8 Questions for... Sam Kahn

Castalia

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Sam Kahn

writes literary-minded essays, short stories, reviews, and political commentary at Castalia and is an editor at Persuasion. He has worked as a documentary producer at Netflix, Paramount+, etc.

1. Why Substack? 

I was really at my wits’ end before I found Substack. I was trying to get my work out in about four different genres — plays, fiction, literary essays, and political essays — and hitting dead ends everywhere. Only the essays would ever occasionally get published and, usually, they would be edited well past the point of recognizability. Once that happens long enough, you tend to assume that you’re either a bad writer or a crazy person — which was really unfortunate since I liked writing more than anything and had made all kinds of sacrifices and gone through a whole vast internal journey to be able to do it. When I started on Substack, the feeling was that this was what I had been looking for ten or fifteen years. I sort of had to pinch myself to believe it was real. 

2. How long did it take you to find your groove?

I had such a backlog of stuff on my laptop that, in a way, I’m still working through it. I pretty much knew exactly how I wanted to write — there were these different sides of myself that I wanted to be able to express — but, in terms of readership, I really thought that it would be like dropping a penny down a mineshaft. I cross-posted my first pieces to Facebook and made sure to include my Substack in the bio whenever I had an article published outside the platform. I also reached out to larger Substacks that I liked and which seemed to be in my field. It was crickets at first — and I’d made my mind up to not be fazed by that — and then, little by little, there was a trickle of regular readers and then, amazingly enough, there were people leaving long, thoughtful comments. It’s had a momentum of its own since then. 

After not too long, that led to a relationship with Persuasion where I am an associate editor. Persuasion is a classy, high-end publication — a real jewel — and deserves to be better-known with the wider media ecosystem. And, as you know, in the last few weeks we've been laying the groundwork for the Metropolitan Review, which

Ross Barkan

and I had a brainstorm for earlier this year. The Metropolitan Review, primarily a book review publication, means to provide a venue for a great deal of the literary energy within Substack and to create a space for the wide-ranging discussion of books and ideas with both a Substack and, ideally, a printed magazine. Our dream is to get some of the magic of the early Village Voice/New York Review of Books. We are looking to launch early next year and, hopefully, to feature the work of a great many people reading this.  

3. How has it changed you?

I really can’t say enough good things about Substack. I was in a very desperate place, in terms of disseminating writing, before I found it. In the end, it’s made me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about artistic production. I’d always sort of thought that people had to hoard their work, and edit endlessly, and then produce this one amazing thing that they would share with the world. And, more and more, I’m coming to realize that that way of thinking is an artifact of modes of production from the pre-digital age — and which never corresponded in any case with how I naturally tended to write. I really feel that expression is infinite, that you can turn yourself into an engine of creativity, and that that is as good a way to live a life as any. I’d always intuitively felt that to be the case, but there really wasn’t a real-world corollary to that sensibility before Substack came along.  

4. What mistakes have you made?

No mistakes! Substack is an astonishingly forgiving crowd. You really only have to worry about mistakes if you have a boss to please, or something like that. I decided pretty early on that I wouldn’t worry very much about optimization. I would include these hellishly long short stories and essays — and it wouldn’t bother me if very few people read to the end. I did feel, though, that I should compromise with my readership and write some pieces — political hot takes, rabble-rousing sermons on the virtues of Substack, etc — that are a little more conducive to desktop and iPhone-reading. I think of my output as something like ‘two for you, one for me,’ where I sometimes give readers what I expect might be interesting to them and then sometimes ask them to indulge me a bit more. 

5. To pay or not pay? 

I turned on my pay feature from the beginning but have put almost nothing behind a paywall. I tried to do a paywall every so often, but I ended up feeling kind of sad for the pieces behind it. I think I’m far from optimizing myself on this front, but my idea has been to make Substack a creative home and happy place and then to also use it as a springboard to find commissions and editorial work elsewhere — and, actually, that strategy has worked pretty well so far. If I get broke, I might have to rethink my relationship to the paywall. 

6. What artistic and technical choices have you made? 

I kind of chose not to choose — so I’ve been making all kinds of mistakes from an optimization angle. I haven’t worried about creating a clear content brand, about word count, about paywalls, or about trying to grow very fast. There are all kinds of pools of dark energy on the web, and there’s always a question about whether I want to dip my toes in any of them. The fact is that my most ‘successful’ pieces have been ones where I pretty mean-spiritedly attacked other writers. I feel morally in the clear about that — other people’s ideas are fair game for critique as far as I’m concerned — but I don’t want to do that too often, even if it's a shortcut to virality. It’s important for me to (within reason) maintain good energy in my Substack.

7. What’s been the effect on your writing?

It’s given me a very rubbery feeling. In the old model, where people put out a story or novel once a year, if they were very lucky, there was a glass-like feeling to writing — you were supposed to ‘polish,’ to make it as perfect as possible. That always went against my own sensibilities — I’m not a polisher, and my belief is that writing is closer to speech than it is to some sort of arts ’n’ crafts — and Substack really works for me since the natural rhythm of it seems to be ceaseless output. I’d worried that at some point I would just run out of stuff to say, and it’s been a pleasant surprise that I find more and more things that I want to write about. That’s not some special virtue of mine; it’s just that imagination tends to take the shape of its container. 

8. In it for the long haul? 

Inshallah! I once went to a museum where a guy — he was actually famous for something else — had a work of art for basically everything that had ever happened in his life. If he’d pricked his finger as a kid, there would be a collage of that. If he bought a car, there would be a sculpture. When the Internet started to come out, that’s what I thought it would become — that everybody would have their personal museum, their bare wall to really express themselves. That seemed not to be happening, and then Substack suddenly made it possible for writers. So I’d like to continue writing on it for as long as Substack exists. It’s a scandal, by the way, that Substack hasn’t gotten more positive attention from establishment media. My feeling is that the action is going to be here for writing for some time to come, and the secret will come out eventually — the platform will only continue to evolve in interesting ways. 

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