Dear Republic,
Liza Libes is one of the stars of LitStack — always intense, always provocative, and as impassioned about literature as anyone you are ever likely to meet. It’s a pleasure to interview her here.
-ROL
AN INTERVIEW WITH LIZA LIBES
1.What’s your earliest memory?
When I turned three years old, my parents sent me to a Jewish daycare several blocks from the apartment I grew up in. I was still in the last stretch of my stroller days, and I remember being pushed along the sidewalk by my grandparents on our way back home. It must have been not too long after noon, and I was holding a bright blue balloon that I had gotten that day at the daycare. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew; I panicked, released the balloon into the air, and cried on the rest of the way home. The loss of that balloon must have been integral to the development of my psyche—I am unusually sensitive to loss of any sort and am still figuring out the best way to deal with life’s ephemerality.
2.What do you know about your parents’ lives in the Soviet Union?
I didn’t know anything about my parents’ lives until I turned twenty-one, and my mom sat me down over brunch and revealed to me that the reason they had fled to the U.S. was that my dad had been wrongfully sent to prison for being a Jew. Up until that point in my life, I had never really cared much about Judaism—it wasn’t a prevalent facet of my childhood, and apart from casually observing the high holidays, my family did not participate in many Jewish traditions. It was a lot to take in at once, and nothing could have prepared me for the ensuing existential soul-searching that still plagues me to this day. I could sense that something of the sort was coming—my parents rarely discussed their past lives in the USSR, so there must have been something traumatizing there—but I could never have been prepared for such a blatant display of antisemitism. I still don’t know much about my parents’ former lives, but I suspect that my mother—whose Muslim father was in the government oil business—has happier memories of the old country than my father does.
This past year, I also learned that my great-grandfather on my dad’s side was beaten to death by the KGB—also for being Jewish. My grandmother lost her father when she was just ten years old. There is a lot of trauma on my dad’s side of the family. I’ve made it my duty ever since to stand up against antisemitism.
3.How did they end up coming to the US?
From what I’ve pieced together from family stories, after nine months in prison, my dad was let out temporarily because there was no concrete evidence incriminating him, but he was scheduled to go back to prison after they “sorted things out.” My grandparents had been in touch with the U.S. embassy, and the timing worked out perfectly. Those few weeks that my dad was let out was enough for them to flee to America as Jewish refugees. The newly-elected Bill Clinton had temporarily tightened immigration policies for Jewish asylum-seekers, but by some miracle, my family was granted an exception. They were allowed only one box of belongings per person. My grandmother still laments leaving behind her extensive collection of Russian literature, but she managed to keep her thirteen volumes of the collected works of Dostoyevsky, which now sit on my bookshelf in my childhood room.
4.Describe what growing up in Chicago was like.
After living in the basement of a synagogue in a Jewish ghetto in Chicago, my dad saved up enough money to move out to his own place. He was an engineer back in the USSR, but because he didn’t speak English, he made a living frying potatoes at Burger King and working odd jobs such as fixing people’s first computers (this was the early 90’s). By 1996, he had saved up enough money to get married, buy an apartment in Chicago’s Lakeview area, and bring my mom back to the U.S. with him. I grew up in that same two-bedroom Lakeview apartment. After several years at Jewish daycare, I was granted a spot at a prestigious private school in Chicago on a scholarship—the same private school that a young Black senator from Illinois sent his two kids to. Barack Obama used to occasionally come to my school to pick up Sasha and Malia and said hello to me once.
I bring that incident up because I had a weird childhood. I was torn between my very middle class life—growing up in a claustrophobic two-bedroom apartment, visiting the Cheesecake Factory downtown (only on special occasions), and shopping at Gap and TJ Maxx—and the affluent world of my peers: playdates at houses with six stories and two swimming pools, hearing tales of my classmates’ winter break trips to Aspen, and sharing classrooms with the sons and daughters of neurosurgeons, hedge fund managers, and future presidents (literally). I didn’t really belong anywhere because the other immigrant kids thought I was a snob for my private school education, and the private school kids looked down on me for my parents’ modest financial situation. I remember one of my classmates asking me in the third grade why my apartment was so small and turning down a playdate with me. I saw her a few months ago at my high school reunion. She could tell by what I was wearing that I made more money than her and gave me the side eye. Karma, bitch.
5.What were your ambitions when you were in high school?
I am very stubborn and headstrong, so my ambitions haven’t changed much since high school. Ever since I was four, I’ve wanted to become a published author. In high school, I doubled down on that dream and sent out my first novel to literary agents (that didn’t go anywhere, but it was a good learning experience). Everyone knew me as the weird writer kid, and my senior superlative was “Most Likely to Win the Pulitzer Prize.” Still no Pulitzer, but we’re working on it.
6.Talk about some of the ways that your parents’ experience of the Soviet Union — and of Communism — shaped your politics.
Another family story I learned recently from my grandmother—right before the Russian Revolution, my great-great-grandfather had set up a successful business as a merchant. A lot of people were merchants back then, but that was a great accomplishment for a Jewish person who would have been barred from holding any sort of official position in Imperial Russia. Almost overnight the Revolutionaries took away everything he had spent his whole life building. There’s an almost-identical scene in Ayn Rand’s early novel We the Living. Say what you will about Rand, but We the Living paints a fairly accurate portrait of life right after the Revolution—at least as I understand it based on family stories. Interestingly enough, however, my parents never explicitly told me that “Communism is bad” when I was growing up. As I’ve said, the “old world” rarely came up in our household. Instead, I was always just taught that hard work is the best way to achieve success even when the world is against you. That philosophy has certainly shaped the way that I approach the world—I firmly believe that your fate is fully in your control and that you have the power to achieve anything as long as you put in the work. This notion, I believe, made me into an old-guard conservative or a classical liberal (depending on whom you ask)—the idea that we are all responsible for our own actions and fates. That is why I am continually vexed by the persuasions of the modern American left, who have convinced young people especially that nothing is their own fault, writing off personal flaws as “mental illness” or “systemic oppression.” My parents came here as refugees, entered the middle class, sent their kids to private school, and watched both my brother and I secure graduate degrees. There are, of course, many cases of true hardship and oppression, but I am not convinced that any individual who has the privilege of receiving a college degree is in any way “oppressed.”
7.So you get into Columbia and you don’t exactly see eye to eye with the rest of the student body. What are some of the ways in which you discover the disjunction between your views and that of your classmates?
I came into college as a liberal. Seriously. I voted for Hillary in 2016. Those were the Obama days, and American politics were slightly more moderate than they are now. In fact, I didn’t really have that many strong political convictions—I suppose I came into college as a liberal because I’d also never been exposed to any other viewpoints—my progressive high school was founded by the father of progressivism himself, John Dewey. Everyone around me in school was a liberal, but it was never really brought up in class unless something major happened in the world—we discussed Charlie Hebdo in my high school French class, for instance, and, of course, I was on the “political violence is bad” side, which back then was a liberal position (not anymore?).
But at Columbia, I sensed that something was wrong. During a department orientation, for instance, we had to go around in a circle and state our name, where we were from and pronouns. I remind you that this was 2015. I’d literally never heard the term used before. I was confused! Here I was in my mascara and my summery dress and I was asked to say if I was a woman? So I played along, but then these little things kept coming up. In my freshman English seminar, we had to read Edward Said, who was saying all of these nasty things about Israel, where I have family. So I thought, okay sure, go ahead and criticize Israel but the f*** does this have to do with Jane freaking Austen—whom he was criticizing in the same chapter? Jane Austen was complicit in “imperialist expansion” (this is an actual claim that Said makes!)? Were we reading the same Jane Austen?
Soon enough, I was being taught Karl Marx in another seminar. See, to me—someone who grew up with parents who’d fled the Soviet Union—Marxism was not synonymous with liberalism at all. So I started to see through the way that literature was being taught, and that pushed me more towards the center because I fundamentally do not believe that Karl Marx belongs in English departments—nor do his ideologies belong on anyone’s political agenda.
And all around me, no one seemed to have a problem with any of this!
But I’d come to Columbia to study English because I love tradition. To me, literature is an extension of a broader thousand-year tradition of telling stories, and at Columbia, I was expecting to meet so many other old-school lovers of the humanities. Instead, I got people who hated tradition and wanted to destroy everything I’ve ever loved—while calling it “English literature” in the process.
8.And it’s not just the students. Want to tell the story of your first English paper at Columbia?
The first ever paper that I was assigned in college was in a course called “Masterpieces of Western Literature.” Being the literature nerd that I was, I came into that course having already read the vast majority of the texts on the syllabus, so I expected the course to be a breeze. Mind you, this was not a department course but a university-wide required seminar. I was in a class with physics majors and econ majors who may have never read a work of fiction in their lives. But on my first paper on The Iliad, I received a C. Initially, I took it as a blow to my ego, but after reading over the professor’s comments, I couldn’t tell what I had done wrong. They were all vague and confusing, so I scheduled time to meet with him outside of class and waddled into his office expecting him to give me clear directions on how to perform better on the next paper, but instead he simply told me that my argument was “incorrect” (that was the exact word he used, I remember).
“It is incorrect to argue that a patriarchal structure can benefit society’s women.”
That was all the feedback I received. For my next paper, I decided to write about the perversion of gender roles in the Oresteia—not because I consciously understood what was happening back then, but because it seemed intuitively like the sort of paper the professor wanted to read. I spent about two hours cumulatively writing the whole thing and had no idea what I was trying to argue, but I threw in all the buzzwords of the times.
I will now delight the reader with my absurd thesis:
Clytemnestra desires to undermine classical gender roles through her play at masculinity, attesting to the circumscription of human beliefs that argues that when faced with an entity that does not conform to what is perceived as proper human behavior, society labels the individual perverted female form as beastly and creates a justification for the silencing of the female race.
I have no idea what that means.
The paper received an A.
9.You have this really searing description of finishing up your M.A.: “For me, however, 2020 was the unfortunate year that I earned my MA in English literature from Columbia University—and graduated with a burning hatred for the literary world….So putting the finishing touches on my MA thesis in May 2020, shutting my volume of T.S. Eliot poems, I would scarcely touch a book for the next sixteen months. I simply couldn’t do it anymore.” Can you say more about this? What was so terrible about the way Columbia was teaching English?
I have an essay on my Substack called “The Year I Quit Reading.” No kidding. In 2021, I read zero books. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I’ll steal a paragraph from that essay because it perfectly articulates my experience:
Books had been poisoned for me. I would open Howards End and immediately start to conceptualize what sort of Marxist reading I could do of Leonard Bast and the Schlegel sisters. I would read Heart of Darkness and think only of Edward Said’s postcolonial theory. I would page through Brideshead Revisited and be keenly aware of the queer undertones in Sebastian’s quips… These were all books I read in the last days of 2020, when I resolved to push through what I had been taught about literature at Columbia and enjoy books the way I had back in high school, when I read for the unique insights that these works provided us into the human condition. I still remember the agony I felt at being able to consume these great works only through the cynical, vivisectional lenses I had been sold at Columbia, and I could not take it anymore.
I borrow the word “vivisectional” from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon—“ruthlessly sharp and detailed criticism or analysis.” Everything in the Columbia English department was about analysis through a certain lens—and God forbid you brought up a “lens” that did not conform to the agenda of the far-leftist coalition.
I don’t want to use the Soviet Union as an example for anything, but in the Soviet Union, there was at least a respect for the writers of the past. Czeslaw Milosz talks about this in The Captive Mind—he recalls that Shakespeare actually wasn’t censored in the USSR because the Bard was so emblematic of a broader cultural tradition. Similarly, many classic Russian authors such as Dostoevsky—who was very critical of socialism—weren’t censored because without Dostoevsky you really don’t have Russian literature at all. It’s crazy for me to say this but even a society that attacked art so vehemently understood the importance of tradition—as opposed to the Columbia English department, which wants nothing more than to destroy it. What I saw at Columbia was tradition constantly coming under attack because Author X didn’t hold Viewpoint Y. My favorite one will always be “Shakespeare is a racist, so maybe we shouldn’t mandate him for all students of English literature.” Can you imagine graduating from Columbia University as an English major without ever once having read Shakespeare? You could do it! Many people do.
What’s mandated instead is literary theory. There was just one required class for all students in my master’s cohort in English literature, for instance, and it was “The History of Literary Theory.” Not History of Literature. History of Theory. We read no literature for that seminar, but we sure as hell read a lot of theory. Imagine you read a book about Beethoven, but you’ve never heard the music of Beethoven. Does that make you a music major? One might argue that by the time that a student opts to receive a graduate degree in English literature, they have read most of the great works of literature, but an English major at Columbia quotes Marx much more readily than Shakespeare or Chaucer.
This over-emphasis on theory at the expense of literature—theory that’s wildly biased at that—is the reason that English departments are seeing so much pushback today.
10.Tell us about Invictus Prep.
My respite from the literary world was fraught but necessary. Without it, I would have never been forced to evaluate what I was doing with my life, and I probably would have moped around my apartment writing articles that no one read while getting paid pennies. I imagine that this would have created more unnecessary stress for me and would have set back my writing career even more. Instead, I took a break from “humanities people” and surrounded myself with corporate people who knew how to make money. I learned a lot from people I thought I’d have less in common with, and that inspired me to also want to create something that could sustain my New York lifestyle. I had absolutely no business experience, but I knew a thing or two about writing, so I started helping students revise essays for the college admissions process. Eventually, that side gig grew into my full-time college consulting company, Invictus Prep. I’m still on Google Docs all day just as I’d always thought I’d be, but I’m editing student essays now. I’m really grateful that I can earn a great living by putting my writing and editing skills to use. And as a bonus, the flexibility of running my own business also gives me ample time to write.
11.Tell us about your return to your writing — and how you found Substack.
I got back to reading in 2022, but between 2021 and 2024, I was barely writing at all. That changed in early 2023, when an old Jewish friend I had lost touch with reached back out to me to see how I was doing after October 7th. I have family in Israel and, of course, care deeply about antisemitism. We had a long phone conversation shortly after, where we caught up and talked about life. From that conversation, I had a key realization about the way I was leading my life—now completely withdrawn from my dreams of becoming a writer—that I knew I had to get back to it no matter what it took.
I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was that inspired me to rush to my computer and jot down some notes from that conversation, but those notes gave a second life to my previously abandoned novel, The Lilac Room. The conversation I had with my friend laid the groundwork for a pivotal conversation that two of my characters have in a later chapter in the novel. By the end of August of that year, I had finished up the novel and was thinking of ways to get my writing out there. I started a Substack in the summer of 2024 right after I’d finished the novel at the suggestion of my longtime friend and poetry book editor. I had about 80 subscribers for the first few months, but as luck would have it, I published an essay on Substack on October 7th, 2024 (purely coincidentally) that blew up and immediately gave me the visibility I‘d been looking for. After a year of hammering out consequent Substack essays, I became a bestseller.
October 7th is a fraught day for the Jewish people, but as all Jews do, I’ve found a way to see the light in the situation and make that day my own. I’ll always remember October 7th, 2023 as the day that sparked my return to writing and October 7th, 2024 as the day that propelled my writing career into motion.
You know I’m a writer because I’ve found some convoluted way to make all of that symbolic.
12.Tell us about The Lilac Room and The Leverkuhn Quartet.
I have a third novel, actually, that I wrote in college called Man a Museum. After being told that the novel was too experimental and intellectually abstruse to find a market, I wanted to write something more palatable. So, abandoning my Joycean convictions, I set out to write a novel about a murder and an FBI agent. After nine chapters, I felt that the book really wasn’t me, and I turned my attention to my company and continued to distract myself. Then, of course, I had this renewed wave of inspiration where I realized that my issue was that I wasn’t a spy thriller/ murder mystery author. I was an author of literary fiction—because those were the books that had captured my heart and informed my writing and ideas throughout the past two decades of my life. When I came back to The Lilac Room, I knew I had to make it more accessible than Man a Museum but more literary than an average murder mystery. So The Lilac Room became a novel about morality. Yes, there is a death (it’s a suicide, not a murder) and yes, there is an FBI agent (though a minor plot point is that we’re not sure if he’s really an agent or not), but the novel is fundamentally about the tension between being a good person and being a brilliant, successful person. The novel critiques utilitarianism and, through the eyes of Cassie Feuerbach, our protagonist, and her unlikely FBI-agent friend Adam Gershon. There’s still a bit of a noir-adjacent mystery plot in the background, but the novel is more about Cassie’s journey to becoming a better person after years “girlbossing” in corporate America (if Taylor Swift used that word, I can do it, too).
The Leverkuhn Quartet is a completely different beast. It came together rather quickly—in just four months—after a flood of inspiration hit me in the midst of reading Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, a twentieth century retelling of the Faust myth. The novel’s protagonist (or antagonist, depending on how you read it) Adrian Leverkuhn, a hubris-filled, tortured composer who sets out to redefine music as we know it today, reminded me of an old composer friend of mine who became the prototype of my loose reinterpretation of Adrian Leverkuhn. At its core, The Leverkuhn Quartet is about what it means to be an artist and whether artistic merit justifies the Faustian desire for the infinite. The novel also recasts many of Mann’s characters as Jewish and explores themes of Jewish identity. There is a central plot point around Richard Wagner, who, of course, represents both artistic snobbishness at its finest and antisemitism—two of the novel’s central themes.
13.How would you describe your literary taste? What are the kinds of ‘problems’ that you try to work through in your fiction and poetry?
I firmly believe that good literature should have a lasting moral message—think Anna Karenina or The Great Gatsby. What’s in vogue in the literary fiction world today seems to be the opposite—vague explorations of identity with vague “choose-your-own adventure” endings. To me, this seems to be an outgrowth of the postmodern conviction that all morality is relative and that, therefore, the writer’s duty is not to lay out morals but to verge on nihilism. I think that the most important part of being human is trying to find meaning in all things, so I reject this nihilist approach, and I reject fundamentally ambiguous endings. You can do a reading of Anna Karenina as a feminist novel if you’d like, but you’d be wrong because Tolstoy’s message is that stable family structures are morally good. That’s what I think is missing from the literary world today—morality embedded in the books we read at the expense of hyper-politicization. That’s why I tend to gravitate toward older books. They have something to teach us in a way that many contemporary novels do not.
The anonymous narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, say, learns absolutely nothing about her hedonistic, degenerate lifestyle. Moshfegh doesn’t attempt to excuse her, but she doesn’t condemn her, either. She depicts a degenerate society without leaving the reader with a clear message; she attacks capitalism, but does not offer an alternative. To me, this sort of writing is antithetical to good literature, which must by nature teach us something about how to live a good life.
For this reason, I want my books to have a message about the meaning of life. I write about morality (as I do in The Lilac Room) or the “artistic life” (as I do in The Leverkuhn Quartet). I create characters who are morally bad, and I drop enough clues for the reader to hopefully conclude that certain actions are immoral while others are morally righteous. I like to write characters with redemption arcs à la Levin or Raskolnikov.
Yes, my writing is heavily informed by the Russian literature I grew up reading, but hey. There’s a reason that Russian literature holds the status that it does. It’s not only good but also meaningful.
14.So I remember when you started kind of live-blogging your journey to publication and it was sweet and optimistic — and then, pretty rapidly, it turned dark. What were some of the reactions you got from publishers?
When I started my Substack, I had a weekly series called “Journey to Publication.” As I’ve mentioned, I’m quite headstrong, so I imagined that I’d secure a literary agent in several months. I was quickly humbled and proven wrong. I ended up discontinuing the series because I lost hope rather suddenly, and I didn’t want to be too negative in the content I sent out to my readers every week. (I have a tendency to be negative about things—that’s the Russian in me. I’m working on it.)
After over 30 manuscript requests and two retracted/ghosted offers, I’ve observed some trends from literary agent feedback that highlight the three main “issues” with my books:
There is no clear market niche for my book. This has been the hardest piece of feedback to hear, but my sense is that someone somewhere out there will believe in the book enough to want to market it. Yes—my books don’t really resemble anything on the literary fiction market today because there are very few writers of literary fiction who are not of the leftist persuasion—and the ones who do exist are, like me, likely unpublished. Therefore, the message I leave readers with is going to be at odds with the writings of Ottessa Moshfegh (if you haven’t read Moshfegh, all you need to know about her is that she called The Free Press a “fascist” publication). I think many agents are also at sea with what to do with my book because my writing style—I like big words and subclauses—is the opposite of “MFA-writing,” which, on average, is more bareboned and minimalistic.
My book does not conform to certain political standards or industry trends. Most agents will dance around this issue, but there are certain key words in their feedback emails that give away political misalignment. Those words are typically “I didn’t empathize with the message” or “I had a hard time connecting with the characters.” To me, these seem to be signs of aesthetic or philosophical misalignment. And agents have told me outright that I need to do more to explore “privilege” or that my characters won’t appeal to “socially conscious Gen Z audiences.” (I quote actual agent feedback here.)
My book does not match what agents expected from the pitch. This has been the most helpful piece of feedback. Originally, I was framing The Lilac Room as more of a commercial work to hook agents, as I’ve said, but it’s really a meditation on morality. After taking a six-month break from querying The Lilac Room, I recently came up with a brand new pitch that more accurately captures the spirit of the book. I’m hoping that if pitch misalignment was an issue for some agents, I’ll resolve the concern with this new approach. I’ve regained some of my optimism here.
15.And you’ve largely become convinced that the publishing world — like literary academia — is hopelessly ideological. What do you with this conviction? What’s left in terms of trying to find an audience?
I have almost 40k followers on Instagram—many of whom routinely reach out to me expressing their solidarity with my work. I have over 5k readers on Substack. My time on the Internet has convinced me that there is very clearly an audience for readers who want literature with a good moral message without the political crap! If 40k people want to watch me talk about Ayn Rand, then I’m sure at least a handful of those people would want to read a literary fiction book with a more traditional message. I’m actually less pessimistic about finding an audience because in many ways I have it already. Yes, the majority of the publishing world is ideologically captured, yes the majority of Gen Z women are also Zohran Mamdani supporters, yet I can name more than a handful of Gen Z women I know personally who oppose him. Majority does not mean all!
I’m also more pessimistic in my Substack articles than I am in real life because such controversy helps with “the algorithm” (whatever that is) and people in general like to complain—so they resonate with me complaining. I don’t think anyone would read my articles if I said, “Publishing is great and here’s why,” so, online, you get this filtered version of my actual views. In reality, I still think there’s hope for me and many other more traditionally minded authors—you just need to be lucky enough to meet the right people.
16.How do you feel your Substack is evolving over time?
For better or for worse, my political essays tend to do better on average than my straight “literary essays.” My piece on Thomas Mann and humanism got 41 likes, while my piece on transgender hormone therapy got 117 likes. My poetry analysis pieces also always perform abysmally compared to my other writing. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but there are, of course, more people interested in politics than literature. That’s definitely incited me to write more political pieces—but with a literary or philosophical flair. My recent piece on Zohran Mamdani invokes the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. I’m learning to balance what I want to write with what people want to hear. You need both.
So though Pens and Poison is not as purely “literary” as I would like, broadening the topics I discuss has also helped me broaden my audience. There are only so many people who want to sit through an analysis of a Joseph Brodsky poem, after all!
17.You’ve clearly taken a risky decision — I worry about you sometimes! — to share a great deal of your critique of the publishing industry even as you’re still looking to find a publishing home for your work. What went into that decision on your part? To what extent do you worry about blacklisting yourself?
I appreciate the concern! I’ve heard that a few times from various people, and yes, I am very vocal about issues in the publishing industry. But I wrote in one of my pieces that I actually think the right literary agent for me will be similarly frustrated—perhaps they might be from the old guard and continually roll their eyes at their far-left colleagues. I see this as the equivalent of a man writing that he is a conservative on a dating app. That will scare off most women, but the right one will love him the more for it.
I just don’t see any possibility that someone who would be upset at such a thing would resonate with the sorts of books I write in the first place—which, at the end of the day, push traditional messages with more conservative morals.
I like to look at it like this—if I point out issues in the medical industry, does that mean I should be barred from receiving healthcare? If I point out issues in our education system does that mean that my kids shouldn’t be able to go to school? God forbid I talk negatively about our political system and our president! Does that mean I should be barred from voting?
These are all flawed systems, and so is publishing—and as a writer who cares deeply about free speech, I want to do my part in fixing the publishing world as it currently stands. It’s absolutely silly to think that literary agents would get this triggered by writers pointing out flaws in a larger system that they, too, have little control over.
Publishing is broken. I want to figure out how to fix it by having an open and honest dialogue about what needs to be done—not by continually silencing writers. I’ll keep speaking out about publishing because I know that the right person is out there who will champion my work and my ideas wholeheartedly.
If CNN had on Ben Shapiro a few weeks ago, then I’ll somehow make my way into publishing.
18.How viable do you think a space like this, i.e. Substack or the new digital lit world, is for building a real career as a writer/intellectual? Are we all kidding ourselves or is this something to double-down on?
I cannot praise Substack enough for helping me launch my budding writing career. I still have a long way to go, but I’ve met some incredible people on Substack who have convinced me that there is still hope left for open discourse of ideas. I am infinitely grateful to have met some lovely people on Substack, and I’ve even had some bigger publications reach out to me (shout-out to Persuasion and The Republic of Letters!) that I would have never dreamed of writing for just two years ago. I’ve gotten my work into The Boston Globe because one of their managing editors found my Substack, and I’ve collaborated with several big names on projects that I hope to announce very soon. A well-known writer I’ve admired since the fourth grade reached out to me letting me know he’d recently purchased my poetry book. What a wonderful (and surreal) full-circle moment!
I don’t know whether Substack is going to fully replace traditional publishing, but it’s done wonders for my own career, and I’m sure it’s been instrumental to the growth of so many other young talented authors. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to get their writing out there and am optimistic about the future of digital media thanks to Substack.
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