walked into his supply closet, shut the door, and screamed his exasperation into the darkness. Then he walked back out deadpanned. It never failed — we snapped back to business immediately. You grow close to people who share these experiences. The effect is familial. I kept in touch with Josh P. over the years, sometimes sending him drafts of essays, other times exchanging photos of our children. And so joining Josh and his family for Thanksgiving felt like coming home. I was basking in the glow of these two friendships and the memories of my education that they revived when the Freakonomics episode began. And this was why my gratitude curdled as I listened.Smith argues the American university system is compromised by three scarcities: access, instruction, and credentials. Institutions leverage market power by controlling “access to the scarce seats in the classroom, access to the scarce faculty experts, and access to the valuable credentials that help you get good high paying jobs.” He’s not wrong. Scott Galloway, of NYU, compares the behavior of elite institutions to drug cartels.Joyce Carol Oates’s popular creative writing course at Princeton illustrates the problem. Oates is one of the major writers of our time and has built a reputation as an excellent teacher. So the waitlist for her “Advanced Fiction” course, which she offers every fall and caps at 10 students, is long. And before you can even get in line for the course, you have to make it past the admissions gatekeepers to get into Princeton, which admits just 4.4% of applicants.But Oates’s course represents a false scarcity. Princeton lists 27 faculty for its creative writing program. If you can’t get into “Advanced Fiction” with Oates, you can sign up for Idra Novey’s section of the same course. And even if you’ve never heard of Novey, you’d be in excellent hands. In fact, you might be in better hands, because celebrity is no measure of teaching effectiveness. A famous writer might offer inferior mentorship if they felt less compelled to give detailed feedback or write a personalized letter of recommendation. Follow that logic a little further, and you could say the same of Princeton, compared to the much less selective SUNY Stony Brook, which admits about half of its applicants. The market logic says that if you get easier access to classroom seats and faculty at Stony Brook, then the credential is somehow diminished (the Princeton degree is thus scarcer). But there are plenty of heavy hitters among the Stony Brook faculty, including Billy Collins (U.S. Poet Laureate), Paul Harding (Pulitzer winner), and Patricia Marx (New Yorker staff writer). A faculty that includes 5 Guggenheims is pretty solid, by my lights. Unless you think Marx loses her mystique by stating in her faculty bio that she “can take a baked potato out of the oven with her bare hand.” Smith suggests that even if subscribers to MasterClass don’t get the same quality of education from Joyce Carol Oates that her Princeton students do, digital learning expands access to “top” professors or artists and thereby destabilizes the conventional models for higher education. Just so, Southern New Hampshire University embodies the “abundant university” by offering its online degrees to “hundreds of thousands of students worldwide.”But if one reason why higher education is broken is its widening class divide, then the mass distribution of educational content does nothing to solve this problem. In fact, it promises only to widen it. According to Stanford’s Raj Chetty, children born into the top 1% wealth bracket are 77 times more likely to attend an elite institution than children born into the bottom economic bracket. This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with privilege, as Smith admits to Levitt: So my wife and I live in the city of Pittsburgh and we pay to send our kids to elite high schools. We were sitting down with the college admissions counselor in a one on one meeting and we were going through one of our kid’s list of schools, and he had a reach school on his list. And the guidance counselor looks at it and he goes, ‘Oh, I know the head of admissions at this school. I’ll make sure that they pull your child’s application.’ And walking out of that, you realize, my guess is the kids who go to the local public school don’t have that connection to get their applications pulled.When elite schools chase rankings by recruiting students they know they won’t admit, thereby lowering their selectivity rate and jacking their prices up to reflect their exclusivity, the class divide widens. So even if Smith and I agree on this as a core problem, not just for American universities but for our democracy, virtual education is not a reasonable solution, even if it lowers the cost of a college degree. So long as cost remains associated with value, false measurements of the credential as a status marker and use of that credential for gatekeeping in employment and other positions of influence will continue. Who wants a MasterClass education if it is a cheap imitation of the real thing? Smith’s kids are still going to learn the secret handshakes that get them into the club. Nobody with a degree from SNHU will be breaking those barriers. A colleague of mine who did his undergrad at St. Lawrence University (a fine liberal arts school) and his PhD at Iowa, confessed that his own graduate program would not hire him. Iowa wants faculty with Yale, Harvard, and Stanford degrees so it can compete in the scarcity game. So long as the Ivy League continues to set the standard and everyone keeps trying to trade up to meet it, the game will be just as rigged as it was before. Online access changes none of that. Smith’s core metaphor for disruption in higher education comes from the entertainment industry. Just as mp3s replaced compact discs and streaming video seriously weakened the market share for cable television, so he believes American universities will be forced to offer more convenient forms of education, even if the quality is diminished. This sounds smart, but it’s a bad analogy because it conflates inanimate products with human relationships. My relationship with Stephen Woolsey was not like my relationship with compact discs. I studied the cover art, memorized the lyrics and liner notes, and loved my CDs to death. Part of me still misses the whish of my player sucking the disc through the slot, then the whir before the first note. But this was a passive experience. The CD played, and I listened. Sometimes I did other things while I was listening. But I never asked my CD questions, never dropped by its office unannounced, never submitted term papers to it anxiously, hoping I had not missed the mark. And not one of my CDs ever looked me in the eye and said, “Well done!,” as Stephen often did. As he still does now from time to time as a reader.I have listened to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and “Give Me One Reason” hundreds of times via CD and mp3, and I forget all about the difference between the two mediums once I’m lost in the music. This might affect my market choice to subscribe to Spotify, for instance, rather than to keep buying CDs. But Tracy Chapman is what I’m after, and her art is relatively unchanged by the delivery mechanism. There’s no literal conversation between us. Her music always flows one way.The same is not true of an in-person apprenticeship with Joyce Carol Oates, compared to passive consumption of her MasterClass course. One is bidirectional, reciprocal, the intimate connection that we require for deep learning. The other offers disembodied learning, no matter how glossy the production is, no matter how thrilling it might be to see a literary hero up close. This difference weakens the entertainment:education analogy irreparably. The only way Smith’s argument holds is if Oates solely offers pre-recorded classes and a cheaper medium replaces an overpriced one. But the most damning flaw in Smith’s argument comes from his indifference to the impact of mass-produced education on PhDs themselves and on academic jobs qua jobs. For instance, the courses that SNHU offers affordably to the world are “planned centrally by subject-matter experts and then delivered digitally by a small army of adjunct professors.” This is the golden age that virtual education offers? Let’s unpack that a bit. SNHU offers courses in 8-week terms. There are 6 of these terms in a year. If you joined their army of adjuncts, you would receive $2,200 for each section you taught. Let’s say you signed up to teach 4 sections for one term. That is a heavy teaching load, but you’d only get about $4,400 per month. Multiply that by 12 months, and you might be thinking that it could be livable at just under $53K per year (depending on where you live). But then you read the fine print: “Course assignments are made by our scheduling team, with the guidance of the Associate Deans. Assignments are made on a term-by-term basis, approximately 8 weeks prior to the start of the term, with adjunct instructors allowed to teach up to 10 sections in an academic year.”So you’d only have employment for two months at a time, and you could never make more than $22K per year. I can see how this model might lower the cost of college and increase access for many students. But there is no case whatsoever to be made for requiring a PhD for these services. No one could call adjunct teaching for SNHU anything more than a side hustle, and a crappy one at that. It’s certainly not a career. The problem that an economist like Smith ought to be addressing is that the system has insufficient funds to offer fair compensation across the board for the expertise required. If you are Michael D. Smith or Steve Levitt, your professorship is subsidized by adjuncts who hold an identical credential, but who work for poverty wages. The more the American university models itself after industry, the more it is forced to accept such externalities. I care about this ethical quagmire as a recovering academic, but it haunts me even more as the father of three children who will soon be seeking college degrees. Here’s Smith again:Imagine a world in which ten of the country’s top history professors made their lectures and exams available online for a fee that didn’t require exclusive matriculation at a single university. Would the relatively inexpensive education you might get in that situation be “worse” than the expensive one that you’d get from just one of those professors teaching at their home university?I’m a little flabbergasted that a decorated professor could pose such a question. If all you’re doing is sitting passively in a lecture hall at a fancy university, then obviously the content from that one course could be packaged in a host of different ways. But this would be one course out of dozens that a student would take, and no one would pay elite tuition if every class were taught this way. So it’s misleading to isolate one lecture-based seminar as representative of the whole. Smith’s question raises many others. Who curates this list of “top professors”? Wouldn’t such a scenario only accelerate personal branding competitions among professors that don’t necessarily serve a greater good? Wouldn’t those superstars be pocketing the majority of fees charged for their à la carte content? And how would enriching an elite class of academic influencers redress the current caste system for faculty, in which 70% of college instructors are adjuncts or lecturers? There might come a day when the difference between free trade and fair trade applies just as much to education as it does to chocolate and coffee beans. Perhaps that day has already arrived.Stephen Woolsey brought an ethic to teaching, not a personal brand. The art was bigger than he was, and he gave himself to it the way an artisan does. That ethic allowed him to complete a conventional career with dignity — a middle class salary, retirement at the typical age — but it also yielded hundreds of grateful students, including many like me who are now lifelong friends. The same was true of the teachers I shared with Josh P. They taught us affectionately, personally, and they bound us to one another as a result.I inherited that ethic from my teachers. It drove my teaching for two decades and continues to shape my approach to writing, coaching, and editing. A golden age in higher education would allow more teachers like us to keep that ethic alive and to share it with students in small groups, the only environment where embodied learning can thrive. The world that Michael D. Smith envisions would render the Ph.D. program itself obsolete, at least at its current scale. There is no earthly reason that anyone should complete expert-level coursework, exams, and a dissertation representing original research to administer someone else’s content in a virtual course for $22,000 a year. Even a subject-matter expert would need only a fraction of the expertise now required by a conventional Ph.D. Lowering the bar for teaching credentials might lower the overall cost of a college education for students. But it would only further degrade the currency of online degrees, especially if students at Princeton continue to be taught by conventional PhDs.The more I study Smith’s book, the more his proposal looks like a Profzi Scheme. It’s hard to imagine the “top” professor existing without the army of graduate students and adjuncts holding the pyramid aloft. Perhaps this system will collapse of its own accord. But in the meantime, don’t your children and mine deserve to be shaped by artisans, however modest their platforms might be? Would you willingly subject your own child to the blacksmith’s hammer and tongs?I’ve run out of space to dig deeper into Lewis’s book. Please join me on Friday for a private discussion thread to continue the conversation. Will education go the way of college athletics, with a few multimillion dollar professors winning the lottery and everyone else picking up table scraps?  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit joshuadolezal.substack.comFriends,I’m wading back into fully produced podcast episodes with today’s interview. The full episode is available to paying members, and free subscribers can listen to the first 18 minutes. To support more conversations like this and unlock more interviews, original essays, and craft resources, please consider upgrading your subscription. Many thanks,JoshA Conversation with Fawzi Abou-ChahineJoshua Doležal: I’m Joshua Doležal and this is The Recovering Academic. I’m back with my interview series with former academics who have pivoted to careers in industry and entrepreneurship. My guest today is Dr. Fawzi Abou-Chahine.Fawzi Abou-Chahine: The reality is some fantastic tenure track people go on to set up businesses from their research, or they do something completely different, and they're not considered failures. So why have we limited ourselves to this one idea that we, to be successful, or to be valid, or valued, we have to achieve this very difficult to achieve task?Joshua Doležal: Fawzi Abou-Chahine is Head of Grant Funding at The FI Group, a global consulting firm which helps companies finance innovation and secure funding for research and development through grants and tax incentives. He is also the author of A Jobseeker’s Diary, which chronicles his professional transition in intimate detail.The fact that Fawzi left academe in 2015 shows how quickly PhDs can climb from entry-level roles to the executive suite. After serving as Technical Sales Lead with a London-based company, then Proposal Manager with the National Physical Laboratory, Fawzi founded Chahine Consulting, which led to his current position. His professional journey also shows how fluid the boundaries between industry and entrepreneurship can be. Sometimes hanging out your own shingle can attract a recruiter’s eye.We talk a lot about identity today – how all of us are more than our current roles. It’s a good reminder, not only for negotiating the boundaries between work and private life, but also for putting our foibles into perspective. If we are more than our jobs, then we are infinitely more than our most recent mistakes.***Joshua Doležal: Fawzi, maybe we'll start with what we have in common – we were once both academics and if I'm not mistaken, you left academe before you got on a tenure track or entered a really serious faculty position. You were still a PhD researcher?Fawzi Abou-Chahine: Mostly. So I did do a postdoctoral research position. It was a fellowship for a applied technology university in Finland. And I guess it works slightly differently than, say, North America. If you have worked in North America, then there's just a higher number of fantastic universities, so you can tend to stay in the same country, even though you probably may move cities, so logistical, legal, financial challenges are slightly different, but yes, I did, for the most part, move away from academia after a one-year position in Finland.Joshua Doležal: That's a distinction that I haven't really considered much, that Europeans are forced to move internationally for jobs in academe. But I am struck by how almost identical the systemic problems are. I grew up idealizing the European university system, thinking that it was better funded, that the life of the mind was somehow privileged more in the cradle of Western civilization. You and several other LinkedIn contacts that come from a European background, Matteo Tardelli –Fawzi Abou-Chahine: Yes, I know, Matteo.Joshua Doležal: Luna Clara Muñoz and others, have experienced almost exactly the kind of alienation that American academics have. And it comes from a corporatized university, it seems. And so that's happening in Europe, just the same as in the U. S. Was it the family responsibilities? Was it a cultural community that you wanted to stay connected to? What made you unwilling to uproot yourself?Fawzi Abou-Chahine: Yeah, they both have their separate challenges. I think it's much more of an industry in North America. It's a much higher volume of PhDs. It's more clear-cut what the roles are. And , even though there's lots of different funding bodies, there's also just one ultimate parent funder. Which is that, for example, in America would be the U. S. Government, whereas in in Europe, certainly from my experiences, numerous sources of funding. This is a generalization, but they come with their own stipulations timeline funding amount. Flexibility to move. Just on the subject of challenges of when you do have to move around. I think that can particularly impact some communities more than others. People who may be lower socioeconomic conditions, the less wealthy, people who try to raise a family or have caring responsibilities, visa restrictions and that can hinder the kind of equality we're trying to achieve, which is another disappointment for the academic journey.I think that's just one of many reasons why lots of people leave and why I in particular left.Joshua Doležal: One thing that I've talked with so many other academics about, and I call myself with not really that much sense of irony, a recovering academic, is this real identity shift that you have to make. You have these ideals in academe that you, thought the life of the mind or the pursuit of knowledge, something that was more pure in certain ways, was your goal, your purpose. And when business in the U. S. began to encroach on that, that's where a lot of us felt like we couldn't live in academia any longer.But then when we try to transition into business, how do you reconcile who you are? How do you fit yourself into this new paradigm? And it seems like a paradox a lot of times. So how have you solved that paradox?Fawzi Abou-Chahine: Absolutely. I think no one talks about those specific challenges. They certainly didn't when I left 11 years ago. I think they're beginning to have that conversation now. For me the challenge was not only finding work, but also valuing the skills that I had, and I'm actually writing an article for Nature Careers at the moment about this, which is…there is this idea that if you're a chemist, you are just a chemist, or social historian, and that's all you do.But the reality is, those skills in identifying information, finding it, comprehending it, then explaining it to someone else or managing multiple projects at the same time – those are very transferable skills. You can apply them anywhere, provided you appreciate that value. And that was the hurdle I had to overcome mentally. And I found that not many people were doing that. Not many people were talking about that realization. So that's why I do what I do. Talk at universities, write articles, promote my book, to talk about the firsthand experience of that transition. I think there's also a sort of emotional barrier, perhaps reluctance to admit that you're not finding it an enjoyable experience to pursue a career in academia.So no one wants to admit those difficulties, certainly they don't want to admit the mental challenges of finding employment, which is difficult enough, not least in an economic downturn that we may be going through. And certainly, if you are a carer or someone trying to raise a family, those come with their own unique challenges of finding work. It's very hard to find work if you're employed, for example, if you've got a lab project – and so, no one has those conversations and no one wants to admit that they're going through those difficulties. And that's really what I want to do: to just make it clear that these are normal things.I think the last point I'll make about the academic, challenges as well is actually academia is a business, and the sooner people realize that, the easier it'll become to find work. Obviously it's not a business in the traditional sense, but they do have a profit and loss. They do monitor how much money they're bringing in through various revenue and how much they're spending. Their funding mechanism is different. They have large pots of funding. But the idea that there is human resource staff, PhDs that they need to pay, and they also need to hire and acquire and grow. So when it comes to applying for your PhD, you've probably applied a very academic and technical focused application, but subsequently when you're looking at fellowships or postdoctoral positions, even a professorship, you also need to make it clear the value you bring from a sort of pseudo-commercial element.You need to recognize your skills that are relevant. Also the skills that are not relevant. And I think that approach, that mindset to applying for jobs, can be very helpful. You are in the job market. You are competing with others. And that is, I think, what people don't highlight.Joshua Doležal: Even so, there is a learning curve in translating skills for a more industry-based audience. This seems to be the Slough of Despond that academics find themselves in for a period, dealing with the identity shift, but also just the mechanics, the logistics of making that case to a different audience.And so you made several mistakes, it sounds like, in that that transition. So what were some of those hard lessons that you learned?Fawzi Abou-Chahine: No one really wants to admit this, but hopefully by talking about this, you can dispel the idea that admitting to a mistake or somehow being wrong is a bad thing. I think especially in academia, you have this mindset: you must never admit that you're wrong, or that if you are wrong, then somehow you are stupid. Maybe that is a particular neurotic facet of some academics, but certainly I think it is quite common because you're surrounded by such smart people. I think there's a difference between being intelligent and being ignorant, and generally people are ignorant about something they've never experienced, such as looking for work, so some of the mistakes, for example, include not recognizing the importance of network, of approaching people that I'm interested in working with either through a connection or sometimes coldly can be a bit of a challenge. Using the right language in applications of talking about how it's a commercial process to apply for work, focusing too much on the wonderful work of my research, for example, rather than the amazing skills I developed doing the research.That is the subtle difference that I think I've learned among the many things.Joshua Doležal: I've heard others say that what you need to do is think about problems that others have and then how you can solve them, present yourself as the solution to those problems. And for job seekers, one piece of advice often is to create a brief collection of portfolio artifacts that offer proof of that. Here is me identifying a problem and solving it using a tool that could be Articulate Storyline for people going into instructional design, or it could be Tableau for someone working with data.So I know this is an enormous question and perhaps hard to kind of corral, but in your line of work, what are some business problems that you have to deal with on a regular basis? And if someone were trying to get into your field, you're involved with fundraising, but also with…I don't know if finance is accurate?Fawzi Abou-Chahine: Yes. So what I do is I write funding proposals for large and small companies to secure funding that helps their business grow. I need to be able to articulate the work they do, the justification for funding and how it will deliver impact. So that requires a series of skills that my PhD helped develop, specifically understanding lots of information that I'm not familiar with, being able to concisely communicate that clearly, and analyze lots of information.And usually I'm doing multiple proposals at the same time, so multiple research projects, for example, gives you that project management. Recognizing that I can apply that to a different field beyond the immediate research application was a game changer for me, and I think that's something that people need to recognize.So that is what I do on a day to day basis, and certainly a PhD would be able to do that. I want to go back to one of the things that you said about phrasing your application as solving someone's problem. Absolutely, that's a good approach, and actually that is a commercial approach. The way I fund my funding proposals, for example, is: the funder has a problem they're trying to solve, the company can solve it through their innovation, for example.In an obvious academic setting, the problem that the university hiring someone is looking to solve is we need to produce more high-quality papers, this researcher can do that. But beyond that obvious problem, there could be a say, a more commercial problem, such as, if you're applying for, for an editorial position, the problem might be, we need to write high-quality, compelling articles. I can do that because I've got the experience writing to tight deadlines, would be the solution, and that's how I would phrase it.Joshua Doležal: I'm reminded of a technique that I would often advise to students in research writing, but also in creative writing, which is problem posing. Good research is driven by a burning question that you really have to answer. You have to pose a problem that has high stakes that someone would care about and position yourself, as the researcher, as the solution to that problem.So that's kind of how we get research published is convincing a peer reviewer that you are in fact resolving something that needs to be resolved, right? And so it seems like one of the secrets is just learning how to see those problems, locate them, identify them, and then position your skills as the answer to them.One of my friends wrote a great essay about a graduate seminar in creative nonfiction that he took. He was a fiction writer, and you would think it would be a natural transition to writing memoir. But in fiction, he could look at the world around him and locate stories – here's a plot, here's a character that I could develop in this way. But he was not accustomed to looking at his own life in that way. So the title of his essay was “Learning to See,” and it was all about locating those potential narrative arcs within his own life in places that it just seemed episodic or there was no point to it or why would anyone care?He was able to frame it in a way that did have stakes, that did make someone care. So I wonder in business if it's the same way as an academic, you sort of understand how to apply for academic jobs, what those problems are, how you offer a solution. If someone's coming into finance or into fundraising, how would they be able to identify…here is the thing that needs to be solved?Fawzi Abou-Chahine:  I really like the idea that you have to be able to see. Researchers are really good at understanding the question in order to solve it. There's a quote often attributed to Einstein that he'll spend 90 percent of his time understanding the question before answering.I was actually talking to my wife earlier today about measuring something and the importance of measuring, and that's what a researcher will do, understand what it is we're trying to measure or solve or question. Researchers definitely do that bit really well. Applying it to business is really important.In the rest of our conversation, Fawzi explains why he titled his book a “diary” and outlines the 3 strategies he would recommend for job seekers trying to avoid the frustration and wasted time from his own transition.

If you haven’t read last week’s interview by with the novelist Lore Segal, head over to Inner Life, where david roberts will also share new work later today.A Conversation with James RichardsonJoshua Doležal: Welcome back to my interview series with former academics who have pivoted to careers in industry and entrepreneurship. I’m Joshua Doležal, and my guest today is James Richardson.James Richardson: I've actually told people in interviews, because they've asked me what should young entrepreneurs do in school, and I'm like, in school, you don't study entrepreneurship. I would tell them if they want to become solo business owners and take on all that stress and loneliness and everything and all that risk, the first thing you should do is do something really risky while you’re young. Your passion doesn't tell me anything.Joshua Doležal: James is a cultural anthropologist by training – first at Harvard, where he completed his bachelor’s degree, and later at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a Ph.D. But near the end of his doctoral program, James hit the wall that so many academics have: the life of purpose that he imagined, and that he had lived as a field researcher in South Asia, did not match the future he foresaw in higher ed.In what he calls last-ditch adaptation to American culture, James reinvented himself as a consultant for consumer packaged goods, accumulating new research skills while working for several firms. In 2017 he founded Premium Growth Solutions, where he now enjoys ultimate autonomy as a solopreneur. James is the author of the bestselling book Ramping Your Brand (2019) – written primarily for business owners in consumer packaged goods, and he writes the Substack series Homo Imaginari, where you can read excerpts of his forthcoming book Our Worst Strength: American Individualism and Its Hidden Discontents.Given my dim view of branding, particularly the damage that corporate branding is doing to higher education and the vexed notion of personal branding that seems rampant on LinkedIn and Substack, you might reasonably wonder why I’d want to talk to James. In fact, I press him frequently throughout our conversation on what strikes me as a paradox. In his own words, James makes a living by feeding the beast of growth. But his forthcoming book is largely an indictment of American individualism and the alienation that capitalism breeds. See what you think of how James reconciles these two strains of his work and intellectual life. James lives with Asperberger’s, which makes him brutally honest. I am drawn to radical truth-tellers, and I appreciate James’s insight into why I felt so alone, even in my own family, during my transition out of academe. In fact, James understands more than almost anyone I know what it means to grieve the loss of that identity.Joshua Doležal: I thought we might start with the crisis of confidence that built near the end of your time at the University of Wisconsin. Maybe tell me a little more about your training and, why you felt that an academic career was just not possible.James Richardson: I was a cultural anthropology doctoral student and by the time I was done, ironically, I was very happy with the fieldwork, the dissertation – and the challenge that I had found myself in was that I had so overcommitted to my career personally and overdedicated my entire self to it to the point of not even forging relationships with other people.And I have Asperger's so that it's very difficult for me to do that to begin with. So when I want to do that, I really have to focus. But I didn't allow myself any of that. I was very tunnel vision.I wound up with no plan B in a situation where there are no jobs. And my mental health was not good at all. I had a diploma, living alone. No job, no job prospects. I did a little pro and con thing on, on whether I should continue and chase the 10 year track in my field. And although the mental health situation was really a wake-up call for me that I just have to settle down. I basically had to get a life. One of the inspirations for my book is the noncommittal nature of American urban life is such that it's almost impossible to build deep relationships with anyone, because that process takes years.It doesn't happen in 30 minute chunks on Saturday. You have to throw hundreds and hundreds of hours at it.So I had spent no time doing that. And I just had to prioritize getting my shh, as they say, one’s s**t together. That's what we say in America. How long did it take you to get your s**t together? And we all laugh. Because this is a normal urban thing, but in my next book, I basically spend 400 pages deconstructing that, from the perspective of most other traditional cultures, this is pathological insanity.It's completely nuts. And we live in a culture where we deal with the consequences of that primal orientation to autonomy. My fucked up academic career is a great example of believing way too much in your own autonomy and putting way too much faith in it.Joshua Doležal: Can I ask about India?Because you were studying in India for a time and that was the totalizing nature of your research was that you threw yourself entirely into that project.James Richardson: I kind of had to destroy my identity as a South Asian expert in order to transition into a new career. That was a very painful process for me personally, because I didn't really want to do that. And I eventually later came to terms with it.I realized part of my challenge coming back from the United States, which triggered this mental health crisis, was culture shock. I had just spent three years in a place where I would go out on the street. And I had friends. I had people I hung out with. I saw real community. I got a taste of it. I saw real family. Got a taste of that. And so when I came back, the alienation that normal people would have perceived as normal, I realized was messed up.Joshua Doležal: So I'm struggling, James, with two dissonant threads in your story. And I want to pivot to how you reinvented yourself and, in your own words, got your s**t together.But I wonder if you kind of already did have your s**t together. You'd been living in a place where the culture was more coherent. Your reasons for going to India and doing that kind of research were not flawed. And so you had to learn how to participate in a system that it sounds like you didn't really believe in or that you've come to see as even more flawed than your mindset coming back from India. So is it true that you really got your s**t together or did you just have to construct a new persona that you could live with in this other capitalistic system?James Richardson: Well, I think that's what ended up happening. I was pretty unhappy in most of my twenties. That's a long time to be unhappy. I was able to get my work done, so, in America, you don't have a mental health problem, Josh. You don't have any problem at all that matters if you're productive. Isn't that funny? I come from a pretty high achieving Anglo Saxon affluent family. So I had all the assets of privilege to give me the basic social skills to be a productive jackass in an office. Like that was never my problem.It doesn't make you a happy person at all. When you fixate on a dream in America, and the more privileged you are, the more likely you're going to concoct some really intense dream and fantasy for your life. I hate to say it because you just have so many opportunities, the wealthier you are, right? You fixate on that dream and fantasy, and then when it blows up in your face, you have no resources. No one wants to talk to you about it.And this is really true, I think, with men. Men do not want to be an audience to you grieving your lost academic career. I never met anybody who wanted to hear that story. You're one of the few, honestly. I certainly didn't bring it up dating! You know what I'm saying? Until I got into therapy, I didn't have someone where I could finally process the fact that I had been grieving and that I was just angry about it all.Nobody gave a s**t. They weren't indifferent in a malignant way, they just were indifferent. James, that's your personal problem, right? This is how we think about people. Your career imploded? Ah, that's a really sad personal situation. So we heal alone. You’re talking to somebody who's like, I was not capable of asking for help in life until my mid thirties. Anywhere.And that is a neurodiversity liability in this country. So the one reason I was inspired to write this next book is that I do believe that there's certain forms of neurodivergence that really are really maladapted to an unstructured autonomy-driven, seek your own glory, culture that we live in.People like me do much better in highly structured society, where there's actually much less choice.Joshua Doležal: But you did work for a time in business, correct, before you shifted to your current role?James Richardson: Yeah, I'm still a consultant. I think what happened was that therapy helped me grieve the loss of the academic dream properly and put it into perspective as, you know, that was just a phase in your life. There's no one out there who's judging you for not doing that. I mean, other than you. And even if other people are judging you for having left, you don't even talk to them.You need somebody to just lay it out, like, to help you let go. I then had to find a way to frame consulting as interesting. And that was a challenge for me. And I also had to personally work on my verbal communication skills, which were absolutely horrible. I mean, just abysmal. And not only because of the Asperger's, but also because I'd been living literally by myself for 10 years – and anthropology is a field of loners.Joshua Doležal: Well, so how did you get into consulting? You worked for different firms for a while?James Richardson: Yeah, I worked at a market research firm and I kind of got tossed into it by the owner. Sometimes that just needs to happen in your life. I ended up finding out that working with executives yielded me access to smart people again. Working with executives on their business challenges, I ended up finding was just as interesting intellectually once I opened up to what the puzzle was.I ended up learning new analytical skills that hadn't been taught in graduate school, which to this day are critical to my ability to make money.Joshua Doležal: Like what?James Richardson: Statistics, survey design. Demographics, demographic analysis. The kind of quantitative sociological analysis that I actually didn't get trained in in graduate schoolI ended up getting on the job from my colleagues.I couldn't have written the book that's just coming out this spring without that training. It could not have been done. I mean, I'm sitting there writing this book, pulling raw census data, analyzing it myself, not farming it out to somebody.Joshua Doležal: Let's talk first about your first book, Ramping Your Brand. And I'm curious how you conceived of that project and the process you went through for writing and marketing it, how it's been received so far, because it seems like this is sort of in your signature as a solo consultant, right? So how did it come to be? And if I can add one more question, how relevant was your training in cultural symbolism, as part of the process for writing this.James Richardson: So the project began because I needed a way to stand out as a consultant in a national context in the industry that I work in, which is consumer packaged goods.And I wasn't going to do that through networking because that's like my worst skill. And I had this content I had secured the rights to use for my own business from my prior employer, because it wasn't of value to them and their client base. It was this data set, essentially, and some findings are very, very unique. So I had this little diamond and I needed to stand out in the industry because I needed to be able to command higher fees. To be honest, the business model I use is 80 percent of my time is PR and marketing and 20 percent is actually billable work. And that's about the ratio necessary to do solo consulting and actually make money.And the only way that works is if you charge very high fees. So I don't work with a lot of folks per year. I use the book. The book attracts them, builds confidence over years, and then they basically come call. And there's like no selling. I just send them a proposal and they pay me. I mean, it sounds like a fantasy, and I still wake up and I'm like, this can't be happening, because everyone tells you this can't happen.It doesn't happen without the book.What I learned was I had accidentally created a go to reference book for the industry for entrepreneurs who had no real strategy guide, no real book that teaches them a mental model on how to analyze their business ruthlessly. So that they're not literally throwing good money after bad, which is very common. Probably one key insight from the discipline of American anthropology is, it's a very simple thing, which is that not all communication is linguistic. In human societies, some of it is purely symbolic.In other words, I flash you an iconographic symbol, or maybe a word or a phrase, and it immediately triggers an association in milliseconds. There's zero cognitive thought, there's zero conscious thought going on. And your ability to manipulate marketing symbols like on a package to be able to trigger the right associations seamlessly is not a joke. If you don't have a massive marketing budget, you actually have to get the symbolism perfect because that's the cheap thing to change. That's cheap. Anybody can change their package.A lot of people in my industry try to over-explain their product. They want to tell you an essay about it. I'm like, you have 10 milliseconds. So what's the one or two symbols that are going to be on your front package that communicate X?Joshua Doležal: You're reminding me of an artist that I worked with in Iowa who talked about what he called metroglyphs. He was riffing on the idea of petroglyphs, the cave paintings that tell a symbolic story, but he was saying you're driving down the interstate and you see the Arby's logo and it conjures a few things.It could be a cowboy hat and it could be a lasso. It could be a branding iron. All of them are related to the product, roast beef, which is the name of the business, phonetically. RB for Roast Beef.It's a distillation of meaning, as you say, that is communicated in seconds at a glance.Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?James Richardson: Yeah. And you know, it's not fancy. But a lot of people who are new to consumer packaged goods don't understand that you have 200 categories of crap in your home that come from a grocery store.Like you're not thinking deeply about any of this. You're on autopilot when you shop. So just to get people to think is a big ask. It ain't happening, right? So you know, a lot of the work I do with clients is simplifying their messaging, the symbolism, getting their positioning really like almost third grade, which is ironic given my academic background. And I often joke with my clients, I'm like, take it from the guy with a PhD, you're over complicating this. That usually stops them.Yeah, it's funny, you know, getting into this solo business, I found like the perfect social positioning for me because I don't like a lot of social interaction. But when I do interact, I'm treated respectfully paid well and I get to have a lot of influence really fast with people.There was no moment in academia where I saw that coming. It took 15 years of me grieving, adapting, therapy, and everything to get where I was. It didn't have to be that this complicated, right? I mean, America has to come to a secular Jesus, quote unquote, about some things about how, what we're asking young people to go do by themselves. In the context of this society we live in, what are we really throwing them into?My new book has this anecdote of a trust fund kid who got his trust fund at the age of 18, goes to Ohio State, and then spends the next 10 years screwing and drinking. All of it away. And winds up in rehab. This is America.My experience with academia was basically no promises, James, no obligation, here's the courses. It's not a community, Josh. That's not a community. Communities make promises. We have to figure out how to be in this autonomy driven, urban capitalist, lifestyle, but give people a more wise toolkit to heal themselves more efficiently. But also we need to have a – I look at it like almost a public health sensory system that says there's a friendship problem in this zip code. These people are not connected. What can we do.Joshua Doležal: I'm looking at your shelf behind you, and you've got your first book there Ramping Your Brand. It's not Ramping Our Brand. It's not a collective. It's a very individualistic message, right? So again, I'm wrestling with these dissonant strains that on the one hand you were truly victimized by this system, and you have found a way to position yourself so that you're not at the mercy of it, and yet it seems a lot of these things that we're describing come from capitalism. And that's very much the air that you're breathing.James Richardson: Oh yeah, that's how I pay my bills. I feed the beast of growth. This book, it's written for the founder's ego. That's how I make my living, because that's the audience I'm best suited right now to help.And the dissonance is, I am absolutely in the fishbowl with everybody else. I'm not an alien. But I hope that readers will see that they should listen to me more because of that. I'm not actually – follow me here – I'm not actually some academic or journalist who's never lived in the real world. Never worked in a real office. Never worked in the private sector, right? I've been through this process of self-reinvention, so I know what it takes.My career trajectory is sort of, Ooh, that's everybody's fantasy, right? They're going to go work for themselves. It sounds strange, but to me, this is just survival, right? In a way, I'm just doing this because I needed more control over my life and people like me do fine in this situation. Most people, they might dream of working for themselves, but they would last one month.Joshua Doležal: When I follow people on Substack, there are some people who are very vocal about best practices, growth strategies, and so on. The takeaway seems to be that you have to be obsessive, you have to be relentless, you have to just double down on this being your life. I really struggle with the idea of personal branding because I have not mastered the distinction between that public face and the private self. And if you put all your eggs in the basket and you ramp your brand and all your identity is funneled into that, you could easily end up in the same situation you were in in grad school.James Richardson: Absolutely, dude. That's why you'll never see me on the internet telling people, Hey, DM me. I'll give you my 10 PowerPoint slide deck on how to be rich and solo consultingy like me. Come learn to do it. I would never, ever, ever advise a stranger to do what I'm doing because this is last-ditch adaptation, to be honest with you. That's the way I honestly looked at it. I mean, I've worked my ass off, but I also had some opportunities that I just seized. Those don't come very often in your life.And I think what gets lost in Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur, and all these lovely positivities, that whole personal branding machine that advises people on how to do this, is that my neurodivergence is actually a strength, and I've said this to people, including my clients, like, the reason I can sit here alone in this stupid shed and do this and have no social interaction all day and yet be just as productive, is because I'm not normal.I don't know how else to say it. You know who can deal with being lonely? The guy with the Asperger's! I'm not good at relationships because I don't need them. I think we've got to the point in America where we’re so hyper-individualistic that people as weird as me off in a corner who actually are able to pull this off due to genetic gift, the random luck… I mean, if you go to universities and see the number of people who are taking classes in entrepreneurship and I just sit there and go, Oh my God.I've actually told people in interviews, because they've asked me what should young entrepreneurs do in school, and I'm like, in school? You don't study entrepreneurship. I would tell them if they want to become solo business owners and take on all that stress and loneliness and everything and all that risk, the first thing you should do is do something really risky while you’re young. Your passion doesn't tell me anything.One of the things that's made it easier for me to make these career transitions, especially to doing what I'm doing now, is that I always was able to look back on my India experience. I was like, wow, I almost got killed a couple times. I got drugged and abducted in a restaurant. And robbed. And I made it. I'm like, this can't be nearly as bad as that.Joshua Doležal: That's interesting, how many colleges and universities are making promises, their students, they are putting more resources toward predetermined outcomes, satisfying students’ and parents’ desire for a predictable return on investment. So these entrepreneurship courses are kind of framed in that way. Come study entrepreneurship, have all the tools you need. And what you're saying is the tools you need are not objective skills or knowable quantities that you learn in books or in even internships. There are some very raw survival experiences that are more analogous to that.James Richardson: I mean, throughout history, there have been weird people who essentially are social outliers to the norms of their communities who were able to go off in the jungle, disappear, travel the world. And what's weird is that we now live in a society, Josh, where an inordinate number of people want to be like that weirdo.I guarantee you that 500 years ago, they were considered to be insane. Not cool. This book tells you the odds. You will never scale your brand. Your brand will not ramp. That's what the data says. But if you want to ignore that, this will teach you a model which will boost your odds. If you're as crazy as James is running his business on his own, you might actually succeed. But you have to be willing to take on all that risk.Joshua Doležal: I loved your phrase earlier – what you're doing is a kind of survival. It's sort of necessary adaptation. This is not the world you would have chosen. It's not the kind of culture that you think is healthy, but you found a way to not be ground up and spit out by it.You've found a way to harness some of those things, but you don't believe in that system. It's just something that you're surviving in spite of. So your forthcoming book, it sounds like, is a kind of diagnosis of those cultural problems.James Richardson: I've lived them all.Joshua Doležal: Yeah. And how embedded they [those problems] are in our work lives, in our work identities. So is there anything in this forthcoming book that would offer a cure, or is the depth of the problem so great that there's really no hope for American culture?James Richardson: So, I do have an epilogue. I talk about some counter trends that I see in data. It's way too early to tell because I think individualism is still peaking. I think it's going to crest in the 21st century because I think we have a global reckoning of human civilization that's happening. I think the hope lies not so much in where people like me tend to go instinctually on the left, which is a whole bunch of federal regulations. Because I'm not dumb enough as a social scientist to think that that magically solves a lot of these really subtle interpersonal issues. It doesn't. A budget doesn't solve what my book discusses. But I do think we can get a lot more constructive about preparing people for risky situations so that they know what they're getting into.How about improving our odds of surviving as an urban individualist in this bizarre society? We need different kinds of tools. We need a massive explosion of therapy and therapeutic resources, because as Americans we're always going to put the burden of healing not on prevention, which is what a traditional society does, whereas the world we live in is about reacting to the problem.We have gotten to the point where we I call it hanging back. In an individualistic society, everybody's hanging back around you. You get to architect your whole world, choose who you want to get intimate with, who you don't want to. There's no obligation to befriend or love anybody. Everyone's hanging back.Then when you have a big clusterfuck, like my failed academic career, and you pick up the phone and ask for help, it's sort of, you can feel it too with parents and company relatives – it's like, they've been dying to talk to you about this for quite a long time? But the sacrality of privacy means that they can't bring it up.So if I think you're going to start some food brand and I'm your relative and think you're completely insane, I will never bring that up. Until it fails, and then you're like, what do I do? And you have a meltdown in front of me and then I'll be there. And then the question is the people that are available to you, are they even qualified to help you heal? They are not, Josh.Your relatives aren't academics. They can't help you understand how to leave academia. They have no idea what you're going through. All they can do is buy you a little card, a Hallmark card, send it to you. Our condolences on your lost career.Joshua Doležal: Here's where I'll gently push back.I regained some appreciation for my family, which is largely non-academic, almost exclusively non-academic. And so this last summer, I went back home, , took my kids back for the first time alone. And I was reflecting on some of the people that I went to school with who had all kinds of problems, who spent some time in prison for drugs or something, but have gotten sober and gotten their lives back and are living there. Maybe reunited with a high school sweetheart. Some of those people I would prefer spending time with to colleagues  from graduate school. And my rural Montana community has served as a kind of antidote to a lot of what you're describing. I think of my parents who – they earned online degrees from Western Governors University in their 50s, too late for it to make much difference. Although my mother was a private school administrator for a little while using that degree. But they have a community of people that knew them as young people, as children, and that they grew up with who are there for them. They have a church community that's there for them. They have people in their lives that would, in fact, intervene in exactly the way you're describing if they saw a problem brewing.And so I've gained a lot of respect for that and thinking about my own future, how can I be a community member in a way like that? So I kind of have to construct this network in a place where I didn't really know anyone two years ago. There's a challenge there. But I'm part of a Quaker gathering. I have begun building some connections that I think are genuine there. And so I guess I don't agree that people in my life who don't understand my academic journey have nothing to offer me, because what they offer me is their humanity. And that's what I need. I'm glad for people like you who understand acuteness of my grief but I don't want to just be in a kind of AA group for former academics, you know?James Richardson: That's a transitional tool at most. So I think you're doing the right thing. And I talk about this at the end of my book, which is the, more important thing is to force yourself into relationships of reciprocal obligation, wherever you can do that. And unfortunately that's going to, in our society, it means you're going to have to stick your neck out and give your time and labor and wait for a, kind of like fishing, wait to catch a bite.I don't enjoy this process I just described. I really hate it because I'm neurodivergent. But as an analyst, it's very clear. And there's a lot of research on what builds relationships and community, and it starts with obligation, not preference.Joshua Doležal: What would an example be of voluntary but reciprocal obligation, a concrete example?James Richardson: This came out in my life history research because I did it on older Americans. So that allowed me to get glimpses, I get whispers of a much older past, before World War II, where a lot of what I'm critiquing in the book was not actually going on in our country. So an example is, before World War II, home renovation was done by your friends.Because almost all American men had basic carpentry and hand tools skills. What more basic thing to build a relationship around than exchanging labor in home renovation, building an addition, a deck, you know? Now, some people still do this, but they're probably professional contractors.This is the problem, we've gotten so, bureaucratized in our product and service mix that even the middle class doesn't need anybody. You don't need anybody. You just need cash. What's happened with friends is that we don't really do anything for them. We receive entertainment from them like a television screen. What happens is you tend to learn to pick friends based on how interesting they are, right? I have a weird sense of humor. So that would attract people, but then I would annoy them very soon after that. So then that’s the problem with being on the spectrum.But that is not what a relationship is. A relationship is what I saw in India where people would drop everything if you had to go to the hospital overnight, your friends would just literally parade into the room and they wouldn't just say, hi, hand you a card and leave. They would camp out there. These are not even relatives, but all your relatives would come too, right? So the community would react like a normal community to the wounding of an individual member because that's a wound to the group.In India there's so much corruption in retail in terms of pricing and lack of price transparency that you have to network in to buy durable goods or you're going to get taken. So the way you do it is you have a large urban network. So it's like, Hey I think we need to get a new dishwasher. So you tap your network and out of your network of 50 friends, one is gonna raise their hand. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah – my cousin's nephew, he runs a store. He'll get you a good deal. I mean, nobody does that anymore here.Joshua Doležal: And that is why I really believe that my rural Montana hometown, it's that way. People do home raisings there. I witnessed one of my uncles build a house that way with a group. The garage that I grew up in was built that way in a single day with notch and groove construction. So somebody was an expert in that in the area, and I don't know what kind of barter took place with, a freezer full of elk meat or something, to compensate for that. Reciprocal obligation lies at the heart of rural communities. And so for an urban space to be taking a page from rural America would be a real revolution.James Richardson: A flaw in research design is that we don't really, there isn't a good statistical way to access rural America beyond certain government obsessed topics, like drug use, drug addiction, alcoholism, these really nasty topics. We have a lot of information there, but in terms of things like… It's just not where the research is done. Academic social scientists don't do it there. They're either doing national studies or they're doing urban studies. And so my book has probably the same bias towards that 85 percent of America who lives within 10 miles of an urban center.But this lost world, it's imputed to be gone in my book. You're actually pretty rare because you have this kinship connection. I'm like multiple generations removed from that. So you didn't have to go to India to taste the other kind of way, the other way of being.Joshua Doležal: True.James Richardson: And I do think that might be a way to frame it. But the real problem is you have to be willing to have your privacy invaded.You have to let your guard down and Americans have a real problem. There's an anecdote in my book – a nurse whose sister had a nice white-collar job as a principal, then became an alcoholic, was fired for being drunk on the job by her school district, and then became a opioid addict and died in a park from an overdose. This all happened in two years – from functional to dead. She got a call at work that her sister's dead body had been found. And there was a superficial reaction of concern, but the administration at her hospital, they did not have any plan to give this person paid grieving leave. They had no policy. She's back at work. Obviously, she's not in normal…she's not behaving properly as a nurse, right? Pissing people off, angry, having outbursts. And it's her problem, Josh. It's her personal problem. No, it's not! This is a community problem. So what's the communal reaction? It's to ignore it and then blame herSo she gets drawn to HR for being a bad griever.It makes no sense, because these are things where simple policy and regulatory changes could make that go away, right? But she has to also let her guard down. She has to lift the veil of privacy and say, look, my sister is my best friend and she just, she became a drug addict and died in two years. I can't work right now. And then the community has to say, don't! We'll pay you. We'll give you six months paid leave. Heal yourself.That didn't happen. That conversation doesn't happen. Except maybe in very small family run companies. But most of us don't have access to that. To me, that's a perfect example of callous indifference that our urban society just throws at people who are really hurting. We're not trying to get paid grieving leave for someone whose 93 year old mother passed after a 20-year illness. We're smart enough to distinguish between that grief and what this woman was…they're not the same. Can we just make some distinctions? Durkheim wrote about this in the 19th century – a modern bureaucracy is the antithesis of a loving kinship community, in which your many mistakes and flaws are forgiven all the time. There's no forgiveness. You are expunged.I think the reciprocal obligation thing is tougher because we've got to actually… I talk in the book kind of almost as a joke, it's like, stop going with your wife to do all the errands. Ask a friend to do an errand. Like we've become over committed to our romantic partner, socially. I mean, people like me, we're like, that's my only friend. That's messed up! It doesn't make any sense. It's way too much to ask of one person, right? I should be calling a friend, hey, let's go shop cars, right?Joshua Doležal: Who is your, audience? Who do you hope to reach, and why should someone buy this book ?James Richardson: My audience is actually younger women, believe it or not, Gen Z and Millennial women. They're in the workforce. These are the people you see on the internet, the most pissed off about every single topic in my book. They feel the most stress between marriage, work, kids, and they talk about it.Also, newer immigrants who are, I would say middle class or educated, who are trying to figure out their messed up American colleagues. I have European fans on Substack who just find my depictions of American life to be fascinatingly accurate. Cause they just don't get it. So that's another group.And then I would say the other third audience is people like myself who've been through some fairly big romantic or career trauma, where the plan was A and it blew up. That includes a lot of people. You know, my little failed career in the beginning was statistically weird because it was a doctoral program, but the structure of it you could reproduce in corporate America. Abdication of responsibility. The apprentice with no master. No clear rules. Survival of the fittest.Joshua Doležal: Well, so people who've been through what Bruce Feiler calls a lifequake would find both some clarity in your book and then also possibly some remedial actions.James Richardson: When I sat down to write the book, I didn't want to have a bunch of sort of hokey solutions be the center of the book. My belief is that we can all become more self-aware of how embedded this lifestyle is in almost every aspect of our daily life. What I learned in therapy is self-awareness is how change starts. And I think that's true with society, too. This is a public health problem and hopefully this book contributes to a better understanding of what is going on. There's actually a substrate – it goes much deeper.Joshua Doležal: James’s forthcoming book, Our Worst Strength, is available for preorder now at Amazon. I encourage you to explore his Substack Homo Imaginari and his podcast Startup Confidential, which James describes as a “zero B.S. look into the realities of running a consumer startup in today’s market.”Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll join me on Friday for a discussion thread to unpack today’s interview.Subscribe to The Recovering AcademicUnlock more essays, interviews, and craft resources. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

A Conversation with Dr. Leslie Castro-WoodhouseJoshua Doležal: Welcome back to my interview series with academics who have transitioned to careers in industry or entrepreneurship. I’m Joshua Doležal, and my guest today is Dr. Leslie Castro-Woodhouse, founder and principal of Origami Editorial, where she offers developmental editing and academic book coaching services.Leslie left a corporate role in marketing in hopes that she would find a deeper “why” in graduate school. She completed a master’s in Asian Studies and a PhD in History, both at the University of California at Berkeley. Like many PhD candidates, she dreamed of becoming a professor, but she completed her degree in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis. After many years of adjuncting and fading hopes for a tenure-track faculty role, Leslie tried to pivot back to industry. But she struggled to find openings in marketing or educational technology that aligned with her values.So she fell back on developmental editing, in her words, as a Plan C, and later discovered academic book coaching when a colleague approached her for help with his second project. Now Leslie says that editing and coaching keep her connected to her favorite parts of the academic experience: ideation and interesting conversations.I asked Leslie how she prefers to introduce herself now, which turned out to be a little more complicated than it might seem.Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: I am both a developmental editor and I call myself an academic book coach. Sometimes writing coach, it kind of just depends on the context. I'm still kind of struggling with the word coach. It seems to evoke different reactions in people. So I'm trying to be mindful of that.Joshua Doležal: What do you mean?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Well, there seems to be a certain contingent who feel that coach has this association with life coaching. Which is a whole other ball of wax, really. I don't want it to sound like I'm just a cheerleader for people as they write. There's a lot more to it than that. And yet, coaching seems to be the term that just kind of fits the best.There really isn't a better term than I've found so far. So, I use it in a sort of qualified fashion.Joshua Doležal: Because we're not really counselors exactly, but something like book midwife would be perhaps overcooked, wouldn't you say?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Or book whisperer. I mean, I feel like the conversations I have when I'm talking to prospective clients, where they're like, so what do we do? What are these hourlong conversations, these sessions about and for and what do we do there? The short answer is, whatever you want. But the longer answer is really what the client needs. And it's part accountability. It's part moral support. It's part actual writing tips and recommending techniques for when people are feeling resistant or stuck or anxious.And there's actually a lot more of that involved in this job than I ever anticipated. And yet when you take a half step back, the bigger picture is that we are a really compassionate partner, like a colleague who is here for our client, to talk through kind of whatever it is that they're stuck on.And I know that different coaches have different orientations and some people are more writing oriented and some people are more idea oriented. I love to talk through my clients’ data with them. If they're having trouble finding the narrative and really understanding what their argument is, or they're just not there yet, I've worked with a couple of scholars now on second books where, unlike a dissertation, you don't come in with an existing thing on which to base the book, right?It isn't a matter of turning a dissertation into a book. You might be starting from scratch, and that's a much different prospect and can be a lot more challenging that way, because also people are out of grad school, they're into their faculty role, they have a lot less time to devote to it, and they don't have the structure that the dissertation, however minimally, may have provided and sometimes they really do just need to start from scratch and start thinking about well, what do I want this book to be about and how am I going to structure this? But to circle back to the original question is we're kind of like the surrogate colleagues that people don't have down the hall from them anymore in their department.And we're also a much safer bet than those colleagues ever really were to begin with in that we don't look at your tenure portfolio. We are completely neutral party and accept that we are really on the side of our client author, we just want to see them succeed. And that's what we're here to help them do.We were raised by wolves in my generation. We were left to figure all of this out for ourselves.Joshua Doležal: I'm going to back up a little bit because this is typically an interview series called academe to industry. And that fits your narrative in a sense, because you moved from academe into your entrepreneurial role. However, you were in industry before that. And so it's a little more complicated. First it was industry to academe. So can you tell me what you did before you got a PhD? What was your job?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Yeah, actually I spent almost 10 years in the world of work, after college, basically in a variety of marketing roles, I mean, my undergrad degree had been visual communications and design, and I started out kind of as a graphic designer and then moved further up the food chain from the person who taking direction from the marketing people to the marketing person giving the direction and I actually got to where I just was really burnt out. I was feeling really overworked and underpaid. I was in kind of an impossible position in my last corporate job and feeling like wow, these corporate types they talk a good game about wanting to know about what the markets are and what their customers really want, but they seem a lot more interested in just getting stuff on shelves and that was the reality, was they were just going to crank out as much stuff to put on shelves as they possibly could and wait to see what worked and what didn't work.And I found that really frustrating and enraging at a certain point because it was on my back. Like my labor, my 70 hours a week, was apparently worth it, as long as the stuff got out the door onto the shelf, whether it's sold or not that they didn't care about that.Joshua Doležal: But you were trying to sell it, right?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Well, yeah, my last roles were packaging. So it was doing all the copywriting, getting the photography done, putting a box around a product or many products and consistent branding and working with the design agencies. And it was grueling at times. It was just really a lot. And I really thought at the time that I was fleeing the corporate world for the meritocracy of academia where they would listen to reason, right?And in a way, even though my career is not strictly in academia anymore, I feel like I still have a foot in it. And the parts that I really like the best, I'm happy to say, are the parts that I still get to do every day, which is to say collegial conversations with people whose work I find really interesting and meaningful and getting that out there into the world, helping promote those voices in the world.A lot of the problems I identified in the corporate world have now migrated to academia. It's like the layers of bureaucrats at the top and the disconnect with the very precarious itinerant laborers at the bottom of the pyramid.Joshua Doležal: And the compensation in academe is not anywhere near what you get in corporate roles. But I want to back up just a touch.So it sounds like you were burned out in your marketing role. You were suffering from a crisis of purpose because you didn't feel like there was a deep and abiding commitment to quality, it was more production and you were, as a marketer, maybe I'm using a regrettable phrase, putting lipstick on a pig at times – there's this product more attractive than it actually is.And it just doesn't sound like that compensation was enough for you. There was a bad fit. The why of your workplace was kind of gone. Is that fair?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Yeah, absolutely. But then I really always kind of felt like in the corporate world, the why was just not supposed to be important to me. I think there are more folks in the generations coming up behind me for whom why is a much bigger portion of the decision making and some companies have gotten a little more hip to providing workers with a greater sense of purpose, but not in the roles I had.Joshua Doležal: When did you leave your corporate role?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: I was in the corporate world for the 90s. Like I graduated from college in 90 and went back to graduate school at the end, fall of 99. So about a solid decade. And then I was in grad school from 99 to 2009, which was another interesting moment to be in a pipeline and unaware of what was going on outside of it until of course I emerged in the bask and the glow of the dumpster fire that was the 2008 financial crisis and economic meltdown.So great timing as per usual.Joshua Doležal: Where did you go and what was your area of study?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: I earned my PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, and I started out there in a master's program, an interdisciplinary program in Asian Studies, which I was using as a kind of springboard to figure out which program, which discipline I really wanted to go into.And at the end of that program, I moved over to the History department and I thought that history would be untouchable as a discipline in the university. I really did. I can't believe that there are now universities and colleges. cutting and actually cutting history programs, history majors and people questioning the value of a history degree.And at the same time, like on the other side of the room, there were these weird discussions about why don't students have any critical thinking skills anymore? And where's the empathy. And I think, do you not see the disconnect between these two issues? You know, that you keep cutting out all the empathy training portions of the program and wondering why empathy is disappeared.But if it cannot be directly monetized, I think that is the challenge that many of the humanities face these days. That if it's not seen as directly contributing to a particular career path, especially if it's tech, I mean, STEM has been valorized, right? Until a machine can do your job.Joshua Doležal: In some of those cases, the social sciences and the data expertise that went along with it, is kind of a nice skill to segue into UXR research, until everybody lays off all the UXR researchers, so that kind of boom/bust mentality is the baggage that comes with a more job skills, jobs based curriculum.So it sounds like you and I both had a kind of romantic idea of higher ed when we went into it. And for my part, it was the examined life, the pursuit of truths, plural, and all of the things that William Cronon mentions in his classic essay, “Only Connect: The Goals of a Liberal Education.” You try to understand the dreams and nightmares of others.You learn how to talk with anyone. You learn how to solve problems. It's sort of this really versatile toolkit. It's not just for jobs. It's for relationships. It's for your lifelong thriving. And he was a historian or is still. And so when did you first understand that that was not what was driving your own education as a graduate student?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Ooh, that's a good question because I was always very job oriented. To be honest, while I was in the pipeline, and my department even had its own placement specialist on staff who was there to facilitate PhDs in the department, all their job portfolio stuff.There was a person to manage this and manage the application and letters of rec and all this stuff. And she had a bulletin board outside her office in the hallway with the names and the institutions after graduation, and I walked by that thing regularly. Like it's going to be me someday.I had plans, man. I had plans. I was going to be a professor. That was the goal. And it has taken a long time for me to unhook myself from that expectation and from beating myself up for not meeting that expectation. And also to learn how deeply that bias runs within academia that helps to perpetuate that mistaken notion on how closely we hook our identities to our work identities and to what those ideals mean, what those roles mean.I'm not sure it ever really did change for me as a grad student because I really thought until 2008, when the economy changed, I thought there were jobs, there were academic jobs. And as a UC Berkeley graduate, I thought I was pretty well positioned to get one of them. So I thought when the crisis hit, I would take a couple of years to kind of just chill out.At that point, I had some other family related things to deal with, a couple of aging parents and some elder care, and some deaths in the family, and things like that, that kind of just ended up sucking up all my time. And diverting me, distracting me from needing to find a job for a while. And I thought it would come back, and it never really did.And from about 2010, 2015, I mainly did adjuncting around the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was living, and I got some roles at UC Berkeley as an adjunct. The University of San Francisco across the bay. And eventually that was where I found my first editing role, was at USF. The small, Asian Studies journal where I became managing editor on a part time basis. And this was kind of my first putting my foot in the pool in terms of really identifying a different arena where I could potentially find a career path. The market wasn't there anymore and I had to figure out plan C.Joshua Doležal: I don't know if as an adjunct you became more aware of these corporate dynamics in the university or if that's only become clear to you from a distance now that you're out?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Oh no, definitely the adjunct experience was hugely informative. The fact that you could be sharing an office with like four or five other adjuncts, or a desk with four or five other adjuncts. The way that you're treated by the other faculty. And at the same time, you're really nicely jerked around by the university.There was one semester, I really freaked out because I got called up for jury duty about a week before I was to start this adjunct position at Berkeley. This is at Berkeley. And I really, really wanted to do it, needed to do it financially, but I had absolutely no documentation to show the court that I was actually going to be employed.And so I had to sit through a jury selection process. I got all the way in the jury box before I finally got selected out. But I just was in terror for a week that I was going to lose my adjunct job because I couldn't even demonstrate that I had, this was a real thing. This was a real job. They didn't even have an offer letter for me.And it turned out once they finally sent me all the union documentation in the handbook, Oh, I could actually have gotten that time off legally. They had to give that to me. I did not know. How would I have known? So it just really, it really drove home how it's all on the adjunct. It's all on this poor contingent person to figure out so much stuff, and it's just really unfair and uncool.Joshua Doležal: What a position to be in, that you were sweating it out, caught between these two bureaucracies. You couldn't really say no to either one. And neither one was going to consider your best interest. And what a perfect metaphor for adjunct and contingent labor.Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Yeah, I mean, I might have lost the crappily paying adjunct job for an even more crappily paying jury duty gig. Like what is that, $3.50 a day or something?Joshua Doležal: The sad thing is that both of them are very important. One, without it, the university would crumble. Because these are essential experiences that you're providing. And the other is – what's more basic than your right to a trial by a jury of your peers?The fact that you were feeling jeopardized or exposed by both is a sad commentary. The percentage of courses taught by adjuncts is continually growing. It sounds like a similar situation to corporate America in the 90s where it's about getting stuff on the shelves and packaging the brand and the marketer or the professor is kind of not important.Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Yeah. They're just sort of the delivery mechanism. It's become very transactional, transactionalized. I kind of see this as a more widespread social problem as well, that our society has also become very transactionalized, but that isn't the focus of this interview.Joshua Doležal: Well, it kind of is because the why that was disappearing from your corporate job became the same why that was disappearing from your higher ed jobs, right?I think I have a sense of why you pivoted. Why didn't you go back into industry where, as I'm doing all these interviews with other people that are talking about upskilling and the job search, like you would have had a huge head start with all that because you already had the resume, you could have gone straight back into marketing.Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Well, I thought so anyway, but it turns out corporate marketers don't really like people like me very much. I don't want to say PhDs. I think there probably are PhDs they'd be very happy with. I think that my main problem. Because I did try to go back in the industry. I really did. I really tried. I tried so hard.It was really demoralizing. Because I think that there are a lot of companies I applied to, roles I applied to, for which I was frankly overqualified and that was a non-starter. But I think the bigger, deeper issue for me was that truly, I didn't buy it. That if it was a UX role, it was an EdTech role, frankly I felt like, aren't these part of the problem?I don't want to be part of the problem. I don't want to be monetizing educational technology. I think educational technology needs to, frankly, be a lot more invisible. You know, it should be more about education. It's kind of extractive, it's exploitive. It's about making money off of things and people in ways that I just find icky.I just don't like it. I don't want it. I don't want to foster that in the world, is what it really comes down to.Joshua Doležal: How did you first become aware of coaching as a possibility for you? And then how did you make that transition?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Completely by accident. I mean, I was early in launching my editing business and I thought that being an academic copy editor was probably a pretty decent pathway to pursue. And I have some folks in my circle, my existing network who were interested in, getting their stuff edited. So there I was, but it was not long after I kind of hung out my shingle that a friend and colleague reached out to me and said, Oh my God, Leslie, I'm so glad you're doing this because I need help. Like, I have this second book, and I don't know what it's about. Like, and I've been gathering data, and I have data, but I'm not really sure what it says. I haven't really unpacked it yet. But here's my initial ideas. And he sent me a very uncooked, I won't call it a manuscript, but it was some writing, where he was trying to hash out his ideas on, what, what he wanted to write about.And I could kind of get an impression of what he was after, but it wasn't there yet. It needed a lot of development and so that was the point at which I said, sure, I would be happy to just meet with you on an ongoing basis and help you figure this out.I didn't know that was coaching. I didn't know that was book coaching at all. I didn't know it was a thing, but then I also didn't even know developmental editing was a thing until I realized, oh, that's what I'm doing. I'm doing this thing and wow, there's a name for it. I just kind of felt like it hit the sweet spot for me of like my favorite parts of the academic experience.And yet it's not like, it's not classroom teaching and it's not doing my own research and writing. And yet, having been in those contexts informs directly the profession, the practice of doing what we do. I want to talk to people who are still ideating, who are still brainstorming what the book is about.That's great. I love that part because I love talking about the ideas with my authors in addition to talking with them about how to stay motivated and how to set goals that will keep them moving along the way and actually reflecting on the actual texts that they write. Once I got into it, I realized, wow, how much there was in this arena to do that was a value to my peers. And it was something that I feel like, wow, I've been, I've been trained to do this all along.  Joshua Doležal: Several colleagues in the coaching space have a similar origin story. One came to coaching while she was being coached – her coach saw potential for her in the same pathway. In my case, I was offering an online creative writing course through a Dallas-based organization called Writing Workshops and like you said, it was accidental.I didn't intend for there to be any workshop element to the course, because I was thinking of keeping my own labor low. But the students wanted that. And so I organized a pop-up workshop at the end of the course, and then gave them all feedback as I normally would in a college class. And it was a revelation for some of them. They'd never had their work seen that way with such care. And so they approached me and said, do you offer coaching? And I never considered it, but for them, I said, sure. And one of them is still a client. So that was my first awareness that there is this field. For me, the word is, I'm a teacher.I don't know that I'm a coach. I'm an editor for sure, but editing is just one part of teaching. So really it's working through the entire writing process. As you say, the planning stage is so important. What's the larger vision for the project, the core set of questions driving it, or when you've resolved it, if it's a memoir, what's the big turning point that you're working toward. And, you know, scaffold everything accordingly.So those are things that I would have spoken with my students about on the essay level. Now it's bigger. And your comment earlier about the colleague down the hall, I think is a really insightful.In your case, being an academic book coach and in mine, being a more of a literary book coach – we are being paid for that kind of invisible labor that's often part of professional relationships in academe. What do you think you bring to your clients that they don't get from, let's say it's not the colleague down the hall, but it's someone that they know through a professional organization and their little writing group or whatever that exchanges drafts. What do you offer that's greater than that?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: I would have to say that really at the top of the list, safety – a sense of if the ideas aren't cooked yet, that's okay. They don't have to worry that I'm a colleague who's going, Oh my God, is this person for real? Like where did they get their degree? Like, I can't believe I already signed off on that dissertation. Oh my God.No. I am their ally. I am on their side. And I'm surprised at how much space that that unlocks in terms of their writing practice and developing ideas, that just knowing that there's somebody you can talk to who's trained like you, who knows this language. Because it is really a language, right? This academic language.But in addition to the safety and that space of safety that my coaching relationship affords, I think the next big thing is the perspective of working with a bunch of different scholars. And seeing how actual published things work, having been on the other side of that desk and having that professional experience to bring to the process, and also that I've published my own book.I've been that scholar trying to whip the dissertation into shape to make it a real book. And I know what that feels like. I know what it's like to be rejected, I’ve been through all of the pieces. And so I really know what it feels like to be in my client's shoes.Joshua Doležal: What do you see as the future of your practice? Why do you feel that this is a sustainable area for you to continue investing in professionally?Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: Well, to be honest, I have my moments when I'm not sure. But then, it's still a very young practice and I need to be a little less hard on myself about like, I should have a million clients right now.It's a practice and I'm trying to build it still and testing out whether it's really long term, sustainable, and viable. But what I am finding is that particularly amongst the current generation of scholars who are kind of like newly hatched from grad school right now, there seems to be a much higher willingness to say, you know what, I need help. And I am looking for a professional to help me with this.Whereas for my generation and people behind me, like what? You can't have somebody else telling you what to write. I'm not telling anybody what to write, but the idea of having, the availability of help and it's that it's acceptable to ask for help, I think is the big shift that I'm seeing. And I think it's a good one because we were raised by wolves in my generation. We were left to figure all of this s**t out for ourselves. And it's not easy, nobody taught us how to write or how to think. And they're still uninterested. In many cases, even our dissertation advisors, once we're hatched, we're gone. Bye bye, see you later. And you're on your own and who's out there to help new faculty and people in these roles?Even people who've got tenure are still looking for, like, I need more accountability and I just need help, maybe if I'm paying someone for their time, I will take the project seriously. I will stay on track with it. So I think there are some cultural shifts.I like the control that I have over my time, over my clientele, but also that I really get to live my why and support the kinds of projects and people that I want to see and encourage in the world.Joshua Doležal: The impulse for writing, even in academe is to be heard, to connect, to know that you're not alone. And so, as you say, for our generation, it was much more of a stiff upper lip. Figure it out. And if you can't, then you're not worthy. And so in this case, it's like anything else. If you want to get better, having support and resources will help you do that.Leslie Castro-Woodhouse: It's actually a role I really love. I didn't expect to; I thought that editing was sort of a plan C, after industry doesn't work out and academia doesn't work out, NGOs don't work out, where are you?And now I find that working for myself is where I really like to be. I like the control that I have over my time, over my clientele, but also that I really get to live my why and support the kinds of projects and people that I want to see and encourage in the world. That's what it really comes down to is, yeah, I could make more money. I could. Hopefully I will. But I just need to survive. I just need to support myself and do okay. I don't need to make a gajillion dollars and I'm not interested in that. So this is a very fortunate pathway for somebody like me who would otherwise be doomed to obscurity and poverty.Joshua Doležal: Well, I'm so glad to hear that you've returned to your why.  That's the most important thing that's sustaining you. I wish you all the best in growing your practice! And, hopefully a reader or two of mine will reach out. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Pitching horseshoes at twilight, gnats whirling out of the shaggy grass, the rusted stake fades each time I turn, and it seems all of these tosses should amount to more than a few leaners skipping off the irons. Red clover lies trampled near the pit, where I have planted my foot, rocking back for the slow underhand, blinking away the mosquitoes and flies. I keep at it because there is now a disc of light on top of each stake, a cool halo there in the dark where the steel gives back the moon’s glow. I can scarcely see my own hands as I cast toward the mark. I am not content with the clusters of near misses glancing into the sand — this must end with the kiss of iron and steel, the ring of the shoe striking home. Let others pluck the daisy’s petals. The night embraces me. I gather the metal crescents. I take my aim. Subscribe to The Recovering AcademicUnlock more essays, poems, interviews, and craft resources. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

While packing boxes for another move, I’ve gone through a familiar cycle of deciding what to keep and what to throw away. Old photographs always make the cut, but I puzzle over some of them. I can’t believe that the boy flexing in neon Spandex and a shredded tank top could ever have been me. But maybe I’m fooling myself by imagining that I’ve left him behind. I was thinking of these things the other day while following Jess Sims through a workout on the Peloton app. Part of me marveled at how far fitness culture had come since the 1990s, when weight rooms were gendered spaces that literally reeked of testosterone. One offender at my college gym filled the place with such rank B.O. that we nicknamed him the Toxic Avenger. Which captured the Zeitgeist of weightlifting well enough. There’s a lot to celebrate in escaping that mindset. Maybe there’s even hope for progress if a boy steeped in 90s fitness culture can become a man whose favorite trainers are women. Yet I continue to ask myself if those old habits of mind are really gone.The bodybuilding paradoxThe goal of strength training in the late 80s and 90s was dominance. You lifted weights to get bigger, to max out higher than the guy next to you, and to make people scared to slam you into a locker. I felt so happy when I set a record as a high school freshman by military pressing the entire stack in the cage. It didn’t matter that I had to twist my torso unnaturally to manage the last few inches and that my upper back ached for days afterward. What mattered was my name up on that wall. Gyms simmered with the tension and silence that has long defined male relationships. There were intimate moments when my lifting buddy placed his hands on mine as I struggled to complete a final rep. But we masked those moments with insults and drew our motivation from the self-loathing that pulsed through the grunge and metal of that era. I am the man in the box. Buried in my s**t. What I’ve felt, what I’ve known, never shined through in what I’ve shown. Never free, never me, so I dub thee unforgiven.A lot of the young men I lifted weights with were compensating for voids their fathers had left in them. Ripped biceps were no different in that regard from jacked up trucks with gun racks. A body that said Don’t mess with me more often meant Help, I’m dying of loneliness.And so for many years my fitness was a façade, not wellness at all, but a stand-in for other forms of self-harm.The muscular ChristianThese thoughts did not occur to me when I first saw John Jacobs and the Power Team perform. The year was 1992, and I was a high school junior when my church youth group bought tickets to see the Power Team in Missoula. There were no YouTube trailers then, no TikTok previews, just posters like the one at the top of this post. My imagination filled in the rest. By the time our bus arrived at the arena, I was buzzing. I watched John Jacobs break 20 (30?) baseball bats over his thigh, slowly, like he was massaging a knot. A man lowered his shoulder and ran through half a dozen enormous blocks of ice. In a particularly twisted stunt, a Power Team soldier lay on a bed of nails and bench pressed 315 pounds more than 20 times. The point of all this was to glorify God, but these were not joyful men. John Jacobs and his crew carried the same simmering rage through their routine that I recognized in my football teammates, even in the coach’s son, who earned straight A’s with an aw shucks grin, but who screamed at us in the huddle, Let’s kick their f****n’ ass! I knew even then that a person secure in their faith does not need bodybuilders to inspire them, and that anyone who answers such an altar call falls away once the endorphins fade. Gazing at that poster now, it’s not the mullets that catch my eye or the phallic swords, it’s the sadness in the mens’ faces. They couldn’t crank their music up loud enough to touch it. Not even the Blood of the Lamb seems to have reached those chilly depths.But I hung the poster on my wall and measured myself against those men each night before bed. I told myself that there was redemption in each burning curl, that torching the last ounce of my strength might cause God to smile down on me as a worthy son, the way my own father never had done. There was a cruel logic in all this, because my penance in the gym made me sexier, more virile, even while I remained committed to abstinence. Sometimes exhaustion was even erotic, sending flickers of pleasure through the pain on the sit-up bench or during the last chest fly, when I’d squeeze my core to help finish the set.But how different was that pleasure, really, from the dopamine hit I sought from cheap college beer? Or, later, from sex itself? Most of my workout playlists were all about drug addiction, anyway. I never bent a needle to my arm, but I sure knew what it meant to call Dr. Feelgood. The problem was that Dr. Feelgood never left me feeling alright.The gym rebornI’m not sure when this all changed for me. I still love pushing my physical limits, but now it’s about seeing what my body can do at age 48, not because I think I deserve the pain. I trace part of my evolution to a running group that I joined more than ten years ago. We had a standing rule that everyone ran together on the way out. The club was co-ed, and talk ranged all over the place, from kids to high school sports to pop culture. It was a revelation, after years of disappearing into my rituals, to be present to others during exercise. A few of us always kicked into higher gear on the way back, but always for the joy of it. COVID killed most of my group workouts. The running club never got back together, even after the danger had passed. And the two friends I’d been training with in the gym got used to their basement routines. Around that time my ex ordered her Peloton bike, and I started using the app for my home workouts. Peloton has a trainer for every demographic. Latino? Check out Rad Lopez and Robin Arzón. Queer? Matty Maggiacomo’s got you. Representation matters in fitness, like everywhere else. Seeing someone who looks like you doing what you aspire to do is motivating. I knew that I was supposed to gravitate toward the “bro” trainers, like Andy Speer, Matt Wilpers, and Adrian Williams. All three of them offer a watered down version of 90s fitness culture with the Metallica, Korn, and DMX playlists to go with it. But you know what? I wasn’t nostalgic for any of that. I wanted more of what I’d experienced in the running club, which is what drew me to instructors who weren’t like me, at least not outwardly. Athletes like Jess Sims and Tunde Oyeneyin. One thing I love about training with women is how different the messaging is. I know that Jess and Tunde don’t see me as their target audience. Much of what they say is meant for people who aren’t accustomed to pushing their physical limits, who need to be reminded that they can do hard things. But they also caution against comparing yourself to anyone else. As corny as it sounds, Jess’s motto, “No ego, amigo,” really resonates with me. If you’re struggling, scale it to the knees. Don’t contort your spine just to get your name on the wall. But the biggest difference between the Peloton staff and my childhood heroes is that Jess and Tunde are happy. They’re not punishing themselves or compensating for emotional neglect. What a privilege it is to move, they say. Fill yourself up so you can show up for others. Just like song lyrics read aloud, most of these platitudes ring hollow if stripped of context. But they land differently when you’re sweating alongside someone who is communicating, at every step, that they’re doing it with you. I even find some healing in the thought that my ex is taking the same classes, responding to the same messaging, even if we both see each other as the thing we’re recovering from. I think I keep choosing Jess and Tunde because I need proof that the gym is no longer the segregated place it once was, and I want to believe that I’ve left those sad men behind. That I belong to this new, happier, fitness family. But I wonder if I can shed my past that easily. I remember the verse I heard so many times as a child, which explains what it means to be born again, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Being born again is not far from Paul DeMan’s definition of modernity as “a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.” I share in the hope of discovering a truer self, a more authentic form of being, but I’m wary of such radical erasure of what came before. It seems violent, like a long blast of electroshock therapy. Even so, I’m not sure what to do with the muscular boy in that old photograph. Maybe we all have a core, like the pith of a tree, that remains solid as we add growth rings every year. Maybe that boy lives on in the heartwood of “me” — not alive, exactly, but still part of where I come from, what holds me together. Another option, as Gail Griffin suggests, is to see myself more like a matryoshka doll — younger versions of me nesting within the more recent shells. But the original core, in Griffin’s formulation, is the ultimate blank slate — “a darkness, a space, a silence.” Even if I carry all of my selves within me, considerable gaps yawn between them — enough to wonder if some of my previous lives now belong in someone else’s nesting doll.I’m keeping that old photograph for now. Hopefully it will be years before I have to go through those boxes again. But someday I know the question will swing back about what to keep and what to throw away, and that then I’ll be asking with my kids in mind. I don’t know whether this photograph will make the cut then or fall mercifully into oblivion. But I marvel at how the stories we pass on can never be whole truths, how our lives land in the hands of others searching for their own points of origin, their own new departures, their own questions about what is essential and what should be wiped from memory. Today’s essay is free. To unlock more memoir, exclusive interviews, opinion pieces, and poetry, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

She reveled in the bumps on the runs, the burn of snow against her wrists. Each time I saw her fall, cheeks glowing in the wind, she lifted the whitewashed cap from her eyes, grinning at the spectacle of scattered skis and poles as I crisscrossed the hill, gathering the gear. Once I reached her, she would steady herself on my shoulder to fit her boot to the binding, stamping her heel into the lock. Soon, she’d drop into a corridor flanked by jagged rocks, bobbing among the moguls, her hair flickering against the black ice. The bruised cheeks were nothing new, she said when she called, but this time her man had dealt the blow. Then she laughed, as if wiping snow from her face — the first time I could not recover what she had lost, weave my way to her side, and return it all. If you know of someone who would appreciate my series, why not gift a subscription for 2024? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s essay is part of a new series on recovery that includes me, Latham Turner, Bowen Dwelle, Michael Mohr, Dee Rambeau, and Lyle McKeany. Each of us will wrestle this week with what recovery means to us and how our life experiences shape that definition. —I used to teach in an Iowa town that Bill Bryson said was “as tranquil as a double dose of Valium.” That was close to the mark. Pretty much everything I hated about it as a single person — the cuteness, the tidiness — I loved as a parent. There were Dutch bakeries, holiday carriage rides, even a craft beer pub all within a five-minute stroll. And I had a six-block commute to work. But there was trouble in paradise.One day I locked my bike outside my office and logged on to my computer, intending to open the budget for the first-year seminar I was directing. I was planning a workshop and wanted to calculate how much I could offer my colleagues in stipends. But the budget had disappeared. I kept scanning my dashboard, thinking I’d mixed something up, removed a widget maybe? But finally the truth sank in. I was still responsible for training 30 faculty and developing curriculum for 500+ students, but I no longer had access to the funds for the program. And no one had thought to tell me. It felt like being locked out of my own office.This was not a mistake. A decision had been made (and I use the passive voice intentionally to mask the “doer,” since I still don’t know who it was) to pool resources for several programs in one fund that an associate dean would monitor. As a result, my program had no guaranteed funds at all. Each expense required a separate request. At the height of the madness, when I was trying to book a distinguished artist who we’d agreed to reimburse for her travel, I had to ask her to email screenshots of airfare, which I then relayed to the deanlet for approval (not knowing, myself, what the hard limit was). The approval came several hours later, and I told the artist to please proceed. But I could tell from her response that the joy from our earlier correspondence had cooled. And, truth be told, I was beginning to feel the same way about my work. The budget switcheroo made me angry. It was insulting to have been left out of the loop. But I could have forgiven that oversight if anyone had acknowledged it — and if the new system came with a sensible rationale. Instead, it seemed designed to minimize spending by obstructing access. The new budget also represented a shift in power, concentrating more authority in administration and stripping faculty leaders of agency. But no one seemed capable of admitting either. And I saw this story repeated over and over again with strategic planning, with accreditation review, with shared governance, and more.I trace my identity as a recovering academic to that memory, because it was the first time I began to doubt my profession and myself as a result. Throughout the process of leaving academe and rebuilding my life on the other side, I’ve often wondered if I was overreacting, if things were not as bad as they seemed to me. Anger is usually a good occasion to check in with yourself, to see if you’re distorting reality, refusing to listen, or simply defending yourself out of hurt. But two years later I do not look back, as so many who have battled addiction do, and marvel at how wrong I was and how obvious it was to everyone but me. Instead, recovery means trusting myself as a reliable witness to my own life. What felt wrong was truly wrong. My gut was telling the truth.Why “The Recovering Academic”?When I launched The Recovering Academic, I knew there would be some chatter about whether the title was meant to be glib or serious. In fact it was meant to be both. The academic is sometimes caricatured as an obsessive, a hound who just can’t let go of the knowledge bone, worrying reams of data, sniffing through the archives, panting the night away in the lab. There’s enough truth in that image to get a chuckle whenever I introduce myself as a recovering academic. But the stereotype hides deeper tales of suffering, of how far academic work can pull us from the “why” that brought us to the profession to begin with, how we blame ourselves for the doubts when they creep in, how we struggle with shame and a feeling of failure when we leave, even if leaving was our own choice, even if it felt like the only choice left. So my recovery alludes not to addiction or treatment, but to bereavement — to a loss that broke me and sent me careening into grief. If this series is about anything, it is about my attempt to reassemble a self on the other side of that mourning. An important first step in my recovery, and one I still emphasize publicly, was the knowledge that I was not alone. Not a week goes by that I don’t hear from readers or new LinkedIn contacts thanking me for my honesty. It’s been a chorus of voices who have suffered from isolation, intimidation, and guilt. I thought I was the only one. Everyone said I was crazy for leaving. My mentor shunned me when I quit. Thank God I wasn’t making it up.I had a line out the door every time I recruited sources for a new Chronicle piece. These weren’t faculty who had been laid off or denied the tenure track, they were high-performing professionals, award-winning scholars and teachers whose faith in higher education had faltered. The most troubling pattern? Most were idealists, the ones who had happily traded religious belief for vocational awe, who fell headlong for research and teaching only to discover that their institutions didn’t love them back in that way.  This is why Liz Haswell compares her own resignation to getting a divorce, a major rupture that required a “conscious uncoupling.” Ashley Ruba, PhD claims that leaving academe restored her mental health. Amanda Welch, Cleyde Helena, and Ian Street produced a podcast for recovering academics before I launched my series. And Gabrielle Filip-Crawford chose the same name for a support network on Slack. I need these reminders that the grief I felt so keenly last year was not only real, but legitimate. Hundreds, maybe thousands of others have walked the same road. Part of that mourning has meant accepting that I can no longer count on my degrees, my publication history, or my record of leadership to open other opportunities. Almost everything that comes next must be new. But one sign of recovery is trusting my instincts and my discernment for past choices and for those yet to come.Was it wrong from the start? I thought of these things when I carried a basket out to the garden before the first frost. It was nearly a year to the date that I’d begun building a deer fence that I called a DIY cure for academe. There’s always something sad about the last harvest of the year, even if it overlaps with garlic planting, and it brought Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” to mind, where a traveler happens upon a ruined statue with the inscription, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Shelley’s poem is a reminder that everything crumbles in the end, the way every garden must surrender to frost. So I was tempted to think of my work in that way. How long did Steve Jobs’s dent in the universe last? Who is even talking about him anymore? And if that is true, how much less significant the sixteen years I spent pouring heart and soul into the classroom must be. But then I remembered Jack Gilbert’s poem “Failing and Flying,” which begins with the unforgettable line: “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.” Gilbert pushes back at those who say, when a relationship falters, that anyone could have seen it coming, that failure was baked in from the start. No, he says — there’s always a side of love that was real. I like his poem as a way of thinking about my academic life because, for a significant portion of it, I flew. I had excellent mentors in graduate school, where I made friends that remain close to this day. Sure, I got sucked into the numbers game with publications, weathered a stressful first year on the job market, and took a job in a region that I would not have chosen otherwise. But the college that hired me was much like the one I attended. The small town recalled my Montana community. I wasn’t invisible there. I even truthfully described my position as a dream job, not because it paid well, but because it offered me a chance to be my full self. No need to carve out a research niche — I could teach both halves of the American literature survey, medical humanities, creative writing, sustainability, podcasting, even a senior seminar on Willa Cather that culminated in a road trip to her Nebraska hometown. These are many of the reasons why I grieved the transition out of academe so hard. But I also know that the air around the classroom soured during my final years, and that I perceived that shift accurately. And so both halves of my academic life, like both sides of the Icarus tale, are equally true. And I might say, as Gilbert does of Icarus, that I was not “failing as [I] fell,” that I was not falling at all, that leaving academe represented the “end of [my] triumph.” Yet I cannot claim Gilbert’s view alone. It was hard to pick those last peppers, to pull out the frozen stalks a week later, to shut the gate on the year. It brought back the feeling of leaving my office on the last day, when I had an impulse to snap a photo or two to prove I’d really been there. The last harvest also felt heavier this year because I am nearing the end of a divorce. I won’t be planting more garlic or anything else in those beds that I built. This is another end, another goodbye. But that’s not all it is. My marriage, like my academic career, saw many happy years and gave me the gift of fatherhood. None of that was in vain, even if it couldn’t be saved. That reminder also helps me see that I did not build my garden for nothing. I built it as an expression of hope, a ceremony of home making, a breathing out of my core beliefs. And it gave me back a beautiful harvest. Fifty pounds of potatoes, enough cucumbers for many quarts of pickles, a year’s worth of tomato salsa, peppers galore, world-class squash, kale, carrots, beets, and more. Some say that you never recover from grief. Never put yourself back together in the same way again. But I find recovery in a more measured view. For now it is sadness that holds hope for joy. One day it will be happiness that saves space for sorrow. Shelley and Gilbert must come together, today and tomorrow.  I walked away from academe, but that’s not all I did. I am a recovering academic and a divorcé, but that is not all that I am or all that I ever will be. Read the full Recovery Series This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Friends, This post is a conversation between Alison Acheson and me. Alison and I both taught writing for many years as college professors. Now we are forging a path for ourselves as teachers and writers outside academe. If you are not already a reader of Alison’s Unschool for Writers, I hope you’ll explore her rich series. In this exchange we reflect on how the traditional classroom has changed, and why we still believe it is possible for writing to stand apart from our private selves. JoshJosh: Alison, you taught in an MFA program at the University of British Columbia for 14 years. It's uncommon for writers who have found a full-time teaching gig to give it up. What pushed you out of academe or drew you toward other opportunities? Was it a push or a pull or both?Alison: I taught "Writing for Children and Young People" from 2002-08, and then again from 2014-2021. Not only was there an incredible shift in classroom focus between '08 and '14, but in 2015, our writing program blew up with accusations and the loss of our Chair...all of which sent reverberations within the entire writing community in Canada. I've written some about this and posted it in Brad Cran's "Truth & Consequences" newsletter here on Substack, so won't go on about that. At the same time – 2015-16 – I was caregiving my spouse through ALS, so was really not dialed in to all the madness. I was never tenure-track – that might have made a difference. I was at first a "sessional" (the equivalent of a US "adjunct"), and then a "lecturer" – someone with a handful of rights and benefits. Months turned into years of grief and loss on my part, and bizarre and divisive behaviour on the parts of those I worked with and for.Josh: I've read about your caregiving, which is the subject of your latest book. How difficult it must have been to see your husband slipping away at the very time that the profession you loved was changing around you. Alison: Yes, it was what was happening in the workshops and classrooms that, in the end, caused me to move on. I would have stayed for the teaching. But the teaching became less and less.There's such irony to the idea of a "creative" writing workshop being a safe space. It's not that it should be a place of attack or fear, no. But there is nothing safe about creating. I always expected that the workshops I facilitated would be places of respect...but for the most part, the respect should be for what the piece of work wants and needs to be. Egos and bruises should be left at the door, and there should be a sense of deep caring for what we are all doing together. I no longer felt I was able to work in the ways that were expected of me. And was experiencing physical symptoms that told me it was time to leave. We need to listen to our bodies; our minds don't always let us know, and hearts have a way of pretending to be occupied.Josh: You're bringing back memories of the last five years or so that I taught in Iowa. Students were changing, sure, and there were some increased difficulties in the classroom. But I often felt that I could win over even the most skeptical audience over fifteen weeks. When I left, I still felt that sacred things were happening in the classroom. It was more the environment around the classroom that triggered physical stress. I remember a faculty workshop where the president had brought in a higher ed consultant (I guess what they call a "thought leader") who was going to help us think through strategic planning for a rejuvenated arts program. At some point he used the term "us-ness" to refer to the benefits of an arts program, and one of my colleagues – a poet – recognized that this was a guise for student retention. Get them to enroll, hook them with belonging through the arts, and get more of their tuition. My colleague said, "I thought we were going to talk about the arts." It was that kind of gaslighting that set off alarm bells for me. I'm not sure I could even name the physical signs — a kind of roiling gut might have been one of them, certainly all the physical symptoms of anger (muscle stiffness, thudding pulse). What were the signs of distress for you, if I may ask? Alison: In the year following my leave-taking, a beloved colleague – my friend in that place – died of a heart attack, a by-product of stress. Or at least, the symptoms were attributed to stress, and otherwise ignored as he had tried to go on.Even in the thick of Covid, when I was teaching from home, I would awaken on the days I had class, with painful stomach cramps, which would worsen until about ten minutes after the class began. When it came time to return, the thought of dealing with that within the institutional walls was terrifying.I recalled the term before Covid, the last term in-class, and the blunt and negative comments about "old feminists who don’t understand where it's at now," the emails from a student unhappy with words I'd used — a sense of hair-splitting. I would think about returning to face-to-face teaching and grow shaky. Josh, do you have thoughts on what might be left at the door of the writing workshop or classroom, and what might be brought inside?Josh: First, I'm so sorry to hear about your colleague. And I'm glad to know that you found your way out before you suffered irreversible injury. Your earlier point about the need for safety in writing workshops resonates with my recent experience with the Prague Summer Program for Writers. Most of the participants were much younger than me, and I found that they were looking more for affirmation than for the tough love that I've always wanted from a workshop. So I'm not sure that there was anything left at the workshop door — everything was brought inside and carried back out again. Maybe it's fanciful to think that it was ever otherwise? We are so conditioned now to think of the self and the personal brands that we curate on social media as interchangeable. So I wonder how open many of us are to critical input on our work without seeing it as a personal criticism — dust to be shaken off our sandals as we remain true to our curated selves. I think that there used to be more humility inside the workshop, that everyone enjoyed a kind of equality in that space, but I'm wondering if you felt that way as a woman. Is it possible to leave something like gender, race, or sexuality at the door of the workshop? Were we ever, truly, better at focusing on craft in isolation from identity, or was that a delusion? Alison: I wanted the work on the page to sit on its own, too; I wanted fellow workshoppers to respect what it was and what it was trying to be, and offer to that end.I’ve had feedback on stories in workshop that had me in tears on the bus ride home more than once—I learned to wait until I was home to pull out the stack of written comments to read beyond what was said in the classroom. But I’m not convinced we have to see it as Tough Love vs Affirmation. Josh: Can you explain that distinction?Alison: In my early days of teaching, I tried to read body language in the workshop, I tried to understand who needed what and when. But I realized that those tough guys who sit back from the table, arms crossed over their chest, can be breaking inside. I learned that a weepy person was not necessarily the most raw in the room. The final straw was an aging woman staring balefully at me all through class (I was inwardly quaking), at the end of which she congratulated me on being a "great facilitator.” She said that she’d had to focus to hear as she’s quite deaf, and the following week she sat closer with a rather convivial expression! After that, I gave up assuming. Josh: It’s true! Someone might be glaring at you and really just need to use the restroom. But it’s so hard not to project or assume. That’s a great story. Alison: For sure. And it helped to remind myself that to scrutinize the work itself, and give the work what it needed, was key. And to make it clear to the participants that I was doing just that.I’ve never felt, in a workshop, as if I’m not seen as equal because I’m a woman. But within the workshop, when I was student, it was all about the manuscript for me, not about my identity. I saw my work as both an extension of me and as separate from me. Like a healthy child, I wanted to see the work go out into the world with independence. I’m not hovering over my children to explain them to people, and I won’t be there for my stories either; they’ll need to stand on their own. The workshop should—ideally—ease this pressure. The workshop should give the story some legs. Josh: Yes, you’re recalling two terms I often use in workshops, both borrowed from Peter Elbow: believing and doubting. Often I divide large group workshops in this way. The first time around the circle, we’ll all be doing our best to believe in the story or essay, looking for elements that are working and celebrating them or locating promising layers to develop. The second time around, we shift into doubting mode, watching for places where the narrative ceases to thrill or jostles us from our reading dream. I always find that writers appreciate that balance. We don’t want pure praise or unrelenting criticism – we want someone to believe in us and then help us reach a little further. That balance works well in coaching, too, in my experience.Alison: Yes, perhaps this depends on the nature of the workshop or consultation: is it for those who want to be professional writers—i.e. people who would like to earn all or part of their livelihood from this work?Or is it for people who want to find ways to express and self-discover—are they looking for a form of therapy? Writing can be extraordinarily therapeutic.If it’s the former, they’re about to encounter a world of gate-keepers. If the latter, that’s a different goal altogether. I think there was a time when this didn’t have to be explained: if you were taking a course in a university, if you had to submit a portfolio to take part, then you knew where you stood. That seems to have gotten blurry. What gets messy is when both groups want to publish.Josh: Ah, yes, and this conundrum lies at the heart of the Substack platform, where writers with both sets of goals can thrive. Perhaps we’ll save that for a future exchange! Alison, thanks so much for this lovely conversation. This is a friendly reminder that tomorrow, 11/29, from 1:00-2:30pm EST, I’ll be offering a live workshop for paying subscribers on writing a high-performing personal statement or college essay. A replay will be available on Friday, 12/1. For details, including the link to the live event, please see last week’s essay.Also, if you haven’t visited the companion site Inner Life lately, check out last week’s essays by and J.E. Petersen, as well as new work later today from Sam Kahn. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

We are sober folk. Our starting place is the fall, when the sun is not half as strong as the warmth of our own underarms, the dead earnest of cold what we have always known best, touching our ears to our shoulders, our upper lips to our noses— rebuilding ourselves beneath annihilated trees, bending our heads as we pass, pressing on. Subscribe to The Recovering AcademicEssays, poems, interviews, and craft This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit joshuadolezal.substack.comEpisode 6 TranscriptJoshua Doležal: I’m Joshua Doležal, and this is Catchment, the podcast for The Recovering Academic Substack series. My guest today is Dr. Ginger Lockhart. Ginger and I connected through LinkedIn, where I’m finding more recovering academics than I expected. And the idea of recovery is more than a metaphor for many of us. Ginger told me that her addiction to achievement as a young person is what led her to the PhD originally, and that as an entrepreneur she now guards against that mentality. Ironically, she is able to achieve more as a business owner by making herself less visible. Ginger Lockhart: I don't want to use the term addiction because that is a serious problem. But as somebody who has had problematic behaviors related to achieving things, I tend not to talk about it too much publicly. I just try to work behind the scenes as much as I can. And that is a much more full way of achieving job satisfaction for me.Joshua Doležal: Ginger Lockhart earned tenure at Utah State University as a quantitative psychologist. She says that much of her work felt like pulling teeth: teaching students who didn’t want to take her required courses. And she struggled with the reality that many low-income students were accumulating debt without even completing their degrees. Everyone told her that she just needed a sabbatical, but when she found herself dreading a return to teaching after a year away, Ginger knew something had to give. During the COVID lockdowns, she and her husband experimented with an online workshop on a popular software for researchers, and when the demand far surpassed their expectations, the idea for QuantFish, a statistics training platform for researchers, was born. Ginger and I cover a lot of ground today, including the challenges that working moms face, the unlimited potential of the creator economy, and the surprising progress anyone can make by taking action for just five minutes a day. In addition to the full episode for paying subscribers, I’m sharing a free sample of my conversation with Ginger. To hear the full interview, you can upgrade your subscription at joshuadolezal dot substack dot com, slash subscribe. Or just click on the subscribe button in the podcast transcript. Your membership also gives you access to my full archive and member-only content, like stories for The Chronicle, interviews with academics who have transitioned to industry, private discussion threads on Fridays, and literary work that I share throughout the year. I look forward to welcoming you to The Recovering Academic community.Now back to my conversation with Ginger Lockhart.Joshua Doležal: Well, there's quite a community of us. It's been heartening on Substack and LinkedIn to see so many ex-pat academics or recovering academics, whatever the term is. What's your preferred term?Ginger Lockhart: I like the term ex-pat because it really does sort of feel like you moved to another country when you leave academia to anything else. It's just a very special culture and I felt like I was going through adolescence again. I had to learn some pretty basic stuff coming out of there and unlearn a lot of things too.Joshua Doležal: Well I was speaking with the dean of the medical school here at University Park and he's retired Navy and he was talking about the identity shift, you know, from the military to civilian life and you really are outside the fishbowl looking in, was his metaphor. So there are a lot of those that fit.  Ginger Lockhart: Yeah, that's true. The military is a good comparison too, I think. I have a lot of military family members and of course they don't get very much attention. I think there's been a lot of attention lately on academics who are transitioning out because I think we tend to be sort of louder about our experiences maybe. And so there's this whole literature, of course, the quit lit and all this other stuff and there's no quit lit for my cousin who just left the military and wants to open a barbershop because nobody cares.Joshua Doležal: I want to rewind a bit, because…I guess some people grow up with academe on their radar from a very early age. I don't know very much about your early chapters and sort of what that path was like for you, but it's kind of an unlikely one and all of us hear those warnings about being overqualified if you get a PhD and we kind of ignore those to some extent, I think, to accept that as our path. So you know, what were the earliest sources of that for you, and why did you make the choice to go on for PhD eventually?Ginger Lockhart: I guess it wasn't really on my radar until I was in college as an undergraduate. So my parents you know, they were both in the military. My mom was a nurse and my dad was like a surgical tech, which is somebody who helps in an operating room, and they met there in the military and just kind of went through the structures along the GI bill and this was all during peace time. So I'm very fortunate that my parents were never deployed. And so college was always in the air for me. I thought of it as the next logical step after high school. And I had gotten it into my mind that I wanted to go to medical school. And that's because I really thrived on, I liked achievement and became over time sort of addicted to the feeling that I got from achievement. And medical school sounded like the sexiest thing that I could come up with that, you know, I could kind of tell people that I was doing next. But it became pretty clear to me after, you know, volunteering a couple of stints in hospitals, that that was not a good fit for me on any level whatsoever. First of all, I could not get past the smell of a hospital. And when I say I couldn't get past, I just really my head would just fill with clouds. It wasn't a really a bad smell. It's just this sort of special combination of bleach and gauze. And maybe it's just a slight amount of urine. I don't know what it is, but it is just really got me where it hurt. So the other thing too was that I thought just vaguely that I wanted to help people and this was the most prestigious way that I could do that. And I didn't feel helpful in this situation. And I talked to a lot of physicians too, and many of them were pretty unhappy with their jobs. They would rather be doing honestly anything else, many of them. Which is also very sad, right? So this, you would think of this as, as a high satisfaction type of job. And it could be because these were hospitals and that is the culture in hospitals and maybe it's different in clinics and things like that. So yeah, that happened.And then I was in a research methods class. So in research methods, this is when you sort of get the grand tour of the scientific method and you have to produce a fair amount of writing. And I had a really wonderful professor who wrote on a paper that I submitted something to the effect of “I'm impressed with your writing and your analytics skills. I hope that you consider graduate school someday. And I would love to talk to you about it. Why don't you come by my office when you can.” And so that's what I did. You know, I was 20 or something like this and I didn't really even know what graduate school, what that meant to go to graduate school. So at the time I thought, okay, that just meant that I was going to scoop up a thing that'll be the next feather that I can put in my cap and the thing that I can tell people that I'm doing. So that was a motivator. But the other motivator was simply because I really liked this professor. That sounds pretty silly, you know, to make this huge life decision based off of a note that a professor wrote on my paper. But I just really loved learning from her and respected her deeply. She's a brilliant researcher, still is. Yeah, she connected me with other professors on campus. And so I got started working in their labs doing sort of applied developmental psychology. So we were collecting data on kids and their experiences with relationships and education. And so I wasn't necessarily ravenously curious about the topic, but I really loved the people that I worked with, because I mean, they just took genuine joy in finding people who had the raw talent and bringing them into their circle and training them to do what they do. And I kept kind of going along with it. I never really consciously sat there and told myself, I am not that into this. It's not that I wasn't interested in the topic, I wasn't interested in the method that goes along with learning the topic. Because, you know, my mind just doesn't really work that way. And even without the bureaucratic red tape and all the nonsense that you have to go through in order to do research, I still could not be motivated to follow along the snail’s timeline that is involved in collecting human subjects data and doing analyses on those data. By the time, you know, a study is completed, my brain has already moved on to many, many other things. And this is not something that I'm terribly proud of, it just is what it is. I just have to move on at a faster rate in order to feel invested in it. So by the time I was finished with graduate school, I thought, s**t, what am I going to do now?So then I found this postdoc. So I went to Arizona State University and got my PhD in human development. So it's an applied developmental science. So it's sort of like developmental psychology, but more contextual. And at the time that I was graduating the job market was really, really slow. This was like kind of right at the beginning of the previous economic crisis that we had with the housing bubble and all that good stuff. And so a lot of universities were responding by not hiring. So I knew I needed to kill more time. And of course, knowing me, I was trying to find what is the most prestigious way that I can kill more time. And so I got a postdoc in quantitative methods at Johns Hopkins. And so that at the time was the best place to do that. So this was specifically being trained in a branch of, of statistics that is designed to discover ways of measuring things in prevention science. Prevention science generally speaking is just the sort of art and science of keeping bad things from happening to people. Whether that's mental health problems, physical health problems, social problems. And so there are a lot of tricky statistical situations that go along to that because you can't randomly assign people to bad things for example, and then see what happens to them. So you have to devise different techniques to measure those processes. And I knew that I could do it. I am good enough at math to sort of be able to pull it off. But it takes everything I have, you know, like I can't socialize and, and I can't have hobbies, you know, and I definitely can't have kids. And those are people that came later. But during my postdoc, that's what I did. Both of my postdoc trainers were wonderful people, and that's what made it tolerable, was that they were wonderful people who took unbelievable amounts of joy in training me to do the thing that they do.Joshua Doležal: Well, as you're talking, if I can just kind of say back some of this, I think your term achievement addiction is very common among academics. The CV and the…when I was speaking with Liz Haswell a couple of weeks ago, or last month, she numbers her publications. It's not something I did, but I was highly aware of every notch on that CV. And then the other thing you're saying is that the work itself is totalizing. When we think about totalizing institutions, they really ask everything of you. And there's no space really for family life or anything else. But I'm also struck by what seems like a very human story of responding to mentors. You know, and that's, I think, something that we're evolved to do, is to respect elders and, and take advice from people who have more experience and who are more seasoned. Who I guess, in hunter-gatherer times, would be trying to protect us from risk. We would trust them and their judgment. And so there's no way that you could have necessarily countered that, right? I mean, how would you have known otherwise?Ginger Lockhart: No, I guess I wouldn't, and this is all, I mean, I didn't really have any degree of clarity until maybe like a year ago on kind of what was going on with me mentally and why it is that I kind of went through all this schooling and two postdocs and the tenure track, knowing that I didn't really want to do it. Because I think being a kid in the eighties, there was just like this sort of background teaching philosophy I think that was going on that was really rooted in developing self-esteem. And so there was a lot of external showing people that they're special, right? And so I was able to sort of get that niche when I was a kid of the smart one in the room. And I liked that, right? And so it made me feel like I sort of belonged to something, you know, the sort of higher up the echelons that I would go even though I didn't really, because I mean the very basics of it are that you should at least be into the thing that you're studying, right? But that wasn't it. I was into the people who were nice enough to usher me through. And I just want to say this again, I'm so grateful for them. I don't have regrets. I'm extremely lucky to not have any serious regrets about any of it. But I did use up a lot of years kind of chasing after things that were not helpful. So I'm still pretty, it's still sort of coming out of it.Joshua Doležal: Yeah. Well, I hope it's not triggering for me to ask about it, but in my own case, I've thought about this quite a bit. You know, my grandfather worked at a sawmill all his life and was proud of being a hardworking man. And, you know, provider for his family and all those things. But he didn't have any fondness for his bosses. There are no country songs about good bosses. He was a union member and I visited him in his lawn chair when he was on strike for better wages, so there was definitely this sense of independence and no, I'm going to look out for myself. I have this job and I'm glad I have it, but not to the point of prostrating myself or groveling before my employer. I'm going to stand up for myself too. I feel like so much of that used to be the spirit of academic freedom as well. I really responded, I think, to that culture in academe because it seemed so similar to this independent spirit of my blue collar ancestors and mentors, role models. And then I was in a community where everyone was scared to death to say what they thought because they thought they'd get penalized on tenure review or something. And it's just like, really? So to become a privileged person means that you must be terrified, insincere, put up a false front. All of that really just rankled over time and I found it kind of unacceptable.Ginger Lockhart: Yeah. Yeah. I'm right there with you. I picked up a lot of behaviors, especially as a professor, that really made me dislike myself because I was one of them, you know, I was one of the quiet ones. I was told by one of my mentors, not one of the ones that I mentioned, but that as an assistant professor, you sit in the back of your faculty meetings and you drink your coffee and you don't talk unless you have some sort of supportive thing to say about one of your senior members. And so I sat in the back and I drank my coffee. I also as a teacher, so I taught statistics and research methods, realized very quickly that we were there to serve a customer base and we weren't really there to teach them. And so I started handing out A’s and B's like they were pieces of candy as a self-preservation mechanism. And so that really made me dislike myself too. So there I was not saying things that I knew to be true and handing out rewards that people didn't earn. And that was sort of the beginning of the sort of stomach churn that caused me to walk.

Episode 5 TranscriptJoshua DoležalI’m Joshua Doležal, and this is Catchment, the podcast for The Recovering Academic Substack series. My guest today is Dr. Gertrude Nonterah – or, as she asked me to call her, Gee. Gee completed her doctorate in Microbiology and Immunology in 2015, but after funding ran out for her postdoc she turned to freelance writing. And she has now worked full-time as a medical communications professional for more than five years. Like me, she struggled with some guilt about leaving a path that she had sacrificed so much to pursue. But she was also tired of jumping through hoops for health insurance – of not being able to donate to causes she believed in or just do something fun with her husband and son. And when she began to see ads for tenure-track positions that paid less than her salary as a post-doc, she knew it was time for a change.Gertrude NonterahThere's something wrong with a system that says go to school just to be poor, you know? And then you watch people that dropped out of high school. And they've started businesses and they're making $50,000 a month, and you're just thinking to yourself, there's something wrong here. There's a disconnect… Asking people to get all this education and then underpaying them is a disservice to humanity.Joshua Doležal During her transition away from teaching and research, Gee created The Bold PhD, a blog and YouTube channel devoted to helping graduate students and recovering academics like me find careers outside academe. She is also a thought leader on LinkedIn, where she tackles ethical issues like fair compensation and offers practical advice for job seekers. If you’ve been following this show, you know that I offer my guests a modest stipend. Gee asked me to invest hers back into my business, which was very kind of her. And so I’m sharing our full conversation with everyone today in thanks to Gee and also as a reminder of what paying subscribers enjoy. Because she’s right – I am building a business that relies on your support. If you’d like to hear the full podcast each month and receive exclusive content, like stories for The Chronicle of Higher Education, private discussion threads, and literary work that I share throughout the year, you can upgrade your subscription at joshuadolezal dot substack dot com, slash subscribe. Or just click on the subscribe button in the podcast transcript. If you do, you’ll find that I’m offering a 20% discount on annual subscriptions through Monday, May 15. I look forward to welcoming you to The Recovering Academic community.Now back to my conversation with Gee Nonterah.Joshua DoležalWell, so I think very few of us in our earliest answers to that question of what are you going to be when you grow up really thought of ourselves as academics. I mean, I'm from a working class family in Montana. I certainly was the first in my family to consider that. How about you? When did that start? When did you first start thinking about yourself as an academic or wanting to do that?Gertrude NonterahRight. So I always wanted to be a physician. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a doctor. And, you know, it was encouraged in my household. My mom was a teacher. My father is a scientist, who had a PhD. And so I knew I wanted to be a doctor, but I didn't want to be his kind of doctor. I didn't want to get a PhD and be a scientist. At least that's what I thought when I was growing up. And then I'm originally from Ghana and West Africa, so that's where I grew up -- well, the first half of my life. And I came to the United States for college. So essentially even through college, my whole -- I was a pre-med major and all that. And then coming up to the end of my bachelor's degree, I realized going to med school is super expensive in the US and by the time you get out, you are going to be owing a half a million dollars in student loan debt. And I didn't want to carry around that debt with me for the rest of my life because this is really what happens to people, right? They carry student loan debt with them throughout their whole lives and it becomes sort of a chain that keeps people from moving forward financially, even when they have high paying jobs, right? And so I was like, okay, what else can I do that is not going to set me back so much money? And getting a PhD came to mind. And back then I really didn't think through, I just thought of the end goal, but I really didn't think through what that would mean. And I think a lot of people going into PhD programs, especially when you're coming right out of college, we are still kids really. Now that I'm like almost what… I graduated from college in 2006, so almost 20 years out of college now. Now I'm like, wow, I was a kid. I don't know how I had to make all those decisions. Those were big decisions to make, right? But you're like a 21 year old, maybe 22 year old, and you have to make this decision that affects the rest of your life. Anyway, I chose to get a PhD and we'll talk more about what happened after that, but that's a little bit about my story.Joshua DoležalDid you feel growing up then that your parents put some pressure on you to be a professional? It sounds like that was sort of the expectation from the beginning, that you would follow that path.Gertrude NonterahI don't think they put pressure. I think I was encouraged. I think there's a difference. I don't think they put undue pressure, but they also didn't expect…they knew my abilities the way my household worked was, once my parents knew your abilities and what you were capable of, they didn't want you to underplay that. I think that's how my parents were, right? If they knew you could be an A student. Why settle for a C, right? That was my dad's philosophy growing up in the house. And so we weren't pressured, but we were definitely strongly encouraged in a loving way to pursue careers we wanted to pursue so that we would be financially okay, you know? And because one of the things that I saw growing up was my dad, who came from a really, really poor background, lift himself up through getting a PhD and becoming a scientist like that changed his life. So for him, getting out of poverty was education, right? So he really encouraged us. Never really pressured, but I think encouraged…and I wanted it too, right? I wanted to be a professional. Of some sort. Just didn't expect it to be what I am now.Joshua DoležalI was speaking in my last episode with Liz Haswell, who is a plant biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and is just preparing to leave her position after many years. And she talked to me about a kind of awakening in high school where she really discovered biology is her thing. Did you have moments like that with your father where the wonder of science, you know, it wasn't just an abstract vocational aspiration, but it was… you owned it, you felt it physically, the pleasure of discovery or experiments -- was that part of your relationship with him growing up?Gertrude NonterahI always loved to learn in general, I don't think science was the thing. I think it was everything. I loved to learn and read about everything. I remember growing up we would go to the local libraries, when we were, like, we had one regional library, so we would drive like 30 minutes out to the library to pick up books. And so I read about anything and everything that was intriguing to me. Including science and science is especially intriguing to me. Cause I wanted to know like how do we have lightning and thunder and how do, how does rain form? So I was very much into that I would say. I was a generalist. I was not good at one thing. I was good at many things. And I think that also how it comes with its own challenge. Because you are good at science. I always tell people that I'm a writer now, and I always tell people that the one subject that I got A’s in from kindergarten all the way through college, A’s all the time, was English. And how it never clicked that maybe I should pursue a career there. I have no idea. But that was the one subject I would get A’s in all the time, right? I would do well in all these other subjects as well. But nothing ever like stood out to me as my thing. I just, I just thought, well, since I think I'm smart at so many things, maybe I can pick a science major, I can pick a STEM major because all the world over, and I don't know how this came to be, I don't know the history, but it seems STEM majors always seem to be in a much more secure position when it comes to jobs than others, right? And, I'm not saying completely, but most of the time that's the case. There seemed to be more paths. I was good at many things. And then I had to settle on one that I thought maybe would open up job prospects for me. I hope that makes sense.Joshua DoležalOh, well, it surely does. And if I'm making funny faces, it's because I was an English professor, you know, for 16 years and near the end of it, it was just a kind of steady drumbeat of this kind of thing. Relentless. You know, it's all about the job skills and the curriculum that leads to the jobs. And so English, Humanities, is always seen as impractical. And of course I fought that myself -- I was going to be a lawyer. I was pre-law and halfway through undergraduate, I just didn't feel it. I could have probably continued and done fine, but where I felt like my full self, my whole self, was in literature class and I guess just stubbornly embraced it, you know? But when you were talking, you're saying, I wonder why I never thought of this. Well, I mean, the world never gave you a chance to think of it, it seems like, right? I mean, it's all STEM all the time.Gertrude NonterahYup, absolutely.Joshua DoležalA little editorializing on my part there, I guess.Gertrude NonterahNo, no, no. It's awesome. I like that.Joshua DoležalWell, and it is interesting that when you become a PhD candidate, you are really discouraged from thinking of yourself as a whole person or as a generalist. How did that work? So tell me a little bit about your path to grad school and how you sort of chose your specialty, and then did it become increasingly narrow for you?Gertrude NonterahYes. So it became increasingly narrow for me and I was, I think all throughout my PhD program, I was frustrated not because my PI [principal investigator] was mean. I had a great advisor. I made a joke because by the end of my PhD between the two of us, we had three kids. So she had two kids and I had one kid. And so she understood what it meant to go through pregnancy and have a child, and be doing rigorous work. She understood all of that and she was extremely supportive. But I felt increasingly frustrated because of this, and now looking back, okay, everything is always hindsight. I realize it was because the focus was so narrow -- my whole life, I'd been interested in so many things. Of course I had settled on STEM because I was like, okay, this is going to give me some jobs, you know? And then now I was like increasingly focusing on something so specific, right? Within a specific system and with a specific protein. So it's so minimalistic, right? I also think that at a point I realized I didn't want to be in academia. But I didn't know what to do with that. Because yes, I understood that there were careers outside of academia that you could pursue. There were things people went out to start their own businesses. People freelanced, people went into industry. But I was like, how do I actually do that? And I had no way forward really, or no clear path. There are a lot of professions out there. The one that easily comes to mind was the path I initially thought I was going to go on, which is medicine. You know that you're going to go through four years of college, four years of med school, you're going to go to residency, and then you're going to be an attending physician. So there is a path. But for PhDs, most of the time it's like, okay, well maybe when you finish you should go do a postdoc. And maybe during your postdoc you can try to like finesse your way to getting an assistant professor position, and then you have to write all these papers and then maybe you'll get tenure. So it's not, academia is not such a -- it's clear cut, but then it's not, because there's nothing that's really guaranteed. So I asked myself, you know, I had some kind of like, introspective moments where I kept asking myself if academia was really the path I wanted to go on. So I went through grad school. I was actually a successful graduate student. I finished with published papers. It was really part of the work I did there, but I knew it wasn't my passion. And herein will I say that it's important to realize that you can be really good at something and still not like it. And that's okay. Then I went into a postdoc, stubbornly, I was like, okay, maybe if I go into a postdoc and still try to be a fight to be a scientist, maybe I'll love this. That's almost three more, more years of my life. So finally, got kicked out on my post-doc because we ran out of funding. And that's another problem with academia. When funding runs out, everybody loses their jobs. And finally I got to sit with myself and say, okay, maybe Gertrude, you really should pursue writing like you've always wanted to do and stop trying to be a scientist. Stop trying to be a lab scientist. So I started freelance writing and that has led to the whole career path I have now.Joshua DoležalForgive me for lingering here for a moment, but it's really ironic to me that you felt that graduate school in science was the sure thing, right? The safe bet job-wise. But once you got into a PhD program, you felt that there wasn't a lot of clarity about what kind of jobs except for faculty. It was as if all of your options were shrunk to that. Is that an accurate statement?Gertrude NonterahYes. I think in my mind, most people became professors. That was the well-beaten path. And I didn't know anybody really outside of that path. I knew one or two people, well, I didn't know them. I knew of them because they used to be part of our programs who had gone into like work for the FDA, or maybe they worked with some industry company, some company out in industry. But it wasn't clear how they got those jobs. So I didn't…the only sure path was academia.Joshua DoležalIf you were to rewind your journey, it sounds to me like you reached a point where, and I used this metaphor once in an essay… It's like you're walking down a hallway that continues to narrow and then you go through doors that lock behind you, and you can't really go back. So you just have to go through the next door, which, you know, for you was the PhD and then the postdoc and at some point that hallway was a dead end. But if you were to rewind, was there a point at which there might have been more opportunities to you if you had only a master's? Would there have been a space for you to not have been funneled into academe, but you could have maybe stopped and had other opportunities in science outside of teaching or research?Gertrude NonterahI didn't even think of that at the time. My kind of personality that I am…I always thought I had to see everything through. Right? If I started something, then I couldn't quit because quitting, this is the other thing too, so I think you kind of touched on it, but also even when you have like a really supportive family, a loving family and everything who've supported you all through, when you have that there and I appreciate it. There is also some kind of guilt that comes with that. With trying to quit anything, right? Because you feel very beholden to the fact that there's so many people that have had to make so many sacrifices for you, and how dare you try to do anything outside of this path of excellence that you have chosen. So there was also that, there was also that feeling of…if I leave this, this would be really letting down my parents and my parents are giving me everything. So I did not even consider that at all. Like, that was not an option in my mind. Like the option was just like try and finish.Joshua DoležalWow. Can you take me to that moment, that day when you knew that it was over and how that felt?Gertrude NonterahYes. I think there was, there was a part of me that was excited that I had come to that conclusion and then there was a part of me that also thought, wow, I've spent so many years and is this, you know, I think you, you probably know about the sunken cost fallacy, right? I've done so many things and so I just have to keep going and maybe if I, you know, so there's all that that goes in your mind. So I think finally when I came to the place where I was like, I want to be a writer. When I lost my postdoc due to funding cuts, I remember one day waking up and I think it was around tax season and we had gotten our tax refund. My husband and I. And I just told him, I said, I think I want to be a writer. I want to do medical writing. And he was like, really? What's that? And even I have this conversation with a few people and they're like, what kind of profession is that? Like, I've never heard of it. And I'm like, yeah, it's a profession. There are people that are in it. And I want to do that. And of course, Again, you know, you have always have well-meaning people around you and they may say, well that's like, that's not such a sure path, right? We don't, like many people don't know about that. Going to be a professor is like everything that most people know about. So I think finally when I came to that place where I myself was making that decision of, well, I've made my parents happy by finishing my PhD, which meant a lot to me too, to make them happy. I've fulfilled that goal. I have gone through a postdoc and I've realized I don't like this path. Now I'm going to do something that I like. Right? I'm going to do something that I want to do. I felt happy that that had happened. But I also felt very grateful and happy that I had finished a PhD. I just wish it didn't take me that long to realize.Joshua DoležalI hope it's okay for me to ask this. I write for The Chronicle of Higher Ed and wrote a story six months ago on why faculty of color are leaving academe. And one of my sources was talking about a job at University of Arizona where she felt like you're saying -- she was first generation and had achieved all these things that made her family proud, had gotten this job that was coveted. It was in hip hop and religion, which was just like this really niche area that was perfect for her research. She gave up a huge friend community on the East Coast. She and her husband did their degrees at the University of Buffalo and moved out to the desert, which was not a place where she felt comfortable, and they had a daughter and her husband was finishing his PhD, going back and forth, and at some point she had a heart attack. And she just thought to herself, I don't have to die here. I don't have to die doing this thing. But it was for her, partly driven by this fear of letting people down. That she was a kind of representation for her community, that she felt she brought her whole community into the university and then by leaving, she was losing a seat at the table or, you know, as one voice in the choir taken away. Did you struggle with any of that as a Black woman in science?Gertrude NonterahYes. So actually one of my friends told me, but Gee, she was like, if you quit, you know, who's going to inspire all the Black students in academia? And I felt guilt around that, right. Because I'm like, yeah, that's true. If I quit…because let me tell you an experience I had when I started. I taught community college for three semesters, and this was right before the pandemic. We still had in-person classes. I showed up for the first day of class, right? And there is this Black girl standing outside of the classroom. We were waiting for the classroom to open up so we could enter. So when she sees me, she assumes I'm a student, right? And she starts chatting. She's like, oh, are you coming to this class too? And I said, yes, I am. And she's like, oh, you know, so we start chatting and then once the other class comes out and we go in, she, I watch as her face changes as I go to stand in front of the class and introduce myself as the professor. Her face just like was like…What? I get…? I don't know what she was thinking, but her whole demeanor changed. She's like you're going to be my teacher. And I think she was just surprised in 2020 that she could probably have a Black woman professor in biology. Right. I still think we're unicorns in this space and people don't see much of us, and especially students of color or Black students specifically don't see a lot of black professors. Now, some of that has changed, but the percentage is so quite low. So there was a part of me that felt, well, you need to do this for the culture. You need to do this for the community because if they don't see that, then you know… For me, growing up in Ghana, I was surrounded by people that looked like me, so nothing in my mind seemed impossible. And I grew up with a scientist father. We lived in a community that had a lot of scientists who worked at the same institution. There were women amongst that, so it wasn't such an odd concept for me. Coming to America and seeing all the different ethnicities and seeing how there was, even though we've moved past segregation, there was still some of that even within our institutions. I realize how important it was to sometimes represent that for some people, right? Because they may not have been surrounded by people like I was, where their mind is like: Can I be that person? Can I be that science professor? Can I be, can I go do something in engineering? Can I do this thing in the humanities? When people don't see that, they don't aspire to it. So yes, I did feel some guilt around that. Then you talked about her having a heart attack. I want to talk about the time. I did have an anxiety attack in a parking lot when I was a postdoc. I went to work. Parked my car and started crying because I did not want to be there that day. I did not want to be in, I did not want to be a researcher, and I've had that building, that feeling had built up all through my PhD up until this point, and I started bawling. I started crying. I was shaking. I remember calling my mother on the phone -- as a grown up over 30 year old woman -- calling my mother on the phone and telling her that I did not feel like going to work today. And I was sitting in my car and crying, you know, not because I had a toxic environment, not because I, I always say like, so, and all of these things. That also builds the guilt because you don't have a toxic work environment. Everybody's so nice to you. Your family's so great. Like, why are you having all these feelings, you know? It's so complex and people don't realize it's not just a matter of just getting up and saying, I'm leaving academia. There's so many emotions that come with that, that stem from various aspects of your life.Joshua DoležalThank you so much. So at the end of the postdoc, you ran out of funding and it sounds like you already had this path toward medical communications or medical writing in mind, so can you tell me how you transitioned then to that?Gertrude NonterahRight, absolutely. So while I was postdoc-ing, I started a side hustle because I live in San Diego, California. And one thing about California is that everything is hyperinflated. It's worse now with the inflation in the system, right? So even in 2018 or, well, 2015 when we first moved here…so we moved from Philadelphia to San Diego. Everything was three times the price. When I started the postdoc, I realized it was expensive. So I started a side hustle to just kind of contribute financially to my family and that side hustle was writing. So I had started a blog and I leveraged that to start pitching businesses, to write content for them. So by the time I lost the postdoc, I realized, oh, while my income was almost matching my income from the side hustle — writing was almost matching how much I was making as a postdoc. So if I just stepped it up a little bit, maybe I could, based on income, and that's what I did. And then I started on my YouTube channel. So like there were income sources kind of like tiny income streams coming from everywhere from all these places. But that was so helpful during that period of time where I was at home and with my son taking care of him because he has some special needs, but at home, taking him to school, picking him up, but also having that time to freelance. So that's how that started. And then a few months after the job loss, I began to narrow down specifically to focus on medical healthcare companies and creating content for them because of course they need to market their businesses. And, I was like, I could do this. So I started doing that and had a health technology company, a doctor's practice. I had a home healthcare company, so I had all these healthcare bioscience companies that I was helping to create content. But just around 2021, I had an opportunity to join a company as a, a science writer, and I did. And my career in medical communications formally took off, but I had been freelancing leading up to that.Joshua DoležalWell, I know that you've written and also spoken on some of your videos about, about compensation and fair compensation and so much of academic socialization is really focused on doing everything pro bono, right? You're serving, you're making a sacrifice. It's all for a higher good. How did you think through maybe giving yourself permission to just focus on earning potential and really embracing that side of your business?Gertrude NonterahAbsolutely. When I give this response, it's always going to sound so crude because of, like you said, academic socialization, but I think I was just tired of being poor. That's it. That's really it. I was really exhausted of…I was like, I have all this education. I think one of the things that got to me was the fact that… I touched on the fact that my, my son had, does have some special needs and I needed health insurance for him, and the hoops I had to jump to get the state funded health insurance were so exhausting, was so frustrating, was so humiliating, was so dehumanizing that I was like, I hate being, having to depend on the state for health insurance on my child. I hate that. I had a PhD, and yet, you know, yes, my freelance income was okay and it helped to pay the bills. But if we wanted to do something fun as a family, we couldn't do that. I hated that. I hated that so much. If I wanted to give to some cause I cared about, if I wanted to purchase something… I'm not a frivolous spender at all. I'm quite frugal, but I just hated being poor. Absolutely. So at a point I was like, there's something wrong here. There's something wrong with a system that says go to school just to be poor, you know? And then you watch people that dropped out of high school. And they've started businesses and they're making $50,000 a month, and you're just thinking to yourself, there's something wrong here. There's a disconnect. So I think all of that made me upset. I think that the one thing that push maybe pushed me over the edge a little was at the time when I lost a postdoc and was looking for opportunities and still couldn't come across any opportunities. There was one job I saw, one job ad I saw for an assistant professor position that I think was paying about $10,000 less than my postdoc. It was at that point that I said to myself, you are requiring somebody with a PhD. With publications. With all this experience to come and get paid $10,000 less than a postdoc? So all these things frustrated me and some people find that quite rude and crude to say, but I don't think it is. I think we need to talk about it more because asking people to get all this education and then underpaying them is a disservice to humanity.Joshua DoležalIt's immoral, right? And I have to say…so I had a tenured position. I was a full professor when I resigned. And there was a long prelude to that. But part of it was that so much of the emphasis on what we were supposed to be doing in molding students in, even in an American literature survey course, I was somehow supposed to be helping them become more employable. And, I mean, I just got to the point where I told one first year seminar, I don't get up in the morning to help you get a job at Wells Fargo. That is not the thing that motivates me. What motivates me is introducing you to new ideas, giving you something that's lifelong, that's not merely the entry level job skill that will be obsolete as soon as you take the next job. It's really examining your life, seeing yourself in the history of ideas. That's the thing that gets me up in the morning. And I guess the other part of it, where I guess I'll turn to my crude, crass part is I started to think more about my own salary. Why was it that my graduates with nothing more than a bachelor's degree were earning basically the same as me right out of college? That's messed up too. That's not motivating to me. So earnings were never my goal as an academic, but it seemed to become the goal of the academic enterprise for students by the time I left and I just didn't believe in it anymore.Gertrude NonterahYeah. So there, there was that, so I began to talk about that on LinkedIn, you know, and I started my YouTube channel, The Bold PhD, and began to talk about that. And then the funny thing that happened was I thought that this was a topic that maybe was just me, but I began to have PhDs actually write to me and say, yes, this is happening to me too. Like what? This is not just me, I'm not like a crazy Black woman? You know, there were people reaching out and saying, yes, I finished my PhD and struggling so much to find a job, or I finished my PhD and I'm struggling to…for somebody to like pay me what I think is... You know, I did a video recently when I was talking about two years out of academia, how do I feel? And I remember there was a post I had made on LinkedIn and somebody made a comment about the fact that, basically you all can leave academia because, you know, it's competitive in here and we need space for the more serious academics. And so there's this flawed thinking within academia that when you leave academia it's because somehow you are a capitalistic opportunist. Or you don't want to serve people. You know, good riddance. And I'm thinking to myself, no, that's not, that shouldn't be the response. The response should be, why are we letting intelligent people leave? And so then you have people saying, oh, I don't want to leave because I don't want to seem like I'm leaving just because I'm a capitalist. And I'm like, but academia is a capitalist institution. What made you think it isn't? Like I don't mind anybody getting paid how much money they should get paid, but there are individuals within academia who get paid over a million dollars a year. And then you have the people that are on the ground, the foot soldiers who would get paid less than $50,000 a year. There's something wrong with that.Joshua DoležalWell, so tell me a little bit more about your other gigs. So you do this YouTube channel, you do speaking engagements, you have kind of a diversified portfolio. You're doing the medical communications thing full-time now, or are you back to freelance?Gertrude NonterahYes, I'm, so right now I am in a full-time role. I think it went back to the dehumanizing experience I had with just trying to get health insurance. So I realized a full-time gig was sometimes more secure in that sense when it came to getting the kind of health insurance that I needed for my family. So I did get a corporate gig, which actually is great because it's very flexible. So I'm very, very grateful for that. Once a while I'll still do a freelance project here or there, but right now I'm focused on that. And then of course The Bold PhD YouTube channel. I produce content for that. I do speaking engagements, so I do get invited to speak at different universities. Just last week I spoke at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I'm really, really grateful for these opportunities that I still get to work because I think what's happening with me speaking out, not just me, but there are quite a number of people, including yourself, right? It's beginning to resonate in the minds of some of the people within academia. I even had somebody tell me they have included their videos as part of their curriculum for like a writing course or something, which Wow, I never thought that that would ever be the case, right? Like, oh look, this unsuccessful academic, and now my videos are being used in that. So it taught me a lesson — it taught me a really great lesson. And, you know, don't be afraid to create a path that maybe other people hadn't created, haven't created yet at the time when I started doing this there were very few people talking about this or being as vocal, right? Or as crude, because I was like, I hate being vocal. But I want to have money too.Joshua DoležalSo one thing that you also offer is coaching, it seems from your website. So can you tell me how you help other academics translate their skills into rewarding careers?Gertrude NonterahGreat. So right now I've actually toned that down a little bit. I don't do a lot of coaching anymore, but when I did do it and when people ask me, I'll like evaluate the situation and see if I have the bandwidth for it. I've just had so many things on my plate, so I haven't, I've had to drop a few things. But with coaching, I would chat with the individual because sometimes people didn't even know where to start with, with seeking a job outside of academia. Right. And so we would talk about what they wanted to do, what their resume should look like, because so many academics, we lead with all our accomplishments. But in the, in the non-academic world, people don't care about your accomplishments, right? They care about the skills that you bring and how you're going to help them solve a business problem. So I always try to show them how to…let's pull out the skills out of you, right? The things that you have gained all throughout your PhD, all throughout your educational experience. Let's pull that out. And in light of the job description, let's write a resume that shows how your skills from your educational and occupational experience make you the best candidate for the job. So that's how I tend to coach people is don't, don't just don't just like glance through. I don't glance through job descriptions. I take job descriptions extremely seriously. So whenever I read a job description, I always tell…the way I coach people is, I tell them, think of every requirement in that job description as a question that is being asked you. They're asking you, can you do this? Can you do that? Do you have A, B, C skill? Now, you, with your resume are going to answer those questions and say, based on A, B, C experience, yes I can do this. Yes, I can do that. And yes, I have this experience. Right. You don't have to meet every single criteria on there, but have enough to look powerful on that resume so that the moment your resume, somebody glances at your resume…I think that the statistic out there is that it takes, what, 10 seconds or 20 seconds or something for, for an HR professional to look at your resume. So within those 10 seconds, you had to wow. Right, and they're not going to spend time looking at the 10 papers you wrote that are in Nature, Cell, or any of these fancy journals. They're going to care about the fact that because you wrote papers for those journals, you have skills that allow you to write the application note. It's a type of document I write: the application note that they need for their company. Right. So that's how I coach people, is really to take the job description and read it, spend 5 to 10 minutes reading it, then craft a resume that says, I can do what you need me to do. Another thing too that I love and which has been helpful for my career, is the idea of personal branding as an academic. I think you have to have a strong personal brand as an academic. And this is not just online. This is just with your work ethic, with wherever you are. That's where it starts. But, you should extend that to some online platform. And my preferred online platform is LinkedIn. You are doing this on Substack and that's great. Medium. Wherever it is you want to build this, you can build it. But I'm very familiar with LinkedIn and so I really encourage people to fill out your whole LinkedIn profile. You know, put in those experiences, highlight those skills that make you the person, begin to interact with other people. Also put out your own thoughts, right? Become a thought leader. And don't worry if people think it's rude or crude. If you don't want to be poor, well then go on there and write that and you're going to get some, you're going to get some people riled up, but you're also going to fall on the radars of people that absolutely love everything you have to say, and they want you to come and talk to their students, to have you in their company. This actually happened to me. The first job I got as a science writer. I still have great relationship with people in that company, but one of the reasons they gave me the job was because one of the people that would become my colleague said, I went to your LinkedIn and I read all your posts and I was like, I want to work with this person.Joshua DoležalHmm. You know, I worry a little bit about that because so many of my posts are polemics. I'm writing about real problems in academe or – my latest one this week was about a group of professional athletes that with their investment company purchased an Iowa farm by which they will receive federal subsidies for the corn and soybeans that they grow, which seems to me just completely backward. These are people who benefited from land grant universities, which exist to promote diversity in agriculture. They know nothing about farming, but all the wealth that they've acquired through athletic celebrity is now going to be used to force a lifelong farmer to lease the land from them. It's upside down. So I'm pretty forceful about things like that and I worry that I'm kind of isolating myself by being so opinionated. But you're saying that that can be an asset.Gertrude NonterahThat can be an asset. Nobody is going to be happy with you a hundred percent of the time and there's always a section of the population you're going to annoy. Absolutely. That's fine. But I think that especially the right company, not everybody can take, not everybody can handle that. But then you're also going to find some companies that actually love that people have a voice outside of just their work. There are certain lines I absolutely do not cross. You know, I, whether I have views on that, political, social, whatever, religious views on anything. I'm not going to go there, there's a line I will not cross because immediately that happens. That just brings up unnecessary controversy and also just disrespect. Right? I don't, I'm not that kind of person, If it's just for causing controversy's sake. No, never, never ever for me. But if it's something that it's like, no, I was tired of being a poor academic, I'm going to write about that because I think that needs to be fixed.Joshua DoležalI'm curious what do you love about your life now? Compared to that moment in the parking lot when you didn't want to go to work?Gertrude NonterahThat's a great question. I love life. I love life now. I have a great professional life. I enjoy what I do. Yes. I like, there's drudgery of work, everybody goes through that. But I enjoy what I do. I never feel trepidation going into work. I never feel like, ugh, not again, which is all feelings I used to have as a researcher. Nowadays I'm like, oh, I get to go to work and I get to write cool stuff, or, you know, I get to go see all the data. I’m on a team of R and D scientists. I don't do the research. I just create content for them, but I get to see what these scientists have done today and all the complex data they generated. And I get to like wade through all of that and create content. Financially my life definitely has changed because now I don't feel as financially stressed. I think there is some research to show stress causes all kinds of diseases, including anxiety attacks, including heart attacks, including strokes. And I am not stressed. And so then I reduce one risk factor for those problems, right? So I'm very, very excited about that. One more thing is, wow, for the first time in my life or in my adult life, let's see, I was able to take vacation with my family. Last year I couldn't do that in academia because I didn't have the money to, and I would feel guilty even taking time off sometimes. But now, like we go on like one week vacations and I come back and I'm rested and I'm happy and I go back to work and people are like, oh, how was your vacation? But in academia, sometimes it would be like, oh, you're taking a vacation, but you have a paper to write. Yeah. Don't you think you should focus on that?Joshua DoležalWell, and so yeah, summer is not a vacation, right? It's time in the lab or time in the library archive, or you're supposed to be producing something even when you're on sabbatical. It's not for recharging. It's for production. I know in my case, a lot of the pressure, the stress, and the negativity from the academic environment really hurt my family and at least five years leading up to when I resigned, and I would've to say that the impact on my family life and the benefits to life here -- we moved from Iowa to Pennsylvania -- was one of the number one factors of making that decision for me. And I'm curious for you what the impact's been on your family life after this transition.Gertrude NonterahIt's been great. It's been great. I remember a comment my husband made the other day and he said something like, when you were academia, you were really stressed and you weren’t, you didn't feel, you know, I would feel he told me I would feel it in my body when we went to bed. Like I was stressed and in the moment I wasn't, that went away. So much of it was built up during that time. And I agree that once I left, I'm not there anymore.Joshua DoležalThanks for listening. And my heartfelt thanks to Gee for sharing her story. You can sign up for Gee’s newsletter at theboldphd.com to receive biweekly career and professional development tips. As a bonus, Gee will send you a free list of 34 non-academic careers that you can consider regardless of your discipline or research area. My guest next month will be Ginger Lockhart, former professor of quantitative psychology and founder of Quantfish, a statistics training platform for researchers. If you know of someone who might be a good guest for the podcast, or if you’d be interested in sharing your own story with me, please let me know at [email protected]. That’s Dole, as in the pineapple, Z as in zebra, A, L, Josh. At Gmail.com. If you are still a free subscriber, I hope you’ll consider upgrading at joshuadolezal dot substack dot com slash subscribe, where you can take advantage of my spring discount. Gertrude Nonterah’s story was produced and edited by me. Theme music is by Doctor Turtle. Thanks again for joining me today, and I hope to see you later this week for our usual Friday discussion. If you missed Shaina Read's essay at Inner Life, check out "Wounding the Reader: The importance of writing hard things in a commodified world." This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit joshuadolezal.substack.comEpisode 4 TranscriptJoshua DoležalI’m Joshua Doležal, and this is Catchment, the podcast for The Recovering Academic Substack series. My guest today is Dr. Liz Haswell. Liz is the first scientist that I’ve interviewed, and she is also the first guest on this program who is preparing, right now, to leave academe. After she turns in grades for the spring semester, Liz will cross that Rubicon. We spoke about everything that led up to that hard decision, as well as what she hopes to find on the other side. Like many of us who have shed our academic robes and the titles that went with them, Liz is hoping to rediscover herself.Liz HaswellI would really like to untangle what parts of my personality and my experience this far in my life are parts of me and what are parts that I took on because they helped me be successful, because they made things easier in this big complex that we call academia.Joshua DoležalLiz Haswell is Professor of Biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Simons Faculty Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis. She co-hosts a podcast called The Taproot and later today will be launching her own Substack — Unprofessoring — a newsletter about consciously uncoupling from the ivory tower. When I first read her faculty profile and CV at Wash U, I was shocked that she was planning to resign tenure, seemingly at the top of her game. Liz has her own lab, works in STEM — which seems to be getting all the funding and promotion these days — and has been publishing and winning awards at an impressive rate. All of those things will soon shift into the past tense. Why would she give it all up? This is the fourth episode of Catchment. Today, in addition to the full episode for paying subscribers, I’m sharing a free sample of my conversation with Liz. To hear the full interview, you can upgrade your subscription at Joshuauadolezal dot substack dot com, slash subscribe. Or just click on the subscribe button in the podcast transcript. Your support allows me to pay my podcast guests a modest stipend. It also gives you access to my full archive and subscriber-only content, like stories for The Chronicle, private discussion threads on Fridays, and literary work that I share throughout the year. I look forward to welcoming you to The Recovering Academic community.Now back to my conversation with Liz Haswell.Joshua DoležalMaybe we can go back to the beginning a little bit and think about why you became an academic, if you had any mentors or family influences or you know when did that story begin for you?Elizabeth HaswellRight, actually it began pretty abruptly, so I do come from an academic family like so many of us do. My dad is an English professor. He was an English composition professor at Washington State University for a long time and then moved to Texas A & M Corpus Christi. He's now retired and my mother was a Spanish instructor, so I had these, you know, I grew up in Pullman, WA, which is a small college town, and half of my classmates were the kids of academics and half were the kids of farmers. It was a pretty cool place to grow up actually. But in my early teens I was pretty convinced that I was not smart. I mean, I have diary entries that are just pages of…I'm not into school. I'm not smart. I'm not academic. And my parents want me to be this way, but I'm just not into it. I just want to be an interior decorator. I mean I was really insistent that what my family did was not for me. And then I took Biology my second year of high school. I mean, it was like almost instantaneous that I was like, oh, actually this is what I want to do. And I have this such a vivid memory of having done all the reading because I was a very good student, even though I was saying I wasn’t. Having read about all the different parts of the plant leaf. So if you look at a cross section of a plant leaf there are all these different types of cells in there and they’re organized in this very stereotypic way, and that, you know, reflects their function within the leaf. And so I had read about it and then went into school, and we looked at a slide under the microscope of a cross section of the leaf and it looked exactly like what I'd seen in the textbook. There's something about seeing in real life something I'd read about in a book that just captured me. And so from then on, I mean, I have like drawings. I did, you know, like little cartoons I drew with my friends in high school that all had me drawn as a chemistry professor. And then once I got to, you know, then I worked in a lab. I think the summer after I graduated from college, I worked in a lab and I was, like, completely smitten. And so that was all I ever wanted to do. There was really no question.Joshua DoležalSo it sounds like a conversion experience.Elizabeth HaswellI'm wary of sort of feeding into this myth about scientists and how the successful ones always knew what they wanted to do and never had any doubt. And if you do have a doubt, then you're probably not meant to be a scientist…because that's totally wrong. And it's also totally fine to be a scientist or an academic because it's a job, and this whole, like science as a calling stuff is, I think can be very toxic. So I just wanted to put in a pitch there for this is my story, but it's not a blueprint for anybody else's success.Joshua DoležalWell, and as I've written, I mean my Substack began with a post titled “The Calling.” Where I'm questioning this very thing—the singular calling that becomes the one thing you were born to do. And it really does create an existential crisis if, you know you can't do that thing anymore or you know, how do you fill that identity void if that's taken away.Elizabeth HaswellExactly, that's exactly what I'm like struggling with in a big way right now, for sure.Joshua DoležalWell, I think we started around the same time. So you I think were four or five years ahead of me. But the main difference was that I went straight into a tenure track after the PhD and you had this limbo of seven years of postdoc. So nearly a decade you were what we think of as contingent, or you're a contingent researcher, I assume, or a teacher for that time.Elizabeth HaswellIt's all research. So in the life sciences, once you get your Ph.D. you're not ready to run your own research program. Typically there are exceptions to that rule, but for the most part then you head off into these postdoctoral positions where you are meant to be building your independent research program. You know those used to be one or two years, maybe three, but over the last 20 years or so, those positions have become these sort of holding patterns where people accumulate more and more publications and they get more and more experience as they wait for those tenure track landing positions you know. And so I was switching fields, not fields like biology to chemistry, but I had done my undergrad and my PhD work in one area of biology and then moved to plant science as a post doctoral researcher. And so I spent a lot of those early years just like figuring out what I was doing, I didn't know what I was doing and it took me a while to figure that out. And then it took me… I actually did job searches for three years before I found a tenure track position. Yeah, those years kind of sucked. Those latter ones were pretty painful, but.Joshua DoležalWell, and some people go through seven or eight years or more of that same cycle. So you know it can be a truly brutal, just soul crushing kind of thing. I mean my first year on the market, I applied… And we call it being on the market, which is so crass, isn't it?Elizabeth HaswellIt's grody, right?Joshua DoležalI mean, it's just an awful way of thinking about it and for us, the Modern Language Association would meet once a year around Christmas time, which is even more humane, for the job interviews and they would rent this giant conference hall and we called it the meat market, you know, because we were just slabs of meat waiting to be, butchered or I don't know, we felt commodified, I guess, was the other way of thinking about it. So I applied to 95 positions before I got a single interview and then it was a wave of, you know, visiting positions in the spring that finally got me to where I landed, but yeah, you just spend so many years feeling like you are an overachiever. You're at the top of your field, you've been distinguished as an undergraduate. You've hit all of the extrinsic markers of success. And then suddenly you're completely invisible. How did you deal with that?Elizabeth HaswellIt was really hard and it was. I remember feeling like powerful in the sense that I had finally gotten together this research program that I knew would be successful. Like I knew I could do it and I had so many ideas. And I had also, I should say, very prestigious institutions in my CV. I had worked with very famous people. And so I had, for the most part, a very solid CV. But then I applied I think the year I was successful, I applied to seven places. So that's like how many jobs there were for plant biologists in R-1 institutions that year: seven. And so it's all of the same people interviewing like the same five people. Who are you know, coming out of the labs that everybody knows the name of interviewing all those places and then whether you're successful, it's partly in your hands because you know you could do a bad interview or whatever. But some of it is so random and has to do with the nature of the people on the search committee or one thing you might have said to one person that then blackballs you or makes you the one they want to hire, and the sort of randomness of it, I think, was the part that messed with my mind the most where there was just this whole aspect that I couldn't control. And I hated that.Joshua DoležalWell, so you had seven years of that and three of them were on the job market and... We were talking earlier about the term hidden curriculum, which is something that physicians use for their training – they have this external curriculum or, the official curriculum, which often includes some sort of gratuitous humanities training or something that's supposed to signal that the patients are first or humanity is really at the core. But the hidden curriculum is the real teaching that happens indirectly through actions, through watching what mentors do, what they prioritize, what they can communicate silently is the most important thing. And that's often not the patient, not humanity. So what was the hidden curriculum of teaching and research for you during those post doctoral years? And I guess we could carry that into your faculty work now, since you're kind of nearing the end of that.Elizabeth HaswellYeah, I mean, there's so much of this out there and I think that's where I had the benefit of coming up in an academic family is that a lot of that information was sort of part of my upbringing. But also you learn it so like as a postdoc, you really ought to. I mean, I'm not saying this as if it's real, but I'm saying these are the lessons I absorbed were… You ought not to express interest in any career other than an academic career, if that's the direction you want to go. So expressing uncertainty is bad. You have to have teaching in the right sort of gray space like you can't say I hate teaching, but you also can't be too serious about it because you really need to be serious about your research. This is for like the R1 type of position. I think that those were lessons I learned pretty well, although the teaching part, I've never really gotten over. Actually, I'm not a great teacher and I don't love it, and that's expressing that has been something that, like I've been told many times, it's like not OK. You really have to say that you like teaching, even if you really don't. And then those are sort of the bigger things. But I feel like I, need to dig more into like what are even more deep lessons that I internalized about even what sorts of hobbies were OK to have? So, like during my postdoc, I got really into and I'm still. I'm like, embarrassed to tell you this, but I'm going to say it. I got really into embroidery. Right. And so. But like why am I embarrassed to say that because that's not the right kind of hobby for a serious scientist, right, serious scientists should have hobbies like rock climbing or marathon running. Reading statistics books and your free time, whatever. So I hid that. I still hide that. Like, I don't think there's very many people who even know how much time I spend, like doing cross stitch. So those kinds of things I pushed down or didn't even let myself be interested in things that I knew… At least nobody said to me like serious scientists don't do cross stitch, but I just bought it.Joshua DoležalSo is that true also of women scientists? I mean the things that you've described sound like a kind of machismo which I would associate with. Science is a kind of patriarchal structure, but would would you say that women who are in science seem to manifest that kind of ultra marathon or persona or…?Elizabeth HaswellI'm not sure. And I certainly couldn't speak for anybody else. And of course I should say I do know people more and more now, especially the young folks coming up who are perfectly comfortable talking about their pottery or their art or whatever they do. Without any of the sort of hang ups that I think I absorbed.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit joshuadolezal.substack.comIf you haven’t visited Inner Life yet, there are new posts every Tuesday and Friday. Check out my essay on the reality show “Alone” and Carol Roh Spaulding’s post “When Will Passing Become Passé?” from last week.Episode 3 TranscriptJoshua Doležal I’m Joshua Doležal, and this is Catchment, the podcast for The Recovering Academic Substack series. My guest today is Dr. Kevin McClure. I found Kevin’s work in The Chronicle of Higher Education around the time that I began my own series on the state of academe. He was one of the voices that helped me feel that my concerns about higher education were valid, that the problems were real, and that the current state of affairs at many colleges and universities is unsustainable.Kevin McClureUltimately, disengagement is about to what extent do we feel like we have a meaningful shared project that can create kind of a value proposition for being physically present and connected with one another. My concern more so now than where, for example, faculty are at is what are institutions doing about it? Or, more pointedly, what are they continuing to not do about it?Joshua Doležal Kevin McClure is the Murphy Distinguished Scholar of Education and Associate Professor of Higher Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research focuses on college finance, management, and leadership, and he writes regular columns for The Chronicle and the website EdSurge. While you might be wondering why I’m interviewing someone so securely established within the Academy, it’s because Kevin and I speak the same language about what is broken in higher education. And he has some interesting ideas about what might be done to fix it. This is the third episode of Catchment. Today, in addition to the full episode for paying subscribers, I’m sharing a free sample of my conversation with Kevin. To hear the full interview, you can upgrade your subscription at joshuadolezal dot substack dot com, slash subscribe. Or just click on the subscribe button in the podcast transcript. Your support allows me to pay my podcast guests a modest stipend. It also gives you access to my full archive and subscriber-only content, like stories for The Chronicle, private discussion threads on Fridays, and literary work that I share throughout the year. I look forward to welcoming you to The Recovering Academic community.Now back to my conversation with Kevin McClure.Joshua DoležalAs I've asked a lot of guests, what was it that pulled you into academe? Probably against all practical advice.Kevin McClureYeah, it's interesting because and first of all, thank you for the invitation and really glad to be here and glad to be part of this conversation. My path into the faculty world was, I have to say, not exactly planned, which can sometimes frustrate people as I tell this story, so I hope that if that's the case for you Please know that I'm aware that this can be a somewhat frustrating experience. But I entered into a Ph.D. program because I had been effectively bumped out of a staff job that I had at a university because they decided that they wanted to have a faculty person direct the program that I had been leading for several years. I had always had an inkling that I wanted to go back to pursue my Ph.D., but that was really kind of the clear signal to me that within the world of higher education, having that degree was going to matter and I wanted to have more options available to me.Joshua DoležalThinking way back to when you were a kid and you know there probably are few of us that ever think, oh, when I grew up, I want to be a professor, but you might have had family members who had gone to college or maybe even some that had been professors? When did you think about higher ed as a place that you'd want to work even before that staff position? Maybe the paths that led up to that through undergrad or even earlier.Kevin McClureSo, zero inkling of higher education as a career path, zero sense of what it was that professors did growing up. My dad was in the military and then did work in communications and my mom was a public special education teacher for 30 years and so. College was on our radar but was not a regular kind of topic of conversation and probably didn't step foot on a college campus until my sister started looking. The way that I got into higher education work is that I was heavily involved in leadership as an undergraduate student. I was a resident assistant for pretty much the entire time that I was in college, including through summers and over the summers at my small liberal arts college, would work in our housing office. I would work in the Dean's Office and through that it became clear to me that there are in fact jobs that people do at colleges and universities. But my focus at that point in time was not on a faculty job. When I graduated from my undergraduate program, I went directly into a master’s program to prepare for a career in student affairs. And so that's that was my entry point into higher ed work. I worked in residence halls. As you noted, I started a staff job in a global studies program and it was at that point that I then started thinking about going back for my Ph.D.Joshua DoležalWell, so I'm curious. Your father in the military and your mother being a public school teacher -- both of those are careers that have a deep service ethic built into them, so it doesn't seem like you grew up in a family that was foremost concerned about money or pushing you into high earning careers. It was more about the purpose question. You know are you helping others or are you being useful? Is that fair to say?Kevin McClureYeah, 100%. I, you know, my parents were lovely about not pressuring me around my college choice, not pressuring me around my choice of major. You know, looking back on it now as a parent, I say, you know, they might have pressured me like a little bit more, you know, or if nothing else, just like offered some possibilities. But really they kind of let me choose and I chose based on what I thought was going to be best for me and the best opportunity to learn. And I don't regret the decisions that I made, but it was definitely the case that I didn't come from a family where the emphasis was purely on college to get a job, to get to earn a certain amount.Joshua DoležalSo having been in leadership, having been engaged with campus life, you didn't want that to end after four years. And so you followed that into…was that into the global studies position or did you have sort of a few stepping stones before that?Kevin McClureA few stepping stones. You know, I did a graduate assistantship, so I was working at the institution where I was pursuing my master’s degree. So for the three years that I was leading that program, my office was located in the residence hall. I was intimately involved in the lives of the students in terms of housing them and roommate conflicts, but also programming. I did a little bit of teaching through that. As much as I say perhaps that I was entirely clueless as I went into the faculty world it's probably fairer to say that, unbeknownst to me there I had been building a bit of a foundation that pointed me in that direction, but as I got into my faculty job search, well, I can't even call it a faculty job search. I was applying for jobs largely in either higher education administration or education policy and was probably 50 or so applications deep before I put my hat or put my name in the hat for a faculty job. I ended up applying for two faculty jobs, and so this is the part where people get frustrated because I ended up getting one of those and literally upon learning that I had an on campus interview had to meet with a mentor at my Ph.D. institution and say, “I don't know what I'm doing. Help me. What am I about to walk into?” I didn't know what the interview process was going to look like because faculty interviews look different and have different components compared to kind of staff interviews and so had to get kind of a crash course in the faculty interview process. But B, you know what things that I ought to be thinking about and asking about and the type of institution that I was going to be walking into because I was going to be interviewing at a regional public university and at that point had only had my experience at a liberal arts college and the research university where I had been working.Joshua DoležalAnd that's the position you still have.Kevin McClureThat's the position I still have. Be, you know, nine years this summer.Joshua DoležalWell, Congrats. I mean, there's no point in wishing more suffering on you, right? To have found your way into academe. But as you’re telling your story, I'm thinking about how your perspective in the limited glimpse I've had of it -- I mean, there's nothing transactional really about education for you. There wasn't for you as a student. It was about meaning; it was about relationships. And so I assume that those things made it, even if you weren't prepared for the interview process, for a faculty position, that's the foundation that you would need to be speaking the language of faculty. I don't know if you've reflected on that in hindsight.Kevin McClurePart of it was I walked into faculty life already with a very, very deep commitment to building relationships with students. So my work up until that point had been working intensively to build community amongst a group of 70 or so undergraduate students and so you know the idea of giving and educating and building community. I would like to think those are some of the cornerstones of faculty life, and so it made that type of transition a little bit easier. You know, the other dimension of it, honestly, is that it's deeply humbling to walk into a job for which you feel so ill prepared. And so I probably had a little bit -- well, I definitely had imposter syndrome. 100%, no doubt about it. So that some of the transactional-ness dials back a little bit when you're like, who am I to be asking anything of this? I was so glad to have a job and even one for which I felt very behind the curve. And so I walked in very much with a posture of trying to learn and figure out whether or not this was something I was going to be able to do and I think that helps to put you in a position to try to make the most of it rather than kind of walk into it and say “how can I leverage this place so that I can move as quickly as possible” --that was never, never really the logic that I brought to it.Joshua DoležalWell, you seem like a really upbeat person and I would guess you're kind of an optimist at heart, but you know, we came together because of a crisis. We both were responding to this from different vantage points. And I think you've said that you noticed at a certain point that something was off in a higher ed. What was that? What were you seeing? Was there a moment? Was it a process? How did you know that you needed to look further into this?Kevin McClureI mean, I think the sense that something was off was probably there at a very early point. The dissertation that I wrote, for example, was on the concept of academic capitalism in higher ed. So I had been studying privatization and the consequences of privatization and higher ed from the very get go. So on that level, I had already started to see things like kind of increasingly managerial approaches and the undermining of shared governance and power dynamics, and how it kind of erodes the voice of staff members. Some of those things were already clear to me, even walking into my faculty job as a faculty member, you know pre tenure. As I was trying to figure things, you know, I had two kids. My dad passed away and there was a moment within my department where I kind of looked around and all I saw was exhaustion. Everybody was exhausted. Everybody was spread thin, everyone was overtaxed and there was some underlying toxicity within the department, but the thing is, that the toxicity often flowed from people being exhausted. And what I know now that I didn't know then is one of the less talked about aspects of burnout is actually not being able to feel like you've got meaningful connection with your colleagues.