8 Questions for... Joshua Doležal
The Recovering Academic
, author, book coach, and journalist, writes The Recovering Academic which includes notes on life after academe with interviews, essays and craft resources. His memoir, Down From The Mountaintop, is published by The University of Iowa Press, and his poetry collection, Someday Johnson Creek, is forthcoming from Syringa Books later this fall.
1. Why Substack?
I came to Substack a little more than two years ago during a period of profound isolation. I'd just resigned a tenured faculty position that I'd held for sixteen years and moved to Pennsylvania with my family. After writing on the side for many years, I was hoping to make more headway as an independent artist. But we all know that lit mags take longer than ever to respond, that submission fees pile up, and that grinding away at agent pitches day after day is soul-withering. I'd left all my friends and colleagues behind, and I needed a new community to feel that I was writing with purpose. Substack became a place for me to make sense of my life transition in real time, and to begin building an independent writing life in earnest.
2. How long did it take you to find your groove?
About a year. I had some early success -- a piece went viral maybe four months in, caught the eye of The Chronicle of Higher Education (which asked to reprint it) and then earned my first featured publication badge. But this is the kind of extrinsic reward that I'm supposed to be recovering from in my departure from academe! So the boom/bust cycle kind of messed me up for a while. Perhaps someday I'll be ready to niche down and settle into a more focused content stream. But for now the focus is really on writing that sustains me, not writing that drives growth. That approach has brought me more peace, and I think that satisfying my own creative hunger and perplexities attracts readers who will stick with me for the long haul. That is my groove, such as it is.
3. How has it changed you?
I feel more confident in my writing life than I ever have, like I have a real voice as a public intellectual. It has also been gratifying to know that my struggles with academe and with traditional publishing are fairly universal. But I'm still changing. The biggest challenge is shifting from the mindset that served me well when I wrote primarily for a handful of gatekeepers whose sensibilities I could anticipate. My readership is much larger now and also somewhat inscrutable. I've never been comfortable with the idea of writing purely for myself -- I want my writing to serve others. But it really seems that the best way to do that now is to trust my own instincts, to answer the questions that feel vital to me. I can't say that my confidence in that approach is unwavering, but it is fundamentally different from how I approached my writing even two years ago.
4. What mistakes have you made?
The biggest error was and still is getting swept up in the hustle rhetoric and feeling that I needed to play by others' rules. I've never been a one-trick pony and never will be. As a teacher, I loved my American Lit survey, Personal Essay course, medical humanities and environmental literature courses, and Willa Cather seminar equally. I still write poetry, memoir, journalism, and fiction. Branding is anathema to my creative life, and I need to remember that being bad at the branding game does not mean that my writing is subpar. But it's a daily struggle to avoid that mistake.
5. To pay or not to pay?
I've been collecting payments for more than a year. It's nice to feel supported in that way, even if the path to a primary income is long and uncertain. I've launched a new website for my coaching business (www.joshuadolezal.com), where I hope to feature courses inspired by my Willa Cather Read Along, new books, and perhaps also best-of collections from my Substack archive.
6. What artistic and technical choices have you made?
Some of this is still evolving. I have used the podcast and voiceover features, though editing audio to my standards is often too time consuming when I'm spread thin. I don't see video or chat threads in my future. I'm not sure that I've seen a meaningful difference between the discussion thread feature and a comment thread on a regular post, so when I want to start a conversation I typically just use a shorter post, since it allows me the full range of aesthetic options. Those are the more technical choices.
Artistic choices are harder to pin down, but I think I have learned the value of modulation. Which is to say that I try to balance my polemics with more affirming pieces, as much for my own wellbeing as for engagement from my readers. It's possible that I ought to be making more artistic choices, though. I can see the potential benefits of identifying a clearly organized sequence of posts for a month or two, so readers aren't guessing about what they'll see from me every week.
7. What’s been the effect on your writing?
This is a very good question and perhaps a more essential one than we care to admit. My hope, initially, was that my weekly output would seed my longform writing, that the discipline of turning something out each week could become a strategy for writing books. I've seen that work for other people. But I came to Substack during a period of profound disruption in my life, and the first rupture from academe was followed by an equally (or more) seismic divorce. I think Sarah Orne Jewett is right that we need to find a quiet center and write from there. I've not climbed far enough up Maslow's pyramid to feel ready for a new book project, for the clarity and long view it would require. And so I have found myself feeding the feed, rather than framing my weekly output within a larger structure. I would like to think that writing each week is a way to stay in the game, so that I will be ready to lean in with more focus when my life allows that. But you know how Facebook or Instagram can infiltrate your thoughts, so that you see every private moment as a potential status update or post? I don't want Substack to have that effect on my writing. I want my creative center to remain my own. That's a work in progress.
8. In it for the long haul?
I'll be a writer for the rest of my life. But I had a writing life before Substack, and I'd still be a writer if the platform disappeared. I am wary of placing too much faith in an enterprise that is still young and that has some deep structural flaws, as I wrote earlier this fall. So I suppose my answer is yes, with the caveat that my writing life isn't going anywhere but that time will tell whether my values will remain aligned with Substack's as it continues to evolve.
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Absolutely love this series. And although I’m a visual artist (rather than writer) this point Joshua makes is crucial for all of us in world of wide web: “But you know how Facebook or Instagram can infiltrate your thoughts, so that you see every private moment as a potential status update or post? I don't want Substack to have that effect on my writing. I want my creative center to remain my own.”
Loved this. I love the whole series because it's such an inside baseball into other writers' thinking and approach to writing. It's amazing how everyone is grappling with a lot of the same questions no matter how different our logistical realities around our writing seems from the outside.
Joshua, I found your takes on both branding and the difficulty in "planning" pieces especially pertinent and relatable.