The Best of Substack Live!

For you...

I hope you’re well!

It’s a holiday week in the States, and some of you may be cooking, driving, walking, feeling grateful, stressed, anxious, joyful, or all of the above.

I curated five of the best Substack Live! episodes to inspire and entertain you.

If you’re in the States, happy holidays! We’ll meet back here next week.

All our best,

Sarah & the boys (the cats)

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Best of the Substack Live! Podcast

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1. The Real Art of the Newsletter with Austin Kleon

Over 700 people showed up to this live recording of the Substack Live Podcast to hear Austin Kleon give some of the best advice on how to have a newsletter/Substack that means something to you and your readers, including:

• making what you want to see in the world,

• taking time to process in a world that wants us to just move on and scroll,

• writing the newspaper column you’ve always wanted to write,

• the So what? test,

and so much more…

Austin was Substack before there was Substack, having started his newsletter in 2013, before Substack existed. He’s the New York Times bestselling author of a trilogy of illustrated books about creativity in the digital age—Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going.

2. Be Contrarian with Substack Icons Jessica DeFino and Emily Kirkpatrick

Over 300 people showed up to this live recording of the Substack Live Podcast to hear Emily Kirkpatrick and Jessica DeFino talk about how they built newsletters that became something bigger than the platform itself, including:

• Why having tens and hundreds of thousands of subscribers doesn’t mean the Substack writer has it easy—far from it

• How to create your own platform and not be platform-dependent

• Why it’s ill-advised to try to write a “genius essay” every week on demand, and it’s better to create a framework you can apply consistently

• Why consistency is everything—unless it’s not

• And so much more…

Jessica DeFino is an award-winning beauty reporter and critic (the New York Times, the Sunday Times, Vice). She’s also written for Vogue, Allure, and more. She now writes the Guardian’s beauty advice column, Ask Ugly.

Emily Kirkpatrick is the Roland Barthes of fashion writing—with a little bit of Steven Wright and Tig Notaro mixed in. I <3 Mess is essential reading, whether you care about fashion or not.

3. All Your Substack Questions Answered with Substack’s Head of Writer Relations Sophia Efthimiatou

A classic. This is the best fifty-two minutes you can spend. This interview with the amazing Sophia Efthimiatou, Substack’s Head of Writer Relations & Events, will fill you with inspiration, optimism, and a true appreciation for Substack and how much it’s doing for us.

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4. Focus on Craft, Ignore the Noise, and Grow Slowly with Mason Curry

My conversation with Mason Currey contains some of the best advice on how to stop feeling like you have to chase the algorithm and can set about owning your platform and doing your best work.

Nearly 300 people were there for the live recording. If you don’t know Mason, he’s the author of the Daily Rituals books and writes the Substack newsletter Subtle Maneuvers about how creative people get work done.

5. The (Substack) Writer’s Growth Mindset with Maya Popa

Nearly 300 people showed up to this live recording of the Substack Live Podcast with Maya Popa about the (Substack) writer’s mindset, including:

• why her gut reaction to “writing” was “terror” (before she corrected herself to “process”),

• the reality that even published poets with awards deal with the same mindset issues as unpublished writers,

• how social media platforms are designed to prey on our weakest parts,

• why we take our temperature based on other people’s responses (and why that’s a problem),

• how current feelings about publishing are usually rooted in childhood or adolescence,

• and so much more…

Maya C. Popa is the author of three poetry collections—including the forthcoming If You Love That Lady from W.W. Norton in July 2026—and is an editor at Publishers Weekly. She teaches at NYU and is the founder and director of the incredible poetry and prose membership, the Conscious Writers Collective. She writes the Substack Poetry Today.

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