Episode 445: Barrett Swanson

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Barrett Swanson is a contributing editor at Harper’s and the author of Lost in Summerland.“You just have to sit there for a long time. That lesson was indisputably crucial for me. Just being willing to talk to someone, even if the first half-hour or hour is unutterably boring, or it doesn’t seem pertinent. These little things, the deeper things, take a while to get at and they kind of burble to the surface at moments when you’re not totally expecting it to happen. So for me, it’s just making myself available for that moment to occur.” Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes: Swanson on Longform 00:30 Lost in Summerland (Catapult • 2021) 00:30 "Lost in Summerland" (The Atavist • December 2019) 00:45 "The Anxiety of Influencers" (Harper’s • September 2020) 10:00 "The Solider and the Soil" (Orion Magazine • December 2017) 11:30 "Men at Work" (Harper’s • November 2019) 20:00 "Political Fictions: Unraveling America at a West Wing Fan Convention" (Paris Review • November 2018) 28:00 “Annie Radcliffe, You Are Loved,” (American Short Fiction Issue #56 • 2015) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:56.2	Hello and welcome to the long-form podcast. I'm Evan Ratliffe, one of your three co-hosts. Max
1:08.4	Linsky and Aaron Lamer are the other two. They always join me here for the intro. Hey guys.
1:12.6	Co-host number two, checking in. They're always showing up. Who's on the show this week? This week I
1:18.5	talked to Barrett Swanson. He is a journalist. He's an essayist. His work has appeared in a lot of
1:26.6	different magazines, Harper's, The Believer of the New Yorker, The New York Times magazine. He has
1:31.0	a collection of work out called Lost in Summerland, which includes a great piece that he wrote for
1:36.1	the Adivist magazine a couple of years ago by the same name. One of the things I love about his
1:41.8	work is he does these sort of immersive reporting pieces. He did one recently about a TikTok collab
1:50.1	house for Harper's. He did one about a kind of men's self-improvement weekend a couple of years
1:57.4	ago. He did one about a home for psychics and mediums called Lillie Dale. I just really like talking
2:02.8	to him about the lens that he uses to approach that kind of reporting. How much he puts himself
2:07.8	into it, his own personal background, and we talked about all of that and kind of how he gets
2:13.6	this work done. How much did you guys talk about going on male self-improvement weekends? I mean,
	...

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