You are about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about what goes into making one.

I'm Sadata Sese, an assistant commissioner of podcasts for BBC Sounds.

I pull a lot of levers to support a diverse range of podcasts on all sorts of subjects,

relationships, identity, comedy, even one that mixes poetry, music and inner city life.

So one day I'll be helping host develop their ideas, the next fact-checking, a feature,

and the next looking at how a podcast connects with its audience, and maybe that's you.

So if you like this podcast, check out some others on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

Hello, we're on the frontier of things today, from the American wilderness to the digital

platform that's reinvented the newsletter.

Substack is six years old, practically middle-aged in internet years, and its

writer-friendly publishing model has attracted the likes of George Saunders and Salman Rushdie.

Later in the program, I'll be talking to Howard Jacobson about why he's now joined its roster.

Before that, we're heading into the woods. Daniel Mason published his first novel,

A Piano Tuna, when he was just 26 and still at medical school.

Since then, he's taken us to impoverished communities in the global south in a far country,

Vienna on the cusp of World War I in the Winter Soldier,

and from ancient Egypt to the 19th century slums of Bristol

in his short story collection,

a registry of my passage upon the earth.

Having ranged so far and wide, his new book sees him putting down roots.

Northwoods brings us to a fertile patch of land in New England and then stays there.

...