The Active Voice Hamish McKenzie

Today’s episode is guest-hosted by Sarah Fay, creative writing professor at Northwestern University, former interviewer at The Paris Review, devoted serializer, and lover of all things Substack. Her Substack Writers at Work helps creative writers use Substack to bolster their careers, including how to serialize their writing. She’s currently serializing her new memoir Cured on Substack through 2023.
—Sophia Efthimiatou, Head of Writer Relations
**
You may recognize the names of today’s guests: Mary Trump, E. Jean Carroll, and Jennifer Taub. Their new venture is a groundbreaking Substack: Backstory Serial. The content may surprise you—though it shouldn’t, and I’ll explain why during the podcast. Backstory Serial features their romance novel The Italian Lesson, which is bringing serial novels and Substack fiction into the mainstream.
The Italian Lesson is a serialization, meaning it appears in your inbox, chapter by chapter, installment by installment. The plot of The Italian Lesson is simple: An American woman moves to a small town in Tuscany and opens a café. Then, as Mary put it in an interview, “some stud walks in and turns out he’s a prince.”
Serialization has a long tradition on Substack—I guide writers on how to do it on my Substack, Writers at Work—but no one has had the success that these three have and there are very good reasons why, which we’ll go into. 
The three women play different roles in the writing of the novel: Mary is the author, E. Jean fields comments from their vibrant community and plays the role of romance-novel fact-checker, and Jen acts as editor.
In case you don’t know Mary, E. Jean, and Jen, a bit of background: 
Mary Trump describes herself as a mom, writer, liberal progressive, and pro-democracy American. She’s the author of Too Much is Never Enough about her uncle (yes, that Donald Trump) and The Reckoning. Her Substack The Good in Us features her commentary on culture, politics, and music (from Tina Turner to Aimee Mann)—plus pet pictures and a community of subscribers who share her vision to use kindness and empathy to ensure that America remains a democracy. 
E. Jean Carroll’s esteemed Substack, Ask E. Jean, is the longest-running advice column in American publishing. It ran in Elle Magazine until E. Jean accused Donald Trump of assault and sued him for defamation, after which Elle fired her. She’s since made Substack her home. Her wit, smarts, sass, and empathy are unrivaled. She’s also the author of the book What Do We Need Men For?—part satirical treatise in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and part rollicking narrative.
Jennifer Traub is a one-woman force against corruption in the United States. In her book, Big Dirty Money, she takes on white-collar criminals. She’s also the author of Other People’s Houses. Jen is a law professor, an activist, and the host of the Booked Up podcast. In her firey—and also fun—Substack Money & Gossip, she clarifies what the rest of us miss or don’t make sense of in the financial and legal world.
In our conversation, we talk about everything from why the media has underestimated them as novelists, how they came up with The Italian Lesson’s unique form, why they chose to serialize on Substack, knitting patterns, cocktail recipes, the email novel, and what love really is.
—Sarah Fay 
https://www.backstoryserial.com/ 
Show notes
* Subscribe to Backstory Serial on Substack
* Find Mary Trump, Jen Taub, and E. Jean Carroll on Twitter, and Mary, Jen and E. Jean on Instagram, and listen to Jen’s podcast Booked Up with Jen Taub
* Big Dirty Money by Jennifer Taub and books by Mary L Trump
* [03:31] Writing a romance novel
[05:19] Meeting on Zoom
[07:58] Choosing to serialize
[13:20] Mary’s introduction to writing
[16:32] Building a community
[22:00] Bringing the book to life
[27:27] Collaborating together
[32:30] Subverting traditional publishing
[38:49] Ideas for the next novel
**
The Active Voice is a

Taylor Lorenz, a tech culture reporter for the Washington Post, has been both observer and participant in an internet culture that has been emerging since the early 2010s, a period of history that has seen the rise of massive social media platforms, the decay of traditional media, and the increasing power of online influencers. That culture can be delightful and enriching, and it can be savage and soul-destroying. 
Of course, anyone who spends much time on Twitter knows that Taylor herself has had ample experience with both sides of that. She is a lightning rod in the online culture wars, loved and supported as much as she is reviled and targeted. She is a frequent subject of critiques from her ideological opponents, a cast that includes such figures as Tucker Carlson, Jake Paul, and Glenn Greenwald, to name a few. 
And how does she take that? Well, it’s just how life is online, she says. 
“What people do on the internet is they build up other people into characters online, and it’s like this crazy soap opera every day.” Her enemies turn her into a character, she says, because it gives them opposition. “It’s just classic influencer tactics, right? You are going to make this other YouTuber into a villain and you’re going to have this feud and then that galvanizes your audience.”
And yet she remains a believer in technology as a force for good. “It’s cool to see people use the internet for progress and to bring more freedom to all of us,” she says. “I think that’s what the goal of the internet should be. It should be a liberating force.”
In this conversation, we discuss the recent history of the internet, social media, and the rise of influencers—of which Taylor is one. Aside from high-profile reporting jobs at The Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Post, she has also amassed huge followings on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. In October, her first book will be published. Its title couldn’t be more appropriate: Extremely Online.
https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/
Taylor’s recommended reads:
Show notes
* Subscribe to Taylor Lorenz’s newsletter on Substack
* Find Taylor on Twitter
* Her upcoming book, Extremely Online
[04:54] Becoming a journalist
[08:20] Tumblr and blogging
[13:05] The “f**k yeah” era of Tumblr
[18:14] Tabloid news
[22:19] Developing a new beat
[26:56] Gaining prominence
[32:13] Dealing with online harassment
[38:57] The state of the media
[42:05] Ephemerality and the internet
[53:14] Being a techno-optimist
[1:01:19] Extremely Online book
[1:05:50] Taylor on her recommended reads
The Active Voice is a podcast hosted by Hamish McKenzie, featuring weekly conversations with writers about how the internet is affecting the way they live and write. It is produced by Hamish McKenzie, with audio engineering by Seven Morris and content production by Hannah Ray. All artwork is by Joro Chen, and music is by Phelps & Munro.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit read.substack.com

Even among politics and media junkies, few people had heard the name Richard Hanania before 2020. But then, as the pandemic intensified online tribalism, the political scientist emerged with a provocative analysis that carried the headline “Why Is Everything Liberal?” The piece, which explores why almost every major institution in the U.S. leans left, did the rounds on Twitter, announcing Richard’s arrival as a distinctive new voice in American politics discourse. Soon enough, he followed it up with a series of other pithily headlined posts that demonstrated a streak of contrarianism that variously managed to win fans and challenge readers from across the political spectrum: “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV,” “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?”, and “Conservatives Win All the Time,” to name a few.
Richard, who has a law degree from Columbia and a political science degree from UCLA, doesn’t hesitate to describe himself as anti-woke. He traces wokeness’s legal underpinnings to civil rights law, which he believes has undermined the integrity of public institutions. He expands on this thesis in his upcoming book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Trump of Identity Politics. Coming during a time of intense social justice activism, these views have won Richard strong support among conservative readers, but he’s not afraid of pissing off those same people. In recent times, for instance, he has published essays that argue in favor of diversity and praise the quality and honesty of mainstream media. 
In this conversation, we examine contrarianism, conservatism, “enlightened centrism” (in praise of intellectuals whose views don’t always easily line up with “left” or “right”), and the future of the culture wars—the perfect fodder for a man who is staking out a reputation as one of the boldest voices in our pugilistic political discourse. 
https://www.richardhanania.com/
Richard’s recommended reads:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ 
https://www.slowboring.com/ 
https://trevorklee.substack.com/ 
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/ 
https://cremieux.substack.com/Show notes
Subscribe to Richard Hanania’s Newsletter on Substack
Find Richard on Twitter
Richard’s post mentioned: “Why the Media Is Honest and Good,” “Why Is Everything Liberal?”
[03:29] Getting started on Substack
[05:40] Growing up
[11:07] Working in academia
[12:01] Writing about wokeness
[16:26] Richard’s audience
[21:33] The main goal of work
[25:40] On Trump and today’s politics
[29:37] Mainstream media
[36:35] Being a “bit of a troll”
[39:53] Politics and trans issues
The Active Voice is a podcast hosted by Hamish McKenzie, featuring weekly conversations with writers about how the internet is affecting the way they live and write. It is produced by Hamish McKenzie, with audio engineering by Seven Morris and content production by Hannah Ray. All artwork is by Joro Chen, and music is by Phelps & Munro.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit read.substack.com

At a dinner party Substack hosted in San Francisco last week, I found myself sitting next to Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and former publisher of the Whole Earth Review. We were talking about the capital of the world. It no longer felt that New York was it, I was telling him, though it had not been replaced by another physical city either. Rather, the world now had only one, digital, capital. If you made it there, you’d make it anywhere.
He agreed, with one amendment. “Silicon Valley is the place least resistant to new ideas today,” he said, which was the original point of the world capital as a destination. I had recently interviewed Nadia Bolz-Weber for this podcast, and her words were still fresh in my mind. I imagined her response to this would be, “The problem is, it is also the place most resistant to old ideas.” 
Nadia embodies the old and the new. She is a striking figure: tall and lean, with a thick mane of salt-and-pepper hair and a penetrating blue gaze. She is covered in colorful tattoos of Christian mythology and exudes the warmth of wisdom. She practices one of the oldest traditions, that of the preacher. The texts she “wrestles with,” as she puts it, are centuries-old. Her task is to bring them to the here and now, to the self. They become personal to her because, in order to interpret them, she must first study herself anew. 
Nadia has been an alcoholic, a standup comic, and a sinner. She has been a pastor, a prison preacher, and a saint. She talked about what these qualifiers mean to her, how she understands the concept of faith, the relationship between poetry and prayer, and the danger of innovating without consideration for tradition. 
One of her observations echoed what Suleika Jaouad and Diego Perez emphasized during their own exchange a couple of weeks ago, when they spoke about the significance of honesty in writing. Nadia reinforced that message when she said:
“Some people make a living off of being sort of influencers, who say things that might kind of be true, but they never feel honest. They feel like they’re ignoring a darker side of our hearts. I always want somebody to really acknowledge the sort of more shadowy contours of my human heart, and then talk about where some grace or hope or forgiveness is. Because I feel like when those things are ignored, it just fills me a little bit with despair, even though they’re telling me something really chipper. I like it when writers or preachers are willing to be honest about their own struggles in a real way.” 
This also brought to mind the conversation that Mike Solana and Ted Gioia had here on the Active Voice. As Ted put it, “There’s been an enormous crisis of trust, and certain voices are emerging and succeeding because they’ve been able to parlay that trust.”
What connects all of them is their allegiance to honesty, and the obligation they feel to deliver it to their audience. 
https://thecorners.substack.com/ 
Show notes
Subscribe to The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber on Substack
Find Nadia on Twitter and Instagram
Nadia’s books
Francis Spufford’s book Unapologetic
“Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins
[02:00] The House for All Sinners and Saints
[06:18] The church after the pandemic
[10:18] The process of preaching to oneself
[12:54] Finding the Good News
[15:29] Nadia’s regrets
[21:00] On resurrection
[25:00] When we call out to God
[29:40] Being clear-eyed about being human
The Active Voice is a podcast hosted by Hamish McKenzie, featuring weekly conversations with writers about how the internet is affecting the way they live and write. It is produced by Hamish McKenzie, with audio engineering by Seven Morris, and content production by Hannah Ray. All artwork is by Joro Chen, and music is by Phelps & Munro.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit read.substack.com

Both Suleika Jaouad and Diego Perez, who writes as Yung Pueblo, arrived at writing through adversity. Writing became a way of life when each was faced with death, a healing mechanism that became a craft.
When they met for the first time in person at our headquarters in San Francisco, they greeted each other with the enthusiasm of old friends reuniting. They fell into conversation with natural intimacy and comfort before we had a chance to press the “record” button and continued talking for another hour past the taping’s end. They were familiar with each other’s writing and eager to share their personal stories with each other, as in an attempt to forge a new friendship. As they spoke, they discovered just how parallel their paths had been, as well as new points of intersection in their philosophies.
Alchemizing pain into creativity is a recurring theme among writers. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke famously wrote, “So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”
Suleika and Diego have made this alchemy their mission. They have created spaces—her The Isolation Journals and his Elevate with Yung Pueblo—where people can meet and turn their experiences into art. They foster and grow with their writing communities, and have invited them into their writing practice.
In this conversation, Suleika and Diego discuss each of their journeys to the “art-making stage,” how they turn confession into craft and protect their creative spaces while living in community, and their own advice to writers and poets of all backgrounds and ages. 
https://theisolationjournals.substack.com/ https://yungpueblo.substack.com/ 
Show notes
* Subscribe to The Isolation Journals by Suleika Jaouad and Yung Pueblo by Diego Perez on Substack
* Find Suleika on Twitter, and Instagram, and Diego on Twitter, and Instagram 
* Suleika’s book Between Two Kingdoms
* Diego’s poetry and prose books, Inward, Clarity & Connection, and The Way Forward, and Lighter
* [04:31] Suleika on starting journaling
* [06:09] Diego’s background* [08:29] Creativity as healing
* [10:50] Suleika on starting The Isolation Journals
* [13:51] Diego on writing with readers
* [16:16] The universe will take care of you
* [18:29] Suleika on finding painting
* [21:15] Suleika on responding to hard moments
* [25:43] Confronting mortality
* [29:13] The writing process
* [32:08] Art v social media
* [37:00] Writing on Substack and what’s next
The Active Voice is a podcast hosted by Hamish McKenzie, featuring weekly conversations with writers about how the internet is affecting the way they live and write. It is produced by Hamish McKenzie, with audio engineering by Seven Morris, and content production by Hannah Ray. All artwork is by Joro Chen, and music is by Phelps & Munro.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit read.substack.com

At first glance, Mike Solana and Ted Gioia might not seem to have much in common. Mike, the publisher of the newsletter Pirate Wires, is very much a child of the internet, a strong proponent of the tech industry and scientific progress, with a career in venture capital (working in marketing) after a brief stint in book publishing. Ted, who writes The Honest Broker and has been a guest on The Active Voice before, is one of America’s greatest music critics, founder of the Jazz Studies program at Stanford University, and the author of 12 books. What they share is a deep love for words and their significance in shaping culture. And even though they will both deliver us the bad news about the latter’s collapse, there is an underlying optimism in their insistence on protecting it, from their own little corner. 
This week we brought them together at Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco for a conversation on The Active Voice about maintaining our optimism at a time of neck-breaking technological change. What followed was a wonderful and wide-ranging jam session on everything from the disappearance of counterculture to the significance of trustworthy voices in the age of AI to the ongoing collapse of the media industry and the rise of something new from its ashes. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!
We have another of these writer dialogues planned for a later episode and may do more of them depending on your feedback—so please let us know what you think in the comments. 
https://tedgioia.substack.com/ https://www.piratewires.com/
Show notes
Subscribe to Pirate Wires by Mike Solana, and The Honest Broker by Ted Gioia, on Substack
Find Mike on Twitter, and Pirate Wires on Twitter and Instagram
Find Ted on Twitter, Instagram, and his website 
Read Mike’s pinned tweet
[5:55] The changing media landscape
[12:10] Spotify’s algorithm
[16:32] Grimes and AI
[22:10] AI and writing
[25:10] What is “content”
[35:30] The counterculture
[45:00] Traditional publishing
The Active Voice is a podcast hosted by Hamish McKenzie, featuring weekly conversations with writers about how the internet is affecting the way they live and write. This episode was produced by Sophia Efthimiatou and Hamish McKenzie, with audio engineering by Seven Morris, and content production by Hannah Ray. All artwork is by Joro Chen, and music is by Phelps & Munro.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit read.substack.com