It's All Write to Call Yourself a Writer

WEBVTT
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.640
One thing that causes me perennial existential crisis as a writer is how thin the line is between writer and non-writer.
00:00:09.054 --> 00:00:21.704
Everybody writes, not everybody paints or sings or makes films, and so I feel like other genres of art are more comfortably sequestered in this kind of specialization of just a sheer medium.
00:00:21.754 --> 00:00:23.975
so I'm just like why am I a writer?
00:00:24.074 --> 00:00:27.515
And in a way all I am is a speaker or a thinker or an expressor.
00:00:27.774 --> 00:00:29.335
It's like saying I'm an exister, right.
00:00:29.335 --> 00:00:30.260
Or I'm a just, yeah.
00:00:30.260 --> 00:00:31.010
I'm a be-er.
00:00:36.472 --> 00:00:38.542
Hi, I'm Ariana McLean.
00:00:38.542 --> 00:00:39.832
I'm Meryl Branch Mc Tiernan.
00:00:40.127 --> 00:00:42.337
And you're listening to, it's All Write.
00:00:42.616 --> 00:00:45.436
A podcast about the writing life and those who live it.
00:00:45.832 --> 00:00:56.351
I am so thrilled to announce that my novel What You should Worry About is under contract to be published by Akashic Books this coming summer of 2026.
00:00:56.351 --> 00:00:56.411
Yay.
00:00:57.576 --> 00:00:57.796
Yay.
00:00:58.896 --> 00:00:59.116
Yay.
00:00:59.411 --> 00:01:03.014
And today we have, my friend Shaan Sachdev here.
00:01:03.014 --> 00:01:03.743
Hi Shaan.
00:01:03.764 --> 00:01:04.323
Hi Shaan.
00:01:04.338 --> 00:01:04.528
Hello.
00:01:04.911 --> 00:01:06.680
How amazing that the work paid off?
00:01:06.710 --> 00:01:07.311
Yes.
00:01:07.911 --> 00:01:08.240
Yeah.
00:01:08.240 --> 00:01:10.281
The work, apparently it can pay off.
00:01:10.331 --> 00:01:10.751
So thank you.
00:01:11.221 --> 00:01:17.700
if you li listen back to our first episode in May, I was a bitter whore and now I am just a whore.
00:01:20.421 --> 00:01:21.052
Alright.
00:01:21.441 --> 00:01:21.981
Alright.
00:01:22.004 --> 00:01:37.081
Um, Shaan is a writer and essayist based in New York City, who writes about a range of subjects including philosophy, political bias, the military, industrial complex, queer city life, and his two favorite divas, Hannah Arendt and Beyonce.
00:01:37.441 --> 00:01:43.951
He's recently written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, the New Republic and others.
00:01:44.012 --> 00:01:47.682
He also co-hosts Diva Discourse, a Beyonce centered podcast.
00:01:47.682 --> 00:01:49.962
Thank you so much for, for being here.
00:01:50.531 --> 00:02:12.461
So you write about such a range of topics from geopolitical issues to sexual issues to sex, sexual enjoyment, but with the same seriousness and with the same amount of um, research, you'd kind of put the same attention to to all topics that you do.
00:02:12.581 --> 00:02:16.032
So how would you describe your writerly persona?
00:02:16.296 --> 00:02:24.211
It's a lovely question, and it's also a flattering observation because it feels like there's some being rewarded just in you acknowledging that.
00:02:25.241 --> 00:02:28.822
I went to grad school to study cultural criticism.
00:02:28.891 --> 00:02:30.572
I did a master's at NYU in that.
00:02:30.961 --> 00:02:37.032
And what we learned was how to be a specialist in the art of non-specialization.
00:02:37.051 --> 00:02:45.072
So how to almost feign specialization which you can't do if you're gonna write about a wide range of subjects.
00:02:45.852 --> 00:02:52.632
And I think I wanted to become a writer partly so I could think about anything I wanted.
00:02:53.141 --> 00:02:59.081
And I'm doing that by specializing in things for three months at a time.
00:02:59.592 --> 00:03:06.102
But my persona, I would say is yes, somebody who just wants to think about anything that comes to him.
00:03:06.431 --> 00:03:10.391
But that I think partly also reflects the audacity of writing.
00:03:10.421 --> 00:03:11.981
There's something problematic about that.
00:03:11.981 --> 00:03:12.521
I concede
00:03:13.706 --> 00:03:15.896
What do you mean by, sorry, what do you mean by problematic?
00:03:16.396 --> 00:03:19.817
I think maybe it's problematic to feign specialization.
00:03:19.817 --> 00:03:34.766
The upside to all this is that you, unlike a scholar who becomes so specialized and so insular, that you lose the ability to communicate to the public because you begin to, use arcane language and you're not considering style and presentation.
00:03:34.766 --> 00:03:42.956
The upside to being a cultural critic and essayist is you draw on the expertise of others to present something beautifully to the public.
00:03:43.616 --> 00:03:46.167
But the downside and the thing I'm saying is problematic is that.
00:03:47.127 --> 00:03:55.917
In a way, the line between being a writer and a non-writer is so thin that what I'm basically saying is, look, I wanna talk about anything I wanna talk about.
00:03:55.947 --> 00:04:03.116
And the question becomes what gives you the right to, and I think that begins to intersect with the idea of are you qualified, are you an expert?
00:04:03.167 --> 00:04:07.717
At what point are you allowed to write about something for a huge publication?
00:04:08.407 --> 00:04:13.266
Like how much research, how much education are you part of that cu cultural group?
00:04:13.266 --> 00:04:14.646
Those, all those kinds of elements.
00:04:14.646 --> 00:04:15.217
Exactly.
00:04:15.616 --> 00:04:16.817
This is fascinating topic.
00:04:16.817 --> 00:04:21.997
'cause'cause right now there's the opposite is also happening where it's like, don't trust the experts.
00:04:22.237 --> 00:04:22.536
Right.
00:04:22.536 --> 00:04:23.747
So you have these, I feel like the,
00:04:23.747 --> 00:04:24.726
like TikTok culture.
00:04:24.786 --> 00:04:25.297
Yeah.
00:04:25.297 --> 00:04:30.107
So it's like on one hand people are questioning what makes you qualified to talk about this?
00:04:30.107 --> 00:04:31.786
But then on the other hand, oh, you're an expert.
00:04:31.817 --> 00:04:33.716
They're, there's some sort of conspiracy.
00:04:33.716 --> 00:04:34.211
They're part of the elite.
00:04:34.211 --> 00:04:35.012
You're trying to get elite.
00:04:35.041 --> 00:04:35.331
Yeah.
00:04:35.331 --> 00:04:35.932
Part of the elite.
00:04:35.982 --> 00:04:37.391
Interesting that you brought that up.
00:04:37.391 --> 00:04:43.141
'cause I feel like there's that tug of war happening right now So how do you, fit into that space?
00:04:43.192 --> 00:04:47.632
Just personally, like when you're going to write something and you, like, how do you find that confidence?
00:04:48.045 --> 00:04:52.925
Or do you ever feel like this is not a topic that's right for me or that I should take on?
00:04:52.925 --> 00:04:55.454
I think, okay, so I think there's two parts to this answer.
00:04:55.454 --> 00:05:09.894
The first is that there is a difference between taking a video of yourself ranting about something and engaging in the activity of formally cohering your thoughts in an elaborate and organized manner.
00:05:10.225 --> 00:05:25.105
When you do the latter, when you're not necessarily on TikTok, but you're writing an essay, you realize that you are required to have a certain degree of protracted engagement with the subject that will necessarily involve expertise.
00:05:25.110 --> 00:05:32.079
I think you begin to appreciate expertise, not as conspiracy, but just as having dwelled for long enough in a subject.
00:05:32.769 --> 00:05:46.490
But Meryl, to your question, when I have, say I have an idea, like I wanna write about how, which I did recently for the New York Times, like how difficult it is to walk through New York City, the first thing I'll do is ask, okay, who else has written about this?
00:05:47.014 --> 00:05:50.824
I might find that so many people have that there's no point in writing it.
00:05:50.829 --> 00:05:53.439
And so at that point, it's what new can I bring?
00:05:53.879 --> 00:05:54.180
The,
00:05:54.180 --> 00:05:57.360
so that's your first step in deciding That's, yeah.
00:05:57.360 --> 00:05:57.689
Interesting.
00:05:57.939 --> 00:06:01.060
I think the very first step is what exactly do I want to say?
00:06:01.060 --> 00:06:03.819
Is it just, is it one thought or can this thought be fleshed out?
00:06:04.089 --> 00:06:14.740
Because on the other hand, even if people have written about it, if you can write about something that's already been written about and bring a kind of new style to it, and even just say it with different words, I think there is some value to that.
00:06:15.339 --> 00:06:16.750
Yeah, snaps.
00:06:16.750 --> 00:06:17.889
And it's actually very easy.
00:06:17.889 --> 00:06:21.970
It's like this idea of there's infinite amount of sentences you can configure with the English language.
00:06:21.970 --> 00:06:25.569
There's also an infinite number of ways that a thought about something can be configured.
00:06:25.779 --> 00:06:33.569
Sometimes just the beauty or the the kind of contemplative approach you take to something that's been taken many times I think can still be worth putting out in public.
00:06:34.439 --> 00:06:42.670
But but Ariana, your initial question was how do I negotiate the contemporary tension between expert and non-expert?
00:06:42.670 --> 00:06:43.300
Was that kind of, it
00:06:43.300 --> 00:06:43.870
wasn't it?
00:06:43.870 --> 00:06:48.504
I didn't actually pose that question'cause it felt a little big, but I would love if you have thoughts on that.
00:06:48.555 --> 00:06:51.665
It was more of an observation of the existence we're all living in.
00:06:51.764 --> 00:06:58.584
Yeah, having worked in traditional news media for a long time primarily just to make a living.
00:06:58.634 --> 00:07:09.605
In addition to being a writer, you learn that the people who work in authoritative positions often are just trading in prefabricated information.
00:07:09.605 --> 00:07:15.814
They're taking reports, they're taking scientific reports and academic reports and what has considered authoritative history, and they're just regurgitating it.
00:07:15.829 --> 00:07:17.105
And they're not taking a spin.
00:07:17.105 --> 00:07:20.254
They're not taking, they're not, it's impartial, so to speak,
00:07:20.254 --> 00:07:20.704
yeah.
00:07:20.704 --> 00:07:24.574
And whether or not it's impartial, I feel like, is almost a more complicated question.
00:07:24.574 --> 00:07:28.485
I think what I'm trying to convey is more that it's that they are not engaging with it.
00:07:28.485 --> 00:07:32.475
They're holding it at a distance, and for them, they're also just working a nine to five.
00:07:32.475 --> 00:07:37.004
They just wanna get the day over with, and yet, from the outside, they might be viewed as the sinister.
00:07:37.079 --> 00:07:40.959
Yeah, crystallizers of what the overarching narrative is.
00:07:41.170 --> 00:07:41.680
Interesting.
00:07:41.709 --> 00:08:03.319
And then on the other side, you might have someone like me who's not an expert and not working at an institution and not even interested in just pulling that stuff to use blindly, but who wants to take a long walk and think about it at length and really get lost in the idea in a way that might make a lot of technical knowledge, secondary not primary.
00:08:03.740 --> 00:08:27.189
And so I think the lovely thing about being like a cultural writer is being able to fuse those worlds and those who are really skeptical of experts, in fact my aversion is less in the idea that there's something sinister at play and more in the idea of what I was, talking about in this primary instance that they're not looking upon the things that they're experts on with any wonder.
00:08:27.189 --> 00:08:28.389
They're not getting lost in it.
00:08:28.389 --> 00:08:31.329
It's just this sanitized relationship you know?
00:08:36.861 --> 00:08:40.751
Do you have a favorite piece that you've written, I guess in recent years?
00:08:41.471 --> 00:08:45.822
It's so funny because when I apply to residencies and when people ask oh, can I read something?
00:08:45.871 --> 00:08:52.317
I have to pick a favorite I, of course, as any writer ought to maybe I feel ashamed, slightly ashamed of everything I've written, right?
00:08:52.317 --> 00:08:52.437
Yeah.
00:08:52.442 --> 00:08:52.451
Right.
00:08:52.451 --> 00:08:53.682
It's like this I can do better.
00:08:54.101 --> 00:09:03.322
The essay that got the most recognition, or that at least helped my career the most was called Portrait of the Technocrat as a Stanford Man.
00:09:03.381 --> 00:09:05.111
And, it won a Push Guard Prize.
00:09:05.111 --> 00:09:07.272
It got shortlisted for Best American essays.
00:09:07.331 --> 00:09:10.481
And it actually just was born out of heartbreak.
00:09:10.601 --> 00:09:14.442
My, my boyfriend broke up with me and I decided to write a revenge essay.
00:09:14.782 --> 00:09:18.532
And it was rejected by 25 reviews.
00:09:18.532 --> 00:09:27.292
And finally the New England Review, which is run out of Middlebury, it's this beautiful small journal basically said we like it, but there's an issue.
00:09:27.341 --> 00:09:35.792
And they've pointed out the issue that I think other places had found with it, which was that I wasn't acknowledging my own elitism and criticizing another elite person.
00:09:36.272 --> 00:09:36.751
Interesting.
00:09:36.751 --> 00:09:37.652
Which was so true.
00:09:37.652 --> 00:09:39.861
And and in my anger, I didn't acknowledge that.
00:09:39.951 --> 00:09:40.101
Right.
00:09:40.101 --> 00:09:44.032
You have to implicate yourself too in order for people to be on your side.
00:09:44.032 --> 00:09:44.542
Exactly.
00:09:44.542 --> 00:09:45.501
That's exactly right.
00:09:45.532 --> 00:09:45.741
Yes.
00:09:45.792 --> 00:09:49.572
And so they actually they were nice enough to say, we'll, publish this if you can fix that.
00:09:49.572 --> 00:09:49.991
And they did.
00:09:49.991 --> 00:09:51.162
And it ended up being, I think.
00:09:51.522 --> 00:09:52.572
A pretty strong essay.
00:09:52.572 --> 00:09:54.412
I remember sending it to you when it came out, Meryl.
00:09:54.432 --> 00:09:54.761
Oh yeah.
00:09:54.761 --> 00:09:55.272
Loved it.
00:09:55.272 --> 00:09:55.782
Yeah.
00:09:55.881 --> 00:09:59.261
But I think that's, I think that's a good example of a mix of genres.
00:09:59.261 --> 00:10:02.111
It's personal essay, it's political analysis, it's philosophy.
00:10:02.111 --> 00:10:03.491
There's some literary criticism.
00:10:03.934 --> 00:10:11.514
I, I also just read this morning your Steamroom-ography piece, which I have to say it was so suspenseful.
00:10:11.595 --> 00:10:13.184
Like that was really hard to do.
00:10:13.184 --> 00:10:25.825
It was a piece about bathhouse culture using actually going into a bathhouse and then giving like a long history, but in the midst of sexy what's gonna happen, suspense.
00:10:26.065 --> 00:10:33.774
So I feel like that was a really great way to have people learn about something while also being completely engaged in the story.
00:10:33.830 --> 00:10:37.730
That's, it's, first of all, I have to just say it's so flattering that you guys have read anything.
00:10:38.169 --> 00:10:40.960
And I like, I feel like often when I hear people being interviewed, I'm like.
00:10:41.379 --> 00:10:46.690
They should at least take a moment to acknowledge that this is like a huge exercise and like flattery and narcissism.
00:10:46.789 --> 00:10:49.850
So thank you for allowing me to talk about my tiny little career.
00:10:50.210 --> 00:10:50.450
Yeah.
00:10:50.450 --> 00:11:04.120
With that piece, Steamroom-ography was written for a non-queer audience because I think for the most part, gay guys queer people are like more familiar both with the phenomenology of the experience itself and have some idea of the history.
00:11:04.460 --> 00:11:12.019
And yet I realized that every time I came out of this experience and talked to my friends about it, who weren't part of this little world, they were always shocked.
00:11:12.019 --> 00:11:15.080
And it was years and years of hearing people be like, wait, that happens.
00:11:15.330 --> 00:11:20.840
I wrote it in the second person to put the non cruiser into the cruiser shoes and just the idea of, yeah,
00:11:20.899 --> 00:11:21.860
I didn't even notice that.
00:11:21.860 --> 00:11:22.610
That's so funny.
00:11:22.845 --> 00:11:26.054
it felt like it started more of a personal essay.
00:11:26.105 --> 00:11:27.360
I don't know, creative essay.
00:11:27.360 --> 00:11:27.690
I don't know.
00:11:27.750 --> 00:11:29.309
There's so many words, but yeah.
00:11:29.340 --> 00:11:38.750
But then it got into, but then I was like, learning about all this history and taking us to I think we, you go back to the 19 hundreds or something and I was just like, oh, wow.
00:11:39.500 --> 00:11:40.360
This is yeah.
00:11:40.509 --> 00:11:40.870
Right.
00:11:40.870 --> 00:11:42.460
So what gives it a nice context?
00:11:42.460 --> 00:11:48.190
Maybe Gen Z guy will figure it out, but he won't know that this he's part of a long history.
00:11:48.850 --> 00:11:49.269
Yeah.
00:11:49.269 --> 00:11:55.470
And in that sense, I think there is something for even queer sub-cultures to gain from reading the essay.
00:11:55.799 --> 00:12:02.759
But I think it's also a good example of this idea that there are a lot of people who've written really seminal work about this history.
00:12:02.820 --> 00:12:04.799
So what I'm just doing is taking their work.
00:12:04.799 --> 00:12:04.950
Right.
00:12:04.950 --> 00:12:06.389
I'm not doing primary research.
00:12:06.389 --> 00:12:14.950
And this, in a way, this works as a case study for what we were talking about earlier where I'm taking Allan Bérubé's work, who's written about bathhouses, and I'm taking George Johnson.
00:12:14.950 --> 00:12:18.710
I'm taking like all these people who've really studied specifically New York.
00:12:19.039 --> 00:12:26.600
But the one little increment I'm making is even in an age of technological experience where you don't need to cruise manually.
00:12:26.945 --> 00:12:32.164
There's still such a thrill in doing so that it's, it exists even in these sanitized, privatized spaces.
00:12:32.174 --> 00:12:33.254
That's just a little thesis.
00:12:33.554 --> 00:12:39.554
And I'm like okay, so how can you take that though and turn it into an essay using other people's research?
00:12:39.554 --> 00:12:48.289
And one thing you do is you create a prestige, but the other is you're so invested in the experience of that increment that you can just make almost like an art product out of it, right?
00:12:48.320 --> 00:12:49.294
Like an artistic statement.
00:12:49.294 --> 00:12:52.365
And so there's a lot of feigned, there's a lot of faux expertise in it.
00:12:52.365 --> 00:13:08.995
I did spend like a few months researching before I started, and I think I learned as I was researching that, oh, there is something to also note about this circular pattern here, that bath houses emerged organically then we're disassembled because of the AIDS crisis and then had to find a new home informally, elsewhere.
00:13:08.995 --> 00:13:10.975
And so we're back to the pre bathhouse era.
00:13:11.245 --> 00:13:25.789
I think that little bit is me attempting humbly to contribute something small to this cannon, but I think the strength of that essay lies in, I'd hope, I think it's more in the art of the sentences than in the overall political contribution.
00:13:25.789 --> 00:13:33.169
I love the little vignettes, like we're in the bathhouse and you're like, you can feel the steam and the steam figuratively and metaphor.
00:13:33.259 --> 00:13:33.620
Sorry.
00:13:33.860 --> 00:13:35.210
Figuratively and literally I need, was sitting
00:13:35.210 --> 00:13:38.120
outside in the park and I was getting hot and I'm like, oh, we're hot.
00:13:38.120 --> 00:13:38.659
We're going the show.
00:13:39.200 --> 00:13:39.799
I gotta go to the
00:13:39.799 --> 00:13:40.100
bath.
00:13:41.639 --> 00:13:44.850
My, my grandmother said she stopped reading at the Moray eels bit.
00:13:44.850 --> 00:13:45.615
And I was like, that's fair.
00:13:53.193 --> 00:13:55.894
Do you ever worry about anything that you put out there?
00:13:55.894 --> 00:14:02.464
How family and friends and any relationship that you have to read about this personal stuff
00:14:03.514 --> 00:14:04.354
Sex wise?
00:14:04.354 --> 00:14:04.714
No.
00:14:04.803 --> 00:14:05.344
Interesting.
00:14:05.854 --> 00:14:13.903
I was gonna say, and we could expand that to, I think a lot of writers are either feeling censored or they are censoring themselves preemptively.
00:14:14.203 --> 00:14:22.903
And so do you feel that pressure or do you find, how do you maneuver in this world that we're living in this reality,
00:14:23.024 --> 00:14:26.443
looking at your work, one might say, oh, he doesn't censor himself at all.
00:14:26.653 --> 00:14:30.913
It's so honest and brave and out there, but I feel like that's probably, I don't know.
00:14:30.913 --> 00:14:31.514
Is that true?
00:14:32.543 --> 00:14:41.864
This almost this question to me feels like something a really good therapist would ask me, I think, part of it is that writing is necessarily a narcissistic act.
00:14:41.864 --> 00:14:46.303
I think it's very funny when people say, oh, I'm just writing to write.
00:14:46.303 --> 00:14:47.714
I'm not writing to be published.
00:14:47.714 --> 00:14:49.783
It's a lie because you are publishing what you're writing.
00:14:49.783 --> 00:14:51.524
Like you are very aware of that.
00:14:51.524 --> 00:14:55.553
And there's a huge difference between writing in public and writing in private.
00:14:55.553 --> 00:15:03.043
And I think that I do have a confessional impulse and I do personally, without having thought it through, just feel like art above life always.
00:15:03.283 --> 00:15:07.778
So I'm willing to, I'm willing to steal, I'm willing to write about people and write about myself.
00:15:08.318 --> 00:15:15.708
But I have absolutely felt the need to censor because I'm still in, I think, the outer parameters of what one would call an emerging writer.
00:15:15.708 --> 00:15:17.418
Not having yet published my first book.
00:15:17.958 --> 00:15:26.759
And when I started writing in early 2020, I had some kind of contrarian approaches to the way that identity and racial politics were being discussed.
00:15:26.759 --> 00:15:29.698
I think as an immigrant to this country, who was neither.
00:15:30.073 --> 00:15:31.783
Black, Latino or white.
00:15:32.114 --> 00:15:37.693
I felt like I had specific experiences that didn't clearly or neatly map onto what was being said.
00:15:37.693 --> 00:15:42.553
And it was at a time when if you even dissented in a microcosmic sense, you were punished.
00:15:42.869 --> 00:15:45.879
And and I'm speaking here as a progressive in a very progressive world.
00:15:45.879 --> 00:15:50.469
I'm not thinking about the conservative world, which I'm not even sure if they read, but
00:15:50.558 --> 00:15:51.219
they we're safe.
00:15:51.399 --> 00:15:51.698
Yeah.
00:15:51.698 --> 00:15:51.938
Right,
00:15:51.938 --> 00:15:52.178
right.
00:15:52.178 --> 00:16:05.249
So like this is I'm talking about an intramural drama here, and so I did have to proceed carefully and I wrote a piece for the point in 2021 called Hysterical Empathy that I had to think long and hard about some things in that and whether I wanted to write that down.
00:16:05.249 --> 00:16:07.649
And I ended up doing it, and then it ended up going well.
00:16:08.038 --> 00:16:12.239
There was a piece I wrote a year or two ago called God Save the Top.
00:16:12.658 --> 00:16:16.818
And there were some paragraphs there when it was being written that were.
00:16:17.308 --> 00:16:21.178
Taking an almost impishly, reductive view of what man and woman is.
00:16:21.509 --> 00:16:22.168
And I did it.
00:16:22.259 --> 00:16:24.119
I did it as part of the performance of the writer.
00:16:24.119 --> 00:16:31.168
And the editors were concerned about how that might be viewed among communities and advocates of communities that didn't agree with that binary.
00:16:31.168 --> 00:16:33.899
And so they asked me to, there were some paragraph.
00:16:34.479 --> 00:16:37.634
Can you tell can you give a little tiny little log line about what the piece is about?
00:16:37.693 --> 00:16:38.354
Oh, of course.
00:16:38.714 --> 00:16:50.543
God bless the top is, it's a piece that looks at the ethnography of gay sexual positions, but it also takes a personal root into why I prefer the passive sexual role rather than the dominant one.
00:16:50.543 --> 00:16:59.033
And the thesis of the pieces that the true gay man is always a bottom, that the true sexual divide between men doesn't lie and gay and straight, but between penetrators and penetrate.
00:16:59.833 --> 00:17:02.624
And so that was a piece where I had to actually take some paragraphs out.
00:17:04.048 --> 00:17:05.808
And this is how quickly time moves.
00:17:06.048 --> 00:17:16.919
Just two years ago, it was a lot trans issues had a certain fraught in the progressive circles that they don't right now, because now they're under siege from the outside in a way that is united the progressive front.
00:17:17.409 --> 00:17:22.368
But I, at this point I'm very worried about writing about politics at this point.
00:17:22.368 --> 00:17:25.848
Now, censorship and fear are top down.
00:17:25.848 --> 00:17:26.628
They're not bottom up.
00:17:26.628 --> 00:17:27.858
They're coming from the government.
00:17:28.138 --> 00:17:35.709
When I wrote a piece a few years ago about Ukraine and Russia, that took the position that NATO and the US were culpable in what was happening.
00:17:36.068 --> 00:17:38.019
I got some death threats, weirdly.
00:17:38.199 --> 00:17:38.259
Wow.
00:17:38.259 --> 00:17:42.249
But it was from like random people who were just like, I know where you live and we're gonna get you.
00:17:42.669 --> 00:17:45.739
And I was like okay, these are like freelance, gorillas.
00:17:45.739 --> 00:17:46.368
That's fine.
00:17:47.179 --> 00:17:54.739
At this point now, when you actually have federal agents detaining people for what they've written at student papers, there's a different climate of fear.
00:17:54.739 --> 00:17:59.999
And so I have a piece coming out in one week exactly on Gaza, and the Holocaust.
00:17:59.999 --> 00:18:07.588
It's a 7,000 word piece for the LA Review of Books that is partly a review of Pankaj Mishra's new book The World After Gaza.
00:18:07.648 --> 00:18:16.528
And it looks at how the Holocaust has been instrumentalized and exploited by Israel, and it uses primarily Jewish scholars to make that case.
00:18:16.528 --> 00:18:18.898
But it's a long meditation on how we got to this point.
00:18:19.229 --> 00:18:20.219
And I'm very nervous.
00:18:20.219 --> 00:18:25.378
I'm so nervous that I'm wondering to myself, do I write this under my name as an immigrant, as a naturalized citizen?
00:18:25.378 --> 00:18:26.009
Is it safe?
00:18:26.368 --> 00:18:27.328
To write about this
00:18:27.388 --> 00:18:29.278
and primarily from the government.
00:18:29.278 --> 00:18:32.759
Like the concern would be from Trump, not from people.
00:18:32.759 --> 00:18:33.479
Absolutely not People.
00:18:33.479 --> 00:18:38.953
Not from I'm not worried about people, I'm not worried about friends, I'm not worried about online angry people that is so cosmetic.
00:18:38.953 --> 00:18:45.190
And actually I feel like people who are still railing against that just don't have much perspective because it's not that scary at the end of the day.
00:18:45.220 --> 00:18:45.640
Like what?
00:18:45.640 --> 00:18:47.529
So what someone hates you who can like Yeah,
00:18:47.589 --> 00:18:48.460
exactly Right.
00:18:48.519 --> 00:18:49.505
But the idea but to have your
00:18:49.505 --> 00:18:51.664
immigration status and, yeah.
00:18:51.724 --> 00:18:51.964
No, but
00:18:52.005 --> 00:18:54.914
we have masked men who are disappearing people right now.
00:18:55.095 --> 00:18:56.654
Like it's a serious,
00:18:56.654 --> 00:19:03.375
and I remember, I mean before I was a citizen flying in as a passport holder who had a lot of Arab passport stamps.
00:19:03.375 --> 00:19:04.424
'cause I grew up in the Middle East.
00:19:04.785 --> 00:19:09.134
I would get, every single time I flew through JFK, I would get moved to a back room and interrogated.
00:19:09.134 --> 00:19:11.144
It was just like this is Bush's War on Terror era.
00:19:11.144 --> 00:19:13.244
And it was like so normalized and then it disappeared.
00:19:13.244 --> 00:19:18.484
But it reminds you that that's the real paradigm of fear, like it's when it's turned down, not on
00:19:18.484 --> 00:19:19.505
Twitter to Yeah.
00:19:19.575 --> 00:19:21.494
and I think that there is, there are enough of us.
00:19:21.555 --> 00:19:24.970
There is like a large portion of people who are like, fuck this.
00:19:24.970 --> 00:19:27.220
And I think there's almost too many to all be rounded up.
00:19:27.750 --> 00:19:28.019
Yeah.
00:19:28.019 --> 00:19:29.789
I have to believe that's still the majority.
00:19:29.970 --> 00:19:30.359
Yeah.
00:19:30.359 --> 00:19:30.750
Yeah.
00:19:30.750 --> 00:19:35.660
And I will say, on the note of Gaza, it's interesting because you couldn't talk about it from, for a long time.
00:19:35.660 --> 00:19:35.720
Yeah.
00:19:35.720 --> 00:19:36.680
Especially in newsrooms.
00:19:36.680 --> 00:19:43.615
And so now, even though there is some censorship, it is still at the forefront of the political imagination globally in a way that it never has was.
00:19:43.615 --> 00:19:43.674
Yeah.
00:19:43.704 --> 00:19:45.775
Britain, France are about to recognize,
00:19:45.865 --> 00:19:46.015
yeah.
00:19:46.404 --> 00:19:52.525
Palestine as a state, there's a lot of progress being made, even in, but of course the price has been the elimination of Gaza.
00:19:52.974 --> 00:19:58.795
But at the same time, on the other side, we were talking about how quickly the political climate changes and the social climate changes.
00:19:58.805 --> 00:20:00.994
2020 to 2023 was a big difference.
00:20:00.994 --> 00:20:02.825
2023 to now is a big difference.
00:20:03.365 --> 00:20:08.144
If, God willing, AOC becomes president or something like that happens in the next term.
00:20:08.384 --> 00:20:09.765
A lot of this will be pedald back.
00:20:09.765 --> 00:20:12.194
And so while this is really horrifying and very scary.
00:20:12.825 --> 00:20:18.525
We have to remember that there are cycles and that if we record this in three years, we could be having a totally different conversation.
00:20:18.525 --> 00:20:23.974
And I think it's important to parse the difference between a timely scare and a larger human condition.
00:20:24.065 --> 00:20:24.244
Yeah.
00:20:24.244 --> 00:20:25.444
Or political condition or, yeah.
00:20:25.994 --> 00:20:31.944
whenever I'm feeling quite down and helpless and powerless, it's what's the word that everyone says?
00:20:31.974 --> 00:20:32.875
This shall pass.
00:20:32.875 --> 00:20:34.255
Like nothing is permanent.
00:20:34.644 --> 00:20:36.474
Change is the only constant.
00:20:36.835 --> 00:20:47.970
And it's just change is happening so much quicker now, I think because of, technology and the internet and all that jazz but also for the good, I don't know, what you said made me think of that.
00:20:47.980 --> 00:20:55.644
Okay, things have gotten really quickly, I consider bad, but it could also quickly become better.
00:20:55.694 --> 00:21:04.355
I will just say that, when Reagan was president, they were a series of astonishing financial deregulation enacted that didn't have the sensationalism that Trump's do.
00:21:04.775 --> 00:21:09.755
I think partly because we just didn't exist in a climate where everyone was watching and commenting at the same time.
00:21:09.755 --> 00:21:17.914
And I guess that leads me to ask, are, are things happening at a fast pace or are we just is that just the perception we have because of the way we engage with the world?
00:21:18.035 --> 00:21:18.335
Yeah.
00:21:18.365 --> 00:21:24.724
If like we were not online and never went online and we just went about our lives in New York City, would we see much of a difference?
00:21:24.724 --> 00:21:26.015
We'd see little things that were different.
00:21:26.295 --> 00:21:28.480
Look, my sister lives on a farm in Virginia.
00:21:28.480 --> 00:21:30.579
It's an intentional community of 40 families.
00:21:30.579 --> 00:21:31.684
And it's not culty at all.
00:21:31.684 --> 00:21:36.335
It's hippie, but there's a lot of like older progressives who are, who never leave this farm.
00:21:36.634 --> 00:21:45.085
And yet when I go over to their houses for dinner, are in the state of hand ringing anguish because of what they saw on a screen and all around them is nothing but beautiful forest us.
00:21:45.085 --> 00:21:46.674
And they're like, the world is ending, right?
00:21:46.674 --> 00:21:47.694
There's no more land left.
00:21:47.694 --> 00:21:48.694
Trump is ruining the world.
00:21:48.694 --> 00:21:50.674
And I'm like, it's important.
00:21:50.674 --> 00:21:51.634
It's certainly important.
00:21:51.634 --> 00:21:54.265
I say this as a writer and as a critic and as a, a political writer.
00:21:54.265 --> 00:22:01.484
It's certainly important to know what's happening, but I don't think it's important to totally untether yourself from the what actually human experience.
00:22:01.490 --> 00:22:01.559
Experience.
00:22:01.565 --> 00:22:01.934
Yeah.
00:22:07.406 --> 00:22:09.402
Can you tell us about the book you're working on?
00:22:09.402 --> 00:22:09.971
Yes.
00:22:11.592 --> 00:22:12.582
Yes, I will.
00:22:12.582 --> 00:22:18.541
And I had a conversation with myself on the way here about how much I should talk about and you'll figure out why in a sec.
00:22:18.541 --> 00:22:21.872
But I've worked in, I've worked in corporate news for a long time.
00:22:21.872 --> 00:22:28.961
I've worked at CNN Fox, CBS and I spent so much time in mainstream newsrooms just to make a living.
00:22:29.291 --> 00:22:33.582
I was there just not really invested in what was happening because I knew I wanted to be a writer.
00:22:33.582 --> 00:22:35.771
And at the time, for a lot of it, I wanted to write philosophy.
00:22:35.771 --> 00:22:37.001
So it was a total disconnect.
00:22:37.511 --> 00:22:50.561
But sitting in the newsroom, I learned that so much of what from the outside is characterized as sinister or conspiratorial is actually conducted by people who are completely unaware of what they're doing.
00:22:50.892 --> 00:22:54.852
They're completely unaware that they're that they're doing anything that's not good.
00:22:54.852 --> 00:22:56.142
They think they're doing God's work.
00:22:56.471 --> 00:23:02.082
And from the very top down, I'm talking about the very highest levels of these organizations that I've sit in on meetings with.
00:23:02.442 --> 00:23:09.451
There is simply no cognizance of the idea that what they're doing is perpetuating a really problematic world and national order.
00:23:09.842 --> 00:23:32.281
And so the book I wanted to write is a way to make use of all these years I've spent in newsrooms by putting out the thesis that what pervades corporate media and mainstream media is unconscious bias, not conscious bias, that the people who work there don't know they're biased and that they internalize bias primarily by the language they use to talk about the world.
00:23:32.281 --> 00:23:41.402
When they use words like terrorist or gorilla or official source or formal source or informal source without really thinking about what those mean, they perpetuate a national world order.
00:23:41.791 --> 00:23:43.412
That's the book I've been meaning to write.
00:23:43.832 --> 00:23:48.392
However about a month before my first residency.
00:23:48.781 --> 00:23:50.701
Which was in Wyoming in April I was
00:23:50.942 --> 00:23:53.071
You've been on how many residencies since April?
00:23:53.122 --> 00:23:53.481
Just two.
00:23:53.481 --> 00:23:53.872
Just two.
00:23:53.902 --> 00:23:54.112
Just two.
00:23:54.112 --> 00:23:55.342
You have another one coming up, right?
00:23:55.342 --> 00:23:56.521
I have another, I have three more coming up.
00:23:56.521 --> 00:23:56.852
Three more.
00:23:56.912 --> 00:23:57.451
That's amazing.
00:23:57.501 --> 00:24:05.031
So you're living in a space where you're dedicated to writing this book, bouncing from residencies, I shouldn't say bouncing, experiencing different residencies.
00:24:05.136 --> 00:24:06.567
I like bouncing it sounds like fun.
00:24:06.717 --> 00:24:08.787
Beyonce's song, river dance song, shit.
00:24:08.787 --> 00:24:09.146
Dance.
00:24:09.146 --> 00:24:09.416
Yeah.
00:24:09.656 --> 00:24:15.237
No, very much it's my year of, it's like my year of the opposite of rest and relaxation, but there is some of that in there too.
00:24:15.237 --> 00:24:16.497
It's really magical
00:24:16.807 --> 00:24:17.916
thinking and magic.
00:24:18.247 --> 00:24:19.237
Yeah.
00:24:19.237 --> 00:24:19.247
Yeah.
00:24:19.876 --> 00:24:28.686
Yeah, it's yeah, the year of the frenetic Penman it's I'm moving between residencies and in between stopping in New York and Virginia where my sister lives, so I'm just constantly moving.
00:24:28.767 --> 00:24:39.196
But, so a year a month before I left for Wyoming, I had I was thinking through a feud I was having with a very close friend of mine, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had to write about it to understand it.
00:24:39.616 --> 00:24:51.132
And suddenly out of nowhere I was hit with this idea to write a novel that was not just about this friend, but about a series of, it was a series of portraits of writers in New York.
00:24:51.642 --> 00:24:55.332
And I've never written fiction, I've ever written, never written a novel.
00:24:55.961 --> 00:24:59.612
And I just realized I had no choice because it would not leave me.
00:24:59.612 --> 00:25:03.501
And so that is and I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to be saying this.
00:25:03.862 --> 00:25:05.152
I love this plot twist.
00:25:05.152 --> 00:25:06.186
I did not expect this.
00:25:06.186 --> 00:25:07.011
I know this is fun.
00:25:07.041 --> 00:25:09.082
But also just judging by, what's it called?
00:25:09.082 --> 00:25:10.261
Steam room ology.
00:25:10.281 --> 00:25:14.481
Like you can write fiction like that reads like fiction.
00:25:15.412 --> 00:25:16.102
You think so?
00:25:16.201 --> 00:25:16.801
Yes.
00:25:17.582 --> 00:25:23.372
Like your nonfiction feels so lived in and feels like it could easily be translatable.
00:25:24.061 --> 00:25:24.152
Yeah.
00:25:24.152 --> 00:25:28.951
You have the artistry of language like you expressed your that you pay attention to that.
00:25:28.981 --> 00:25:31.142
And I feel like that's fiction.
00:25:31.196 --> 00:25:31.916
That's really interesting.
00:25:31.916 --> 00:25:40.537
I think as a nonfiction writer writing fiction, I've learned that the line is a little bit eerily nebulous because I'm writing it as nonfiction.
00:25:40.537 --> 00:25:44.757
I'm writing it as a collection of creative nonfiction, essays, learning that you can get away with doing that.
00:25:44.787 --> 00:25:45.057
Yeah.
00:25:45.116 --> 00:25:48.207
It's if I could just write a portrait of you and change your name.
00:25:48.606 --> 00:25:55.096
And it works, but it's being written in a kind of intellectual way that i'm wondering how it will come across when it's done, but that's what I'm doing.
00:25:55.096 --> 00:26:03.721
However, my next residency, I'm officially the nonfiction writer in residence, and I have to give a number of public presentations, and so I'm going to pivot to my nonfiction book
00:26:04.051 --> 00:26:08.311
so that you'll shelve the fiction for until after that residency.
00:26:08.551 --> 00:26:10.071
Or you'll write late at night.
00:26:10.221 --> 00:26:10.612
Exactly.
00:26:11.422 --> 00:26:12.291
That's what you're used to.
00:26:12.291 --> 00:26:12.741
That's your
00:26:12.741 --> 00:26:14.832
your muse or your like your side piece.
00:26:14.832 --> 00:26:15.162
Yeah.
00:26:16.281 --> 00:26:20.422
You've been doing it with your news writing and your nonfiction, so for a
00:26:20.422 --> 00:26:20.932
while, right?
00:26:20.936 --> 00:26:21.106
Yeah.
00:26:21.201 --> 00:26:21.471
Yeah.
00:26:21.521 --> 00:26:23.521
I think it's hard to give up something you've started.
00:26:23.521 --> 00:26:27.152
So I think I'll write it because the nonfiction will be a lot of research, not writing.
00:26:27.511 --> 00:26:28.951
It's gonna be like a year of research.
00:26:28.951 --> 00:26:30.692
So I'll be able to continue the novel.
00:26:36.736 --> 00:26:45.435
You've worked in these corporate news spaces, but then you've also written a lot that you've pitched to different publications.
00:26:45.546 --> 00:26:52.635
We were curious about your process of pitching ideas to, I don't wanna call them non-traditional, but the non-corporate publications.
00:26:52.685 --> 00:27:03.726
Yeah, there's actually I almost feel like I get excited when helping friends pitch to places because in a way it's it's almost the straight equivalent of collecting sports cards or something.
00:27:03.776 --> 00:27:06.746
Like I love this idea of oh, let's look at a deck and see what'll work.
00:27:07.076 --> 00:27:15.776
There in an age where we are sadly being fragmented into kind of individual, platforms we write just for ourselves, obviously I'm thinking about substack.
00:27:16.226 --> 00:27:37.246
I do still feel like there's this magic to publications and even if they have a small circulation and even if they have an a volunteer staff, which is very sad, and even if they can barely pay their writers anything, something about the cultural nexus and the collective intention to run a publication that publishes literary pieces is just, I just think it's this magical thing.
00:27:37.655 --> 00:27:44.346
So I do believe that it's worth trying to publish with journals and reviews and magazines, and
00:27:44.346 --> 00:27:45.276
I a hundred percent agree.
00:27:45.276 --> 00:27:45.336
Yeah.
00:27:45.365 --> 00:27:51.705
There's something to being accepted, to having the stamp of approval to go beyond your own audience.
00:27:52.185 --> 00:27:52.846
Exactly.
00:27:52.846 --> 00:28:01.006
And to work with people who are dedicated, even though editors can be tedious sometimes to work with people who are dedicated ultimately to this project.
00:28:01.316 --> 00:28:03.415
And to, to giving your work to others.
00:28:03.476 --> 00:28:14.471
And also look, if we all have our own substack in 10 years, we'll have to just recreate this landscape once again by consolidating, because no one is gonna subscribe to 10,000 different writers.
00:28:14.471 --> 00:28:15.131
It's never gonna work.
00:28:15.161 --> 00:28:16.990
It's like streaming services now.
00:28:16.990 --> 00:28:18.101
Like it's a fucking nightmare.
00:28:18.101 --> 00:28:20.590
My whole email, it's I'm like, I don't even know who these people are.
00:28:20.590 --> 00:28:21.790
Somehow I'm on their list.
00:28:21.790 --> 00:28:21.851
Yeah.
00:28:22.151 --> 00:28:24.280
Should I read it or should I just delete all of them?
00:28:25.121 --> 00:28:25.631
Totally.
00:28:25.631 --> 00:28:25.901
Yeah.
00:28:25.901 --> 00:28:29.740
And it, and I think it also dissolves the line between formal and informal writing.
00:28:29.740 --> 00:28:34.421
There's no longer this, at least quasi process of, let's think about this, let's look at it together.
00:28:34.421 --> 00:28:35.740
Let me show it to somebody else.
00:28:35.840 --> 00:28:38.961
Let's invest in putting it out in, in our pages.
00:28:39.351 --> 00:28:47.421
So I say all that because whenever I'm pitching or I'm helping a friend pitch, I think it's lovely to look at the places that remain and ask, okay, who would this be good for?
00:28:47.661 --> 00:28:59.351
And there are a lot of lovely small reviews that are run out of they're run out of university sometimes, like the New England Review is run out of middlebury, for example or the Hedgehog Review is run outta the University of Virginia.
00:28:59.361 --> 00:28:59.750
They're not for
00:28:59.750 --> 00:29:01.340
Southampton Review from Stony Brook.
00:29:01.391 --> 00:29:01.871
There you go.
00:29:01.871 --> 00:29:02.171
Right?
00:29:02.171 --> 00:29:02.320
Yeah.
00:29:02.320 --> 00:29:03.250
And they're not for students.
00:29:03.250 --> 00:29:09.441
They're actually for established and sometimes esteemed writers they're just part of the university apparatus, and so they have the funding for it.
00:29:09.750 --> 00:29:19.951
And so, I do tend to start with the big places just because there is like an inkling of careerism still that I have to cater to just for my own tenability as a writer.
00:29:20.260 --> 00:29:24.050
So I'll start with the five big places as in my mind.
00:29:24.050 --> 00:29:30.921
And if it's not good enough to pitch to the Atlantic or Harpers or, I'll just be like, okay, let's start at a magazine that has a smaller circulation.
00:29:31.280 --> 00:29:39.006
But you also have to know that, for example, the New York Times will never publish something super literary or super long form or super voicey.
00:29:39.066 --> 00:29:39.885
Steamroom-ography.
00:29:39.905 --> 00:29:42.226
I pitched to a ton of places.
00:29:42.465 --> 00:29:47.596
I actually started writing it with the approval of an editor at Guernica and then Guernica shut down.
00:29:47.935 --> 00:29:48.715
Are they still shut?
00:29:48.715 --> 00:29:49.826
They're just gone forever.
00:29:49.885 --> 00:29:50.365
They're gone.
00:29:50.455 --> 00:29:50.605
Oh,
00:29:50.605 --> 00:29:51.296
wow.
00:29:51.750 --> 00:29:55.434
I remember that there was an issue and yeah, everyone quit and then I guess they,
00:29:55.819 --> 00:29:56.839
I thought it was very silly.
00:29:56.960 --> 00:29:57.920
God, I just think quitting.
00:29:57.920 --> 00:29:58.275
That was ridiculous.
00:29:58.369 --> 00:29:59.059
That was absurd.
00:29:59.180 --> 00:29:59.690
I agree.
00:29:59.720 --> 00:30:05.109
And it, the piece, I thought the whole thing was an example of leftist hysteria in a way that's self-defeating.
00:30:05.109 --> 00:30:09.220
Like why dissolve an institution or, a magazine that does such good work.
00:30:09.269 --> 00:30:13.740
Because one person wrote a piece that was ultimately sympathetic to Palestine.
00:30:13.740 --> 00:30:16.680
I'm writing, I'm, saying this as someone who's like a hardcore supporter of Gaza.
00:30:16.730 --> 00:30:21.589
It was just, it was very silly, but, so I, the piece ended up being killed and I wrote the whole thing.
00:30:21.650 --> 00:30:21.890
Wow.
00:30:21.890 --> 00:30:23.000
And it was very depressing.
00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:26.000
So it's very difficult to pitch a whole piece.
00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:27.769
It's always better to start with a kernel.
00:30:28.109 --> 00:30:30.720
And I wrote it unconventionally knowing that it fit Guernica.
00:30:30.720 --> 00:30:32.400
And so I pitched it everywhere.
00:30:32.430 --> 00:30:33.480
Everybody said no.
00:30:33.839 --> 00:30:39.480
And then finding this lovely new magazine started by a cohort out of Princeton called Strange Matters.
00:30:39.839 --> 00:30:41.789
And they're like a Socialist magazine.
00:30:41.789 --> 00:30:42.390
They loved it.
00:30:42.390 --> 00:30:43.829
And so they took it on board.
00:30:43.829 --> 00:30:47.450
But it was like, that was an instance of me not having planned a place.
00:30:47.700 --> 00:30:50.970
Often I'll first pitch and then write from there.
00:30:50.970 --> 00:31:03.430
So for example, I just pitched a piece that is seems to be in the work for New York Magazine on traveling while Brown and Bearded in the age of Mamdani and in the age of Kash Patel.
00:31:03.430 --> 00:31:10.890
So you have the head of the FBI, who's brown and bearded, the likely mayoral, victor of New York City, brown and bearded, and I, yet, I still get pulled over to airports.
00:31:10.890 --> 00:31:13.509
And so my question is are we still using the right metrics?
00:31:13.509 --> 00:31:14.349
25 years on?
00:31:14.400 --> 00:31:18.750
Surely there's another indicator of someone who's sinister that just being brown and bearded, but they're
00:31:18.750 --> 00:31:19.170
gonna love it.
00:31:19.170 --> 00:31:19.545
Bald and white.
00:31:21.625 --> 00:31:21.974
White.
00:31:22.585 --> 00:31:28.109
The most likely person to have a firearm at security at an airport is a white southern man.
00:31:28.200 --> 00:31:28.349
Right.
00:31:28.500 --> 00:31:30.640
So it's then that's like an official, statistic.
00:31:30.640 --> 00:31:31.509
So it's really funny.
00:31:31.730 --> 00:31:36.140
But, so for example, that's a piece that I'm not gonna write in a literary way because it's for New York Magazine.
00:31:36.140 --> 00:31:42.589
I'll write, it'll be funny and voicey and punchy, but you have to I think it, it helps to know who you're writing for so you can write accordingly.
00:31:42.799 --> 00:31:43.130
Yeah.
00:31:43.769 --> 00:31:43.836
Mm-hmm.
00:31:43.836 --> 00:31:52.296
So as you are working on your own books right now, Do you have an audience in mind for, let's say, your novel, for example?
00:31:52.506 --> 00:31:55.006
Or are you just using your own voice?
00:31:55.695 --> 00:32:01.935
I think with the nonfiction book, I have an audience in mind because I've thought about it for so many years.
00:32:01.965 --> 00:32:02.326
Yeah.
00:32:02.536 --> 00:32:10.125
This novel is like this weird thing that came out of nowhere that I'm just writing because I really wanna write it.
00:32:10.246 --> 00:32:21.965
And I think that my aspirational audience is a type of person who'd read like a book by Rachel Cusk or by Garth Greenwell which is like a higher brow literary audience.
00:32:21.965 --> 00:32:26.836
And I'm saying that with some irony in the sense that I have no idea if I can pull that off.
00:32:27.145 --> 00:32:30.205
And I'm also I told myself, look, just write this as simply as you can.
00:32:30.445 --> 00:32:33.780
And I started writing it and I was like, I'm so fucking florid in the way I write.
00:32:33.830 --> 00:32:38.121
Like I'm just so baroque and so old fashioned in such a ridiculous way.
00:32:38.371 --> 00:32:53.256
And that has come out and my mentor looked at a little bit of it and was like, look, even if you tried to write in the most gmail-ish way, you're still gonna be so old fashioned calm down, so I'm trying to do that and I think it's working.
00:32:53.465 --> 00:33:01.445
So with the novel, it's hard to say with the nonfiction book, this is an era where nonfiction writers actually have an easier time than novelists do.
00:33:01.476 --> 00:33:13.246
I think of a book by Anand Giridharadas called Winners Take All that was published a few years ago about how philanthropists are perpetuating the financial world order by just putting band-aids over it.
00:33:13.250 --> 00:33:26.421
And that was written with this really lovely mix of personal, political and political analysis and then I think of others like Naomi Klein and Maggie Nelson, and I'm, and I think of merging those voices a little bit.
00:33:26.750 --> 00:33:35.810
'cause you ultimately, you wanna be inspired, but you still want to write in a way that is true to yourself, enhances or vilifies your individual quirks,
00:33:35.861 --> 00:33:38.171
and I feel like it is really nice right now.
00:33:38.171 --> 00:33:44.840
I think a lot of contemporary nonfiction books are really pushing the bounds of what the form can take, which is really cool.
00:33:45.111 --> 00:33:45.861
Absolutely.
00:33:46.260 --> 00:33:49.411
Breaking formula can be so liberating and refreshing.
00:33:49.411 --> 00:33:53.010
It's nice to pick up a nonfiction book and be like, oh, this isn't just laborious text.
00:33:53.040 --> 00:33:55.381
There's something different going on here and something literary.
00:33:55.381 --> 00:33:56.701
And Maggie Nelson does that so well.
00:33:56.701 --> 00:33:57.121
Yeah, she does.
00:33:57.121 --> 00:33:57.330
Yeah.
00:34:03.319 --> 00:34:04.730
And where are you going next?
00:34:04.789 --> 00:34:06.079
If you next?
00:34:06.079 --> 00:34:08.809
So I was in Wyoming, then I was in Washington State.
00:34:08.840 --> 00:34:09.860
Next is Texas.
00:34:09.860 --> 00:34:10.880
I've never been to the state.
00:34:10.909 --> 00:34:11.690
Okay.
00:34:11.690 --> 00:34:14.570
That's a small, very artsy town called Corsicana.
00:34:14.570 --> 00:34:15.710
And I'll be there for two months.
00:34:15.800 --> 00:34:15.860
Wow.
00:34:16.380 --> 00:34:17.099
Which will be really nice.
00:34:17.099 --> 00:34:19.079
And then after that, I'm in Spain.
00:34:19.110 --> 00:34:23.670
I'm in the house that Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood, and it's right on the Mediterranean, on the cliff.
00:34:24.159 --> 00:34:26.829
And that'll be really interesting, I think there for a month
00:34:27.280 --> 00:34:30.570
Your little luxurious treat at the end of your your tour.
00:34:31.320 --> 00:34:31.650
Yeah.
00:34:31.650 --> 00:34:31.889
Yeah.
00:34:31.889 --> 00:34:36.440
Then after that a friend of mine has a house in Hungary and he's just basically opened it up to me for a month.
00:34:36.440 --> 00:34:37.280
So I'll be there.
00:34:37.460 --> 00:34:37.550
Wow.
00:34:37.579 --> 00:34:39.230
And then back to Wyoming, and then I finish.
00:34:39.230 --> 00:34:39.530
Yeah.
00:34:39.559 --> 00:34:40.010
Whoa.
00:34:40.010 --> 00:34:45.699
Can you tell us how your experience has been in general through these through these residencies?
00:34:45.699 --> 00:34:46.690
Like what it's done for you?
00:34:48.579 --> 00:34:48.760
Yeah.
00:34:48.800 --> 00:34:58.000
Actually I feel like this could be a good starting point for that could be the genesis of our friendship, Meryl, which is perfect in a way, the oldest, urban and largest urban writer's colony in the country.
00:34:58.000 --> 00:34:58.929
The writer's room.
00:34:59.300 --> 00:35:00.320
Shout out to the writer's room.
00:35:00.320 --> 00:35:01.864
Shout out to Donna Brodie, the director.
00:35:02.909 --> 00:35:09.599
okay, so the writer's room is, it's in Greenwich Village and it's a 24 hour space for writers, and it's quiet and it's amazing.
00:35:10.139 --> 00:35:13.800
And I joined in 2014 in January, 2014.
00:35:13.800 --> 00:35:24.960
So I've been a member for over a decade, and it's because I just couldn't, for the life of me write in my room I couldn't write in a space that that was so close to my bed and where I could masturbate as much as I wanted.
00:35:24.960 --> 00:35:26.909
No, could hold me accountable for same problem.
00:35:28.775 --> 00:35:32.849
And I, so I just found like some distance traveling somewhere committed me to that space.
00:35:33.329 --> 00:35:35.670
And that model has always worked very well for me.
00:35:35.829 --> 00:35:43.239
Residencies are like a really intensified version of a writing space because you are put in the middle, often of a rural environment.
00:35:43.460 --> 00:35:49.469
You're given your own space and you have nothing to do but write and you don't have any of the distractions of everyday life.
00:35:49.469 --> 00:35:52.139
So there's no gym, there's no grocery shopping.
00:35:52.170 --> 00:35:52.949
They give you everything.
00:35:52.949 --> 00:35:57.045
The one I just did had a chef who deliver lunches to my room every day at noon.
00:35:57.045 --> 00:35:58.514
And then there's dinners made every night.
00:35:58.514 --> 00:35:59.925
Breakfast is made for you as well.
00:36:00.284 --> 00:36:06.065
And so what you get done in four weeks can be the equivalent of, three or four months in the city.
00:36:06.065 --> 00:36:07.505
It's such intensive work.
00:36:07.864 --> 00:36:09.304
That being said, it's also dangerous.
00:36:09.304 --> 00:36:11.494
Like you can burn out, you can exhaust yourself.
00:36:11.494 --> 00:36:16.295
That can almost be this intellectual adrenal fatigue where every pore of you has been drained.
00:36:16.635 --> 00:36:18.405
There can be drama with the other residents.
00:36:18.405 --> 00:36:21.789
It's like a reality TV show where there's there can be some weird people you're stuck with.
00:36:22.099 --> 00:36:30.250
But I just feel like if you have an idea and you're ready to really hunker down, it is incredibly liberating to just have nothing but that to do.
00:36:30.769 --> 00:36:34.579
And I was writing at my best, I was writing like 2000 words a day, every day.
00:36:34.579 --> 00:36:35.659
It was really nice.
00:36:40.880 --> 00:36:47.376
So you have your own podcast, Diva Discourse in which you focus on one song for each episode.
00:36:47.467 --> 00:36:47.586
Right.
00:36:47.806 --> 00:36:49.246
So how did that come to be?
00:36:49.246 --> 00:36:54.947
Tell us about your love for Beyonce, because I also love Beyonce and we can also talk about Cowboy Carter
00:36:55.797 --> 00:36:57.117
No, it's, that's so great.
00:36:57.197 --> 00:37:05.806
The title of the podcast, Diva Discourse, kind of gestures towards my obsession and my podcast co-hosts obsession.
00:37:05.806 --> 00:37:07.936
His name is Enzo Escobar, very good friend of mine.
00:37:08.387 --> 00:37:20.956
There's this tradition of gay men having divas that they worship, and it started out with opera singers and then it moved to Broadway stars and actresses, and now it exists primarily in the form of the female pop star.
00:37:21.327 --> 00:37:27.967
And the way you look upon them is not as a peer or even an aspiration, but a Goddess, someone who's untouchable.
00:37:28.262 --> 00:37:40.681
And just in a way the female form in femininity is this, it's the, this kind of exalted untouchable, glamorous way of living that the gay man can only aspire towards or imitate in drag, in, in the drag sense.
00:37:40.992 --> 00:37:43.391
And so divas become this, like this paragon.
00:37:43.782 --> 00:37:51.831
And when you look at female singers and pop stars, just nobody, if you're a gay man and you don't watch a Beyonce, that's fine.
00:37:51.831 --> 00:37:53.902
It just shows to me that you don't really understand music very well
00:37:54.496 --> 00:37:55.657
or just, goddess hood.
00:37:56.407 --> 00:37:56.646
Exactly.
00:37:56.646 --> 00:37:57.126
Right, right.
00:37:57.157 --> 00:37:57.447
Like,
00:37:57.552 --> 00:37:58.271
where are you?
00:37:58.271 --> 00:37:58.871
Who are you?
00:37:58.961 --> 00:37:59.052
It's
00:37:59.052 --> 00:38:08.141
Yeah, you just, you have some lesser religion, but she can do everything in a way that is so superhuman and so glamorous and so glamorized that I found her irresistible.
00:38:08.202 --> 00:38:36.443
it was really when she started touring post the Beyonce experience of the I Am World Tour onwards, where I feel like she became such a master of her craft singing so flawlessly that her live albums are just as good as a recorded albums with all the flourishes of what she does live, which is often not just off the cuff, but really thought out mixes of her songs, which as we saw during Cowboy Carter, reach this incredible zenith of a 30 year discography I go on and on.
00:38:36.753 --> 00:38:44.514
But my friend Enzo and I I wrote a piece in Slate about Beyonce for her 40th birthday that he read before we became friends.
00:38:44.704 --> 00:38:48.403
And so he was like, we became friends at this at the Beyonce connection.
00:38:48.434 --> 00:38:49.423
'cause he was like, I love her too.
00:38:49.423 --> 00:38:50.233
Can we talk about her?
00:38:50.233 --> 00:38:56.744
And we became really close friends and people who would listen to us speak about her were like, you guys should just put mics in front of you.
00:38:57.039 --> 00:38:57.318
Mm-hmm.
00:38:57.614 --> 00:38:59.264
And so we just, were like, okay, let's just do that.
00:38:59.264 --> 00:39:00.914
Let's just talk about one song and do that.
00:39:00.914 --> 00:39:07.184
And we found that it was really fun but also we put clips of what we're talking about, whether it's her live performances or her songs or other people's songs.
00:39:07.454 --> 00:39:11.414
And I feel like there, so there are these nicely textured 20 to 30 minute episodes.
00:39:11.784 --> 00:39:45.043
But with Beyonce herself, I just can't, I thought during her Renaissance world tour that I was seeing kind of the end of this glorious chapter of her live performances because she had stopped dancing and she revealed during the Renaissance World tour film that it's because in 2009, during a rehearsal, she was flown into metal stairs in a way that injured her knee so badly that she just couldn't dance in the same way But looking at Cowboy Carter, not only is she dancing once again, even though her knee is still injured, but she's shown us that she can actually have this glory on stage that's post dance.
00:39:45.043 --> 00:39:50.833
The album was so conducive to something that was not just her dancing, even though she had amazing choreography when she did.
00:39:51.239 --> 00:39:52.438
I think it's her best tour.
00:39:52.469 --> 00:39:53.668
I, oh my God.
00:39:53.668 --> 00:39:54.148
I saw it.
00:39:54.148 --> 00:39:59.338
I paid like my rent to see it and I cried so hard.
00:39:59.338 --> 00:39:59.789
Did you see it?
00:39:59.789 --> 00:40:00.389
I cried.
00:40:00.418 --> 00:40:00.809
Oh my God.
00:40:00.809 --> 00:40:05.925
So the opening number, I just got this huge rush and it was like tears.
00:40:05.925 --> 00:40:07.365
'cause I've seen people cry at concerts.
00:40:07.365 --> 00:40:08.775
I'm like, I've never been that person.
00:40:08.775 --> 00:40:10.606
But I was just like, like what?
00:40:10.606 --> 00:40:13.286
They, when they started with Requiem I was American Requiem.
00:40:13.306 --> 00:40:15.615
I was just like, I was flooded.
00:40:15.615 --> 00:40:28.306
And then all those little bits in between with that are just homages to all the people who've come before and who have created American music and all these Black people and the struggle and all this stuff.
00:40:28.306 --> 00:40:29.715
And it was just like, it was so layered.
00:40:29.715 --> 00:40:33.300
I also thought it was performance art.
00:40:33.300 --> 00:40:34.891
This wasn't a concert, this was theater.
00:40:34.891 --> 00:40:35.760
It really was
00:40:35.940 --> 00:40:39.240
totally performance art and like concept art and high art film.
00:40:39.291 --> 00:40:44.481
And the way that she paid homage to those that came before her was so not like laborious or gestural.
00:40:44.481 --> 00:40:52.661
It felt like part of a celebration where you weren't like, oh, I'm being lectured to, you were electrified by the footage of her performing alongside video of James Brown and others.
00:40:52.661 --> 00:41:01.050
It was amazing and then she flies around the stadium in a car, which was eventually swapped out for a golden horse after a scare in Houston where the car almost toppled her over.
00:41:01.050 --> 00:41:03.240
But she like flies around the stadium.
00:41:03.240 --> 00:41:05.760
She came so close to us seeing know 16 carriages.
00:41:06.090 --> 00:41:12.610
I was sobbing so hard that I was like with Enzo, we were holding each other's like sobbing and my cousin next to me was like, do I need to call the EMS?
00:41:13.661 --> 00:41:15.521
I was like shaking and convulsing.
00:41:15.701 --> 00:41:15.880
Yeah.
00:41:15.880 --> 00:41:15.971
I
00:41:15.971 --> 00:41:19.601
was with my mom, my brother and his and his wife who's pregnant.
00:41:19.601 --> 00:41:25.780
And all of us were just like, we just felt blessed, like when she came around in that car and we could like nearly touch her.
00:41:27.170 --> 00:41:34.820
She's so good that all she has to do is get up there and suddenly, you your urge to be contrarian just dissipates in the face of her glory.
00:41:35.030 --> 00:41:35.451
Yeah.
00:41:36.021 --> 00:41:36.380
Yep.
00:41:36.590 --> 00:41:37.701
I'm part of the religion.
00:41:38.791 --> 00:41:39.271
Meryl's, like
00:41:39.346 --> 00:41:42.376
one of those daughters who's been like dragging along to church being like, oh, fine.
00:41:49.916 --> 00:42:00.706
There was one more thing I wanted to say that, One thing that I think causes me perennial existential crisis as a writer is how thin the line is between writer and non-writer.
00:42:01.121 --> 00:42:13.771
Everybody writes, not everybody paints or sings or makes films, and so I feel like other genres of art are more comfortably sequestered in this kind of specialization of just a sheer medium.
00:42:13.820 --> 00:42:20.061
Every time a doctor or an assistant or anyone, even a family member emails me something that's well written.
00:42:20.061 --> 00:42:22.101
I'm just like why am I a writer?
00:42:22.101 --> 00:42:25.940
You can write a well-written email and you're a doctor or a lawyer or whatever you are.
00:42:25.940 --> 00:42:28.311
Like, I have nothing but just this writing.
00:42:28.641 --> 00:42:33.081
And in a way just feels like what all I am is a speaker or a thinker or an expressor.
00:42:33.391 --> 00:42:36.210
Writing and speaking is the air that we all breathe in.
00:42:36.210 --> 00:42:40.021
And so how do you, what gives you the right to call yourself a writer?
00:42:40.021 --> 00:42:41.581
It's like saying I'm an exister, right.
00:42:41.581 --> 00:42:42.505
Or I'm a just, yeah.
00:42:42.505 --> 00:42:43.255
I'm a be-er.
00:42:43.565 --> 00:42:59.266
And so that is something that I feel like besieges me now and then because I feel like there's, just in the promiscuity of the medium, there comes a higher threshold of of validation of having to prove yourself as being able to call yourself a writer.
00:42:59.985 --> 00:43:01.396
And I think there's an answer to it.
00:43:01.445 --> 00:43:02.315
I have good news though.
00:43:02.315 --> 00:43:07.565
I hear basically in every conversation I'm in now, people are using AI to write.
00:43:07.775 --> 00:43:10.115
They do not feel comfortable even writing an email.
00:43:10.206 --> 00:43:18.250
And so I think that if we continue to not use AI and continue to write from our heads, we are going to become really special soon.
00:43:18.730 --> 00:43:19.449
I love that.
00:43:19.510 --> 00:43:20.230
I really love that.
00:43:20.230 --> 00:43:28.090
In fact, I love the proliferation of AI because I feel like we will be the special ones in a generation if we still
00:43:28.090 --> 00:43:31.489
trust ourselves to write and and not use it.
00:43:31.489 --> 00:43:34.530
I think we're gonna be really, the top of the world.
00:43:34.920 --> 00:43:40.769
I love that, and thank you for bringing me into the contemporary because I was speaking with LADA and thinking about that, and you're totally right.
00:43:40.769 --> 00:43:53.190
And all I would add to that is that one other thing that distinguishes the writer or gives the writer the right to distinction is the sheer persistence and will to continue writing.
00:43:53.489 --> 00:43:58.289
It's one thing to write an email, it's one thing to write incidentally, it's another to sit down and write.
00:43:58.289 --> 00:44:08.369
And I think in sitting down and intentionally writing, you also do something with your mind and with the coherence of expression that is unique to the craft, that is a little bit different from anything else.
00:44:08.590 --> 00:44:12.909
When you speak for an hour, it's very different than speaking off the cuff for a few sentences.
00:44:12.940 --> 00:44:13.179
Right.
00:44:13.179 --> 00:44:16.389
Your ideas reach a kind of crescendo.
00:44:16.869 --> 00:44:21.730
And so what I would say to end that is it's all right to call yourself a writer.
00:44:27.476 --> 00:44:28.826
Follow us, like us.
00:44:28.876 --> 00:44:31.755
Leave a review on wherever you get your podcast.
00:44:31.755 --> 00:44:32.806
It's all right.
00:44:32.856 --> 00:44:36.376
You can follow us on Instagram@itsallwritepod.
00:44:36.396 --> 00:44:39.246
Write spelled W-R-I-T-E'cause it's a pun.
00:44:39.666 --> 00:44:43.835
You can also email us at It's All right pod@gmail.com.
00:44:43.835 --> 00:44:45.545
We'd love to hear from you and yeah,
00:44:45.545 --> 00:44:46.289
thanks for listening.