Its All Write

It's All Write to Call Yourself a Writer

• It's All Write • Season 1 • Episode 8

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Essayist Shaan Sachdev contemplates what it means to be a writer & how to be a writer in the context of today's world; discusses the impact of unconscious bias in corporate journalism; and shares his process for writing on everything from gay bathhouse culture to geopolitical conflicts. It's a sexy and cerebral episode that even includes a little discourse on Queen Bey..."Bounce on that sh***, dance..."

After this episode, check out Shaan's Beyonce podcast "Diva Discourse" on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Shaan Sachdev is an essayist, cultural critic, journalist, and writer based in New York. He writes about a range of topics including philosophy,  America's preoccupations with race thinking, masculinity, biases in media, city life, and his two favorite divas, Beyoncé and Hannah Arendt. 

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Shaan's Work mentioned in the show:

"Steamography" (Strange Matter)

"Portrait of the Technocrat as a Stanford Man" (New England Review, Pushcart Prize Winner, Best American Essays 2024 Runnerup)

"Hysterical Empathy" (The Point) 

"God Save the Top"(The Point)

"The Gaza Generation" (LA Review or Books)

"The Key to Beyoncé’s Lasting Success" (Slate)

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Also mentioned in this episode:
The Writer's Room

Winners Takes All  by Anand Giridharadas

Allan Bérubé

Rachel Cusk 

Garth Greenwell 

Naomi Klein 

Maggie Nelson

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Follow the show in Instagram @itsallwritepod.

Email us at itsallwritepod@gmail.com

Shaan:

One thing that causes me perennial existential crisis as a writer is how thin the line is between writer and non-writer. Everybody writes, not everybody paints or sings or makes films, and so I feel like other genres of art are more comfortably sequestered in this kind of specialization of just a sheer medium. so I'm just like why am I a writer? And in a way all I am is a speaker or a thinker or an expressor. It's like saying I'm an exister, right. Or I'm a just, yeah. I'm a be-er.

Ariana:

Hi, I'm Ariana McLean.

Meryl:

I'm Meryl Branch Mc Tiernan.

Ariana:

And you're listening to, it's All Write.

Meryl:

A podcast about the writing life and those who live it. I am so thrilled to announce that my novel What You should Worry About is under contract to be published by Akashic Books this coming summer of 2026. Yay. Yay. Yay. And today we have, my friend Shaan Sachdev here. Hi Shaan.

Ariana:

Hi Shaan.

Shaan:

Hello. How amazing that the work paid off?

Meryl:

Yes. Yeah. The work, apparently it can pay off. So thank you. if you li listen back to our first episode in May, I was a bitter whore and now I am just a whore.

Ariana:

Alright. Alright.

Meryl:

Um, Shaan is a writer and essayist based in New York City, who writes about a range of subjects including philosophy, political bias, the military, industrial complex, queer city life, and his two favorite divas, Hannah Arendt and Beyonce. He's recently written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, the New Republic and others. He also co-hosts Diva Discourse, a Beyonce centered podcast.

Ariana:

Thank you so much for, for being here. So you write about such a range of topics from geopolitical issues to sexual issues to sex, sexual enjoyment, but with the same seriousness and with the same amount of um, research, you'd kind of put the same attention to to all topics that you do. So how would you describe your writerly persona?

Shaan:

It's a lovely question, and it's also a flattering observation because it feels like there's some being rewarded just in you acknowledging that. I went to grad school to study cultural criticism. I did a master's at NYU in that. And what we learned was how to be a specialist in the art of non-specialization. So how to almost feign specialization which you can't do if you're gonna write about a wide range of subjects. And I think I wanted to become a writer partly so I could think about anything I wanted. And I'm doing that by specializing in things for three months at a time. But my persona, I would say is yes, somebody who just wants to think about anything that comes to him. But that I think partly also reflects the audacity of writing. There's something problematic about that. I concede

Ariana:

What do you mean by, sorry, what do you mean by problematic?

Shaan:

I think maybe it's problematic to feign specialization. The upside to all this is that you, unlike a scholar who becomes so specialized and so insular, that you lose the ability to communicate to the public because you begin to, use arcane language and you're not considering style and presentation. The upside to being a cultural critic and essayist is you draw on the expertise of others to present something beautifully to the public. But the downside and the thing I'm saying is problematic is that. In a way, the line between being a writer and a non-writer is so thin that what I'm basically saying is, look, I wanna talk about anything I wanna talk about. And the question becomes what gives you the right to, and I think that begins to intersect with the idea of are you qualified, are you an expert? At what point are you allowed to write about something for a huge publication?

Meryl:

Like how much research, how much education are you part of that cu cultural group? Those, all those kinds of elements.

Shaan:

Exactly.

Ariana:

This is fascinating topic.'cause'cause right now there's the opposite is also happening where it's like, don't trust the experts. Right. So you have these, I feel like the,

Meryl:

like TikTok culture.

Ariana:

Yeah. So it's like on one hand people are questioning what makes you qualified to talk about this? But then on the other hand, oh, you're an expert. They're, there's some sort of conspiracy. They're part of the elite. You're trying to get elite. Yeah. Part of the elite. Interesting that you brought that up.'cause I feel like there's that tug of war happening right now So how do you, fit into that space? Just personally, like when you're going to write something and you, like, how do you find that confidence?

Meryl:

Or do you ever feel like this is not a topic that's right for me or that I should take on?

Shaan:

I think, okay, so I think there's two parts to this answer. The first is that there is a difference between taking a video of yourself ranting about something and engaging in the activity of formally cohering your thoughts in an elaborate and organized manner. When you do the latter, when you're not necessarily on TikTok, but you're writing an essay, you realize that you are required to have a certain degree of protracted engagement with the subject that will necessarily involve expertise. I think you begin to appreciate expertise, not as conspiracy, but just as having dwelled for long enough in a subject. But Meryl, to your question, when I have, say I have an idea, like I wanna write about how, which I did recently for the New York Times, like how difficult it is to walk through New York City, the first thing I'll do is ask, okay, who else has written about this? I might find that so many people have that there's no point in writing it. And so at that point, it's what new can I bring? The,

Meryl:

so that's your first step in deciding That's, yeah. Interesting.

Shaan:

I think the very first step is what exactly do I want to say? Is it just, is it one thought or can this thought be fleshed out? Because on the other hand, even if people have written about it, if you can write about something that's already been written about and bring a kind of new style to it, and even just say it with different words, I think there is some value to that.

Ariana:

Yeah, snaps.

Shaan:

And it's actually very easy. It's like this idea of there's infinite amount of sentences you can configure with the English language. There's also an infinite number of ways that a thought about something can be configured. Sometimes just the beauty or the the kind of contemplative approach you take to something that's been taken many times I think can still be worth putting out in public. But but Ariana, your initial question was how do I negotiate the contemporary tension between expert and non-expert? Was that kind of, it

Ariana:

wasn't it? I didn't actually pose that question'cause it felt a little big, but I would love if you have thoughts on that. It was more of an observation of the existence we're all living in.

Shaan:

Yeah, having worked in traditional news media for a long time primarily just to make a living. In addition to being a writer, you learn that the people who work in authoritative positions often are just trading in prefabricated information. They're taking reports, they're taking scientific reports and academic reports and what has considered authoritative history, and they're just regurgitating it.

Meryl:

And they're not taking a spin. They're not taking, they're not, it's impartial, so to speak,

Shaan:

yeah. And whether or not it's impartial, I feel like, is almost a more complicated question. I think what I'm trying to convey is more that it's that they are not engaging with it. They're holding it at a distance, and for them, they're also just working a nine to five. They just wanna get the day over with, and yet, from the outside, they might be viewed as the sinister. Yeah, crystallizers of what the overarching narrative is.

Meryl:

Interesting.

Shaan:

And then on the other side, you might have someone like me who's not an expert and not working at an institution and not even interested in just pulling that stuff to use blindly, but who wants to take a long walk and think about it at length and really get lost in the idea in a way that might make a lot of technical knowledge, secondary not primary. And so I think the lovely thing about being like a cultural writer is being able to fuse those worlds and those who are really skeptical of experts, in fact my aversion is less in the idea that there's something sinister at play and more in the idea of what I was, talking about in this primary instance that they're not looking upon the things that they're experts on with any wonder. They're not getting lost in it. It's just this sanitized relationship you know?

Meryl:

Do you have a favorite piece that you've written, I guess in recent years?

Shaan:

It's so funny because when I apply to residencies and when people ask oh, can I read something? I have to pick a favorite I, of course, as any writer ought to maybe I feel ashamed, slightly ashamed of everything I've written, right? Yeah. Right. It's like this I can do better. The essay that got the most recognition, or that at least helped my career the most was called Portrait of the Technocrat as a Stanford Man. And, it won a Push Guard Prize. It got shortlisted for Best American essays. And it actually just was born out of heartbreak. My, my boyfriend broke up with me and I decided to write a revenge essay. And it was rejected by 25 reviews. And finally the New England Review, which is run out of Middlebury, it's this beautiful small journal basically said we like it, but there's an issue. And they've pointed out the issue that I think other places had found with it, which was that I wasn't acknowledging my own elitism and criticizing another elite person. Interesting. Which was so true. And and in my anger, I didn't acknowledge that.

Meryl:

Right. You have to implicate yourself too in order for people to be on your side.

Shaan:

Exactly. That's exactly right. Yes. And so they actually they were nice enough to say, we'll, publish this if you can fix that. And they did. And it ended up being, I think. A pretty strong essay. I remember sending it to you when it came out, Meryl. Oh yeah.

Meryl:

Loved it. Yeah.

Shaan:

But I think that's, I think that's a good example of a mix of genres. It's personal essay, it's political analysis, it's philosophy. There's some literary criticism.

Meryl:

I, I also just read this morning your Steamroom-ography piece, which I have to say it was so suspenseful. Like that was really hard to do. It was a piece about bathhouse culture using actually going into a bathhouse and then giving like a long history, but in the midst of sexy what's gonna happen, suspense. So I feel like that was a really great way to have people learn about something while also being completely engaged in the story.

Shaan:

That's, it's, first of all, I have to just say it's so flattering that you guys have read anything. And I like, I feel like often when I hear people being interviewed, I'm like. They should at least take a moment to acknowledge that this is like a huge exercise and like flattery and narcissism. So thank you for allowing me to talk about my tiny little career. Yeah. With that piece, Steamroom-ography was written for a non-queer audience because I think for the most part, gay guys queer people are like more familiar both with the phenomenology of the experience itself and have some idea of the history. And yet I realized that every time I came out of this experience and talked to my friends about it, who weren't part of this little world, they were always shocked. And it was years and years of hearing people be like, wait, that happens. I wrote it in the second person to put the non cruiser into the cruiser shoes and just the idea of, yeah,

Meryl:

I didn't even notice that. That's so funny.

Ariana:

it felt like it started more of a personal essay. I don't know, creative essay. I don't know. There's so many words, but yeah. But then it got into, but then I was like, learning about all this history and taking us to I think we, you go back to the 19 hundreds or something and I was just like, oh, wow. This is yeah. Right. So what gives it a nice context?

Meryl:

Maybe Gen Z guy will figure it out, but he won't know that this he's part of a long history.

Shaan:

Yeah. And in that sense, I think there is something for even queer sub-cultures to gain from reading the essay. But I think it's also a good example of this idea that there are a lot of people who've written really seminal work about this history. So what I'm just doing is taking their work. Right. I'm not doing primary research. And this, in a way, this works as a case study for what we were talking about earlier where I'm taking Allan Bérubé's work, who's written about bathhouses, and I'm taking George Johnson. I'm taking like all these people who've really studied specifically New York. But the one little increment I'm making is even in an age of technological experience where you don't need to cruise manually. There's still such a thrill in doing so that it's, it exists even in these sanitized, privatized spaces. That's just a little thesis. And I'm like okay, so how can you take that though and turn it into an essay using other people's research? And one thing you do is you create a prestige, but the other is you're so invested in the experience of that increment that you can just make almost like an art product out of it, right? Like an artistic statement. And so there's a lot of feigned, there's a lot of faux expertise in it. I did spend like a few months researching before I started, and I think I learned as I was researching that, oh, there is something to also note about this circular pattern here, that bath houses emerged organically then we're disassembled because of the AIDS crisis and then had to find a new home informally, elsewhere. And so we're back to the pre bathhouse era. I think that little bit is me attempting humbly to contribute something small to this cannon, but I think the strength of that essay lies in, I'd hope, I think it's more in the art of the sentences than in the overall political contribution.

Ariana:

I love the little vignettes, like we're in the bathhouse and you're like, you can feel the steam and the steam figuratively and metaphor. Sorry. Figuratively and literally I need, was sitting

Meryl:

outside in the park and I was getting hot and I'm like, oh, we're hot. We're going the show. I gotta go to the

Ariana:

bath.

Shaan:

My, my grandmother said she stopped reading at the Moray eels bit. And I was like, that's fair.

Meryl:

Do you ever worry about anything that you put out there? How family and friends and any relationship that you have to read about this personal stuff

Shaan:

Sex wise? No.

Meryl:

Interesting.

Ariana:

I was gonna say, and we could expand that to, I think a lot of writers are either feeling censored or they are censoring themselves preemptively. And so do you feel that pressure or do you find, how do you maneuver in this world that we're living in this reality,

Meryl:

looking at your work, one might say, oh, he doesn't censor himself at all. It's so honest and brave and out there, but I feel like that's probably, I don't know. Is that true?

Shaan:

This almost this question to me feels like something a really good therapist would ask me, I think, part of it is that writing is necessarily a narcissistic act. I think it's very funny when people say, oh, I'm just writing to write. I'm not writing to be published. It's a lie because you are publishing what you're writing. Like you are very aware of that. And there's a huge difference between writing in public and writing in private. And I think that I do have a confessional impulse and I do personally, without having thought it through, just feel like art above life always. So I'm willing to, I'm willing to steal, I'm willing to write about people and write about myself. But I have absolutely felt the need to censor because I'm still in, I think, the outer parameters of what one would call an emerging writer. Not having yet published my first book. And when I started writing in early 2020, I had some kind of contrarian approaches to the way that identity and racial politics were being discussed. I think as an immigrant to this country, who was neither. Black, Latino or white. I felt like I had specific experiences that didn't clearly or neatly map onto what was being said. And it was at a time when if you even dissented in a microcosmic sense, you were punished. And and I'm speaking here as a progressive in a very progressive world. I'm not thinking about the conservative world, which I'm not even sure if they read, but

Meryl:

they we're safe. Yeah. Right,

Shaan:

right. So like this is I'm talking about an intramural drama here, and so I did have to proceed carefully and I wrote a piece for the point in 2021 called Hysterical Empathy that I had to think long and hard about some things in that and whether I wanted to write that down. And I ended up doing it, and then it ended up going well. There was a piece I wrote a year or two ago called God Save the Top. And there were some paragraphs there when it was being written that were. Taking an almost impishly, reductive view of what man and woman is. And I did it. I did it as part of the performance of the writer. And the editors were concerned about how that might be viewed among communities and advocates of communities that didn't agree with that binary. And so they asked me to, there were some paragraph.

Meryl:

Can you tell can you give a little tiny little log line about what the piece is about? Oh, of course.

Shaan:

God bless the top is, it's a piece that looks at the ethnography of gay sexual positions, but it also takes a personal root into why I prefer the passive sexual role rather than the dominant one. And the thesis of the pieces that the true gay man is always a bottom, that the true sexual divide between men doesn't lie and gay and straight, but between penetrators and penetrate. And so that was a piece where I had to actually take some paragraphs out. And this is how quickly time moves. Just two years ago, it was a lot trans issues had a certain fraught in the progressive circles that they don't right now, because now they're under siege from the outside in a way that is united the progressive front. But I, at this point I'm very worried about writing about politics at this point. Now, censorship and fear are top down. They're not bottom up. They're coming from the government. When I wrote a piece a few years ago about Ukraine and Russia, that took the position that NATO and the US were culpable in what was happening. I got some death threats, weirdly. Wow. But it was from like random people who were just like, I know where you live and we're gonna get you. And I was like okay, these are like freelance, gorillas. That's fine. At this point now, when you actually have federal agents detaining people for what they've written at student papers, there's a different climate of fear. And so I have a piece coming out in one week exactly on Gaza, and the Holocaust. It's a 7,000 word piece for the LA Review of Books that is partly a review of Pankaj Mishra's new book The World After Gaza. And it looks at how the Holocaust has been instrumentalized and exploited by Israel, and it uses primarily Jewish scholars to make that case. But it's a long meditation on how we got to this point. And I'm very nervous. I'm so nervous that I'm wondering to myself, do I write this under my name as an immigrant, as a naturalized citizen? Is it safe? To write about this

Meryl:

and primarily from the government. Like the concern would be from Trump, not from people. Absolutely not People.

Shaan:

Not from I'm not worried about people, I'm not worried about friends, I'm not worried about online angry people that is so cosmetic. And actually I feel like people who are still railing against that just don't have much perspective because it's not that scary at the end of the day.

Meryl:

Like what? So what someone hates you who can like Yeah,

Shaan:

exactly Right. But the idea but to have your

Meryl:

immigration status and, yeah. No, but

Ariana:

we have masked men who are disappearing people right now. Like it's a serious,

Shaan:

and I remember, I mean before I was a citizen flying in as a passport holder who had a lot of Arab passport stamps.'cause I grew up in the Middle East. I would get, every single time I flew through JFK, I would get moved to a back room and interrogated. It was just like this is Bush's War on Terror era. And it was like so normalized and then it disappeared. But it reminds you that that's the real paradigm of fear, like it's when it's turned down, not on

Meryl:

Twitter to Yeah.

Shaan:

and I think that there is, there are enough of us. There is like a large portion of people who are like, fuck this. And I think there's almost too many to all be rounded up.

Ariana:

Yeah. I have to believe that's still the majority.

Shaan:

Yeah. Yeah. And I will say, on the note of Gaza, it's interesting because you couldn't talk about it from, for a long time. Yeah. Especially in newsrooms. And so now, even though there is some censorship, it is still at the forefront of the political imagination globally in a way that it never has was. Yeah. Britain, France are about to recognize,

Ariana:

yeah.

Shaan:

Palestine as a state, there's a lot of progress being made, even in, but of course the price has been the elimination of Gaza. But at the same time, on the other side, we were talking about how quickly the political climate changes and the social climate changes. 2020 to 2023 was a big difference. 2023 to now is a big difference. If, God willing, AOC becomes president or something like that happens in the next term. A lot of this will be pedald back. And so while this is really horrifying and very scary. We have to remember that there are cycles and that if we record this in three years, we could be having a totally different conversation. And I think it's important to parse the difference between a timely scare and a larger human condition. Yeah. Or political condition or, yeah.

Ariana:

whenever I'm feeling quite down and helpless and powerless, it's what's the word that everyone says? This shall pass. Like nothing is permanent. Change is the only constant. And it's just change is happening so much quicker now, I think because of, technology and the internet and all that jazz but also for the good, I don't know, what you said made me think of that. Okay, things have gotten really quickly, I consider bad, but it could also quickly become better.

Shaan:

I will just say that, when Reagan was president, they were a series of astonishing financial deregulation enacted that didn't have the sensationalism that Trump's do. I think partly because we just didn't exist in a climate where everyone was watching and commenting at the same time. And I guess that leads me to ask, are, are things happening at a fast pace or are we just is that just the perception we have because of the way we engage with the world? Yeah. If like we were not online and never went online and we just went about our lives in New York City, would we see much of a difference? We'd see little things that were different. Look, my sister lives on a farm in Virginia. It's an intentional community of 40 families. And it's not culty at all. It's hippie, but there's a lot of like older progressives who are, who never leave this farm. And yet when I go over to their houses for dinner, are in the state of hand ringing anguish because of what they saw on a screen and all around them is nothing but beautiful forest us. And they're like, the world is ending, right? There's no more land left. Trump is ruining the world. And I'm like, it's important. It's certainly important. I say this as a writer and as a critic and as a, a political writer. It's certainly important to know what's happening, but I don't think it's important to totally untether yourself from the what actually human experience. Experience. Yeah.

Meryl:

Can you tell us about the book you're working on?

Ariana:

Yes.

Shaan:

Yes, I will. And I had a conversation with myself on the way here about how much I should talk about and you'll figure out why in a sec. But I've worked in, I've worked in corporate news for a long time. I've worked at CNN Fox, CBS and I spent so much time in mainstream newsrooms just to make a living. I was there just not really invested in what was happening because I knew I wanted to be a writer. And at the time, for a lot of it, I wanted to write philosophy. So it was a total disconnect. But sitting in the newsroom, I learned that so much of what from the outside is characterized as sinister or conspiratorial is actually conducted by people who are completely unaware of what they're doing. They're completely unaware that they're that they're doing anything that's not good. They think they're doing God's work. And from the very top down, I'm talking about the very highest levels of these organizations that I've sit in on meetings with. There is simply no cognizance of the idea that what they're doing is perpetuating a really problematic world and national order. And so the book I wanted to write is a way to make use of all these years I've spent in newsrooms by putting out the thesis that what pervades corporate media and mainstream media is unconscious bias, not conscious bias, that the people who work there don't know they're biased and that they internalize bias primarily by the language they use to talk about the world. When they use words like terrorist or gorilla or official source or formal source or informal source without really thinking about what those mean, they perpetuate a national world order. That's the book I've been meaning to write. However about a month before my first residency. Which was in Wyoming in April I was

Meryl:

You've been on how many residencies since April? Just two. Just two. Just two. You have another one coming up, right?

Shaan:

I have another, I have three more coming up.

Ariana:

Three more. That's amazing. So you're living in a space where you're dedicated to writing this book, bouncing from residencies, I shouldn't say bouncing, experiencing different residencies.

Shaan:

I like bouncing it sounds like fun. Beyonce's song, river dance song, shit. Dance. Yeah. No, very much it's my year of, it's like my year of the opposite of rest and relaxation, but there is some of that in there too. It's really magical

Meryl:

thinking and magic.

Shaan:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's yeah, the year of the frenetic Penman it's I'm moving between residencies and in between stopping in New York and Virginia where my sister lives, so I'm just constantly moving. But, so a year a month before I left for Wyoming, I had I was thinking through a feud I was having with a very close friend of mine, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had to write about it to understand it. And suddenly out of nowhere I was hit with this idea to write a novel that was not just about this friend, but about a series of, it was a series of portraits of writers in New York. And I've never written fiction, I've ever written, never written a novel. And I just realized I had no choice because it would not leave me. And so that is and I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to be saying this.

Meryl:

I love this plot twist. I did not expect this. I know this is fun. But also just judging by, what's it called? Steam room ology. Like you can write fiction like that reads like fiction.

Shaan:

You think so?

Meryl:

Yes. Like your nonfiction feels so lived in and feels like it could easily be translatable.

Ariana:

Yeah. You have the artistry of language like you expressed your that you pay attention to that. And I feel like that's fiction.

Shaan:

That's really interesting. I think as a nonfiction writer writing fiction, I've learned that the line is a little bit eerily nebulous because I'm writing it as nonfiction. I'm writing it as a collection of creative nonfiction, essays, learning that you can get away with doing that. Yeah. It's if I could just write a portrait of you and change your name. And it works, but it's being written in a kind of intellectual way that i'm wondering how it will come across when it's done, but that's what I'm doing. However, my next residency, I'm officially the nonfiction writer in residence, and I have to give a number of public presentations, and so I'm going to pivot to my nonfiction book

Meryl:

so that you'll shelve the fiction for until after that residency.

Ariana:

Or you'll write late at night. Exactly.

Meryl:

That's what you're used to. That's your

Ariana:

your muse or your like your side piece. Yeah.

Meryl:

You've been doing it with your news writing and your nonfiction, so for a

Shaan:

while, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's hard to give up something you've started. So I think I'll write it because the nonfiction will be a lot of research, not writing. It's gonna be like a year of research. So I'll be able to continue the novel.

Ariana:

You've worked in these corporate news spaces, but then you've also written a lot that you've pitched to different publications. We were curious about your process of pitching ideas to, I don't wanna call them non-traditional, but the non-corporate publications.

Shaan:

Yeah, there's actually I almost feel like I get excited when helping friends pitch to places because in a way it's it's almost the straight equivalent of collecting sports cards or something. Like I love this idea of oh, let's look at a deck and see what'll work. There in an age where we are sadly being fragmented into kind of individual, platforms we write just for ourselves, obviously I'm thinking about substack. I do still feel like there's this magic to publications and even if they have a small circulation and even if they have an a volunteer staff, which is very sad, and even if they can barely pay their writers anything, something about the cultural nexus and the collective intention to run a publication that publishes literary pieces is just, I just think it's this magical thing. So I do believe that it's worth trying to publish with journals and reviews and magazines, and

Meryl:

I a hundred percent agree. Yeah. There's something to being accepted, to having the stamp of approval to go beyond your own audience.

Shaan:

Exactly. And to work with people who are dedicated, even though editors can be tedious sometimes to work with people who are dedicated ultimately to this project. And to, to giving your work to others. And also look, if we all have our own substack in 10 years, we'll have to just recreate this landscape once again by consolidating, because no one is gonna subscribe to 10,000 different writers. It's never gonna work.

Ariana:

It's like streaming services now.

Meryl:

Like it's a fucking nightmare. My whole email, it's I'm like, I don't even know who these people are. Somehow I'm on their list. Yeah. Should I read it or should I just delete all of them?

Shaan:

Totally. Yeah. And it, and I think it also dissolves the line between formal and informal writing. There's no longer this, at least quasi process of, let's think about this, let's look at it together. Let me show it to somebody else. Let's invest in putting it out in, in our pages. So I say all that because whenever I'm pitching or I'm helping a friend pitch, I think it's lovely to look at the places that remain and ask, okay, who would this be good for? And there are a lot of lovely small reviews that are run out of they're run out of university sometimes, like the New England Review is run out of middlebury, for example or the Hedgehog Review is run outta the University of Virginia. They're not for

Meryl:

Southampton Review from Stony Brook.

Shaan:

There you go. Right? Yeah. And they're not for students. They're actually for established and sometimes esteemed writers they're just part of the university apparatus, and so they have the funding for it. And so, I do tend to start with the big places just because there is like an inkling of careerism still that I have to cater to just for my own tenability as a writer. So I'll start with the five big places as in my mind. And if it's not good enough to pitch to the Atlantic or Harpers or, I'll just be like, okay, let's start at a magazine that has a smaller circulation. But you also have to know that, for example, the New York Times will never publish something super literary or super long form or super voicey. Steamroom-ography. I pitched to a ton of places. I actually started writing it with the approval of an editor at Guernica and then Guernica shut down.

Meryl:

Are they still shut? They're just gone forever.

Shaan:

They're gone. Oh,

Meryl:

wow. I remember that there was an issue and yeah, everyone quit and then I guess they,

Shaan:

I thought it was very silly. God, I just think quitting. That was ridiculous.

Meryl:

That was absurd.

Shaan:

I agree. And it, the piece, I thought the whole thing was an example of leftist hysteria in a way that's self-defeating. Like why dissolve an institution or, a magazine that does such good work. Because one person wrote a piece that was ultimately sympathetic to Palestine. I'm writing, I'm, saying this as someone who's like a hardcore supporter of Gaza. It was just, it was very silly, but, so I, the piece ended up being killed and I wrote the whole thing. Wow. And it was very depressing. So it's very difficult to pitch a whole piece. It's always better to start with a kernel. And I wrote it unconventionally knowing that it fit Guernica. And so I pitched it everywhere. Everybody said no. And then finding this lovely new magazine started by a cohort out of Princeton called Strange Matters. And they're like a Socialist magazine. They loved it. And so they took it on board. But it was like, that was an instance of me not having planned a place. Often I'll first pitch and then write from there. So for example, I just pitched a piece that is seems to be in the work for New York Magazine on traveling while Brown and Bearded in the age of Mamdani and in the age of Kash Patel. So you have the head of the FBI, who's brown and bearded, the likely mayoral, victor of New York City, brown and bearded, and I, yet, I still get pulled over to airports. And so my question is are we still using the right metrics? 25 years on? Surely there's another indicator of someone who's sinister that just being brown and bearded, but they're

Meryl:

gonna love it. Bald and white. White.

Shaan:

The most likely person to have a firearm at security at an airport is a white southern man.

Meryl:

Right.

Shaan:

So it's then that's like an official, statistic. So it's really funny. But, so for example, that's a piece that I'm not gonna write in a literary way because it's for New York Magazine. I'll write, it'll be funny and voicey and punchy, but you have to I think it, it helps to know who you're writing for so you can write accordingly. Yeah.

Ariana:

Mm-hmm. So as you are working on your own books right now, Do you have an audience in mind for, let's say, your novel, for example? Or are you just using your own voice?

Shaan:

I think with the nonfiction book, I have an audience in mind because I've thought about it for so many years. Yeah. This novel is like this weird thing that came out of nowhere that I'm just writing because I really wanna write it. And I think that my aspirational audience is a type of person who'd read like a book by Rachel Cusk or by Garth Greenwell which is like a higher brow literary audience. And I'm saying that with some irony in the sense that I have no idea if I can pull that off. And I'm also I told myself, look, just write this as simply as you can. And I started writing it and I was like, I'm so fucking florid in the way I write. Like I'm just so baroque and so old fashioned in such a ridiculous way. And that has come out and my mentor looked at a little bit of it and was like, look, even if you tried to write in the most gmail-ish way, you're still gonna be so old fashioned calm down, so I'm trying to do that and I think it's working. So with the novel, it's hard to say with the nonfiction book, this is an era where nonfiction writers actually have an easier time than novelists do. I think of a book by Anand Giridharadas called Winners Take All that was published a few years ago about how philanthropists are perpetuating the financial world order by just putting band-aids over it. And that was written with this really lovely mix of personal, political and political analysis and then I think of others like Naomi Klein and Maggie Nelson, and I'm, and I think of merging those voices a little bit.'cause you ultimately, you wanna be inspired, but you still want to write in a way that is true to yourself, enhances or vilifies your individual quirks,

Ariana:

and I feel like it is really nice right now. I think a lot of contemporary nonfiction books are really pushing the bounds of what the form can take, which is really cool.

Shaan:

Absolutely. Breaking formula can be so liberating and refreshing. It's nice to pick up a nonfiction book and be like, oh, this isn't just laborious text. There's something different going on here and something literary. And Maggie Nelson does that so well. Yeah, she does. Yeah.

Ariana:

And where are you going next? If you next?

Shaan:

So I was in Wyoming, then I was in Washington State. Next is Texas. I've never been to the state. Okay. That's a small, very artsy town called Corsicana. And I'll be there for two months. Wow. Which will be really nice. And then after that, I'm in Spain. I'm in the house that Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood, and it's right on the Mediterranean, on the cliff. And that'll be really interesting, I think there for a month

Ariana:

Your little luxurious treat at the end of your your tour.

Shaan:

Yeah. Yeah. Then after that a friend of mine has a house in Hungary and he's just basically opened it up to me for a month. So I'll be there. Wow. And then back to Wyoming, and then I finish. Yeah.

Meryl:

Whoa. Can you tell us how your experience has been in general through these through these residencies? Like what it's done for you?

Shaan:

Yeah. Actually I feel like this could be a good starting point for that could be the genesis of our friendship, Meryl, which is perfect in a way, the oldest, urban and largest urban writer's colony in the country. The writer's room. Shout out to the writer's room. Shout out to Donna Brodie, the director. okay, so the writer's room is, it's in Greenwich Village and it's a 24 hour space for writers, and it's quiet and it's amazing. And I joined in 2014 in January, 2014. So I've been a member for over a decade, and it's because I just couldn't, for the life of me write in my room I couldn't write in a space that that was so close to my bed and where I could masturbate as much as I wanted. No, could hold me accountable for same problem. And I, so I just found like some distance traveling somewhere committed me to that space. And that model has always worked very well for me. Residencies are like a really intensified version of a writing space because you are put in the middle, often of a rural environment. You're given your own space and you have nothing to do but write and you don't have any of the distractions of everyday life. So there's no gym, there's no grocery shopping. They give you everything. The one I just did had a chef who deliver lunches to my room every day at noon. And then there's dinners made every night. Breakfast is made for you as well. And so what you get done in four weeks can be the equivalent of, three or four months in the city. It's such intensive work. That being said, it's also dangerous. Like you can burn out, you can exhaust yourself. That can almost be this intellectual adrenal fatigue where every pore of you has been drained. There can be drama with the other residents. It's like a reality TV show where there's there can be some weird people you're stuck with. But I just feel like if you have an idea and you're ready to really hunker down, it is incredibly liberating to just have nothing but that to do. And I was writing at my best, I was writing like 2000 words a day, every day. It was really nice.

Ariana:

So you have your own podcast, Diva Discourse in which you focus on one song for each episode. Right. So how did that come to be? Tell us about your love for Beyonce, because I also love Beyonce and we can also talk about Cowboy Carter

Shaan:

No, it's, that's so great. The title of the podcast, Diva Discourse, kind of gestures towards my obsession and my podcast co-hosts obsession. His name is Enzo Escobar, very good friend of mine. There's this tradition of gay men having divas that they worship, and it started out with opera singers and then it moved to Broadway stars and actresses, and now it exists primarily in the form of the female pop star. And the way you look upon them is not as a peer or even an aspiration, but a Goddess, someone who's untouchable. And just in a way the female form in femininity is this, it's the, this kind of exalted untouchable, glamorous way of living that the gay man can only aspire towards or imitate in drag, in, in the drag sense. And so divas become this, like this paragon. And when you look at female singers and pop stars, just nobody, if you're a gay man and you don't watch a Beyonce, that's fine. It just shows to me that you don't really understand music very well

Ariana:

or just, goddess hood. Exactly. Right, right.

Shaan:

Like,

Ariana:

where are you? Who are you? It's

Shaan:

Yeah, you just, you have some lesser religion, but she can do everything in a way that is so superhuman and so glamorous and so glamorized that I found her irresistible. it was really when she started touring post the Beyonce experience of the I Am World Tour onwards, where I feel like she became such a master of her craft singing so flawlessly that her live albums are just as good as a recorded albums with all the flourishes of what she does live, which is often not just off the cuff, but really thought out mixes of her songs, which as we saw during Cowboy Carter, reach this incredible zenith of a 30 year discography I go on and on. But my friend Enzo and I I wrote a piece in Slate about Beyonce for her 40th birthday that he read before we became friends. And so he was like, we became friends at this at the Beyonce connection.'cause he was like, I love her too. Can we talk about her? And we became really close friends and people who would listen to us speak about her were like, you guys should just put mics in front of you. Mm-hmm. And so we just, were like, okay, let's just do that. Let's just talk about one song and do that. And we found that it was really fun but also we put clips of what we're talking about, whether it's her live performances or her songs or other people's songs. And I feel like there, so there are these nicely textured 20 to 30 minute episodes. But with Beyonce herself, I just can't, I thought during her Renaissance world tour that I was seeing kind of the end of this glorious chapter of her live performances because she had stopped dancing and she revealed during the Renaissance World tour film that it's because in 2009, during a rehearsal, she was flown into metal stairs in a way that injured her knee so badly that she just couldn't dance in the same way But looking at Cowboy Carter, not only is she dancing once again, even though her knee is still injured, but she's shown us that she can actually have this glory on stage that's post dance. The album was so conducive to something that was not just her dancing, even though she had amazing choreography when she did. I think it's her best tour. I, oh my God. I saw it. I paid like my rent to see it and I cried so hard. Did you see it? I cried.

Ariana:

Oh my God. So the opening number, I just got this huge rush and it was like tears.'cause I've seen people cry at concerts. I'm like, I've never been that person. But I was just like, like what? They, when they started with Requiem I was American Requiem. I was just like, I was flooded. And then all those little bits in between with that are just homages to all the people who've come before and who have created American music and all these Black people and the struggle and all this stuff. And it was just like, it was so layered. I also thought it was performance art. This wasn't a concert, this was theater. It really was

Shaan:

totally performance art and like concept art and high art film. And the way that she paid homage to those that came before her was so not like laborious or gestural. It felt like part of a celebration where you weren't like, oh, I'm being lectured to, you were electrified by the footage of her performing alongside video of James Brown and others. It was amazing and then she flies around the stadium in a car, which was eventually swapped out for a golden horse after a scare in Houston where the car almost toppled her over. But she like flies around the stadium. She came so close to us seeing know 16 carriages. I was sobbing so hard that I was like with Enzo, we were holding each other's like sobbing and my cousin next to me was like, do I need to call the EMS? I was like shaking and convulsing. Yeah. I

Ariana:

was with my mom, my brother and his and his wife who's pregnant. And all of us were just like, we just felt blessed, like when she came around in that car and we could like nearly touch her.

Shaan:

She's so good that all she has to do is get up there and suddenly, you your urge to be contrarian just dissipates in the face of her glory.

Ariana:

Yeah. Yep. I'm part of the religion. Meryl's, like

Shaan:

one of those daughters who's been like dragging along to church being like, oh, fine. There was one more thing I wanted to say that, One thing that I think causes me perennial existential crisis as a writer is how thin the line is between writer and non-writer. Everybody writes, not everybody paints or sings or makes films, and so I feel like other genres of art are more comfortably sequestered in this kind of specialization of just a sheer medium. Every time a doctor or an assistant or anyone, even a family member emails me something that's well written. I'm just like why am I a writer? You can write a well-written email and you're a doctor or a lawyer or whatever you are. Like, I have nothing but just this writing. And in a way just feels like what all I am is a speaker or a thinker or an expressor. Writing and speaking is the air that we all breathe in. And so how do you, what gives you the right to call yourself a writer? It's like saying I'm an exister, right. Or I'm a just, yeah. I'm a be-er. And so that is something that I feel like besieges me now and then because I feel like there's, just in the promiscuity of the medium, there comes a higher threshold of of validation of having to prove yourself as being able to call yourself a writer. And I think there's an answer to it.

Meryl:

I have good news though. I hear basically in every conversation I'm in now, people are using AI to write. They do not feel comfortable even writing an email. And so I think that if we continue to not use AI and continue to write from our heads, we are going to become really special soon.

Shaan:

I love that. I really love that. In fact, I love the proliferation of AI because I feel like we will be the special ones in a generation if we still

Meryl:

trust ourselves to write and and not use it. I think we're gonna be really, the top of the world.

Shaan:

I love that, and thank you for bringing me into the contemporary because I was speaking with LADA and thinking about that, and you're totally right. And all I would add to that is that one other thing that distinguishes the writer or gives the writer the right to distinction is the sheer persistence and will to continue writing. It's one thing to write an email, it's one thing to write incidentally, it's another to sit down and write. And I think in sitting down and intentionally writing, you also do something with your mind and with the coherence of expression that is unique to the craft, that is a little bit different from anything else. When you speak for an hour, it's very different than speaking off the cuff for a few sentences. Right. Your ideas reach a kind of crescendo. And so what I would say to end that is it's all right to call yourself a writer.

Ariana:

Follow us, like us. Leave a review on wherever you get your podcast. It's all right. You can follow us on Instagram@itsallwritepod. Write spelled W-R-I-T-E'cause it's a pun. You can also email us at It's All right pod@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you and yeah,

Meryl:

thanks for listening.

People on this episode

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Ariana McLean

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Meryl Branch-McTiernan

Host