“I wanted there to be a way to share that with you”: introducing The Postscript

A personal note from me, with a behind-the-scenes on our interviews with Alia and Melissa, a life update on why I’m moving to Croatia, and a peek behind the curtain on Season 3

The artist in her (recording) studio, visibly pleased w herself for having hidden two easter eggs from the episode in this screenshot

If you’ve been a longtime reader or listener, you’ll know that this kind of one-on-one is something I haven’t done before. So I’m definitely feeling a little bit nervous in this moment.

But I also have a lot of excitement around it. Because with this post—and with the episode of the podcast you saw at the top of it—we’re launching a new section of Women of Letters called The Postscript.

The initial inspiration behind this new section was that, as the host, I’ll often have a few minutes at the beginning and the end of our interviews to chat with our guests off-air. And, during those moments, I’ll typically share some contextual things or points of commonality that came up during my prep for our conversation.

We’ll talk, for example, about recent life updates, or things in the cultural zeitgeist. We’ll discover that we’ve both read a particular book, or that we’ve both been obsessed with Heated Rivalry. And these brief exchanges end up being really structurally useful for our conversations, because they allow us to go into the interview knowing, okay: this is the shared vocabulary, shared history that we’re working from, these are the terms of art that we can draw from without having to explain them.

These exchanges, in other words, add a really valuable scaffolding to our conversations—a scaffolding that me and our guests know about, but that nobody else does. We cut that part out before the interview gets published, because that is the off-air portion of our conversation. But I wanted there to be a way to share some of that context with you.

So that was the initial inspiration for The Postscript.

An additional component of the decision behind launching this new section was that, although there’s always so much more I want to say in response to what our guests share, I am really deliberate about not inserting myself too much into their interviews. To me, an interview is our guests’ time: it’s their space to be sharing about their life and their work. And, as the host, I see my role as facilitating the creation of that space, but specifically not encroaching on it.

So: what I am going to start doing, as a way of both offering that peek behind the curtain and expanding on what our guests have shared, is publishing a bonus episode—like this one—which will be called The Postscript.

In these episodes of the podcast, it will just be you and me, one-on-one, doing a kind of debrief on my conversation with our guests. I’ll also be sharing some life updates, things I’ve been reading and enjoying, maybe—we’ll see what it ends up being. But that is the spirit of what I’m trying to do with this new section.

I played around with a few different names for this, but I ultimately landed on calling it The Postscript because I love how it ties thematically into the broader series. And I love how aligned the practise of including a postscript is with the goals of this new section. When you write P.S. on something, you’re indicating that you have an extra bit of information to share that is kind of a sidebar to what the main message was, but that is still important and is still a part of that original.

I’m planning to publish episodes of The Postscript after every couple of interviews, and to use these bonus episodes as an opportunity to respond to those interviews in the ways we’ve just talked about. But there’s a lot here I’m still figuring out.

I don’t know if I’ll be sending these out to our Substack each time or just directly to the podcast feeds. I don’t know how long these episodes are going to be. I don’t even know exactly what they’ll look like. This is a genuine experiment for me and for us.

But, at this point—now that we are three seasons and three years (!) into Women of Letters—I feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable in that way and to take that kind of risk. And so much of that is because of you and your response to the series. So thank you for being here, and thank you for having been here. 💛

I’ve got a few things sketched out for us to talk about today. One, of course, is building on each of the interviews we’ve published so far this season, with Alia Hanna Habib and with Melissa Febos.

I also want to give you a bit of a life update on what’s happening in my world these days, including why I’m moving back to Croatia and what it’s been like navigating a series of international moves the last few years as I’ve prioritized making major life decisions around my career. And, finally, we’ll end with a peek behind the curtain on the production of Season 3, where I’ll talk about why the planning for a new season begins about 6 months out from the publication of the first interview, how I decide on each season’s new set of questions, and one of the projects I’ve been wanting to take on for a long time that we’re finally getting to do now.

You can listen to the full 30-minute bonus episode with me on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify. If you’ve read this far, I recommend starting at about the 7-minute mark because I’ve recreated the introduction here in writing.

More soon!!
— Jana

A sneak peek at what’s coming up next Thursday morning: we’ll be publishing our podcast interview with Victoria Redel, where we’ll be talking about her latest amazing book I AM YOU from SJP Lit, what it was like working as an assistant to Adrienne Rich, the routines that have made it possible for her to have a prolific writing career, what she’d do differently if she were starting now, & so many other things I can’t wait for you to hear all about.