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Episode 375: Hattie Fletcher and Stephen Knezovich
1.4k Plays2 years ago
Hattie Fletcher and Stephen Knezovich are part of a team that started Short Reads, short-reads.org a weekly email dispatch of flash nonfiction.
Substack: Rage Against the Algorithm
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Sponsor: Liquid IV, promo code cnf
Suds: Athletic Brewing, promo code BRENDANO20
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Transcript
Promotional Offers and Sponsorships
00:00:01
Speaker
AC and efforts, this episode is sponsored by Liquid IV. And I gotta say, this is a delicious way to rehydrate and fuel those endurance activities, or if you just wanna zhuzh up your water. Liquid IV, it's in my bottle, man. It's some tasty stuff. Been a big fan of the lemon limes, non-GMO, free from gluten, dairy, and soy, so you know your burly vegan is diggin' it.
00:00:29
Speaker
Get 20% off when you go to liquidiv.com and use the promo code CNF at checkout. That's 20% off anything, anything you order when you shop better hydration today using promo code CNF at liquidiv.com, com, com.
00:00:50
Speaker
Also, as you know, I love to shout out to Athletic Brewing, my favorite non-alcoholic beer. I just got a shipment in the mail of some Athletic Light and Free Wave. Yes, not a paid plug. I'm a brand ambassador and I just want to celebrate this amazing product. If you hit the athleticbrewing.com and use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout, you get a nice little discount on your first order. I don't get any money.
00:01:14
Speaker
And they are not an official sponsor of the podcast, just to be clear. I just get points towards swag or beer. Mmm. Beer. Give it a shot. Yeah, you don't have a lot of room to sort of fart around or like throw in stuff that doesn't really matter. Like you have to really kind of focus on what you're doing and get it done and then get out.
Introduction to Guests and Their New Venture
00:01:41
Speaker
Oh hey, CNF Pod, the creative non-fiction podcast. A show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, yesss. Today we have Hattie Fletcher, editor of shortreads.org.
00:01:57
Speaker
and Steven Nezovich marketing whiz kid over at shortreads.org and let's just be clear it is short hyphen reads dot org lest you not include the hyphen you will be taken to something else let's i'm going to type that in short reads without the hyphen dot org what does that do let's see what this is scintillating audio it looks like
00:02:26
Speaker
Oh boy, that's not, is that, looks like some German website or something.
00:02:37
Speaker
Something like that. Don't do that. Those two are heading up short-reads.org as well as Chad Vogler and Anna Hall, but it's only Hattie and Stephen you're gonna hear from. Chad and Anna are not here, but maybe in the future. Who knows? It's my podcast. I can do whatever I want.
00:02:57
Speaker
This cohort is formerly of Creative Nonfiction Magazine, and due to conflicts of leadership at the magazine, they left, which they've made quite public on Twitter. You can go check out their Twitter thread about their letter of resignation of sorts. We don't get into that because this isn't a gossipy podcast, but we do get into what inspired them to start short reads.
00:03:23
Speaker
It's a weekly email flash nonfiction essay beamed right into your stupid inbox You know how you hate your living place? But if you get like this this bouquet of flowers, and it just brightens everything up And you're like yes one day where I don't feel like driving my car into oncoming traffic That's the short reads essay that bouquet of flowers that appears in the hellhole of your inbox is
00:03:48
Speaker
every Wednesday
Navigating Content Ownership and Email Platforms
00:03:49
Speaker
morning. Make sure you're heading over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. Just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com. Who owns the content on Substack? It's free to sign up and they don't make you charge for subscriptions. So if Substack decides it wants to pivot,
00:04:15
Speaker
Do we own what we've posted? And what about notes, which is like their Twitter thing? I like it a lot, but what's gonna happen if Substack is like, you know, to keep this free? We're gonna need to put ads in, and then we're gonna have to start tracking your data, and we're gonna mine all the subscriptions in Substacks you read, and then we're gonna pump you full of ads again.
00:04:43
Speaker
Ah, if that's the case, I don't know what I'm going to do. You know what I'm going to do? I do know what I'm going to do. I'm going to rage against that algorithm elsewhere. First of the month, no spam. Can't beat it. Hey, if you dig the show, you might want to share it across your network so we can grow the pie and get this CNFing thing into the brains of people who get the joke.
00:05:03
Speaker
You can also leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts, so the wayward CNFer might say, well, shit, I'll give that a shot. And also, there's patreon.com slash CNFbot. He can drop a few bucks in the head if you glean some value. Show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. I started doing just some one-on-one coaching calls for patrons of any tier. I was mildly frustrated with myself for not providing enough value over there, so I did this call, I put it out there.
00:05:31
Speaker
It's not gonna be like a regular thing, but it'll probably be out there any time I'm feeling guilty. And a chunk of patrons took me up on the offer. You know, probably about 25% of the entire crew.
Creative Challenges in Short Nonfiction
00:05:44
Speaker
Sounds more than it is, but it's still a significant percentage. We talked some things out.
00:05:51
Speaker
Sometimes that's all you need. So Hattie was the longtime editor of Creative Nonfiction Magazine and she's got a great eye for bringing a piece of writing along. And so we kind of talk about some of the differences between editing flash nonfiction versus some of the longer form stuff that she had done in the past. And Bryce still does as a freelancer.
00:06:13
Speaker
Steven knows a thing or two about putting email bouquets into dingy mildew infested inboxes. He's also an amazing collage artist. That's how you really say it, artist. I love making collages and Steven's style is so cool. I have to be careful not to copy him too much. You can find more info about his art at his, damn it if he doesn't like vowels,
00:06:49
Speaker
There's only one vowel and it's in that mandatory.com.
00:06:54
Speaker
I imagine if maybe he hosted his website through New Zealand or something, he could get away with all consonants. I do have a parting shot this week in case the five of you who listen to them want to stick around. This was a toe-tapping good time. So let's get after it, CNFers. Riff.
00:07:29
Speaker
publishing climate and it can be hard to start something and even harder to keep it going so in light of that the the kind of climate that we're in you know what was the the energy and the motivation behind doing what you guys have started with short reads
00:07:44
Speaker
I mean, I mean, you know, I guess obviously the elephant in the room is what happened at criminal fiction. So it was kind of not going in a great direction and the whole staff left and in sort of the aftermath of that.
00:07:59
Speaker
You know, there was, I don't know, there's kind of like a grieving process, I suppose, but, you know, we all had been working together for a very long time. Hattie and I have been working together for 15 years. When I started at Creative Nonfiction, it was really just, I mean, Lee was there, but it was Hattie in an office with her two-year-old daughter. And then I like wandered in and we kind of built it from there. So we've been together for a long time. And there was others who had been there, Chad,
00:08:27
Speaker
Vogler had been there for 10 years. And when things fell apart at Crave Nonfiction, I think we really just wanted to find a way, first and foremost, to stay connected to one another and to continue to work with each other. So there was only six of us at the end and four of us are doing short reads at the time. So that was, I think, one of the main driving factors is just to be able to continue working with people that were friends, really, and have been co-workers for a very long time.
00:08:56
Speaker
But it's also, you know, the model for it is something we were doing at Creative Nonfiction, and it was quite popular, the short reads model, more or less. I think this is a little bit different in tone and in some of the things we're trying out with it. But, you know, the model of emailing something out, you know, short,
00:09:17
Speaker
we were doing it already. So it sort of made sense as a starting point for kind of kicking off any new publishing endeavor to start with something that we knew that people liked already.
00:09:28
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the Sunday short reads was wild, was a wildly popular thing we were doing at CNF. I think at the end there was 9,000 email subscribers to it and it was, it had like a 75% open rate. So that was tons of readers. And it was just kind of a fun thing that we started, uh, I guess a little bit before the COVID things happened. We just decided to try this thing and just roll it out. It was a free offering.
00:09:53
Speaker
It was a way to kind of maybe reach some new people, publish some different work because we were able to partner with other publications. And the short stuff was a little quicker to get from, you know, acceptance to publication and email as it was a fast delivery system. But yeah, I mean, it was a nice
The Power of Email as a Publishing Tool
00:10:11
Speaker
little community of readers that was going on over there. And so we wanted to kind of keep that going in whatever way we could.
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah. And with the bigger CNF magazine, a lot of the essays were in the ballpark of I think 5,000 was about the upper limit. And then the true story chat book could be up to like 10,000 words. And now now you're like really dialing dialing it back to the flash nonfiction. So, so Hattie, like having edited all those kind of those ranges, what are the unique challenges to writing and editing flash nonfiction?
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. It's really different actually, sort of in a fun way. I think one of the things with Flash is that writers have to be so much more, not deliberate. I mean, I think you have to be deliberate in anything you do, right? But I think Flash, you have to be really careful about the choices you're making about sort of
00:11:05
Speaker
where something starts and kind of the scope of it. And one of the things that's been really fun to see with doing The Flash is the just the incredible range of approaches people can take to it. I think partly because it's short, there's not always, but often a sort of, you know, this is a dumb word, but experimental.
00:11:26
Speaker
sort of approach and form just because you can try things as a writer that probably wouldn't work to be able to sustain in a longer form, right? So we have a piece upcoming next month, I think, that's the pieces we run in short reads go up to 1200 words, because that's sort of logistically what you can put in an email.
00:11:47
Speaker
But we have a piece that is not quite at that upper limit, but it's all one sentence. Right. And and that's not to say there's not a writer somewhere who can write a whole piece. I'm sure someone has like a 10,000 word one sentence piece, but it's a lot harder. You know, the challenge is, I think, sort of multiplier if you're talking about forms that are, you know, sort of hermit crabby things sometimes are hard to sustain over the long haul or
00:12:14
Speaker
certain kinds of organizational structures, you know, they can get tedious at longer lengths in ways that in a shorter piece really can be really effective and fun and cover.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think to your point of the writing has to be deliberate or like definitely very intentional. Every word or sentence has to carry so much more weight and momentum with it, which I think is kind of fun to try to whittle things down to such a point where you can really, I don't know, just distill it and reduce the size.
00:12:49
Speaker
Yeah, you don't have a lot of room to sort of fart around or like throw in stuff that doesn't really matter. Like you have to really kind of focus on what you're doing and get it done and then get out. Not that editorial is really my focus and all of this, but I do think that in a longer piece, right? Like the challenge is sustaining the reader's attention, but in a shorter piece, the challenge is like sticking the landing, right? Like making an impact in a short amount of time. At least that's how I sort of perceive the two differences.
00:13:18
Speaker
Yeah, because you don't have a ton of time to build rapport and then build up to this big hammer at the end or a big kicker. So it's like it does have to, when you don't have a whole lot of time to build the relationship with the reader, it's all the more challenging to stick a landing or make it really, really pop in an effective way.
00:13:42
Speaker
No, and I think that's something I really like about the short read too is that, you know, sometimes some of the longer pieces we published at Creative Nonfiction, you know, there was sort of this generally like a really informational element, which is great. And we're certainly not not looking for that in short work. But I think the short pieces have been a nice chance to sort of think about the balance in a piece of like the element of heart.
00:14:12
Speaker
Right. So that's not to say that the pieces that we're publishing in the short reads are, you know, I hope they're not overly sentimental or, you know, anything like that. But I think one of the factors we do think about, right, it's this short piece. It comes in the email, you know, it's in your inbox. It's early in the morning. Right.
00:14:31
Speaker
And as we're reading submissions and sort of thinking about things, one of our criteria is sort of, you know, did it make me feel something? You know, not just like, did I learn something from it? Did I think something interesting? But like, did I feel something from it? And I think that's something that unites a lot of the pieces we've published and that will continue to publish.
00:14:52
Speaker
And as a corollary to that, one of the things that's been kind of funny has been kind of getting the hang of the way the medium affects the work we have accepted in that sense that because it's immediate, because it's in your inbox, because it's early in the morning,
00:15:12
Speaker
because a lot of nonfiction people write tends to be, not exclusively, but tends to be, you know, sort of the stories that are important to people and the real life stories that tend to be important to people are, let's say, on the whole, you know, people write more about intense situations than about sort of their greatest moments of joy, right? Might be a way to put that. So it's been an interesting thing to sort of calibrate
00:15:41
Speaker
you know, like how do you balance elements of trauma or things like that in this format that is so immediate and so sort of in a certain way intimate, right? And we've definitely, we've had a couple pieces that we've looked at and it's sort of like,
00:15:59
Speaker
Okay, well, are people gonna wanna wake up to that? It made me feel something, but is that what we wanna email to people at seven in the morning? And sometimes the answer is actually like, well, maybe no, or maybe we do, but like with a little warning or, you know, it's been an interesting thing to figure out. And I think something that when we started doing this, we didn't necessarily consider.
00:16:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the mode of publication is how he mentioned it being in the inbox. It's a pretty unique situation versus say a print magazine, right? You could subscribe to those that shows up at your house. You choose though when you want to engage with it. Same thing, we used to run a little micro essay contest on Twitter called Tiny Truth. So people could post them whenever they wanted and we would read them and reshare them and occasionally put them in the magazine or in our newsletter.
00:16:51
Speaker
But again, people are choosing when to engage with those or even to engage with them. But the inboxes, as you know, like email inboxes are very action oriented. Whenever you're dealing with email,
00:17:04
Speaker
you're taking some sort of action, you're reading something, you're filing it away, you're deleting it, you're clicking on something. And so people are usually in this like mode of like, I'm doing email now. And so when our thing shows up, number one, we want it to be, I think the goal and what we think is nice about publishing in an inbox is it can be a small break from your emails from your boss or your to-do list or whatever. And they're short enough that it's like a nice little,
00:17:32
Speaker
nice little break and we're not asking you to do anything other than engage with the piece and maybe think about it or feel something. But you know, we're showing up at a specific time and sort of, you know, we just want to be mindful of that. So it is definitely a challenge.
00:17:48
Speaker
Yeah and email is so important these days I think maybe in the last what I don't know let's see when did you know.
Building and Maintaining an Email List
00:17:57
Speaker
Twenty ten issues when everyone is really getting obsessed with social media as a means to build platform and to get your work out there and I think we've.
00:18:07
Speaker
We've really seen the pendulum swing against that or away from that and in favor of more permission based assets be it email newsletters or sub stack or stuff of the nature that you're doing. So just how important is that aspect to where you see the where you see short reads going here.
00:18:27
Speaker
I mean, I think it's very important. I mean, and I've always been a web 1.0 kind of person, right? Where it's like, you want an email list and a blog, you know, social media is nice.
00:18:39
Speaker
And when I work with writers or people on the marketing side, the best thing about an email list is it's something that you own. Social media has changed so much. The initial promise of Facebook was one of connection. And it's just, they got everyone to sign on and then they totally changed it into a place of distraction. So the big three, especially, I guess it's really just two, because it's meta and Twitter. But in the last several years,
00:19:06
Speaker
they're falling apart. People are fleeing, they're going other places, the audiences are breaking apart again. You no longer, I think that access to that huge group of people isn't going to be around much longer, or it's going to look very different. And email is just sort of that tried and true thing. It's just, it's a great, I mean, I very much
00:19:32
Speaker
I don't know, I think email is the place to be. But I think building that email list is important, not just for us, but for any writers who are out there trying to build an audience and they're still chasing followers on Twitter or Facebook. It's not really going to be worth your time in the near future and focusing on an email list.
00:19:54
Speaker
And also email is personal. There's a Dan Oshinski, I think his name is. He was doing the New Yorkers email stuff for a while. Now he runs this thing called inbox collective, but he had this quote a few years back.
00:20:06
Speaker
something along the lines of the email inbox is like, it's the equivalent of somebody's living room. It's a private personal space, not everyone gets invited in there, and you want to show up and respect that space. So it takes a lot to earn that trust to be invited into somebody's inbox, but
00:20:25
Speaker
But when you're in there, it's worth it because it is a personal place and it is a place that you can connect more deeply with people. And I think in the bigger picture of what we're trying to do as short reads, yes, we want to publish great work and help our writers reach more readers.
00:20:41
Speaker
But we're also focusing on trying to figure out a way to make it much more of a community, especially as people are leaving the bigger spaces of the social media platforms. I know Facebook groups are still going pretty strong, but we want to have a place that is personal and private and cordial and feels like a community and a place that people can have a conversation around a specific topic. So that's not quite baked into what we're doing right now, but it's part of the conversations that
00:21:10
Speaker
that we're having about where we want to go with it. But it all starts with email, I would say.
00:21:16
Speaker
That's one thing I wanted to ask you guys as well. Given that an email list is something that you own, an author's website is their real estate, no algorithm can change any of that. Knowing how important email is to an author's platform, I'll even say I would take 10 email subscribers to 1,000 Twitter followers. I just feel like that's
00:21:42
Speaker
to the living room metaphor. Those 10 guests are going to be just so much better than a thousand people throwing tomatoes at the stage. So what can writers do if they're starting from zero and they might not even have a big social media presence? So they have a little social media. They have an email list of zero. What can people do to start slowly building that list?
00:22:09
Speaker
I think it's important to kind of break it down into phases of building an email list. I think of it as like 110, 100, 1000. So you start with one, you put yourself on your email list, you make it something that you want it to be, right? Like this is something that I would like to receive, not something you think somebody else would want to receive. So
00:22:27
Speaker
Because if you're not doing something that you find to be fun or creative or a natural extension of the work you're already doing, you're not going to maintain it. So you got to start with yourself, what it is you want to do, what you're trying to accomplish, what your objectives are, and most importantly, what you want to put out in the world. What would you enjoy receiving? So you start with one, and then you go to ten. You start with your
00:22:52
Speaker
close friends, your parents, people you know that support your work already and you let them know what you're doing and invite them onto the email list. You can't just add people. I see this all the time.
00:23:03
Speaker
It's like, just put people you know on your list. Like, you can't do it. You gotta... I hate it when people do that. Right, because they're your friends and then they get added to your list and then it's uncomfortable because they may not, it's not that they don't want to support you or they're not interested in what you're doing, but as I mentioned, email is personal. People take a lot of, go to great lengths to like maintain the number of emails they're receiving. They might just not want another one. They want to support you, but they might not want your email and that's got to be okay.
00:23:31
Speaker
Um, so you have to just let people know and let them know how they can get on it. Uh, and you try to go from one to 10 and then the game is 10 to 100 you start play a game where like once you have some momentum and you've put a few out and you kind of know what you're doing You you know, you send some invites out again letting people that you respect or your peers know that you're doing it make sure if you are on social media, you kind of let people know that you're doing it
00:23:56
Speaker
You put it out there to your immediate circle and try to get to 100. And then the game to 1000 is a little bit more challenging, but ideally your list will help you get there. You start leaning on the people who are getting value from your newsletter. I also think that there's a difference and some people confuse it between an email newsletter and email marketing.
00:24:18
Speaker
An email newsletter is a value add, meaning you are trying to create value for others. And email marketing is a value extraction. That doesn't make it bad if you are offering products, if you are a writer who also teaches and you have online classes, like at some point you want to engage in email marketing, but that's you extracting value from your list. And so you want to be mindful of that. The point of the email newsletter is to engage with people, connect with them and create value for them.
00:24:48
Speaker
And I also saw something interesting I think it's um
00:24:51
Speaker
And Handley, who does the anarchy newsletter, she's a copywriter. But she, I think she's mentioned something about how too many people also focus on the news part of that word and not the letter. And again, email is personal, and you want to make it feel personal. Sure, on your end, it's a one to many communication, but on the receiving end, it feels one to one. And so you want to pretend like you're writing a personal letter. The news part also important, but it should not be the focus of it.
00:25:19
Speaker
So that's generally my advice when I talk to writers or creative people of any sort or even literary publications or small arts nonprofits. Like that's usually it's a mindset thing. I think like you want to make sure you're starting small and as you mentioned doing it drip by drip.
00:25:36
Speaker
like 10X-ing anything or trying to get scale quickly. That's for like Silicon Valley, you know, VC funded tech companies that are playing a totally different game. And really their whole point is to get to scale so they can get bought out anyway. But if you're in it for the long run, you're a writer and you're trying to create something lasting of value,
00:25:58
Speaker
Take it slow. It's okay. You'll get there as long as you continue to remember that you're adding value, not simply extracting it from your list. That it's not about you, it's about them, really. The simplest way to say that.
00:26:11
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And also, no matter how big the list is, you obviously have to have a really good product on offer, so to speak. And then that gets to the writing and writing really great pieces. And Hattie, if you're coaching someone to write a short essay, would your advice be write long and whittle down or just try to
00:26:37
Speaker
I don't know just write the fill up the box if you just wanted to write say 750 words you know could it be best to go to 1500 and try to cut it in half or or I don't know you know what would be the the balance if you had to coach someone oh man that's a tough question because I have to admit that writing is magic to me I don't write
00:26:58
Speaker
But I think, no, I think if you're setting out to write something short, generally my advice would be to aim for that. That said, I think that pieces often sort of find their own length, right? And so the trick for a writer, it seems to me, is
00:27:18
Speaker
is having an awareness of being aware of what it is you have and the sort of space that it can take up. Some of my best advice for writers overall, I think, is to have an awareness, and this is not unrelated to sort of all those things Stephen was saying about marketing, actually, is understanding
00:27:43
Speaker
at some sort of deliberate level, what kind of story you have and what kind of space it demands, right? And so for length, that means kind of like understanding for a longer form piece, right? Like, is there enough to sustain a longer form piece? Like, is the scope of a piece big enough? Is the scale of it? Is the reach of it big enough? With a flash piece, I think,
00:28:11
Speaker
Conversely, it's about defining the scope in a small way. So that's not to say that we haven't published pieces that have a big timeframe in them or I don't think there are a lot of rules, but it's sort of an awareness of how much detail you have or how much detail you need to share and how many words that's going to take up.
00:28:34
Speaker
So I think it's about, I don't know, if you think about it as like a sculpture, right? A piece of writing as a sculpture, right? Like if you're making a sculpture, do you have something that's big enough that it's, you know, like,
00:28:48
Speaker
it's going to take up a town square and that people are going to want to see it in a town square every day? Or do you have something that is like more for a side table? Or what is the raw material you have and kind of what can you form out of it? If that makes sense. Sometimes when writers go wrong though, it is, you know, maybe after the initial writing, right? It's about not quite seeing that. So, so I think one of the common things with longer work that I see
00:29:13
Speaker
you know, because I read so much stuff and I read so much stuff that doesn't end up getting published, right? So it's a little bit weird in that way as a reading experience, but like there's a kind of common sort of story that I see where people get really, you know, it's often chronological, but that's not, I don't think the main point, but it's sort of like, and this and this, and it's just so much detail, you know, it's sort of like telling a story that's kind of not ultimately a very big story, but it's like,
00:29:43
Speaker
all the details and trying to work up to kind of the meaning of it. And the meaning is sometimes surprising, but it's usually not like, you know, life shattering. And often with that kind of story, right, it's like 4,000 words.
00:29:59
Speaker
kind of your interior monologue as an editor or a reader you're like this doesn't need to be this long like this this is a shorter story and often I think those shorter stories and I've said this to writers sometimes in rejections like like they seem like shorter things that should be shorter stories and in fact that might even be shorter stories inside longer stories because they're kind of like
00:30:24
Speaker
the anecdote that's like the, you know, the other part of the metaphor where you're like, here's this one story and here's another story where something similar happens. So I think sometimes, you know, that's what I mean about finding the shape of it is, you know, sometimes I think
Analyzing and Crafting Effective Short Essays
00:30:40
Speaker
it's possible, right? You sit down in a first draft and you write and you write and you write and you're like, okay, well, this is, you know, 4,000 words, but really it's just sort of an anecdote with like,
00:30:52
Speaker
An observation at the middle of it or something and so then I think part of the revision process right is is as a writer taking a critical look at what you've written and sort of thinking like okay well.
00:31:04
Speaker
Well, why, what's in this story for me? What's the, you know, what's the discovery? What's the change? What's the important thing? And will that be equally important to someone else at this length and at this detail? And sometimes the answer to that is no. And then maybe you revise and you make it shorter.
00:31:24
Speaker
If we were to maybe, this one's extremely short, if you were to kind of like break down why it worked, most recent one, My Sister Used to Give Me Blank Journals for My Birthday by Bethann Finale. If we were to put this on the table and doing an autopsy, for you when you read this, what made this very, very, very short essay work for you?
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Beth Ann is so good at sort of, I said this to someone the other day right after the piece, she's really good at sort of twisting the knife. And I think often before you realize she has a knife, right, is sort of the effect of this piece, I think. It happens, if you've read a lot of her work, she's written sort of a fair amount about her sister who died young. And I think
00:32:18
Speaker
this piece works because it is sort of just like a quick punch, right? And that's not to say that she couldn't write a much longer thing sort of about all the things her sister gave her or what happened to her sister or, you know, endless possibilities. But this piece I think is great because it kind of lulls you along just for a tiny little bit.
00:32:44
Speaker
with sort of these details, this sense of writing, and then like, okay, well, here's what I need them for, right? And it just, I think it's a good example too of that thing we were talking about, like it makes you feel something, right? It's a quick sort of intense feeling that I think you also sort of come back to a little bit. It's a feeling with a little bit of weight to it.
00:33:12
Speaker
And I think what it does especially well, and I think short pieces done very well, they leave you really wanting more, right? Yeah, I think that's true too. So, you know, this, it's a, I don't want to say it's a fun piece. It's not a fun piece. It's a sad piece, right? But it's a fun piece in the way I think that you can see her stringing out sort of like the details, right? The sensory details, the descriptions of notebooks.
00:33:42
Speaker
you learn a surprising amount. Like you get a sense of the sister, right? Like in this sort of where she's buying the notebooks and sort of you get, it's so short, but you get a sense of like what a full life she lived to.
00:33:59
Speaker
And I just think the juxtaposition of all that, you know, sort of cramming literally a ton of notebooks, right? Like there's a lot of stuff crammed into the front part of it, but without feeling ponderous, right? And you can see where a different writer might and might effectively catalog the individual blank books, right? Or what's in each one or kind of all those things, but this piece doesn't need to do any of that. That's not the point.
00:34:29
Speaker
to your point, how you got a lot of information about the sister in this brief piece. I don't know the quote, but J.R. Mohringer is a great journalist and novelist and ghostwriter. You've probably read it, but essay in The New Yorker recently about ghostwriting. And he had a quote about, or quote, it's something he wrote a sentence about memoir, and I think a lot of people make this mistake about the memoir being a little too,
00:34:55
Speaker
to Navel Gacy, but in a way like the best memoirs are the ones that really sort of catalog, not catalog, but kind of highlight the other people in the narrator's orbit. So I think in this sense how you learn so much about the sister in such a short punch is like that's what really good memoir does too. It's very grounded in the person she loves and is talking about and writing about.
00:35:17
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's such a great point about memoir is the is finding the balance of kind of, you know, yourself, because obviously it's your story. It's that whole thing. Memoir, the me, whatever. But but also like you as the writer, you have so much control over it. It is all you. And because it's all you, I think that the exact content of it doesn't have to be you, you know,
00:35:45
Speaker
sometimes it's a little bit that thing like you don't have to start every sentence with, I think, right? Because it's kind of implicit in the whole activity. But I think people do, see, there I went. I think people do sort of fall into that trap a little bit where, you know, you're writing and you're like, well, why is this story important to me? And I think a lot of times writers
00:36:07
Speaker
struggle with finding that balance of not, you know, getting bogged down in that and sort of the like, well, here's why it's so important to me. And you can, I think, make that clear without having to kind of engage with it so overtly sometimes.
00:36:21
Speaker
And what I like about so many of the essays well all the essays too and it has nothing to do with the actual writing of the essays themselves but it's at the very end in the footer how you say like you're the editor and you know in Chad fact checks and proofreads and the illustrators there and you know Steven's role in marketing I love how it's just this little punch of
00:36:44
Speaker
this is our little cohort and this is what we do and this is how we do it and who we deliver it to. And I kind of love this like, not us against the world thing, but I do love that it's just like, here's our little team and this is what we do. I don't know, I just like that you guys put that on. Oh, that makes me so happy that you noticed it and like it. We like it a lot too. Yeah, thanks. I think actually the first piece or two didn't have that, but it occurred to us
00:37:11
Speaker
The first few pieces went out with just the illustration credit for Anna because that's an important addition to the piece, right? We're publishing an essay. Here's the writer and there's art with it. Here's the artist we are. It is a publication and most publications, you know, you get to have a little masthead. And yeah, and then we wanted to have a little fun with it. So I try to swap out the little emojis every week and stuff like that. But yeah, it just felt like a nice way to
00:37:39
Speaker
to let people know, again, that there's humans, there's people behind this, and we're trying to, you know, you wanna put your name on your work, right? So you want people to know, we wanna take responsibility for it, and we're proud of the work we're putting out there. But yeah, thanks for noticing that. That does please me quite a bit.
00:37:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the team element I think is so important to us at this point. Yes. Which is to say that it should matter to anyone else, but it does matter quite a lot to us.
00:38:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I like with like that. The activist magazine does this to like at the up high in the story. It'll be like the byline. It'll be like who is the lead editor. Who is the fact checker and the illustrator. And I love that it underscores the the collaborative effort that goes into putting together a piece be it long or short.
00:38:31
Speaker
And I think it's important for people to see because it's all different labor and all that labor is what's creating this great thing that you enjoy. And it's nice to see everybody get their due credit because there's no element of all of that that is more important than the other because they're all needed.
00:38:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, 100%. I mean, that's why every book has an acknowledgments page as well. I know writing itself is a solitary activity, but it takes a lot of people and a lot of work to bring good work to the world, right? Like you need a good circle of support and you need people who have your best interests in mind and are trying to do a good job on your behalf. And I think that that's, yeah.
00:39:20
Speaker
It's important to remember, especially for, I don't know, just as a reminder to have that there.
00:39:27
Speaker
And I'd love for you to expand on how you've got original submissions, obviously, and then you have some that are from, sort
Reviving Defunct Works and Sustaining Enthusiasm
00:39:36
Speaker
of republished or repurposed from other literary journals, you know, most recent being from, you know, Kenyan Review, but I think Forest Genre had a contribution from another writer. And just what are the mechanics of that?
00:39:51
Speaker
I'll let you speak to that, Addy. I mean, currently we're trying to figure out how to sort of open submissions organically in a way that won't be overwhelming for us just because at this point we are a small team and sort of volunteer based. You know, there's not really any money involved with this at the moment. So it's sort of a side project we're all doing in our, in our spare time, along with other things.
00:40:17
Speaker
At the moment, the process is that we reached out to a lot of writers whose work we admire and who we've worked with before and sort of did a soft call for submissions.
00:40:32
Speaker
And people sent a mix of original work and sort of work from other pieces. But this really sort of lovely thing emerged that I, you know, to be honest, we didn't really plan for it. But as we were getting pieces that were reprints, what we started to notice, and I think, you know, someone
00:40:53
Speaker
I don't quite have the whole view of the landscape on this, but I think there are so many places. Well, there are two things, right? One is that probably half the places that we've reprinted from are defunct in some way. So they're like online publications that people, you know, not unlike us, right? Set out with really good intentions to sort of start a publishing thing and for whatever reason,
00:41:19
Speaker
for a whole lot of reasons, right? Couldn't keep it going. Which is also just part of the natural life cycle, I think, probably of a lot of publications, right? Nothing's going to last forever. So it's been really nice to sort of give a new home to some of those pieces that sort of disappeared or weren't online or languished or
00:41:39
Speaker
There's also, I think, you know, in nonfiction, there's obviously, there are kinds of publishing and publications that don't last, or that, you know, you can't really revisit years later, or they don't hold up the right way. But there's also a whole lot of writing and stories that does, that's archived. When we were doing the Sunday shorts at Creative Nonfiction, it started as part of a tool for, you know, re-showcasing people
00:42:06
Speaker
pieces from the archives from ours and then from other places. I think, you know, in a time when there is so much stuff demanding our attention, there's so much, you know, ironically, because archives are sort of more available, it just adds to the piles of things that, you know, you could do a deep dive anywhere. But really what we're doing is sort of helping curate that experience and saying, well, here's a piece from
00:42:32
Speaker
you know, fourth genre from 20 years ago. But look, it's still really, it speaks to us now. It's fresh for the writers. Sometimes it's a really nice opportunity. It's been a nice opportunity to sort of, I think, you know, that piece by Mimi Schwartz, Mimi's comment was something like, oh, it was so nice to sort of be back in touch with my younger self, right? I think it's a really, there's something really nice about that. And it's, it's kind of like a,
00:42:58
Speaker
a little bit of a meta commentary on publishing and where publishing is, you know, like, like, what does it mean to publish something now? And what does it mean to reach an audience? I think there's there's no reason not to re-feature pieces. And I think that's relatively new in publishing, right? I think for a long time,
00:43:17
Speaker
publishing and especially like literary magazine publishing has a tendency to sometimes be a little precious and to kind of feel like, well, we own this thing, like we, you know, it belongs to us. And that's true in some sense, obviously, and there's, you know, copyright and kind of all those things. But also, you know, if you publish something and it doesn't get to readers, you know, it's a little like the tree in the forest, right?
00:43:43
Speaker
All right. So, you know, you started this a little while ago and there's always that honeymoon period of like, oh, this is awesome. We're going to keep doing this. Great. You know, us against the world. And then eventually, you settle into your, you settle into a routine in a groove and you're like, okay. It's 10 years later and you still have a podcast.
00:44:03
Speaker
Exactly. It's just one of those things where you're like, OK, here we go. It goes out every Friday. But similar to you, there was that honeymoon period. And then, OK, now it's like, OK, we're into the grind of it. This is where the initial buzz wears off. How do you guys keep yourselves just kind of excited to just in the face of when the honeymoon wears off, to keep going and keep your vision
00:44:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think this came up in our weekly meeting. Not that the honeymoon phase is over, but there was an initial rush when we launched. We got to 500 subscribers in two weeks.
00:44:44
Speaker
Um, we're not now around like 800, but, but the growth has definitely started to slow as far as people finding us. And, and, you know, not that I pay a ton of attention to metrics like that, but it feels good. I mean, growing numbers always feels good. There's, there's no denying it, but, but there's more to what we're doing than just building an email list, but, and I don't, I can't speak to Hattie, but me personally, I have a problem.
00:45:06
Speaker
at least in my personal life, that when I feel sort of things getting stale, I rearrange the furniture in my house. And so I'm always, even in work mode, I'm trying to think of ways that we might be able to, like, how can we, we still have the same couch, but what does it look like if we put it over there? And so some of the conversations we're having now are like, what else can we do with what we're working with? And I think if you can start adding
00:45:34
Speaker
not necessarily features because you don't want to kill something with like, here's a new feature. Now it's not just a weekly email. It's seven days a week. Like that gets a little excessive, but, but how can we stay true to the original form of what we're doing, but, but add value to it for readers who want to go deeper? It doesn't have to be for everyone. Um, and so some of the conversations we're having now is like, how can we act like it's about that idea of building a community around it and, and
00:46:03
Speaker
Not even necessarily us engaging with the readers, but how can we get the readers to start engaging with each other? Because that's really where community is formed. People coming together around an idea or organization and then connecting with one another. And I think that those kinds of things are, at least that's kind of the things that we're talking about now. And I think that's the best way to stay engaged is to not
00:46:30
Speaker
let it get too stale to move the furniture around occasionally and poke things and say, what if we do this? As long as you're not building a whole new wing onto your house, I think that that's a safe place to be and a fun place to be also. But that's me personally. I don't know how Hadi is staying excited about what we're doing. I'm just coasting on your excitement.
00:46:56
Speaker
But I think there is that element. I mean, this is, I think, one of our advantages heading into this, and we already talked about this, but is having a team that's worked together for a long time, and that does let you sort of shortcut some things in that sense. Like, I'm... I don't know that I knew about the furniture arranging, but I'm pretty familiar with Steven, right? Like, Steven and I at this point, and I think everyone else on the team, like, we have a pretty good...
00:47:27
Speaker
you know, it's sort of like an improv game going on, right? There's a lot of like, yes, and, and I think we, we have a lot of practice in sort of like, you know, someone picks up the ball and runs it down the field a little bit, and then someone else is like there to grab it and keep going. And I think that's, that's like a really helpful thing. That's a big asset in all of this. I agree. We are one big improv group. Yeah, but I do like that metaphor because that is how we
Balancing Creative Projects with Personal Well-being
00:47:55
Speaker
work. I mean, like it is,
00:47:57
Speaker
It's that level of comfort that, you know, with people you've known and worked with for a long time and you kind of know each other's working patterns or, you know, whatever. I mean, I know I have plenty of blind spots and I always rely on Hattie and Chad and Anna to make sure that I'm covered in those areas. And hopefully I do that for them as well. So, you know, we always have each other's back. We always have. And, but yeah, it's,
00:48:25
Speaker
It is like a big game of yes and. We just kind of, we play, we meet regularly, we talk, and we trust each other, I think. When you said, like right now, it's more of a side project than that you're weaving into the rest of your day. So how are you folding this into your days amidst all the other things you have going on?
00:48:49
Speaker
I mean, we have a weekly standing meeting. We meet every Wednesday after the email goes out for an hour or two. We check in, we talk about pieces that are maybe under consideration or whatever is on our mind. And then we're in that discord fairly regularly, I think.
00:49:10
Speaker
I mean, it's funny, cause like, I know I have other stuff going on and Hattie certainly does and everyone else, but considering how much we were putting out at Creative Nonfiction, and I said this at a meeting and I don't think anyone else feels the same way, but I feel like we're only publishing weekly and it feels like I'm waiting a long time in between issues. And maybe that's my excitement for what we're doing and putting out there, but I feel like, not anxious, but I'm like, man,
00:49:37
Speaker
I wish we were doing more, but you know. That's just because as we've established in this week's meeting, you are actually doing less. Yes, that is correct. I'm not doing as much as everyone else. So that is probably accurate. We just need to be more busy. Yes, that's true. But yeah, to answer your question, we're just trying to make space for it. I mean, Anna is out of the country at the moment. She's traveling, but she's trying to
00:50:07
Speaker
to keep up to date. I think she's going to talk to us from wherever she is next week. She's going to jump into the call. So yeah, it's one of those things. If something's important to you and you want it to succeed, you got to make space for it. And so I think we've done a good job of that so far. Talk to us in six months and we might be like, oh, hanging on. But we're trying to do our best. And also, as Hadi mentioned with the submission stuff,
00:50:34
Speaker
We're trying to be mindful of the amount of work we allow into this part of our lives. So that's why we're not just opening up an open submission call and getting flooded with thousands of flash essays we have to read and get back to people in a timely manner.
00:50:52
Speaker
methodical and thoughtful and anything that we do, we want to make sure that it's going to be sustainable. We want to be able to keep doing this for as long as we can. And moving forward, we're looking into how we can actually become a nonprofit organization, which would be a total game changer and turn this into something that
00:51:16
Speaker
that we can get funding for and build sustainability into the actual business model. But for now, as far as the amount of work we're allowing this to occupy in our lives, we're trying to be very mindful of not just ourselves, but the rest of the team as well, right? Because everyone is kind of piecing it together at the moment, I think freelance wise, jobs here, jobs there. And I was gonna say, right, it's been a little while at this point, but everyone was
00:51:44
Speaker
somewhat abruptly unemployed. Right. When we started, we all had quite a lot of time on our hands, but that's maybe not the case so much anymore. But yeah, just trying to move slow.
00:52:00
Speaker
Yeah, move slow. Don't break things. Right. Like the anti-meta. Right. Steven, so one of the final things I'll be asking you guys, I got to ask you, how's the collage game going? I love your collages, love your work. I love your eye for that. So how's the collage game going? Thanks. It's going pretty well. During COVID, I
00:52:27
Speaker
I just kind of hunkered down. I was just doing a ton of work. For me, the visual art stuff that I do, the collage, it's like a form of mental health for me. There's something about that activity of just cutting up old magazines and reassembling them. I mean, it's
00:52:44
Speaker
It's like an offline activity. I find it very calming and sort of in this world of like constant connection, it allows me to kind of disconnect for a period of time and focus on a very analog, tactile, contained activity. And I find that to be sort of my mental release. But it's going pretty well. Yeah, I appreciate you asking.
00:53:11
Speaker
It's just one of those things that I kind of do on the side and try not to make too big a fuss about it. But yeah, it's great. Yeah, of course. And as you guys may or may not know, I like to bring these conversations down for a landing by asking the guest or guests in this case for a recommendation for the listeners of some kind. And it can be anything from a brand of coffee you're excited about or a meal delivery service or a fanny pack. It doesn't really matter. So I'd extend that to you guys. What might you recommend for the listeners out there?
00:53:41
Speaker
Yeah, can I do two very brief ones? Oh, yeah. So I mentioned him earlier, Dan Ashinsky, he runs the inbox collective, I think anyone who's working on email stuff, he focuses mostly on like newsrooms, I think is his consulting side, but he has a lot of really great valuable information on his website.
00:54:00
Speaker
uh, which is called inbox collective. And then he has a newsletter called not a newsletter where he rounds up some really geeky, nerdy, deep cut marketing stuff in that. But, uh, but the blog on inbox collective is pretty great. There's stuff on there about building an audience, et cetera. And then, um, I recommended this book to, to everyone that CNF when, um, but, but there's a book by the writer, Annie Duke, um, who was like a professional poker player. And I think,
00:54:30
Speaker
a clinical psychologist or behavioral psychologist or something like that. But she wrote a book called quit, which was very timely for me when I read it. And but also just a lot of really great stuff in it. And I mean, we're talking about, you know, literary magazines are trying to make sure that this is a sustainable thing. The one thing I did get from that book is thinking forward about like, you want to have a plan in place for like
00:54:55
Speaker
If it if this thing is not doing x by by this date like the maybe it's time that we call it quits that actually having a plan to exit an exit strategy.
00:55:07
Speaker
baked into the original idea. Not that Shortreads is going anywhere, but just, you know, you don't want to push things too long, too far and just keep doing it because you feel you have to. I mean, there's anecdotes in the book about people trying to run marathons on broken legs because they just can't quit. They got too much grit to quit. And you don't want to do things that are harmful to you in the long run. But it was a great book and I highly recommend it. Nice. How about you, Hattie? Oh my gosh. Okay.
00:55:38
Speaker
So many possibilities. But you know what? I'm going to recommend a place, actually, because this spring break we went on a trip through Alabama. And I'm going to recommend the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, which is just a fantastic, amazing, incredible experience.
00:56:00
Speaker
a great place to spend a few hours. It's sort of, it goes on a sort of a journey from enslavement to mass incarceration is kind of the organizing theme, I suppose, but it's, you know, sort of a really interesting mix of like primary documents and kind of, you know, it's pretty dark. It's an intense experience, but also there's sort of a lot of great art and just,
00:56:28
Speaker
I would recommend the trip there for anyone. I know Montgomery, Alabama is not necessarily like a primo vacation destination, but I hope more people go there.
00:56:40
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, this was really fun to get to talk to you guys in tandem and get to celebrate what you're doing. And I'm real excited for what you've done and what you're going to continue to do. So thanks for carving out some time to do this and talk about short reads and what you're working on. So thanks a lot. Thanks for the opportunity. Thanks for the invitation. Yeah. Appreciate it.
00:57:02
Speaker
Nice. Nice. Nice. Thanks to Steven and Hattie, hailing from the mighty city of Pittsburgh. Don't forget to rage against the algorithm with me over at Substack. I pulled a bit back from Instagram and I've pulled way the fuck back on Twitter. I logged the fuck
00:57:21
Speaker
out man that's the cowards twitter deletion I hang on to it because I'm a cowardly invertebrate which is another way of saying I'm spineless in my morning panic journaling I was writing about journalism as an extraction industry
00:57:37
Speaker
Or journalism gone awry in a sense. Gone off the rails is a non-renewable energy, a drilling for finite source of energy, destroying the land and the landscape for short term gain. And maybe that's why I'm a decent journalist, if I can even call myself that.
00:58:03
Speaker
is that I don't see people as information wells that I need to frack out of the rock, a boom town ready to go bust so I can move into the next hot spot. Move on. Ah, you're done. You're ravaged. Nothing left for you to offer me. I'll go to the next one. In my reporting, of course I'm interested in how a particular person orbits the central figure.
00:58:28
Speaker
But I'm equally interested in the person I'm talking to. Like, I asked them where their careers took them. I asked them how it felt when their bodies were working perfectly. You know, how it felt when they threw the discus, how it came off their finger. And, you know, give them a chance to be and feel seen. You know, not just someone carrying water for the main guy.
00:58:51
Speaker
And before you think I'm just feigning interest to garner trust so I can rip more from the well and leave them a lifeless husk. That's not, that's just not how we do it. It's never how I've done it. That's why journalists get a bad rap a lot. And that's why Janet Malkin, that's what she riffed about, Riff, and the journalist and the murderer. And it can feel icky.
00:59:14
Speaker
like using these people for their stories and then they leave it up to you, the writer, to shape it, to use what they see fit. And then these poor people, they cede all that control. It's a wonder anyone ever talks to a journalist.
00:59:30
Speaker
I guess what I'm trying to say is being a non-fiction writer with a journalistic slant doesn't absolve you from being a human. Good human. Doesn't mean you can't approach the work with, you know, like empathy and compassion. You don't have to be this... Doesn't mean you have to be a dick. No? That doesn't make you soft. Shit. I mean, fuck. I wish I was a novelist. Stay wild, see you in efforts. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:00:10
Speaker
you