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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
, author of the Substack . 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 as craft principles or aesthetic qualities that define good writing to you?
Mark Slouka: I mean, the Holy Grail of writing is the voice, right? Everybody talks about the voice. Well, the voice is simply the fingerprint on the page. It's the thing that makes a particular person's writing unique, recognizable.
I remember a professor of mine at one point – I was, must have been 19 or 20, maybe a sophomore in college, and he gave me five different paragraphs. One was from Thomas Mann, one was from Robert Musil, one was from, I don't know, Kafka. One was, who knows? And he said, okay, match 'em up. Like, who wrote this? Who wrote that? Who wrote that?
And I knew, I could tell. And he said, how do you know? And so it forced me to go down to the level of the lexical level, the level of word, the sentence structure, et cetera. And identify oh, this is what makes Robert Musil, Robert Musil, and this is what makes him different from Kafka or different from Thomas Mann. Or, I still, when I pick up a book, let's say Tobias Wolff, you know, if you pick up In Pharaoh's Army, there's a voice there, there's something in his prose that makes me, I'm just plugged in. I'm interested. And that raises the question, well, why am I exactly interested? I think I'm interested because for me, the writers that I admire, the writer that I try to be, still try to be, is someone who combines precision and soul.
I don't know if I can put it that way, But I think I can. Those two terms, precision and soul, for me, kind of say a lot. It's not enough to just emote and it's not enough just to be precise. You have to blend those together in your own way and when you hit that sweet spot, when you are able to do that, and to do that requires a big heart. But it also requires discipline. Like you actually have to interrogate as you do as I do. It's like every writer you and I admire, no doubt does. You have to interrogate what you've done. If you're just sitting there sort of like writing at speed, admiring yourself, it is a matter of honing, polishing, reducing, refining, struggling.
It's supposed to be struggle. Yes, there are those moments when you're just in the zone and you suddenly get up and it's like, oh my God, three hours have passed and my back is all locked up because I was in that space. But even in that space, when you're unaware of anything around you, and it doesn't happen often, even in that space, the critical faculty, the refining faculty, is still on.
You're not just feeling endlessly. Yes, of course you're feeling, you know, you could have tears running down your face because of what you're writing, but at the same time that those tears are running, you're shaping what you're putting down.
Joshua Doležal: It seems that this idea of refinement, shaping, the precision part of that equation is, I think the heart of what we're talking about with craft. You know, there is a method that assumes also a discerning reader who is responding to that.
I know for myself, when I'm in that zone, it's not a zone where I exist in solitude. There's an imagined communion with a reader and a particular kind of reader that I respect, and that has a respect for craft in its highest form. And so when we're talking about the apprenticeship to the craft and how we do that in solitude, I think there's an implied communion with that discerning reader.
There was an intro that you wrote and you're basically scoffing at the whole idea of the essayist introducing his own collection, because if you'd been doing this long enough, you sort of knew what pose to strike and you were sort of acknowledging that there's a performative aspect there, that voice is not really your authentic soul. It is a kind of selective recruitment of personal qualities combined with effects and stylistic techniques that you know are effective in achieving soulfulness. But it's not necessarily authentic and true in every particular, that there's a kind of performance there. What I'm getting back around to is the sense that when you're in that zone, you're doing it for someone, not purely for yourself. Is that fair?
Mark Slouka: Yeah, it is. It is. I think a lot of us would like to think that we would simply keep writing and have to keep writing, even if we had like a written guarantee from God that no one would ever read it. Right? I'm not sure that's true. And I'm learning to my surprise that it's probably not true for me. I don't need a lot of readers, but I need to know that I have some, that I'm communicating with somebody, somebody ideally who can stop at a sentence I've written and say, okay. Okay. Wow, that's good.
You know, that's what I'm aiming for. I want and need that approval because, let's face it, like most writers, I'm out there to move people. I'm out there to affect people, to touch people. Not just by the entertainment value of the story I'm telling, but the way it's told. That matters to me. It matters supremely to me as it does to you. That's why I write, that's why I admire some writers more than others, because I admire that largely indefinable skill, which we were just talking about. But your question raises a larger question, which is, is that community of readers still there?
Is there a community of readers capable of appreciating what I do? I have a good friend of mine, the novelist Brian Hall. I mean, he's a good novelist and he and I have been joking for years about how we're basically roof thatchers in the 21st century. You know, we're pretty good at thatching a roof, and every now and then we pass a house whose roof we thatched and we think, man, that's my roof. And that's not too bad. I did a really fine job of that.
The bitter little joke being, of course there's not a whole lot of need for our craft anymore. It's like not a whole lot of roof thatching to be done lately. That used to be funnier 20 years ago than it is now. Because now I feel like it's come back to me and I feel like a goddamned roof thatcher sometimes. I really do. It's like I can thatch a pretty good roof. Does anybody give a damn, I'm not sure.
Joshua Doležal: Two parts of this that I want to kind of drill into. One is what you were saying earlier about universities. You know, they used to be places where craft was taught, and I think for the 20th century in particular, I don't really have as good a sense of this for the 19th century because I think there were, I guess there still were popular outlets for writing, so there were writers in the 18th century and 19th century who sold a lot of books and became kind of celebrities in that regard, but probably weren't being taught in the universities and quite the way that the modernists and postmodernists were.
And so you could get on syllabi across America, and that was a way of gaining a certain status and reputation. You could be taken seriously by experts who were in that position of curating style and curating taste and setting some of the baseline for that. So with the shift that you're describing from ideas to politics or ideology, a lot of those gatekeepers shifted their metrics. So the institutions were no longer supporting craft as the benchmark for quality literature. So that, as you've said, that world is gone. That world was also one in which institutions could be sanctuaries for writers. So you could sort of take the money question off the table, you could focus purely on craft, and that could be sort of, you're a north star, right?
So that's, that's gone as well. So in this world, without institutions with the roof thatching sensibility and skillset, what's the future? Is it just a kind of defiant practice of the craft in increasing obscurity? Or is there something more substantial to hope for?
Mark Slouka: Well, I take heart from something which is difficult to understand, which is that as all the things that we're talking about are kicking in, as the universities are becoming primarily centers of business, I mean, Columbia is not a university. It's primarily a corporation. It's a $10 billion corporation or whatever. That's not to say that there aren't some really intelligent, wonderful people teaching there, good students da, da da, but as a whole, it's a corporation and it conducts itself as such. As that's happening, as publishing houses are becoming what they always were to some extent, but moreso places of business, bottom line institutions.
Even as all this is happening at the same time, it seems we're having more and more people, young people, interested in writing. They want to write, they're drawn to the idea of writing. They're drawn to the idea of expressing something essential to themselves, and sending it out into the world. They may not have been trained for it. They may not have not have been prepared for it. But Melville said, you know, a whaling ship was my Yale and my Harvard. You don't need to go to Yale to learn how to write. In fact, it's probably a hindrance. There's something going on if you have this many people in this age, just like on the verge of AI and what all the rest that's coming down the pike, still interested in writing.
Now, the flip side of that optimism – I'm Slavic, so there's always a flip side to the optimism – the flip side to that is that I worry sometimes that writing is becoming kind of a fashion statement. It's like when I used to walk into the School of the Arts when I was teaching at Columbia, and you'd have all these students standing downstairs smoking their unfiltered cigarettes, dressed in black, they look great. They all look like Paul Oster, with those soulful eyes flies and the hair and this and that. And it was great. But I think sometimes the notion of actually writing is becoming kind of a more of a pose than the actual thing itself.
If you're a man, you think you have this like romantic vision of yourself on the porch in Cape Cod, and you're sitting there with like three-day scruff of beard and you're looking really good in your black sweater. And you know this pretty girl comes walking down the beach and sees you clacking away on your typewriter writing your novel.
And so there's this whole sort of romantic encrustation around what's really very simple, very unromantic, very basic. It's just one woman or one man sitting in a room by themselves, writing isn't done by committee, trying to say something, trying to say something that's essential to them, and then hoping that by some miracle, by some alchemy, it'll be essential to somebody else.
That's it. What I used to say to my students, it's not about the goddamned shirt. It's not about the shirt. It's not about how good you look. It's about that sentence. And so you answer like, where's hope? Well, I think there's some hope in the fact that so many people still want to write, they're interested. On the flip side, it's like, well, why? I would love to know, how do you see writing? Do you just see it as an answer to the increasingly soulless options out there? I don't know. A lot of people are interested in writing, but then when I talk to them, I realize that they haven't read. And so I'm wondering, what do you think it is that you're doing here?
Joshua Doležal: I think what you're describing, and because we're both on Substack, where this interview will be shared, there's a premium on soulfulness or rawness. There's this sense that the thing that is most authentic is the thing with the least precision and that you shouldn't second guess yourself. The zone that matters is the zone of creation and that it is a kind of way of claiming your voice.
I think that soulfulness goes, it’s kind of like the Jack Kerouac school, there's a kind of revival of a Beat sensibility about it. That to me is not about craft at all. It's more, as you're saying, it's like an accessory. It's a cool thing to do with your time, but it's not an apprenticeship to anything. It's not a calling. It's not a tradition that you're joining with deference to those that have come before. In fact, there isn't really a long arc from the past that you're trying to follow or add to or contribute to. It's really very contained in the present. Recency is part of the currency of that kind of soulfulness.
So that's the downside I suppose of it. I'm German and Slavic and so I don't know that I see the upside as often. I get kind of a double dose of the other.
But one of my guests last fall, John Pistelli, who self-published his novel serialized it on Substack and then got a deal with Belt Publishing. John's idea is that there is no universal readership anymore or broad readership. It's sort of symptomatic of the shift from network television to cable to streaming, that everything gets kind of fragmented. It's on demand. You can't sit around a campfire anymore and with a guitar and sing songs that everybody knows because everybody's got their own little playlist. So his idea is that increasingly the people that we're writing for are small coteries. And that that's the best that it can get. And the idea of a broad reach is kind of part of what we have to let go in this brave new world. So there are implications for that that are financial, but I think there are also implications for craft because there isn't a shared sensibility of what real achievement looks like in writing either.
So it's kind of everyone's retreating inward to their own sensibility and then trying to find a tribe that kind of rallies around it, rather than doing what hooked me on writing, which is taking my life or ideas. I'm not as much of a fiction writer, but bridging the gap between myself and a stranger who would think if they saw me on the subway, that they had nothing in common with me.
But there's this kinship that forms on the page. And that's not what happens in a small coterie, but that's that's what Pistelli is saying is the future. I'm not sure what your thoughts are on that.
Mark Slouka: I think that, and maybe he's an example of how people will find ways of kind of tunneling in, you know making it work. It may not work the way it did, but you have to stop and, I'm really suspicious of that kind of Golden Age thinking. I could make an argument that higher education was significantly better, different and better, than it is today. I'm not as sure of publishing because at least for the last 30, 40 years, because you had these gatekeepers who were, even then, already sort of aiming for kind of that big, fat, middle of the consuming culture, right? This is how, this is how sales work, this is how capitalism works. Whatever it is you're selling, you're not selling to a minority audience, by definition. You're trying to aim for the big middle where you'll get the biggest numbers, the most customers and so forth.
But that militates against originality, against difficulty, against innovation, against a whole lot of things. You know, you go back to1851, when Moby Dick, you know, Moby Dick was, it's still arguabl, the greatest novel in American history, but it was reviled as this mad thing. I mean, he had like four readers in England who actually said, my God, you've done something extraordinary. The rest of them thought he lost his mind.
He and Hawthorne were bitching about the women “scribblers” back then. Which was partly jealousy. Partly misogyny. The fact is that there were popular writers back then as well who were, you know, selling 400,000, 500,000 books. Whereas The Scarlet Letter sold what, 1500 or something. And Henry David Thoreau ended up with a library consisting of 900 copies of his own damn book, Walden, and made jokes about it.
So I think that the new ways of cutting the cake, whether it be self-publishing, whether it be serializing on Substack, whether new avenues will begin to creep up, whether independent, kind of low overhead publishing houses will begin to assert themselves.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, considering that what I see at the publishing houses right now is an ever more desperate clawing for the bestseller. There's a wonderful line. It's probably apocryphal. That the late actor Heath Ledger was at the Oscars and he was sitting next to somebody, and I forget somebody else had won the Oscar, and he felt he should have, and he turned to the person next to him and he said, “Well, I thought this award was for the best acting, not the most acting.”
Well, I think that right now what we're seeing, and it pisses me off because I can't do it. I'm not that kind of writer. We're seeing the most writing, not the best writing. We're seeing loud, we're seeing, hey, more zombies, more Nazis, more this, more that, more bells and whistles, more loudness. Whereas everything in me tends toward, tends in a different direction toward that. Again, it can be entertaining as hell. It can be something you can't put down. But it has to be good. It has to actually say something that I hadn't thought of already. It has to move me, shake me, affect me in ways that a lot of the contemporary stuff doesn't. So I'm trying to be positive here.
I'm trying to think of like, okay, maybe the good work will begin to come up through different avenues, and maybe yes, maybe we won't have that big audience we dreamed of, but that big audience usually came at a price. I mean, there were exceptions, extraordinary novels that sold a lot of copies, but they were always the exceptions. The stuff that sold a lot of copies was Michael Crichton. It's like, you know, try reading Michael Crichton. If I had hair, I'd pull it out. It’s just bad sentences. He could write really good plots. That's why they were all made into movies. Good for him. I'm sure he did very well. But that's the kind of stuff that's been published for a very long time. The Good always had trouble coming up through the system. It may be having more trouble now than ever, but I'd like to think that people are an inventive lot. They may come up with new avenues.
And I personally, for one, I would love to take advantage of them.
Joshua Doležal: So you are a Substack writer. I was pleasantly surprised, but also just surprised to see you join, given that it's another one of those places – you came to it with no platform, with no favors to call in. You're starting from scratch after a fairly decorated writing career. You know, writing for venues like Harper's and publishing with Norton for most of your life. And so you're doing that for a much smaller readership on Substack. And part of me is curious why you're doing that. And part of me would love to know also what else you're working on, if you're willing to talk about it and why you're working on that given all the givens that we've covered in terms of craft in the marketplace and what the hope is or not for something like that coming to fruition?
Mark Slouka: Well, I'm too old to bullshit. I mean, honestly, I came to Substack partly out of desperation, out of a need to articulate some thoughts, some ideas. It's not enough to write in my journal. You know, I've kept a journal since I was 17. But that's a different kind of writing. I never expected to fork any lightning.
I expected to be writing for a handful of people and to try to get something down every week or two that satisfied me, which said something about the world we're in. The reason I came to Substack was. Again, without getting sort of unduly confessional, that I finished a novel, a sequel to a novel of mine called Brewster, finished it to my satisfaction.
You know, but it's not a particularly loud story, but I think it's a pretty good story. And it talks about a couple in America who have their own ghosts, both the husband and wife, that they carry with them. And it's about their life and the obstacles they run into and how those obstacles are eventually surmounted through the kindness of strangers. So really it's a book about sort of the better angels of our being, of our nature in America. And I was proud of that for that reason, that I wanted to write a book which wasn't about the serial killer in the trailer park – often written by people who've never been in a trailer park in their lives. So it just annoys me.
But I gave it to one agent who's very good. And then I gave it to a second agent who's arguably even better. And I ran into a wall. I realized that for 25 years, I simply took for granted that whatever I wrote would find a home. It just would. I would write a novel. Or I'd write a collection of stories or collection of essays. And it might not be Knopf, it might not be HarperCollins, it might not be Houghton Mifflin. It might not be Norton, but it would find a home. And I just took it for granted. I was incredibly spoiled that way, I think.
What I didn't realize is the landscape was changing under my feet quietly. And so this book was finished and I sent it off, and both of these agents started, as I said, they're really very good agents, and they started receiving replies in some cases from editors who didn't even want to read the manuscript. In some cases, editors I've worked with successfully. And the reason they were given, which just shocked me, it sounded like some right wing propaganda nonsense, but the reactions they got were—there's the question of a sales record, which is lousy, but more mportant is the fact that he's a middle-aged white man. He's just not interesting. We're not interested in another novel by another middle-aged white man. And I was shocked by this, absolutely shocked by it. And I thought, well, that's just this editor, or that one. But I heard from both agents who don't know each other, and the story they gave me was almost verbatim and they were shocked by it.
And the long and the short of it is that I was, that I found myself sitting on a novel that I worked on, off and on – I wrote another book in the middle of that one – but off and on for, what, eight years. And it hasn't found a home. And so some point I was actually was thinking of it as a trilogy. I was thinking of writing a third one. But now with the second one mired in the mud, it was kind of come to Jesus time. It's like, well, okay, what do I, nevermind the financial hit, because I didn't expect to make a lot of money, but I expected to make something, some small advance that would kind of feather the nest a little bit.
And so it was a time to really reevaluate, rethink. And I wish I could say I got very far. I'm not really sure how to, how to finesse this.
Joshua Doležal: In some cases it might be a principle of justice and others it might be the shifting priorities that we're talking about earlier.
And if craft doesn't play into it, you know, take your demographics out of it. If the main thing that you offer is a high command of craft, but there's a low premium on that because it's roof thatching, then maybe it's less personal in that way. It's more about the sensibility that has fallen out of favor or it was not a loud enough book, it didn't have grievance at the heart of it.
There might have been other ways that – you know, Jake Tapper just published a book. It's not as if demographics are stopping everyone. So I think that some of what we're talking about is a shift in sensibility, and that's why I said this series that I'm doing is a bit defiant in the sense that for me, because I can't do those other things – not that I can't do any of them, because my Substack was founded really on a series of polemics about higher ed. And I think if I had just really embraced that and become a jeremiad preacher on Substack, there's definitely a market for that. People like reacting to things. The playbook I've heard for going viral is that you speak to one tribe while speaking against another tribe. So if you have something that's polarizing in that way that makes both of them upset, that's something you can ride for a while. I don't find that satisfying. I was writing out of a particular angst and kind of shock of my own, but I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life.
I wanted to actually recover from that and find something that was more soul-affirming that was meeting my standards of craft. And that would be less limited to particular moments in time and something that might be more enduring.
So when I'm talking to people about craft, it's, for me, the principle of writing that transcends the political, that transcends all the vagaries of any particular fashion. It connects me to a writer like Hawthorne. It connects me to a writer like Phyllis Wheatley. I feel that I can go back in time and find kindred spirits in the literary tradition. And there's a lot of meaning that comes from that and thinking that I'm striving toward the same goals that they were more or less.
It's almost like a religious tradition of artists and that we share a set of practices and a hope and desire and yearning for nirvana or enlightenment or salvation or whatever it is that experience of good writing feels like. That's the thing that to me, gives meaning to the enterprise.
Mark Slouka: I used to tell my writing students, you know, there are kind of two parts to this racket. There's the writing and then there's everything else. It's like when you're sitting in your room, when you're working on this thing that you're writing. That's, to me, that's it. That's the world. And then the reason we have other people, editors, publishers, publicists, all the rest is because they're better at that other stuff. That's not for us.
Well, more and more I think it's becoming, marketing is kind of where it's at. Well, that's a problem for people like me, because I'm not a marketer. I can't sell anything to anybody. So, Substack in a sense, what I love about it is that I get to hear back from readers. I don't hear often, but when I do, I get to hear back from readers quickly. Right? Back in the old days, I published an essay in Harper's or The Paris Review or whatever, and maybe two months later they'd get a letter in the mail and they forward it on to me. And I always get a kick out of that.
But it was, it was rare and few and far between. Now there's something like a dialogue happening. The flip side of that are the numbers, the metrics, the, oh, you know, I worked hard on that piece and I got six likes. And you find yourself thinking, well, what did I do last time because I got 10 likes. What did I do wrong? Well, I didn't do anything wrong necessarily. Don't worry about it. Just write your thing. So I'm still negotiating this new world, trying to figure out how to work it. Mostly right now I'm grateful for having a venue in which I can simply express what I want to express this week about this increasingly complicated world we find ourselves in.
Considering that my other, other venues have largely closed off, you know, you go where you can
Joshua Doležal: If you look down the road, even five years, if there were some of those glimmers of hope that you're describing that were to continue to bear fruit, what would be some good things for yourself personally and for book culture generally that you'd like to see?
Mark Slouka: I think that literature is…it's about growing the self. It's not just a product. It's what makes human beings human beings, in some sense. It grows the capacity for empathy. That's not going to just end, I don't believe that. It's a fundamental, it's some kind of a human need, still, even in this age.
My favorite anecdote is kind of a grim one, but it's also kind of memorable. There's a place out here in a city called Brno, here in the Czech Republic. And during the Second World War, the Nazis took over this university, it's called Kounicovy koleje, and reformed it into an execution yard. It was a horrendous place.
When that place was liberated in the spring of 45, the troops coming in found crammed into the cracks in the bricks, they found bits of toilet paper with poetry, with bits of writing, with stuff on them, jammed in there with whatever they had available to them.
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.
It's still there on some level. It's just trying to find its way through this thicket of difficulty having to do with media, with marketing, with what's happening to universities, da, da, da. I'm not sure what form it'll take or how it'll come out the other side, but I do believe it'll survive. I do.
Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next month with a review of Dr. Rana Awdish’s memoir, In Shock. Stay tuned next week for another installment from my fatherhood memoir.
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