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I’m very excited to announce my new podcast, Substack Live, which features the incredible work of early adopters of Substack who continue to bring their good work to the world and make the world a better place in doing so.
It’s also where you’ll find my updates and expert guidance on the platform as it changes and changes again and again, so you can use it to fuel your creative, professional, and financial life without feeling like you’re on yet another platform you have to game and perform on.
There’s no better person to launch this than
.Maya is a poet, prose writer, exceptional human, and someone I’m so lucky to call a dear friend. She’s the author of three books of poetry: Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023), named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry; American Faith (Sarabande 2019); and her third collection coming in 2026, which we’re all going to make sure it gets on the bestseller list. She’s also the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly. She’s been teaching for thirteen years at NYU and is just such an exceptional human. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Granta, the Nation, and elsewhere.
What I love most is Maya’s Conscious Writers Collective (CWC), her online school and writing community that offers a rigorous, MFA-level education for writers without forcing them to take on the debt an MFA program would. Having taught at NYU and elsewhere at the graduate and post-grad level, she’s created a not-to-be-missed-out-on mentorship and training for writers at all levels, those who already have an MFA, those who might go on to receive one with the training they need to make the most of it, and those who may get enough to produce a body of work ready for publication without it.
CWC also helps writers with the mental and emotional side of becoming a successful writer, which to my mind is at least 50 percent of the work.
I love everything Maya said in this interview because it’s so grounding. A taste from Maya:
“The financial logistics of writing should not be the thing you depend on for your bread and butter. Like there’s your life and writing is an enormous foundational part of it. But would you ask the thing you love to also pay your rent? Would you ask it to do all these things when it’s already giving you the biggest gift of all it’s making it making you want to stick around for 90 years doing all these wonderful things to you. Now, do you want, in addition for it to do this? Do you want it to pay your rent? Do you want it to make sure that you have retirement?”
0:00 — Introductions & Maya’s journey to Substack
4:26 — The realities of pitching, publishing, and rejection
10:41 — Building community and the Conscious Writers Collective
17:53 — Mindset, motivation, and the myth of “having it all together”
26:18 — The financial realities of being a writer
35:07 — Substack strategies, authenticity, and audience growth
44:04 — The dopamine loop, validation, and the writing process
54:56 — Revising, self-editing, and the value of patience
1:04:09 — The future of poetry on Substack
1:13:22 — Resources and closing remarks
1:27:00 — Final thoughts
Thank you
, , , , , and many others for coming to what turned out to be an epic conversation with about writing, Substack, and why dopamine hits won’t get you the platform or creative life you want.
