An Interview With Naomi Kanakia

Icelandic Sagas, Mahabarata, Sci-Fi, and Substack

Dear Republic,

If you are into LitStack, then you definitely know Naomi Kanakia. Naomi writes in a bewildering array of forms and styles — sci-fi, YA, realist fiction, tales, pseudobibliographies, and, I think, everything else. She also somehow manages to have a reading list that includes Apuleius and just about every New Yorker short story ever published.

-ROL

AN INTERVIEW WITH NAOMI KANAKIA

1. What was your childhood like? Were you always a reader? Did you always want to be a writer?

I would say that I had a classic nerd childhood. I was really into sci-fi and fantasy books. Recently when they moved out of their house, my parents had to get rid of literally 1,000 mass-market paperbacks I had in the attic. I spent a lot of time working on fantasy maps for my D&D campaign and making amateur websites for the same.

When I was 14 I bought a set of five CD-roms containing the first 250 issues of Dragon Magazine, the official Dungeons and Dragons magazine, and I developed the ambition to write for the magazine. They not only published game material—they also published short stories. I eventually got an article accepted by Dragon when I was 17, but had a harder time finishing a short story, and by the time my first story was completed they’d stopped publishing fiction. However I figured there must be other places to submit your writing, and that led me to a site that listed sci-fi / fantasy journals (the now-defunct Ralan.com).

I started submitting assiduously to these journals: I collected mostly rejections for six or seven years, but there’s a whole subculture of people who submit to sci-fi journals, and by reading the blogs and online fora devoted to this activity I got socialized to the idea that you expect to be rejected a lot before you get any traction. Finally when I was around 25, I started selling regularly to these journals.

2. What’s your personality like? How would friends describe you? How about enemies?

Growing up, I was very shy, found it extremely difficult to talk to people, make friends. I was anxious and depressed in college, and drinking heavily was the only way to cope. After I got sober around age 24, I made a concerted effort to become more social, and now I really enjoy talking to people. I have an extremely good memory for names, places, dates—even if I meet someone after ten years I’m usually able to recall significant details from their lives. I love gossip of all sorts.

The best advice I ever got about how to talk to strangers was from a girl named Hope who I only ever met once: she said to just ask people about their love lives, since it’s usually the thing that most preoccupies them. That stood me in good stead for a long time, but is less useful now that my peers are usually married.

People are terrible at describing their friends: they’ll say, “Such and such is so warm, funny, smart”—everyone sounds generic when described by their friends. But I’d like my friends to say that I have a democratic personality—that I have no interest in social-climbing, and I maintain a broad range of ties, with all kinds of people.

All my enemies are exactly like me, but have ever-so-slight differences that are only visible to me and them, so I’ll just describe my average enemy: “Highly-educated and accomplished, but they still have a chip on their shoulder and regard themselves as an outsider, as a result they come off brittle and thin-skinned.”

3. Did you like your MFA program? Where were you in your writing trajectory when you did that?

I chose my MFA program because it was high-minded and austere—very literary. I was a science fiction writer when I entered, and I wanted the secret of literariness. Many of the women at this program were tall, thin, with high cheekbones and an ethereal affect—many of the men had deep voices and horn-rimmed glasses and violent opinions about which mid-century writers were the best.

Ultimately, I got what I wanted, which was credibility. I don’t know that you’d be interviewing me if I didn’t have an MFA.¹ But this world wasn’t really to my taste. It felt quite insular. The professors were well-read, but the students seemed mostly familiar with American literary fiction: they loved Carver, Flannery O’Connor, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, and didn’t necessarily care about foreign authors, early 20th century writers, 19th century literature, or anything I’d call classic literature.

I also didn’t really like the airless, stultifying environment. The writing department was in a building with a high atrium and these marble floors, and I can still hear myself trying to talk over the clangor of voices in Gilman Atrium. I just couldn’t imagine spending my life trapped in this building or buildings like it. Something happens to the human soul when you spend your life trapped on a college campus. At Hopkins you can choose to stay for a third year, as an adjunct, but I chose to leave as soon as my degree was completed.

However I did meet many great people at the MFA including one of my dearest friends, Courtney Sender, and another talented writer, Amber Burke, who for many years was my go-to beta-reader (both are now RoL contributors!)

4. You write across a really wide variety of genres. Which parts of yourself do you feel like you’re expressing when you write science fiction? How about YA?

The truth is that my writing style has changed a lot in the past two years. I write completely differently now from how I used to when I was publishing my science fiction stories, or my YA novels, or even my literary novel, The Default World. I think that I was trying out a lot of things, but I hadn’t really yet found my voice.

Now, with what I write, there is a fusion of all those things. My fiction nowadays is like a YA novel in that it focuses on simple situations that are full of natural drama. And it’s like a science fiction story in that I write with an expansive point of view that’s capable of getting to the root of things and explaining the why and how of the situation.

5. How did you find your way to Substack? I was really interested to read about your ambivalence towards Substack as “the home of some of the world’s biggest transphobes.” How has that ambivalence played out for you over time?

I started blogging on Wordpress in 2008, and I kept it up pretty regularly until 2023. But by then my audience had dwindled and I was getting maybe only thirty or forty views for each post. I had considered switching to Substack, but I felt a lot of trepidation because I knew it was the home of Bari Weiss, Katie Herzog, Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal, and other writers whose income derives in part from their fear-mongering about trans people. My perception was that on Substack people just sat around bashing trans folks all the time.

But at some point John Pistelli commented about an essay I’d written for LARB. And I got interested in this guy, Pistelli. I listened to a podcast where he and Daniel Oppenheimer discussed Wesley Yang (a guy whose trans takes are truly unhinged). And I got the sense that John and Daniel, while we might not agree on every jot and tittle of trans policy, were pretty sensible people about trans rights. In their comments, people also seemed very sensible. And I was like, okay, maybe this can work.

I came over in August 2023, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I sometimes get anti-trans trolling, but very little—perhaps once every few weeks. I just block them and move on. Harassment-wise, it’s a lot better than most platforms.

My readership was almost immediately ten times greater than on Wordpress, but what’s been most helpful is being part of the community here. On Wordpress I was alone, didn’t interact much with other writers. Over time, my Substack’s form and content have changed a lot. For a while I only blogged about the Great Books, then in June of last year (2024), I started posting my tales and writing more about contemporary literature.

It’s become a very unique literary blog—I’m really grateful that my audience is willing to follow me down into so many rabbit-holes. In the last year alone, I’ve written about James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 19th century sentimental novels, O. Henry, Raymond Carver, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Western, amongst others. My tales have also done really well and have acquired a significant fan-base.

6. What do you feel like sharing about your relationship to Hinduism?

I’m from a Gujurati Hindu family, but my parents are atheists, and my impression of Hinduism was quite negative. I’d read Ambedkar—an Indian Founding Father from the Dalit caste—and he lambasted Hinduism as codified oppression. His view was that if you take the caste system out of Hinduism, there would be nothing left.

But after reading The Mahabharata I came to feel that there was a lot of truth in the Hindu worldview. This worldview is marked by a sense of balance—a feeling that things in life basically even out. Whatever evil people suffer is the result of their past actions, and the good people do is also eventually rewarded. It’s not a worldview that you can defend on a strictly logical basis—what about the child who gets leukemia and dies? Are they really being punished for past sins? But I just felt a deep, wordless conviction that the universe is ordered by justice—the same conviction that people in many religions possess. In Hinduism, that conviction is articulated through the idea of dharma—a sense of rightness that governs the natural order—and through the logic of karma and reincarnation. In other religions, they articulate that sense of justice by talking about God’s mercy and God’s compassion—that he wouldn’t create suffering unless there was a reason for it, and that suffering on Earth is somehow redeemed in Heaven. But to me all religions are underpinned by the same feeling, which is that things happen for a reason.

7. You read just an unbelievable amount. Do you have a system? How exactly do you manage it?

My system is to go easy on myself. If I thought that my reading needed to be some higher or more intense form of reading, then I could never do it. I read the same as everyone else—just open the book, run my eyes over the page, and get what I can. With some books (Hegel and Kant come to mind), there’s a lot that I don’t understand. Then I do some googling and try to get some sense for what they’re talking about. I try and tell myself a story about the book as I’m reading, so I at least know what I think the book means. But I don’t get everything, and I don’t pretend to. I give myself permission to be a dilettante.

8. I remember a teacher telling me that “nobody has read The Mahabharata.” You’ve actually read The Mahabharata — or a version of it. What surprised you as you were reading it? What did you learn?

The Mahabharata is a much less cohesive story than The Iliad or The Odyssey. It’s much more like an anthology—more akin to The Bible or The 1,001 Arabian Nights. There is a version of this text called the BORI critical edition, and this version purports to contain a core Mahabharata—the oldest substrate of this text, and the basis from which subsequent versions were constructed. And even this core version is millions of words long: it is approximately ten times the length of The Iliad and The Odyssey combined.

A version of the Mahabharata was translated into English in the 19th century, but for most of my life this translation wasn’t easily available in the US. But about ten years ago, a scholar named Bibek Debroy translated the BORI edition into English, and this is the version that I started reading.

Like most Indians, I had encountered the Mahabharata story in many forms. I’d watched a TV serial of the story when I was growing up, and I’d read at least two different abridged English translations. But I’d always known that the ‘real’ version was ten times as long as what I’d read, and I was curious about what was in it. One surprise was that the first four volumes were so exciting, so diverting. There’s this whole substrate of stories in the Mahabharata that are about older legendary heroes—Parasharama, Vishvamitra, Vashishtha—and it was a pleasure to encounter these for the first time.

I had also never encountered the framing story of the Mahabharata before: it is told in a kind of Q&A style, where at the beginning of every chapter, one character will ask a question and another will answer it. You also have stories nested inside stories, oftentimes many layers deep, like with The Arabian Nights.

There is a progression to the Mahabharata. It begins with the exciting adventure stories, then continues to deeper ethical conflicts, and closes with several thousand pages describing the finer points of cosmology and various forms of righteous behavior. Ultimately the epic is about dharma—the principle of rightness that governs the universe. By living in accordance with dharma, you not only fulfill your function on Earth, you also improve your outcomes in the hereafter. But ideally you don’t pursue dharma because you want a reward—you do it because it is the right thing to do.

However, dharma is complicated. Yudhisthira, the hero of the Mahabharata, constantly questions whether it can truly be righteous to pursue kingship. He asks, over and over, whether it wouldn’t be better to just give up the idea of lording over other people—why not just go into the woods and live as sannyasi, renunciants, giving up on worldly things. It’s not a question that has an easy answer—many of the stories in The Mahabharata are about the conflict between different forms of dharma, different kinds of righteousness.

It’s hard to describe the experience of reading this book. There really is something you learn from reading it—some unspoken understanding of rightness—that you can only gain through the accumulation of thousands of these little stories and parables and incidents. The book contains many extremely boring passages—it’s written in quite a lush, florid style, with very long paragraphs and lots of repetitious phrasing—but the maximalism of the reading experience is part of the charm. It’s one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had.

9. You’ve written very interestingly about how your reading in, let’s say, the deep canon — The Icelandic Sagas, The Decameron, maybe The Mahabharata — changed your approach to writing fiction. Can you say more about that and the stripped-back style that you developed as a result of that?

Yes, I have a function on my e-reader that lets me choose a random book from my library. About two years ago, this function served up my copy of the Penguin Classics translation of Njal’s Saga, which is the most famous of the Icelandic family sagas—a set of prose fictions from the 13th and 14th century. This book was so excellent! At its core, it’s about a very bitter feud between the wives of two friends—a feud that results in dozens of deaths and several shocking crimes.

These Icelandic family sagas are often called ‘novels’, and there is something recognizably novel-like about them. They’re very concerned with the details of secular life. Iceland during the Republic period (the 10th and 11th centuries) had a unique system of government—there was no executive, no army, no police, no lawful armed authority. Instead everything was decided through lawsuits. There were a series of meetings throughout the year, where people would get together and sue each other. Now you might ask, if there was no police, who would enforce the judgements of these lawsuits? Well, in practice that’s how you got status in Iceland—if you were a powerful landowner (a godi), then you took it upon yourself to make sure people obeyed the judgements of the courts.

Most of these family sagas begin with a blood-feud. Then powerful people encourage the parties to settle the feud through a lawsuit and a blood-price. But sometimes the price isn’t enough, or the judgement isn’t enforced, and events spiral out of control. Winning these lawsuits was also a very delicate process of its own, which involves winning the support of various powerful chieftains to your side.

I really enjoyed these tales, which were so crisp and specific, but entirely un-psychological. Nobody dwells at all upon anyone’s interior states. There’s also very little description. It’s all about relationships and actions.

After reading twenty or thirty of these Icelandic sagas, I got into other early prose fictions: I read the 2nd-century A.D. Roman novel, The Golden Ass. I read several Ancient Greek novels. I read The Decameron, a compendium of tales from 14th century Italy. And I admired the way all of these storytellers just related their stories very simply, without a lot of the baggage—setting, description, rumination, metaphor, etc—that contemporary fiction comes laden with.

After all this reading, I had the thought, “I bet that I could do something like this myself. I could just sit down and write a story, as simply as possible, without doing any of the stuff I’ve been told that ‘good’ fiction ought to do.” And that was the genesis of the tales that I’ve been posting ever since on Substack.

10. Tell us about The Default World.

While I was writing novels for young adults, I always had the thought that I should write a serious book for adults that would be taken very seriously. And The Default World was my attempt to do that. This side of the business—prestige publishing—is very different from commercial publishing. There are a lot more barriers, it’s quite hard to break in. Ultimately I had a very difficult time getting literary agents to buy into the idea of me as a talented writer.

Earlier versions of The Default World were written in a much more flowing, ambitious style—it had an omniscient perspective, like a 19th-century novel. But agents kept saying they felt too distanced. I kept rewriting it with a closer and closer point of view, until eventually I came up with something like a Sally Rooney novel. At that point, agents were more interested, but to make it as a literary writer, you also need something that’s fresh and unique, and the book didn’t really have that anymore.

I’m trans, and the book had a trans protagonist—it’s about a young woman who tries to con her friend into marrying her, so she can access the trans healthcare benefits offered by his employer, a tech company. It was definitely the kind of thing that publishers really wanted in 2021. You know, on Substack I see many writers who feel like the publishing industry didn’t want them for demographic reasons—because the industry only wants minorities or woke viewpoints—and that’s why their books failed to get traction. In my case, I never had that excuse. My book was exactly what the industry wanted. And in fact during the same time period when my book was failing to sell, many other trans writers sold their books, and often did so for lots of money. So with my book, it really was personal—they just didn’t want what I was selling. With prestige publishing, you really need that magic: just commercial enough to sell, just literary enough to be exciting. I couldn’t make that balancing act work.

Ultimately the book did sell to a small nonprofit publisher, Feminist Press, and it came out last year. I have no idea how many people read it—not many—certainly an order of magnitude more people have read the novella I published later that year on my Substack, “Money Matters”. But, as many people have noted, “Money Matters” is written in a very different style from The Default World, and I don’t know that I really stand behind The Default World anymore.

11. How far afield do you now feel from the current literary mainstream? How committed are you to being in a kind of alternate literary space?

It’s hard to tell. I can see my own subscriber list, so I know that a good portion of my subscribers are authors, editors, agents, critics. I have a number of subscribers who are editors for places that I would never even consider pitching, because they’re much too austere and difficult to break into. My story, “Money Matters”, was reviewed by The New Yorker because one of their critics, Peter C. Baker, had already subscribed to me for my literary takes. Similarly, I found my current agent, Alia Hanna Habib, because she was a subscriber. She liked my publishing-industry takes. Alia represents Hanif Abdurraqib, Clint Smith, Lauren Oyler, Merve Emre, and many other high-brow writers.

So it’s a weird situation where my blog has somehow become very popular with exactly the kind of people that I fruitlessly tried to interest in my work for years. Like, I had never before queried Alia Habib specifically, but her agency, Gernert, represents a lot of very impressive literary writers, and I tried for years to interest various agents at this agency in my work, with no bites.

I think this highbrow, prestigious end of the business can be very resistant to salesmanship. It’s different from commercial fiction in that way. With commercial fiction, if you come to an agent with a very commercially-viable book idea, they’re always interested. With highbrow stuff, there’s more suspicion—there’s a feeling that if you were really good, you wouldn’t need to be selling yourself. That means once I started to maintain distance from the industry I became a little more attractive to it.

So to answer the first part of your question, I am actually much less far afield than I was two years ago.

At the same time, for ten years I used to compare myself to a certain sort of literary writer. Someone who had a Stegner fellowship, had gotten a Whiting Award, had gone to Breadloaf and Yaddo and McDowell and been published in The Paris Review. And I am obviously not that person. I used to put effort into applying for those things, but I stopped because I never got them. Now I don’t apply for those things because I just really don’t want to be judged. So whatever I am, I’ll never be a person whose CV is heavy with those kinds of easily-legible accomplishments. Although I realize it’s something of a joke to call those accomplishments ‘easily legible’ because eighty percent of your readers probably have never heard of Yaddo or the Stegner.

I personally think it’s very important to maintain my independence. It was a strange experience to deliver a draft of my short story collection to my agent, because I realized it was two years since I had asked for anyone’s opinion about my writing. With my tales, I have the idea, write it, revise it, and post it, all without asking for anyone’s feedback. It’s a startling amount of creative freedom—unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

For me, the most important thing is to maintain my creativity. Bad reviews don’t impede my creativity. If I post something and people don’t like it, that’s fine. What makes things difficult is when I need to please someone in order to get published at all. That’s the point where I start second-guessing myself, and I lose my connection to the dreamscape—the place that stories come from. You can’t really control the dreamscape as much as you’d like to—certainly not as much as editors and agents would want you to—and if you try too hard to force the dreamscape to give you certain stories, then you’ll lose the ability to write anything at all. What you really need is the ability to sit still and record comes to you. Substack has given me that stillness, and that’s the thing I value most in the world.²

12. What went into the decision to share “Money Matters” just on Substack in the way you did?

I’d been posting my tales on Substack, but they tended to perform best when they were explicitly about writers or writing, or when they had some tie-in to current literary discourse. I have a literary blog, so people are more interested in stories that are about literary matters. However, I had lots of things I wanted to write. And at this point, I felt my career was over—I’d published two novels in the preceding year and neither had succeeded. I didn’t think any publisher would be interested in working with me again. So I wanted to turn my Substack into a channel for more-ambitious work.

The novella itself came relatively easily, but I forget a lot about the composition process. I think basically I started writing it, just playing around, and I realized at some point it was going to be very long—much longer than my typical tale. But I had this idea that maybe a longer tale would be good, because it would seem more serious, would demand more from the reader. My tales were getting a lot of attention because they were good stories—much easier to read than a lot of other short fiction. But I wanted to get some credit for the formal innovations involved in the tales, and I felt that appreciation would be more forth-coming if I wrote something longer.

Self-publishing also allowed me to be much more straightforward. I could write honestly about something many Millennials I know have experienced: receiving an inheritance. And I’d written a lot of stories in my life about bitter losers who can’t get laid, so I thought it would be funny to write about a guy who can get laid, who is actually a real man, and has something women want. For reasons I don’t totally understand, the readership of my blog is mostly men, but before this I’d written a long time in a field (YA) where the readership is entirely girls and women, and I knew that girls and women tend to enjoy protagonists who are aspirational—they like protagonists who are pretty, charming, desirable. I figured men might be the same, so maybe I should write a male figure who was aspirational.

I thought a lot about the presentation. I figured that I’d use a Netflix model—just give them the entire thing at once. If someone is going to read my novella, then I should just let them binge it. I also realized that I needed to talk up the release a little, let people know it was coming. So I spent six weeks promoting it. I also didn’t paywall it, because I actually wanted people to read it. In general, I haven’t been big on paywalling my work—I think that in the long run I gain a lot more from the exposure, from having as wide a readership as possible. Peoples’ attention is much more valuable than their money.

13. How did you find out that you were going to be at the center of The New Yorker piece on Substack fiction? How has that changed the reception to your work?

It was a Sunday morning in May. At around 5 AM I got a text from Ross Barkan saying there was a New Yorker piece and it was about me. I clicked through, read the first paragraph, and then I stumbled downstairs—my wife was already up and working in the living room—and I said, “The most incredible, unbelievable thing has happened.”

The piece changed a lot for me, particularly within the Substack ecosystem. I gained something like three thousand subscribers over the next month, and many more people on Substack started paying attention to me. Over the last six months, I’ve gotten a lot more interview requests, and a few more mainstream press mentions. The New Yorker mention was a direct source of credibility, but what helped just as much was the resulting increase in my subscriber count, because now my numbers are another form of credibility.

The ultimate prize would be some publisher putting out my story collection. I’d love to have a story collection that was actually stocked in libraries and available in stores—something durable that people could rediscover long after my blog is gone. You know, nothing on the internet is permanent: in five or ten years, Woman of Letters probably won’t be around, but if I put out a book, then that’ll at least continue to exist.

I don’t know whether that’ll actually happen. My last novel, The Default World, was a book that should’ve been an easy sell: it was exactly what publishers were looking for. Now, I am trying to interest them in something they definitely don’t want—a book of self-published short stories. So who knows? But I am enjoying the feeling of hope.

14. Tell us about this turn to writing “The Tale.” It feels very much to me like a pre-Maupassant, pre-Poe form that you feel is having its time again in digital space. What went into your move to write in this way?

I wrote something above about why I started writing in the tale form—it was an aesthetic experiment. The purpose of the tale wasn’t to do numbers online: my tales come from the dreamscape, same as anybody’s fiction.

But I also have some thoughts about why the tale form is so successful online. Basically, when you write online, you’re writing in a zero-prestige environment. Nobody opens up a blog post and thinks, “I’m going to read a great work of literature today.”

However, the literary short story, as seen in the pages of The New Yorker and The Paris Review and other periodicals of that nature, really relies upon the reader’s expectation that they might in fact be reading a work of literature. The typical literary short story is drenched in ambiguity—you’re inserted into a situation, and you have no idea who these characters are. You read some conversations or descriptions, and can sense there’s some subtext—these characters are deeply troubled, but you don’t know exactly why. As you read the story, the tension builds and builds. And then it’s suddenly released through an image that feels surprising but perfectly appropriate. Oftentimes, with these stories, you can never exactly say what was at stake or what was going on, but you know that you’ve glimpsed something important.

It’s a great form. But it requires a lot of trust. The reader needs to trust that there’s more to this story than is readily apparent, and they need to trust that the author is going to stick the landing and leave you with that crisp feeling, like a bell is tolling inside your head.

And nowadays we live in a low-trust environment. All kinds of institutions are not trusted the way they used to be. And literary journals are one of these distrusted institutions. That’s why people don’t sit still for literary short stories anymore—they don’t trust that it’s going to actually be good.

That goes triple for a blog post. People think, “I wouldn’t read this kind of story even in The New Yorker, so why would I read it on some random person’s blog?”

My stories, in contrast, do not rely on that kind of trust. I wouldn’t say they’re pre-Poe, I’d say they’re a lot like Poe. Poe did not rely on trust—he relied on suspense. You open one of his stories, and you think, “Hmm, how are they going to escape from this maelstrom?” Or you think, “What is going on with this M. Valdemar guy?” When Poe was writing, this prestige economy hadn’t yet built up around the short story—they were more purely a matter of entertainment.

I think my stories have a lot of literary merit—I wouldn’t write them otherwise—but the reader doesn’t need to believe they have literary merit in order to read them. That’s why they work so well online.

15. How much do you think mixing fact in with fiction affects the work and affects the way people read your work?

When you’re writing online, the first-person is much more compelling to the reader than the third-person. But if you’re writing in the first-person, the reader naturally expects everything they’re reading is going to be true. I have experimented in a few different ways with breaking that experiment. I have a first-person protagonist who’s a teenage boy in an unnamed fascist country. These stories seem to be more immediately compelling to readers, but my sense is that some readers come away from these stories feeling confused or betrayed.

I have also written a few fictional book reviews, pseudobibliographies, à la Borges. Readers really seem to enjoy these! It is a lot of work to come up with fictional books, and it can be hard to structure these as a story, but writing these stories is fun because they’re just written exactly the same as my nonfiction essays.

Sometimes I also write autofictional third-person stories. These are tales, told in the third-person, that are about a writer, Johanna, who faces problems very similar to those faced by myself. These are harder, because they’re most read as fiction—they don’t have the immediacy of the first-person—but people also assume that this Johanna character is basically the same as yourself. So you get all the reputational downside of nonfiction—people getting mad over stuff you’ve said—without the upside of people being more engaged by the story.

I never try to put one over on the reader—in my first-person stories I’m always clear, at least by the end, about which parts are fiction and which are nonfiction, but it’s still possible to turn off readers. What works best, and what I’ve been trying lately, is having a very clear first-person authorial voice, and then using that voice to tell fictional third-person stories. It’s kind of like with Mark Twain’s volumes of travel-writing. A lot of times he is telling you stories that you know are not true, and there’s no sense of betrayal, because he relates these stories as jokes or legends or tall tales.

But this is something I’m still in the process of working out—I am continually experimenting with different ways of using the tale form.

16. What do you mostly do for money?

My Substack and other writing bring in 20k per year, but mostly I am not supported by writing. My wife is a doctor. My parents helped us buy a house. I suppose I could say that I am a stay at home mother and that writing is a flexible form of labor that allows me to be the primary parent for our child. But…I prefer to think that I am a highly-indulged forty-year-old woman whose loved ones are content to allow her to tinker all day with her blog.

17. What do you think happens next? Are the traditional literary world and Substack going to forever be these kinds of parallel universes? What’s the next turn of the wheel here?

They’ve basically already converged. There used to be this world of small magazines, n+1, The Point, The Drift, etc. And if one of these small magazines got really popular amongst the New York literati, then that would be great for its editors and would launch them into literary careers.

Now Substack has replaced the world of those small journals—you, Sam, are getting big and getting well-known exactly the same way the editors of n+1 might’ve once gotten well-known. But what I think has been interrupted is the next step. I don’t know that big corporate publishers are truly able to launch a writer in the way they once could. Ten years ago, you had writers like Lauren Oyler and Jia Tolentino and Roxane Gay who started off writing for websites, and then they got bigger bylines and published books, and that’s when their careers truly began.

Now I don’t know if that next step will happen. Maybe for some people, but probably not for me. I like writing for my blog, for my audience of ten thousand people—I don’t really believe there’s anything the publishing industry could do to expand my audience so that now I’m being read by fifty thousand or a hundred thousand people. My product is a niche product, and that’s fine.

Some people will probably make the jump to bigger journals. Alexander Sorondo, most likely. He already writes Vanity Fair or Esquire style profiles. These journals could give him an assignment and trust that he’d carry it out, and I don’t know if there’s many up-and-coming writers who have his demonstrated skill at doing this sort of task.

But even then, where does it lead? Is he going to become a staff writer and earn a living by writing for Esquire? I have no idea—it seems unlikely. The model, I think, will be something like what I’ve done. You get credibility from the mainstream publishing world, and you use that to build your audience online. Then the publishing world sees that audience and offers you a book deal. And you use that book to grow your audience. And somewhere along the way you start directly monetizing your audience, and then with some mix of book advances, freelance income, and subscription income, you maybe somehow make a living for a few years.

This is not that different from how things used to be—I read Lee Israel’s memoir of her time as a forger, Can You Forgive Me? (it was turned into a great movie with Melissa McCarthy), and before turning to crime she survived for decades through a mix of freelance work and book advances. But I think even that precarious lifestyle has become much less sustainable, and the number who reach the next stage (the staff job or the best-selling book) will be even smaller.

But literature itself will be fine. When Chaucer was writing, there was no economic model for supporting literature at all. The Canterbury Tales circulated privately, in manuscript form. He made a living as a courtier, a servant of the King. In Chaucer’s time, there were many fewer readers, and no publishers, but…great literature was still produced.

It’s the same thing with these Icelandic family sagas. Basically, Iceland was famous as a home for skalds: Icelandic storytellers were well-known throughout the Scandinavian world. And these storytellers developed oral versions of most of these famous sagas. Iceland was extremely poor. Even the rich people in 11th-century Iceland weren’t that rich. Everyone in this society farmed—a rich person had a slightly bigger hall or more sheep. There was no real leisure class. But there was a tradition that if you wanted something more from life, you’d hop a ship to Norway or Denmark and try to get a place in the hall of someone who actually had some money! And that’s what these storytellers tended to do.

Some of these skalds became legendary figures themselves. We have several sagas, like the Tale of Gunnlagur Serpent Tongue, that are about skalds and poets who might’ve actually existed.

The person who started codifying the sagas as literature was Snurri Sturluson, a rich chieftain from later in Iceland’s history, after it devolved into an oligarchy. He composed a few sagas of his own, and he started writing down a lot of the old oral tales that’d been circulating. He didn’t do it for the money, he did it for the clout (and because he loved these stories, obviously).

With the Mahabharata, it was the same thing. A lot of the stories in the Mahabharata were originally told, we think, by a class of storytellers, the souti. These were poor people, close to outcasts. Their stories got threaded together with a lot of religious stuff, the traditional preserve of the brahmin caste, and then it all got written down together.

That’s what happens—people tell stories, and if enough people like the stories, and if they like them for long enough, then the stories become literature. One form of that activity—the interlocking world of literary journals and literary publishers—might pass away, but literature itself will never die.

Interview conducted by Sam Kahn

1. Not true! - Ed.

2. Amen - Ed.