Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to The Things Not Named. I’m Joshua Doležal. This year I’ve been asking writers how they know high-quality writing when they see it and how their own sensibilities have been forged. My guest today is Sam Kahn.
writes literary-minded essays, short stories, reviews, and political commentary at and is an editor at . He is also Founder and Editor of . Sam has worked as a documentary producer at Netflix, Paramount+, and other studios.I should mention that when Sam and I spoke, he was in a café in southern Kyrgyzstan, where he is helping to establish a new college. So you’ll hear some of that background noise as we go, but I hope it adds a note of authenticity, which is one thing I’ve come to associate with Sam’s writing.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
On Literacy, The Soul, And The New Intensity
Joshua Doležal: It’s funny, Sam, you’re so prolific. And yet you’re kind of an enigma online. I tried to do a little bit of research on you, and it’s like you’re a spy or something.
Sam Kahn: So the throughline is basically that I get paid for the stuff that I care the least about.
There’s an almost perfectly inverse proportional relationship between the thing that I put time and effort and love into, and the things that get monetarily rewarded. If that makes sense, everything else kind of follows from there. So I’ve had one life, which is just basically trying to earn a living.
And essentially I’ve been going through a career change the last few years. So for about 10 years I was working in documentaries first as an associate and then as a producer. There were some things I liked about it, but at the end of the day it wasn’t really for me. And then I was doing kind of a career transition to trying to figure out something to do with print media that could actually make money. And what ended up happening was that I worked for
, which is based on .So I’m an editor there. It’s been really a nice job to have. And then in the middle of that, I moved out of nowhere to Kyrgyzstan to teach at a university, which somebody I knew offered me a job for. And actually right now I’m involved in setting up a college in Southern Kyrgyzstan, which is wild and is a very exciting thing to be doing.
But my real life story is basically just trying to be a writer and trying to get better at it, to be a quality writer. And then secondarily trying to get things out there. And that’s mostly been long, endless frustration of just having lots of things in my laptop, no real outlet, a little bit of outlet for the stuff I care less about, which is journalism and criticism. But very little outlet for the stuff I care a great deal about, which is plays, which is fiction, both novels and short stories.
Substack for me has just been a godsend. It’s been an unalloyed good in terms of taking all this material that was just sitting in the black hole of my laptop and sending it out into the gray hole of internet space. That’s really why I’ve been so evangelical about Substack and where you and I differ a little bit, is that for me it took this hole in my soul that I’d had for about 10 or 15 years, and then flipped that into a productive outlet.
Joshua Doležal: It seems like the thing that you really care about is the thing that you get the least engagement on. So what you are known for by most people on Substack and in your freelance writing is this electric and really just shockingly creative take on history, on criticism. The way that you write a review, you’re not really a journalist, but the way that you write that kind of think piece is really unlike anyone else.
And so that’s how you’ve made your name on Substack.
Sam Kahn: I’ve been serializing something the last few months, which has much less engagement than hot takes on other stuff, and that’s just the way it is. I mean, that’s just a fact of the internet age and probably something about the human psyche in the 21st century. But thank you for what you’re saying about the criticism.
I guess the philosophy on this is a few things. One is that I feel very strongly that writing is basically closer to speech and to thought than a lot of people tend to think. So if we’re talking about craft, I always have this idea in MFA land and these kinds of things, I tend to feel that everybody’s talking about creating a wicker chair, creating this immaculate product. And to me, that’s not really what it’s about. What it’s really about is just connecting to your thoughts and your instincts at a given moment in time.
If you’re accessing that honestly, then it’s always interesting and it’s always valuable, and so I get frustrated with most social interaction. I don’t really like talking to people that much. Because there’s just so many layers and so many filters barring you from what anybody really wants to say. And in writing you just don’t have that problem. If you have the guts to say what you want to say, then to me that’s automatically interesting and true and of value. I partly train myself to do this through some complicated inner journey, but I think I also believe in this more than a lot of other people do.
That it’s okay to just put a lot of stuff out there. You don’t need to have a brand. You don’t need to be that structured in it. If it’s true to you, it’s worth saying. And then it’s other people’s problem if they want to read it or not.
So that’s my worldview.
Joshua Doležal: I don’t mean this to be as glib as it might sound, but in some ways you’re kind of like Susan Sontag, right? Who had this vision of who she really was as a writer or wanted to be, and then became known for all these essays that she kind of wrote in her mind with her left hand, but that was her legacy, Illness As Metaphor. I don’t know of any of her novels that I’ve read that I think of as more influential than that.
Sam Kahn: I think if I kind of strip down to who I am, I have a pretty analytical cast of mind. I’m not a super creative person. Sometimes you’ll meet these people and they become writers or artists, and you ask them what their lives were like as children, and they had these imaginary friends in complicated worlds. My inner life as a child was baseball lists, I mean, over and over again.
But I really loved reading. I loved writing. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I kind of knew from fairly early on what I was lacking in, which was really imagination and a certain degree of social nuance, social understanding. And I feel like I went through a whole journey to basically develop that in myself. And so I think being able to write plays opened up for me when I was in my mid or late twenties.
Being able to write a short story opened up when I was towards my mid-thirties, and I think novels really opened up for me a few years ago. I mean, there’s still this thing that drives me crazy, which is that this novel that I’m very fond of, that I’m posting, if I post a chapter of it, it’ll get about seven likes. If I post something on the Israeli conflict or something about Trump, which fundamentally I know nothing about, I’ve never met Trump, I know it’s going to get about 70 likes, something like that. And it’s just the way it is. It’s not really something I can fight.
I mean, there are these limitations to Substack about it being maybe at its heart a social media. But to me it’s close to being a miracle because everything in the culture was going towards shorter and shorter form bullshit for a long time. And I mean, that’s just what it seemed like with Facebook and Twitter. And the fact that people’s attention spans are getting longer again is amazing.
And then that creates the possibility for something else to happen for a renaissance and people really appreciating fiction and really appreciating deep stuff. And that’s what I’m here for. I want a flourishing literary culture where people have pride in their inner lives and in essentially their souls and in the stuff that matters.
Joshua Doležal: This is always happens when I read your work and then when we talk, I feel like we’re kindred spirits. But then I hear these, for me, irreconcilable tensions in some of what you’re saying. So all of my life, when I became a serious writer, the writing itself took place out of sight. And the only way that you had engagement was when you worked through this laborious process of revision and you had this longform piece or poem that you’d really crafted as carefully and beautifully as you could. And then you shared it and then you would amass a body of work and then publish a book and you didn’t really show much mess behind the scenes.
I don’t write longform as much as I used to because I think there’s something fundamentally antithetical to the real-time engagement and the work that it takes to produce longform writing. Longform writing happens over sustained solitude. It’s not something that is improved by commentary.
The soul of my creative life that I followed for 20 years with the literary journal scene...it’s not gone, but it’s antithetical to everything you’re saying about Substack, the hot take, the shorter post. All those things are what get engagement and you sink more time into the longform work, you sink more of your soul into it, and that’s not what moves the needle.
To me Substack is really the opponent of that kind of creative work.
Sam Kahn: This might be close to I think where the pivot of our usual disagreement is.
I’ve had a turn in the last few years where I’ve really become kind of a McLuhanite in terms of really believing that the technology shapes the communication and that that’s kind of the way it is. And that basically in the collective memory of all of us, everything has been done a certain way for a couple of hundred years. We have this very stable form of the book, and then we have this distribution of the book. And I think that that whole system is really evaporating in front of our eyes. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing actually.
And I think part of what’s happening is that the internet is bringing us back to something that we haven’t really had since like the 18th century. Now that I come to think of it, that’s probably why I was in part calling it
, was that it’s just a little bit more dispersed.I remember a line that John Barth had. He was talking about a novel that he was writing in the sixties and he said he wanted to make an end run around Madame Bovary and when I came across that line, I thought that was very interesting. It was like there’s a solid form of the novel or really of the book that’s in our heads or of the print journal. But if you go around that, on the far side of it is something that’s a little bit looser and a little bit freer and is not for everybody, but it fits my sensibility in certain ways. It allows you to be fast. As you know, I don’t really like to edit. I just feel like the first take is basically the best take. That’s just sort of my disposition and a little bit my belief. And so I think where we are creates some possibilities to drive out in that direction.
And then I think some things become really interesting that in a way almost never existed before, which is the ability to compose in a crowd. I don’t know if there’s any law that says that writing has to come from solitude, that good writing has to come from solitude. I think good writing can come from being part of a vibrant community.
My writing has changed in some ways since I’ve been on Substack and in some ways that I’m grateful for. But you know, at the same time I’m also a creature of the old ways. And so for me, it’s like the mother of arts is to sit down and hammer out a novel that probably nobody will read and that is maybe a bad idea to do for the rest of my life or even my career. And here I’m totally with you. Like that’s the thing that matters most. And then the Substack schedule and all this other stuff is kind of an unfortunate distraction from it.
Joshua Doležal: What was your major, if I can ask?
Sam Kahn: I was a humanities major, which only exists at Yale. It was actually a creation of Harold Bloom when the English department had kicked him out in the seventies and he was sort of trying to revive a classical study, so they kept him on to do this. But it suited me.
I mean there were a lot of reasons for the ambivalence about Yale. So one thing that was going on was that I shut down as a writer to some extent as an adolescent. So there was a point when I was about 11, when I kind of decided I wanted to be a writer and I wrote a lot and all just kind of for myself.
And then I switched schools in middle school and I was at this new school, which is a very good school. But I suddenly had all this kind of social pressure and I felt like I had to conform. And part of the conformity was to basically write a lot less. I wasn’t trying to produce novels as a teenager which is something I’m still sort of sad about.
And in college that feeling of retreating a little bit from a true self was very much there. So I wasn’t writing as much freely as I wanted to write. I was a little bit scared of taking writing classes. I mean, I would write a lot of academic essays and I did do one writing class, which was kind of a big deal for me.
It was Daily Themes with
who’s now active on Substack and who left Yale in a very dramatic way, pretty much at the end of the semester that I was there. And Daily Themes is really very close to what I’m doing now, or what Substack does. It’s a famous class. It’s what it sounds like. You’re given a bunch of prompts for the week. Everybody writes a piece a day. When I first heard about that I was like, this is impossible. I haven’t written anything in years. A short story is a huge sweat in labor. But it’s actually, you kind of wake up that muscle and you can really do it. I mean, anybody in the class can do it.I didn’t necessarily love the stuff I was writing for it, but in retrospect, I think that was a precursor to what Substack has been for me, which is really about pushing yourself out of the comfort zone into basically writing when you don’t even think you have anything to say.
I was trying to be a writer afterwards, and there were a couple periods of being really stalled and it had to do with some expectations. It had to do with thinking I had to write the greatest thing ever. It had to do with undoing a certain undergraduate voice that had been kind of overdeveloped in essays, and so I felt like I had to go through this process of freeing myself from that. Which I think probably started in my late twenties. So in a way I think of my lovely, expensive education as being a psychological block that I had to get through. And so I’m much more comfortable now feeling like I’m on the outside or in this sort of weird wild space of just people writing very freely.
And that’s where I’m happy to go back to something you said earlier. It would be nice to have more readers and it would be nice to be written up, to have a certain kind of respectability for writing. But for me, the big inner battle was writing more or less in a way that I wanted to write, or in a way that I could be proud of myself.
That’s the lifelong struggle. Having readers is a secondary thing.
Joshua Doležal: Well, my assumption is that Yale was a stand-in for the canon: you enter this very selective environment, there are craft standards that you have to meet. There’s a strict hierarchy of expertise and you’re satisfying gatekeepers to an extent to get in and then to perform admirably once you’re in. I mean, you have a series called Curator where you fill that role yourself, but you really are against curation largely. You’re more for open doors and open gates. So those are some interesting tensions.
I mean, there are two posts [of yours]. One of them is among your most popular, if not the most popular, “Everything About How Writing Is Taught Is Wrong,” which to me reads as a reaction against that Yale mentality and maybe some things that you were taught there about workshops.
But I’m trying to reconcile that with other things, like a piece (I’m forgetting where you had this) “Novelists Have Forgotten Narrative.” A lot of what you’re pulling on in those critiques is things that newer writers have lost. There is a, not conservative, but more traditional vein in your expectations, your sensibility for that piece. But in the other one you’re really pushing back against that.
So on the one hand, you have a fairly traditional literary sensibility. That sense of what craft is and should be, what high level of mastery looks like, comes from writers who did, in fact, go through many drafts and painstakingly write in solitude. A Solzhenitsyn, for instance, might fall into that category. I don’t know what your opinion of him is, but I think of you drawing from that long past. But then in your own practice you feel that you don’t fit there. And so you’re kind of saying both things at once.
Sam Kahn: You’re right that what I am saying might be totally contradictory.
I mean, and there are a lot of points of tension that I’m not sure resolve. You said a couple things, so I’ll go through them. I mean, Yale was very complicated. Like a lot of things were going on there, and I sort of haven’t…there’s a post in my head that I haven’t written up yet that maybe I should do soon.
But there were a lot of things about Yale that weren’t what I expected going in and a lot of things that were changing very rapidly. So at the beginning, I did this directed studies the first year, which was kind of reading through the canon, which I loved. It was a great program and in a way was kind of the culmination of a fairly classical outlook that I’d always had. But Yale, there was a whole pseudo-MFA side to Yale. The writing workshops were pretty different, and I was a little bit leery of them. The student culture was kind of its own thing, and I had an ambivalent relationship to that.
And then in retrospect, this was in the two thousands, but the woke turn was kind of happening there. And it was on campus at that point and it hadn’t really moved off of campus yet. And I was kind of influenced by it. So by senior year I was writing critiques of directed studies my freshman year that in retrospect, I’m kind of like, what was I thinking? Like that was a great program. So there were a lot of different things going on at once.
The other main point you’re talking about are these different tensions. I’m kind of getting ready to launch an aesthetic movement called the New Intensity. And my idea with it is basically that writing our art is a way of connecting to the capaciousness of your own soul. That fundamentally it’s a religious experience, but deeper than a church or a creed, that you’re really supposed to talk to your soul. And then whatever comes out of your soul is the truth. And usually people can feel when you’re lying to your soul. And people can feel when you’re speaking the truth. And so what great literature is can look totally different. I mean, what Céline looks like is totally different from what Whitman looks like.
And I love them both almost equally. So I wouldn’t necessarily construct these things as a binary between say Solzhenitsyn writing in solitude and, I don’t know, somebody like Alan Ginsburg really believing that the first thought is the best thought and being connected with this downtown scene.
I think Solzhenitsyn and Ginsburg lived very different lives, and they’re connecting with themselves in different ways. And the way I write and the way you write are always going to be different and neither one of us is right or wrong.
What it is possible to do is it’s possible to be wrong within yourself. It’s possible to really limit yourself to let other voices get inside of your head. To me, that’s the enemy. The enemies are the different emotional psychological blocks. And so the process is getting past. And to get something that’s closer to your truth. And your truth can be many different things, and they can contradict each other and they can change over the course of your life. But I think usually you know when either you’re lying to yourself or somebody else’s voice is constricting your text. And for me what’s been exciting as I’ve written more and gotten more and more experienced is the feeling of expanding range.
There were different points when I thought like, oh, like this is a Sam Kahn story, this is a Sam Kahn piece. And then I realized, oh, wait a minute. There are actually a lot of different things that I didn’t think I could do that I could do.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I think we connect because of soulfulness and because of that fundamental integrity that we’re truth-tellers, and we will tell the truth that hits us deep and true or we’ll tell the truth that resonates in what you’re calling the soul.
I don’t mean to be too much of an academic, but how do you define the soul? How literally do you mean that?
Sam Kahn: I mean it pretty literally, and I mean it actually not that mystically. I mean it as inner life. I mean it as the stuff that sits inside you. That whole vast world inside a person that is pretty different from whatever their social presentation is.
We can talk about what that inner world is, and different religious and mystical traditions have different interpretations of it. But for me it’s an uncontroversial thing. It’s a very simple thing. And basically like all of our thoughts, all of our feelings, all of our emotions, all the stuff you never got to say to anybody. All of your dreams, all of your impressions, all of your imagination. The sum total of that is your soul. And that becomes basically the domain that you can write in or create in, is all of that, as well as basically the imprint of anything that happens in your life as it’s left on your inner life, which is a huge fucking domain. What I’ve kind of learned to do is basically to think about my domain as a writer as being basically anything that’s left some kind of an impression on that internal space. And that’s a lot of stuff. It would take me several lifetimes to write it all down.
So the challenge is first of all choosing and then having the discipline to do it, to write enough of it down that I feel satisfied. So that’s where I am.
Joshua Doležal: So earlier this year you wrote a post that was essentially a question, “Are Books Finished?,” which has been haunting me ever since. Books were a technology that served a purpose for a time, and you’ve kind of alluded to similar thinking about Substack as a disruptor, not just of publishing, but of literacy itself and that goes with another post that I think was spot on. And you’re ahead of the curve with a lot of these things. And sometimes I push back and sometimes I feel like I can’t argue with what you’re saying. And that was the essay, “What Was Literacy?” – past tense.
So I’m wondering, do you still feel that books are an outmoded technology? And similarly do you see literacy as it was defined through sustained and solitary attention as also obsolete? And if both of those are true, what gives you hope for the future of writing and the future of literature? Because you are definitely a lifelong devotee of literature.
Sam Kahn: Well, it is a really good question, and to me these are two pretty separate things and one I’m fairly optimistic about and one I’m deeply pessimistic about. So if books kind of disappear, I mean printed books in binding disappear, and the main communication is digital writing, I have really no problem with that. It’s just an adaptation to new technology. It’s cheaper. It opens doors for all kinds of people who don’t get to go through publishing. That’s what Substack is. That’s very exciting and I’m very bullish about that in part because I just don’t have any alternative. I don’t have access to a traditional publishing market. And so that side of it I’m kind of excited about.
The idea that literacy is actually sort of disappearing, like in our time, in our epoch – that to me is deeply, deeply depressing. I see how my kids are, I see how younger people are. And it’s like, man, the way they’re taking in the world is basically through these digital images. And to me, this is just bad news. I understand that they can survive in a world where everybody else is doing that. But it does mean that that takes away a certain connectivity with your deep self, it takes away a connectivity with language. Probably the bigger one is it takes away a certain continuity with the past. If somebody’s watching, like TikTok videos, their whole world starts with the digital era. They almost can’t conceive of anything that has happened before the advent of video. And if you do that, suddenly you’re cutting yourself off from 4,000 years of human…how we talk to each other across 4,000 years.
Joshua Doležal: Or is there a restoration of a more ancient… I agree with you effectively, I would add critical literacy to that, the ability to determine what’s true and what’s not. You know, how you trust information sources, how do you do actual research? Research has become almost a meaningless term. I believe in a scholarly method that almost no one uses anymore. And that’s part of the literacy that you’re casting in the past tense.
However, some say that TikTok and other forms like that are actually more ancient. Do you see that as a return to something fundamentally older, part of that human history, or is it really, like you say, a sharp break and something totally new?
Sam Kahn: Yeah, I do. I mean, in a way there’s something very unnatural about literacy and I think something we may be coming to terms with is that literacy never really went as deep into the population as we sort of think. Look, it’s possible to be a really intelligent, really successful person without having passed through reading or literacy. I mean, we have all these stories about illiterate people doing fabulous sums in their head and memorizing all these epic poems. Probably most people I’ve met in film are like this. Their brains don’t really work through reading, but they’re like really fucking smart and they can do all this stuff just in other forms.
So in a way, it’s not that much of a problem for humanity as a whole, but it’s a big problem for me. It’s a big problem for you. And it’s a problem for people like us because there’s some stuff that is just very hard to do without literacy. It’s very hard to do history without literacy. It’s very hard to do with a certain kind of internal excavation into that soul stuff that I’m talking about because film is always on the surface, it’s always dealing with images. It’s much harder to get at thought with film.
The first port of call for film is the visual plane. It’s the senses. The first port of call for literature is your thoughts. That’s where it’s connecting. So if we lose that it’s bad news for interiority. It’s bad news for continuity. And it kind of seems to be happening. And, and to be honest, this was something that in my wildest nightmares, I never thought would take place. I mean, I knew that everybody in school preferred to play GoldenEye than they did to read a book.
I’m sure we both had the experience of feeling a little bit apart from reading. But it always felt like there was going to be a stable mass and that being good at reading carried a certain social weight to it. And I do have a feeling that may be going away within our lifetimes. And that is deeply depressing. That I really don’t know what to do with exactly. I’m teaching students right now and I’m actually pretty reluctant to give them reading assignments because in a way I feel like it’s going to be a waste of time. They’re going to kind of break their heads on [it] and they’re not going to get very far and they can get the information other ways.
So this is something I’m wrestling with with my students. I’m a dinosaur in this way. I love writing. I’m just going to do it as long as I can. And if literacy falls off a cliff during my life, I’ll be sad, but it won’t affect the way I do things fundamentally.
Joshua Doležal: That’s “the thing not named” for today. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned next week for another craft essay.
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