Most of my content in 2025 is free, but I appreciate the support of readers who make my interviews possible. Upgrading your subscription unlocks my monthly essays from a memoir-in-progress, as well as the entire archive. I’m also proud to be a Give Back Stack. 5% of my earnings in Q2 will go to Centre Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic for those with no health insurance and annual income under $38K (individual) or $78K (family of four). The Things Not Named — With Mark Slouka Mark Slouka: These were people whose lives were over. These were people who were going to be tortured and killed, and the last thing they thought to do was to write something in those days and weeks they were waiting. To me, there's something fundamentally human about wanting to express and express something well. And that need isn't going to just die overnight. Joshua Doležal: That’s Mark Slouka, author of the Substack Thought Salad. He’s my guest today for The Recovering Academic Podcast. I’m Joshua Doležal. My interview series this year is called “The Things Not Named.” It takes its title from a passage in Willa Cather’s essay “The Novel Démueblé,” one of her craft manifestos. I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. Today you’ll hear from one of the finest stylists I know. Mark Slouka’s books have been translated into sixteen languages and his stories and essays have repeatedly appeared in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories and Best American Essays. A past contributing editor to Harper's Magazine, his work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Agni, The New Yorker, and Granta. His forthcoming novel, For What It’s Worth, is a sequel to the award-winning Brewster. Mark currently divides his time between Prague and a small cabin in upstate New York. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Joshua Doležal: My series this year is mainly about craft, and I suppose I have a kind of defiant mindset about it because I invested about 20 years in honing my craft, and you've invested much longer than that. And my feeling has been that it's almost become kind of irrelevant as a market principle and that the institutions surrounding teaching of craft, the communities in which craft is discussed are falling apart. And so for me, craft is one of the only reasons to write. It's the high standard that we're all striving toward, to get better as apprentices to the art. And so to feel that it's becoming irrelevant has been hard for me. So I don't know if I'm just grieving that by talking to other people looking for commiseration or if there is in fact a future or writing that includes craft as a cornerstone. Mark Slouka: You’ve kind of started off with the with the big question. I'm trying really hard not to be pessimistic because, you know the pendulum tends to swing and it may swing back somehow. But I would say that first of all, I think craft has almost disappeared from the publishing industry as we as we know it today. It's almost unrecognizable from the industry that I knew only 30 years ago when I started publishing. I'm sure there are plenty of editors who would argue that passionately and say that they care deeply. The truth is that all the editors I've known are moving so fast. They're on such a treadmill that I can't recall getting a craft-based edit in decades. That's not what you get. You get sort of product placement advice. You get advice on how to streamline something, how to make it more reader friendly how to move product more effectively, ideally. But I think there's a larger issue, which is that up until say 20, 25 years ago, the universities were still teaching literature in the sense that basically there were generations of students being trained to admire, respect craft. And at some point the writing itself was subordinated to ideology, to politics, right? Certainly true in theory. There was a time when you could publish a literary criticism type piece and let's say the New York Review of Books, and it would be discussed broadly, you know, among people who read the New York Review of Books. But still, you know, it would be, oh, hey, did you read the latest da da da? Well, them days are gone. So in the university, the first step was that craft, as I said, was subordinated to ideology, to politics, to whatever particular political axe you had to grind, which meant that over time that the craft element of it, the fact that Faulkner could write a certain kind of sentence that somebody else couldn't, and you'd want to study how that was done, kind of fell by the wayside. And at the same time that was happening, students were morphing into customers, which is another kind of – all of these things kind of converged together to create a new climate, a new atmosphere in which, frankly, I feel more and more adrift, as do a lot of authors I happen to know, including yourself, maybe. Not just people my age, but younger as well, who are saying, well, we went into this for this reason. It's not, of course…a book can be entertaining, but literature also used to aim for something like wisdom as well to say something about justice or truth as we perceive it, and so on. As the industry is being squeezed financially, as the smaller fish gets continually eaten by the bigger fish, that kind of work is no longer wanted, we need to try to thread the needle and get that big hit. Hopefully film rights are attached. Bing, bing, bing. And you're off to the races. If you don't do that, good luck. Joshua Doležal: Part of our purpose then is to think about what a future looks like for people who are not on that track, who don't want that particular lane, or whose values don't align with the values of the gatekeepers right now. But I'd like to go back a little bit to origins. So when you think of when your apprenticeship to craft began, when was that? Mark Slouka: I grew up in a family where reading was a big deal, where reading mattered, where books mattered, where there was a kind of an inherent respect for the writer. It was a very old school attitude in some ways. And frankly, a kind of a, not just Old World, but New World too. Up until recently. Yeah, my dad was a professor. My mom was a librarian. It's like, man, books were a big deal. As a kid, obviously, it was all about the story, you know, it's like I was just immersed in stories. I couldn't tell you a good sentence from a hole in the ground. But then at some point, you know, my mom was always talking to me about, you know, this or that Somerset Maugham story and like the motivations of the people involved. That was nine years old, you know? And she's asking, well, why do you think he would say that when that's contrary to his best interest? Like, why would you, if you were in his shoes, what would you do? You know, da da. And so we'd have these great conversations and because Mom was taking me seriously during those conversations. It was kind of heady stuff. My real awakening to craft came at university. I mean, there was some inklings of it in high school, but really it was, it was at Columbia and I was blessed with having two or three, which is about all you can ever hope for, one in particular, just extraordinary teacher. And I vividly remember…you asked the origin, okay, so here's my origin thing. I remember I was flying to Fresno, California, from New York to take a job working on this crew, this trail crew in the High Sierras. I was 19 years old and I had brought Camus’ The Stranger with me because I'd heard somebody had said, you know, some professor, some other student, because books were a big deal. They’d said, oh man, this is really good. You gotta read this. So I took it with me and the plane was delayed for four hours. So I'm sitting in Kennedy, I read straight through, I read straight through the flight, we're landing in L.A., and my life was changed. It's like, I don't know what he's doing, but I'm fascinated. I didn't fully understand what Camus was accomplishing, but this world of ideas just opened up to me. And then, you know, then it was like step follows step. Back then going down this path wasn't quite as fraught as it is now. Joshua Doležal: I remember your story about when you completed your PhD. I think your mother-in-law wondered if you were going to open a what, a philosophy store or something. So I mean, that's been…I was advised rigorously against the English major and then also against the PhD, which even in the year 2000 seemed like a real fool's errand. And of course, all of that has gotten steadily worse. But it's never been what anyone would see as a responsible adult kind of choice. Mark Slouka: Especially in America. I mean, you and I both know that two and a half century-long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America. I mean, there's books written about it, right? The Hofstadter book is called that: Anti-Intellectualism in America. So yeah, we we’re all, we've all been immersed in that, you know, those who can do, those who can't teach, all those old saws. Like, I'm talking to you from Prague. You don't get that here. That's not, that doesn't exist here. That's not to say it doesn't, that there aren't elements of it, but in general, there's still a kind of a vestigial respect for the life of the mind. Joshua Doležal: Well, so as we're going back to this, Camus had this effect on you, and you were responding to something that even then you recognized as good writing, even if you didn't have language for it. So I'm assuming that your apprenticeship, which must have begun shortly after that, steadily gave you language for what good writing was and that it's not so difficult for you to explain what that is now when you see it. So when you're reading a work or an author that you admire and it hits that same note, what are some of the things that you're responding to that you would be able to identify
