On Leaving Academia: An Interview with Anne Helen Petersen
"Take The Most Exciting Parts and Make Them Primary"
When I ran away from my doctoral program in English literature at twenty-nine, I’d thought I’d left academia well behind me.1 As with nearly every other assumption of my twenties, I thought wrong. I didn’t consciously set out to represent academics or post-academics,2 but they make up a good portion of my client list. I must say, I very successfully pulled a fast one. The primary reason I went to grad school was because I liked going to classes and talking to my professors. Now I get to do a version of that whenever I wish, without having written a word of my dissertation.
Given that I am drowning in academics on both the professional and personal front, a significant subset of my conversations on “how do I get published?” are “how do I transition from publishing within academia to publishing outside of it?” Or, “I went to grad school and I am not sure I want to be an academic but I know I want to write, so what do I do next?” If these questions have rattled around in your brain as well, my conversation with this week’s guest is for you.
Anne Helen Petersen (or AHP, as her fans call her) is one of the most prominent examples of a writer who has used her academic training as a tool and a lens for her work while leaving institutional academia behind.3 Petersen is inspiring for so many reasons — her productivity, her adaptability, her candor, her really great Substack. An astute observer of media culture, she’s been remarkably canny in early adoption of new media outlets and technologies. Read if you’re interested in
platform building
how to make your academic interests relevant to non-academic audiences
the unexpected reasons your academic training might be helpful in your writing career
what AHP says is the next big thing in the writing business …
Yours with thanks,
Alia
❦
I talk to a lot of writers who either straddle academia and trade publishing or have left academia and done other things. I was reading an interview where you said that the question you get asked all the time is essentially, “Is what I did replicable?” — the implication being it’s not. I want to push back on that a bit. What can we learn from a career that is so idiosyncratic about what is replicable? Especially as your career is one many writers would envy.
I am glad that you are poking at that question because I do think the broader movements are replicable. Oftentimes, academics or even undergrads are asking for a roadmap — one that is very legible. That is certainly what I wanted. It’s why I went to grad school. I was attracted to grad school, because the idea was, “Oh, you go to school, and then you match.” In many ways, back when I was considering going to grad school and talking to my professors about it in the early 2000s, it was more like that. If you went to a good PhD-granting program, then you just figured out where your match was within the industry.
Also, the credentials were fairly clear. You publish an article, then you go to conferences, and then you do your book …
Then I followed all those things, and they didn't go where I wanted them to go. But I think when people ask me, “How did you manage this?” My first response — and I am inflicting my own desires from when I wanted to know when I asked how people do this — was that I can't tell you. I can't be like, “Start writing blog posts, and then it will happen to be 2011, when there's a lot of sites on the internet that will let you write to broader audiences, and not pay you, but give you the ability to make that jump.” Because the internet in 2011 was a very specific sort of internet.
The way that I first started writing more publicly was on a WordPress blog. If someone were to start a WordPress blog now, it is not necessarily going to get you what you want. The way that I made connections with other writers already in place was that I started tweeting at them. Twitter is a different space in 2014 than it is today. So much of my advice feels not just out of date, but also as though you couldn't take that path. If I tell you what I did, and you do that now, it is not going to work.
So if we took your path now and did it exactly the same way, it wouldn't work because the institutions have changed, the media landscape has changed, and academia has changed. But what is still applicable?
While I was still employed as an academic — though this could apply whether you're an academic or not — I started figuring out how to take the ideas that I was so excited about and make them feel exciting to people who weren't also specialists in my field. People within academia who teach already have practice in this. When you're lecturing, if you're committed to being a good teacher, you are trying to make both fundamental and niche components of your discipline interesting to your students, some of whom are there because they love it and some because they have to fulfill a requirement.
Then I started writing more. I learned how to write in a constipated style when I was in academia. Then I learned to basically re-embrace some of the creative nonfiction style I had learned when I was an undergrad. Asking “how do I make this accessible?” doesn't necessarily mean dumbing down, it just means taking the most exciting parts and like making them primary.
When you say make it more accessible, many people assume you do mean dumbing it down. But I think you’re talking about how you organize and present your material.
I had been teaching this to my students in their writing because I didn't want them to write these dry five paragraph essays. It felt important to explain we have something called “a hook,” or a lede, though I didn't know that term at the time. And then you have what I call “the so-what,” which is your kicker.
I had been thinking about how I could do that in my own writing — take a really interesting part of a story, or a theory, or a historical document and have it really grab the reader, and then have this really amazing zoom out. I thought about how to make your argument on why this matters and how to give your supporting evidence in an interesting way. Maybe you are not doing a review of all the literature, as you would in an academic paper, and you're not doing some of the wild hand gestures that are de rigueur. Instead you make a concise push forward to say, “This is why this is important to think about.”
Especially during my early transition, when I was exclusively (or mostly) writing about celebrity, it was a great opportunity to say, “Here is something that you may either dismiss out of hand, or just think of as frivolous, or not understand why you like it.”
The reason that I knew how to do that was because of my idol within my field is the scholar, Richard Dyer. He wrote like that — like he was a public facing scholar and wrote in a way that was gripping, while also deeply rooted in his field and in various theoretical concepts. Then my advisor as a master's student, and one of my co-advisors as a PhD student, had both been newspaper writers before they came to academia. They really cared about writing and would do drafts with me. They were unique in that, and maybe part of the reason I gravitated towards them was because I really liked their style of scholarship.
You are talking about teaching composition and the work of convincing someone in a classroom. When I talk to people from my cohort in grad school, they often want to hear what was useful about grad school for my job now. It was teaching introductory classes — the skills of grading composition papers are the same skills of doing a mockup on a book proposal. Trying to get my students to care about Henry James is not dissimilar from trying to get a publisher to pick up a manuscript.
We often lose sight of that. People all the time say, “The thing about undergrad is that it taught me how to think.” That is an easy acknowledgement. There is less acknowledgement of the fact that a PhD program can also teach you how to think — be persuasive and navigate the world and all those things.
I don't know how much you're able to answer this as someone who has left, but I'm going to read you back to you: you said in a previous interview that you are “proof that cultivating an online presence, blogging your way through your dissertation, and writing hybrid scholarship freaks job committees out.” Do you think there's been a backlash against that? Or do you think that's still true?
It really depends on the department. That is what I've come to understand. There are some departments that see that as like a cheapening of the discipline or of their department.
If you were a grad student, do you think there's a way to suss that out?
You don't know. And you don't know what jobs there are going to be. It also depends on whether you are applying for a job at a liberal arts college. I was at Whitman College — they were more okay with popular press books, but not every liberal arts college is. There was a rule of thumb that liberal arts colleges would be more into that, as opposed to a Research 1 school. You could also find yourself at a Research 2 school where the tenure committee had a chip on its shoulder and was like, “This doesn't count.” Or you could be at a cool, innovative, and upcoming department where everyone is trying to figure out how we can make digital scholarship part of our packets and reconfigure how we conceptualize tenure. That is so hard to know, when you're going to grad school.
How has Substack been for you?4
For me, as a writer it is amazing. It is certainly more lucrative. The people who are following you are much more loyal because you live in their inbox. I live in these people's inboxes. I know that there have been pieces written about this, but it is a great promotional tool for books.
Tell me more.
It is just a direct address. The buy-in from someone who follows you on X is not the same as the buy-in as from someone who subscribes to your newsletter. There are people who subscribe to my newsletter, who never open it (or who open it seldom). But there are a whole lot of people who open it a ton. That means that if someone is paying for my newsletter, they are the type of person who's probably going to pay for a book and who is probably much more likely to show up at a book event just to be a fan. I know that journalists have problems with talking about fans. Like, you shouldn't be a fan of a journalist or whatever, as if it's somehow feminizing or, or inappropriate.
And writers who say that writers don't have fans.
You can be a fan of a writer! I am. This is one of those things that is normalized for fiction writers but less normalized for nonfiction writers. There is an understanding that fiction writers do creative work and thus can be idolized and compensated in a different way than nonfiction writers.
I started as a publicist and if you got that big New York Times op-ed — especially on a Sunday — you had a good shot at being a bestseller. And that is not true anymore. It sounds like, for you, book promotion is more effective through your newsletter. Could you have become a person who has such a successful newsletter if you hadn't had this history of being published by high profile places?
Building up my newsletter didn't come from publishing in the New York Times, it came from writing for BuzzFeed News. I've talked about this in a couple of different places, but when I started that WordPress blog, I also started a Facebook page. That is where I built a platform — it was 44,000 people. I don't use it anymore because I don't like using Facebook generally, but that grew into a loyal user base, where we were just talking about celebrity gossip and pop culture stuff. When I first started writing the newsletter, I'd be like, “Hey, subscribe to my newsletter.” So, by the time I left BuzzFeed, I had 17,000 unpaid subscribers on a mailing list that had accumulated over time, and that had accumulated not through BuzzFeed, but through the Facebook page. It is one of the chicken or the egg things — how did I get so many followers on BuzzFeed, or on Twitter. In part, by writing for BuzzFeed. Having the main account retweet me, having my fellow journalists retweet me, that sort of thing. I know this is true for other people who are at my level, like any freelance piece that I take, either has to be somebody that was super easy for me to write or really fun. I just wrote a piece for Country Living about my dog, Peggy. I would do a 500-word piece about Peggy any day for Country Living.
I will write for Bloomberg because they pay bank. At the same time, Bloomberg is useful in a lot of ways because it gets my name in front of people that I want to talk to otherwise. If I want to talk to a business professional, if I want to get an interview with a VP of Slack, it gives me some of that cachet. Because I'm not associated with a magazine anymore, but when I email and, “I’m writing a piece for Bloomberg,” then you can get in the door in a different sort of way.
Thinking about your year, I want you to tell me whatever your next move is before you make it because I want everyone else to make it. You are like the epitome of an early adopter. You're like, oh, wait, academia? Oh, Buzzfeed? That is where it's at. And you're like newsletters? You're always right! Just tell me.5
I've been talking with my partner Charlie a lot about this. He is at the Atlantic and he keeps joking that when the boomers die, no one is going to read longform articles on the internet anymore. People still read books. Books are still good.
Books are a great technology.
I am making dropping out of grad school sound like an elopement to Gretna Green, but I feel I’ve earned it. For me dropping out of grad school involved moving to Italy on an expired tourist visa and significant parental disapprobation. Obviously, you should take all my advice.
Post-academic (more commonly post-ac) refers to careers that PhDs undertake outside of academia. Its related term alt-ac refers to careers that remain in academia but are not faculty positions, such as in advising, teaching support, directing a center, and so on. In a context where only 5-15% of PhDs attain a tenure track position, post-ac and alt-ac career tracks are now the overwhelming norm.
For readers who are still within academia and have no intention of leaving but are still interested in branching out to writing for non-academic audiences, I got you. Future newsletters will feature guests who did exactly that.
She asked, innocently.
Reader, she did not
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