This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, we share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. Hello. If you're enjoying writing it or feel like you're gaining some new insight or tips about academic writing and publishing, we sure would appreciate your taking a moment to rate and review us. It helps other folks find us. Today, we're talking with Liz Bukhar, who is a professor of religion at Northeastern University and the director of Sacred Rites, Public Scholarship on Religion 
which is a grant-funded project that provides support resources and networks for scholars of religion committed to translating the significance of their research to a broader audience. So I wonder, Liz, if you can tell us a bit about Sacred Rites. Yeah, sure. So let me tell the story in terms of making it very writing forward, okay? So it's sort of its origin story really comes out of I think my own frustration of getting asked to write more public facing work and realizing that I didn't know how to do it. And that although my institution would be delighted if I did it, there wasn't really any training or support to do it, nor did I really know where to go to my networks to find people who were doing it and would kind of help. 
And so that comes out of writing a more general audience book for Harvard that got a lot more press than I had ever gotten before and not knowing what to do with that and not knowing trying to like find my voice again as a writer and as a communicator outside the academy and doing a bunch of trainings. Like, you know, I did the op-ed project. I did part of Auburn seminars training, media training, but not having anything that was quite the right fit for what I needed. And then finding, eventually finding senior scholars who would be on our advisory board, who would help develop a curriculum for really thinking through I mean, it's really a lot of thinking through the vocation of a writer, vocation of a scholar as a writer, but not only for former academic writing, but also as like a writer in terms of communicating outside the academy or communicating in non-written forms as well. 
So that's sort of the, that frustration is the origin story of Sacred Rites. And now what Sacred Rites did in its first four years is kind of develop a really robust training that, which is both really practical stuff, but also creating space for writing reflection and cohort building around public facing work that people have a raft of support when they go and do this and have reflected on their own values for like when they're going to say yes, when they're going to say no we also did early on, we did a lot of media partnerships where i personally learned a lot from co-writing with a working journalist and writing for these other outlets. I'd never just, I had read, but i never thought about writing for, you know, a teen vogue or atlantic or whatever, or the wall street Journal. 
And so we set up some partnerships where we basically place scholars with these different media outlets and have them mentored into kind of doing that work. So that's, that's kind of stuff that we do. And now we do, we do quite a bit of training, both our grant funded stuff, but we also do it for institutions that kind of need a little, want a little help or need a little help, either with their graduate students or with their faculty. So this is a, is it a couple weeks long program that people apply for? And is it in person or online? Yeah. Yeah. All those things. You know, we started before COVID and our first cohort of nine was in person, in week, in Boston, super intense. 
Like they, we gave them, you know, no breaks. There was no time to work out or hang out or anything. We pivoted online during COVID. The full training is like eight modules, which are basically meant to take a week in person. But we also run them online now where we run something out, you know, maybe every couple of weeks we'll do one. So we have a couple that are running right now. We have one that's running right now that's funded by Luce, which is focused on the intersection of race, religion. in social justice. And so that cohort had to apply. There was a little bit of money to be involved. It's really a focused cohort. When we did it for the Carpenter Center this spring, it was focused on sexuality and religion. 
And then sometimes when we go and do it in person for people, like, so we're going to the University of Chicago next. We do our whole curriculum, most of it in person. We go for three intense days, and we do some of it online and do a bunch of mentoring afterwards. Or most recently, I guess last month, we did one for FTE. They have a doctoral students of color program. where they do a writing program and we did it for them. Forum for Theological Education is the E? Exploration? I think it's education. A Lilly-funded project, which is great. So yeah, we've kind of evolved to be a little bit nimble and tried to create things that will work for people and are flexible so that people internationally can do it if it's online. 
We have a big program we're going to roll out this winter, which is ACLS-funded, which will be focused on contingent and non-tenure track. scholars so that we can think about this as a form of professionalization as well. So yeah, we have a lot of different things going on. And a lot of it is focused on writing, but we also support people doing other forms of public-facing work. And are folks whose work touches on religion, but they might be in, I don't know, anthro departments or non-religion departments, are they also eligible to apply? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we, I mean, we've actually done some training I did some for philosophers of AI ethics this spring for my own institution. So we've actually done some training in a non-religion space at all. 
But our own programs that we run that are grant funded, basically, it's that you have to have some sort of graduate training in religion. That's what our mission is, to get people who have expertise in graduate training in religion in some form. So if you're an anthropologist but you study religion, fine. If you're a lawyer studying religion, it's fine. Historians, we've had a lot of people with different PhDs, say, but who've really focused and are focused on religion are interested in, in public facing work as sort of public teaching and helping religious literacy. Yeah. That's what we, that's what we've been doing anyway. Great. Yeah. And listeners might want to go back to episode two, where we talk with one person who did the program. 
Brett Crutch is in our episode two. Brett was in our first cohort of nine. And so everything that Brett does, we take credit for since then. So yeah, this is before he became editor of The Revealer. And so we had that first cohort was really, it's great to see sort of the fruits that the training has sort of borne for a lot of them. And Brett's a great example, because I think he really, it was a great, it came at the right time for him when he was really trying to figure out where he was going to find space to do what he wanted to do in the academy. Yeah. I wonder if you could give us an idea of what other alumni are doing or what they, you think they've done at least partly as a result of the program. 
Yeah. So I'm trying to get in his cohort. The person that comes to mind right away is, is Tia Noel Pratt, who really came out of that program and also did a writing retreat at Collegeville. I was at that with her and she came out of those two programs, really understanding herself to be an essayist. Like she's like, I never thought of myself that way. I like, she's like, I don't really like the op-ed forum. I don't really love the, the, the peer review form, but I just sort of found that this was my voice and I loved writing essays. And so she just wrote a tremendous amount of public facing work, which was, you know, really excellent. And, you know, we have a lot of our alumni have won journalistic awards. 
We're always really proud when an alumni wins something that is an acknowledgement by, you know, the religion beat folks, whether that's a Wilbur Award or Religion News Association. So that sort of, you know, media sort of, I guess, experience and success has been part of it. I think other people have, you know, taken and applied it in their work and all that sort of careers and um you're outside the academy as well, particularly as that becomes more and more of the norm. Thinking about a way, a space to sort of reflect on their skills as critical thinker and communicator that would sort of translate into other spaces. But yeah, we have we have we have like between our media partnerships and our um trains we have like 90 alum now, so i can't run through them all yeah and i hate like i hate to like highlight too many and and so 
you know, and short shift some of them. But Tia and Brett come to mind just because they were in that first cohort and it was really a turning point for them, I think, in terms of understanding their own voice as well for Brett in terms of being an editor and then for Tia in terms of like writing a certain form, finding a comfort level with certain form. Yeah, I was telling some friends that we were going to get a chance to talk with you and people outside of religion also wondered if there was advice you could give to academics, especially because I'm sure much of, or at least some of what you guys talk about applies to folks outside of religion too, but tips for those who want to be writing more popular pieces. 
People wonder, how do I go about doing that? I hope where we move actually to secret rights is thinking about developing and offering our training out, like just in the humanities more general, because a lot of the stuff is really translatable. So I think that you know, a big part of our curriculum is starting with these big questions of like, why did you get a PhD? You know, what, what, how are you trying to be useful in the world? And how does writing fit into that? And often that conversation, that internal conversation starts thinking about, well, I didn't just get into this to write dissertations and university press books and, you know, the peer reviewed article, which for many of us is not 
the most creative genre that we ever write in. So who who am I? So who am I trying to talk to and reach and what kind of public teaching do I want to do and how my writing for different outlets do that? Right. So I think it's really beginning of thinking about the audience that you want to reach and then what is that audience already reading? We spent a lot of time thinking through with our cohorts sort of a balancing act of rewards for doing this work, but also responsibilities and risks that come with it. um and all three of those things right i think sometimes people can't imagine why you would want to do public writing if you didn't want to be like famous which a lot of us don't really want the spotlight maybe but there might be other forms of reward again in terms of having a conversation with people you don't usually have a conversation with starting conversations sometimes you can get paid sometimes it can create other opportunities form relationships that can be really beneficial then also responsibilities in terms of well 
if we're thinking about writing in these mainstream journals and stuff or publications, responsibilities to the gig economy of journalists, right? So like actually getting paid is important because if you don't get paid, then you're undercutting someone whose list is their livelihood. And then risks, everyone's risk calculation is really different. It's very, you know, I started doing this work when I was already tenured and I'm also a white cis woman. And so the risks for me are, I mean, if you're a woman in public or a woman online, there's harassment that comes with that no matter what. But the risks for me are quite a bit less than somebody who is maybe writing about a very contentious topic or a community that has very well organized trolls associated with it or themselves are from a marginalized community in the academy. 
So really thinking through that. So I think these seem like, okay, well, I just want to start writing, but I think these things are really important for making the work safe and energizing and sustainable, these bigger conversations. And then also having that support system, like who are you going to call to read your email when you write something that blows up and you have to have someone monitor your email from you? Or who are you going to gut check something before you publish it if you're really angry and feeling really emotionally raw? Like, I really want to write this, be like, you know you who are going to check in? Make sure it's like a safe thing for you to write about, a productive thing for you to write about. 
So that raft. And then, you know, that's a part of our curriculum and part of what we do with our fellows is a lot of that sort of big picture reflective, creating space for that, for them to do together not like, here's what we think you should think here but like here's a space to do that thinking, which i don't think we have time to do in graduate school. And certainly i didn't have time to do it in my you know tenure track job because i was just constantly teaching and getting the stuff done, trying out the stuff for tenure. So creating that space and time. And then the other thing is really practical skills. Like I had to, to relearn how to write in a certain way when I started doing this, doing this. 
I mean, I sort of feel like it's like going back to like how I used to write when I was like in middle school or even elementary school, like what my voice was like, how I found joy and creativity, how my editor at Harvard, Sharmila Sen, who is, who I worked on my last two books on is we sort of joke that it's about putting on your big girl pants, but like, it's like not looking over your shoulder and like really being fully you and whoever you are, maybe with your students in your classroom and using that voice to write maybe, or, you know, if you're funny, being funny. And if you're, if you're able to be vulnerable in a certain way, being that way or sharing personal stories, because the public likes that, even if the academy downplays that. 
So really learning to find voice and style in a way, like the art of writing in a different way. And then some of it's like mechanics, like, right, what does the pitch look like? What is an op-ed? How is that different than an explainer? How do you prepare for a written interview with a journalist so you don't get yourself in trouble with a piece that you're not going to have editorial control over? How do you use social media? And how is Twitter or threads, like a text-based social media platform, different and useful than compared to Instagram, compared to YouTube or TikTok? And which one of those platforms might be the best fit for your personality or your gifts or your comfort level or your research. 
My work is very visual, but I'm just not very good at Instagram. Instagram is just like I just put too much stuff on my dogs on it. I just can't use it for work in that kind of way. It turns out TikTok is a really good platform for me. I just discovered this a couple of months ago because I don't mind talking into a camera and I don't mind telling stories and being informal. And it's harder for me to be piffy and clever in a tweet. so I can do public-facing work. It's easier for me to do it in a three-minute video on TikTok than it is for me to come up with that thing that's really going to start a conversation or contribute to a conversation on Twitter or threads. 
So a lot of this stuff is trial and error, or what are other people doing? How is a sausage made in these different sorts of, these different sort of platforms. And then once you learn about how the sausage is made, then you can figure out like, that's like, that's like not sausage I'm interested in. Like, I don't really, that's not a place I want to be. I don't feel comfortable doing that. Or this one's a really good fit for me. And a lot of that is trial and error, actually. You were talking about social media and actually, you know, a few of us working on the podcast, we're talking about social media and how it's not something we're all super comfortable with or used to. 
I'm curious, did this, I mean, it sounds like you, you found your comfort area in social media. Did it take a while or, or what was that like for you? So I'm just making this up, right? I'm a hundred percent trial and error. Like I didn't do a stitch of public facing work before my book, pious fashion, which was 2016, 2017. And now i am like, you know, op-eds everywhere from, um, you know, the Atlantic to whatever, but the same thing for social media. So I had, you know, and I had people mentor me through that. So Megan Goodwin's a great example. She was our first founding associate director of Secret Rights. She's always been, she's incredibly online, she would say, right? And so she, both she and my editor at Harvard, Sheryl Miller, were like, you should really be on Twitter. 
And I was like, I don't know how to do Twitter. I was a very late adopter to Twitter. And then for Twitter, you know, I just kind of got on and lurked for a while. And then I found the things of mine that went very more viral on Twitter were much more mentoring threads where I was just like, oh, my God, we just did a job search. And these people, these poor scholars are bombing their their job talks. And like, it just seems like there are some real practical advice that no one's getting. I could just put out there. Right. So I had a thread that like that's probably my biggest threat, probably a million views or something where I was just like, when you do a job talk, you know, here's. 
And things like that for pitching, like we might talk about that later, like what makes a good pitch and stuff. You know, sort of tips like that. That worked for me on Twitter or whatever we're calling Twitter now, X. Twitter is not as much fun for me anymore that we're all leaving it. Yeah, but a lot was trial and error. So TikTok, you know, TikTok is something my 15-year-old is pretty comfortable with. I'm not choreographing dances on TikTok. There are actually not a lot of scholars on TikTok. There's a few. There's quite a few people. Biblical scholars, actually. People love Bible content on TikTok. But it wasn't even like I could find someone and be like, oh, they're doing what I want to do. 
For TikTok, I just got on and posted a video. Made myself post a video every day for a month. And I was like, oh, I did a book review. I thought that was interesting, good content related to what I know. No one really cared about it, but that felt comfortable. I felt like book reviews felt comfortable. And then I taught an online class. And I posted a video every day related to the online class. And that's like when I started having things that went viral. So I posted something for my sexual ethics class about the bachelorette and evangelical purity culture. And then suddenly my people found me, right? Because I just was like, this is what I do. Oh, I'll teach a little bit online. 
So it was really trial and error. I think a lot of social media can be trial and error, but you can also get tips from people who've been doing it longer. So Megan did that with me. Megan Goodwin did that with me for Twitter. And we're thinking about trying to do some more public-facing programming around, actually might be around TikTok, trying to figure out, it's such a moving landscape right now. It's like, what is even stable right now? Like, what would you even tell a scholar to use? But YouTube and TikTok, I think, are really underutilized by scholars. It's places where particularly young people go for educational information. Like, they want educational content there. And if you're okay being like, I'm a content provider, you know, creator, that's what I do for the classroom. 
Can I... double dip a little bit. Can I take what I'm doing in the classroom and socialize education a little bit? That's kind of how I came out with the trick back. I was like, well, I'm just going to socialize education. That's what feels comfortable. And again, energizing. And the comments are wild. Like I try not to pay attention to them. And I think that the most viral thing I had was that bachelorette video, but I posted another video about, it was really kind of a book review. It was summarizing Deborah Majeeb's book about plural marriage. among American black Muslims. It was sort of just summarizing her four interpretations of the Quran on the issue of plural marriage. And it did very well in terms of how like a lot of views, but the comments were crazy. 
Like it had so many comments, people fighting in the comments. And the whole purpose of that video was like, look, there's a diversity of thought in the Muslim community. And the comments are all like, no, there's not a diversity of thought. I'm right. No, no, I'm right. No, no, I'm right. No, no, I'm right. So like create like, creating a space for people to have conversations that they're not, you know, finding each other not having, that's sort of like wild to me that that could happen. Yeah, but for me, it's all been a lot of trial error. I think the law of social media is a trial error because it's a little bit the wild west. Everything keeps changing. The algorithms change, the platforms change, and it's risky, right? 
So you have to have a thick skin and you have to figure out if there's high risk, high reward. Yeah, if it's worth it or not. I think that's the question. For scholars, I think it's a much easier question translation to do an op-ed or even an explainer. I feel like people don't think enough about explainers, but just like an explainer of a concept or an idea or a piece of history or a framework that would help the public understand something that's going on in the world right now, which doesn't even have to take a side necessarily, right? It doesn't have to be persuasive and argumentative way in op-ed. That can feel like a more comfortable transition or translation for an academic, I think, in public writing. 
Yeah, no, maybe you can actually explain what the explainer kind of piece is. Folks might not know that term. Yeah, so that's, I mean, that might be a little bit of a way that we've parse things out in sacred rights. Again, I was trying to get the landscape of the land here. What is the kind of public writing that scholars do? And everyone comes thinking, I want to write op-eds or the things I want to write. That's what people write. That's what you write. You write an op-ed for the New York Times. And we have realized over the years that, well, there is an op-ed which follows a certain structure. And it's an argument. It's about changing. It's about finding somewhere they are and moving them towards your position. 
And it's not like changing someone's mind who's you know, you're on the other side of the world from you, but finding someone sort of adjacent and convincing them through evidence-based, you know, argument that, you know, this is how you should think or believe. An explainer doesn't have to, and so that's going to be a little uncomfortable for scholars because we're trying, we're often taught that we should be unbiased, right? And not, you know, maybe it seems a little risky, like I don't want to take a position on this issue, this public issue. People might say that I'm wrong or I might get in trouble with my employer. An explainer is something, when we were thinking about this, particularly around publications like The conversation that works with scholars, as long as you have an academic affiliation, they'll work with you. 
And they're amazing because they're really a bunch of professional journalists and editors who are used to mentoring scholars to write really accessible pieces like high school accessibility level. And they really focus mostly, I would say, on explainers where they don't want you to take they don't want an opinion piece. They don't want something that pushes a certain agenda. They want something that is explanatory. So if an op-ed argues, an explainer just explains. So like, what is, I say I've done one for the, what did I do one for the conversation about? Three lessons you can learn about the diversity of Muslim women's dress, for example. Or, you know, what is Orientalism? Or, you know, something for me, because I do work on cultural appropriation. 
What did the Kardashians do last week? Okay, great. I'm going to explain the thing that they just like engaged with publicly, give it a little history. Like, okay, Kim Kardashian wore a rosary. you know, in the Dolce, in the Milan Fashion Week or something. Okay, so let me think, let me explain the history of rosary and how it's been used for fashion or how it's been used for politics or something. So using something that's going on in the world as an opportunity to do some public teaching. So it's like much more like 101, like what you teach the first day of your basic class. It's like one thing, like something very simple that you're like, oh, everyone knows that. But it's just not true. 
Like just because you know it or you've taught it a hundred million times, the general public probably doesn't understand that concept or that idea. And so trying to be useful in that way. And actually, do you have any idea who reads the conversation? Yeah. So I'm, you know, Paul and Jane probably have a really great breakdown of this. I know that my piece like had, you know, 90,000 hits in the first day. But what I know, like what I have heard is that it gets assigned a lot in high school classes. So definitely, I've assigned conversation pieces before my college classes. But I know in the US, particularly, it's a source of information and assignments for like high school classes. It does have a very international readership. 
So you can kind of watch, they have a really good analytic, like, okay, it just became, you know, nine o'clock in India, and so you get a big spike, and all these readers can come online. Yeah, so it's much more, it's a very, very general broad audience, which is actually why they're so great to work with because they really get you to like, you know, it's not like when I write for a Teen Vogue audience, like I have a certain level of like wokeness that I can assume, a certain level of tabular. Like I don't need to explain to them what some things are, but the conversation really lets you do something very, very basic. And you can, and also the great thing in the conversation is you can hyperlink and great thing about online stuff is you can hyperlink to stuff. 
So you can hyperlink to actual peer reviewed scholarship for the conversation. They love that. So it doesn't feel like it's watered down or dumbed down. It's just simplified and accessible, which is not the same thing as, you know, dumb. Yeah. So the practical steps for writing a popular piece less let's say you've been reading the Atlantic and you feel like you've got a topic that maybe they'd be interested in. Maybe you guys discuss this in sacred rights, but is it good practice to kind of look online for who the editors are and see if they have sort of contact or email information and just kind of cold call that way? Yeah. So I would say the first, so I, I am notorious at sacred rights for coming up with really dumb metaphors and I have a nautical metaphor that I use for this. 
So I, We talk about boats, ports, and docks where the boats are the topics that you want to write about. So you could just sit down and brainstorm that right now. And we do that with our scholars. I'm like, here's a stack of post-it notes, write down every topic you think you might want to talk to the public about. Then there's the ports or the venues. So like the Atlantic is an example, right? And people often come in being like, yeah, I want to write for the Atlantic or I want to write for the Washington Post. And often we're like, you know, maybe, maybe That's not the right place to start, not only because it's very hard to place your first piece there without any clips, but also because that might not be the right audience. 
So really thinking about that, those ports, those venues as who are the people you want to reach, what are they reading versus like, what are you reading? It may not be the same thing, right? So I don't read, I actually do read Teen Vogue, but Teen Vogue is not the first thing I read every morning, right? But the Teen Vogue readers are who I want to reach, which is why I love writing. I mean, besides the fact that I love their editors, I love writing for them because that's my audience. So this is all the prep work before you even figure out. So okay, say you decide that The Atlantic is the one that you want, but again, there may be something smaller, more local, or with a readership that is already 
interested or savvy about your topic. So for us, for example, we have great relationships with editors and publications that already do a lot of religion, which makes it easier for our scholars to be like, all right, I don't have to convince you that religion is important. Like you already get that. That's something that your publication does a lot. And that's a really nice lift not to have to do, right? So where are the venues that are publishing your disciplinary friendly sort of stuff already? So say you decide to say Atlantic, although I would probably push back against Atlantic, but I'll give you Atlantic. I'll concede that. Then the next thing, of course, is what I called, I just called it the doc, which is really the hook, right? 
So like, why does Atlantic want to hear from you right now? You got to find some reason to make this editor pay attention to what you want to write about. Like there's anniversary coming up. There's an election coming up. Again, the Kardashians did something in the news or something in popular culture going on, right? Like, so there's a new movie being released that talks about, so really that kind of hook. And that is before you even start the approach. But I think your question was much more, practical, right? So most publications have pitch guides online, right? The Conversation has one, the Atlantic has, the Publishing Atlantic has one, and it will tell you what they want from a pitch and who the editors are. 
You have to do quite a bit of research, right? And then it's a cold, it's a cold email the first time. And I mean, I have a little formula for pitches. I think you answer, almost always you answer a what and three whys. And the what is What are you arguing? Not what your topic is, but what is your angle? I don't want to know that you're going to send me an op-ed about abortion. I want to know what your op-ed about abortion is. So what are you writing about? What's your angle? And then there are three whys that every pitch should answer, which is why it matters to the reader, not to you, because I know you care about this because you're a scholar, so you think it's all interesting. 
But why does it matter to my readers at The Atlantic? Why now? Right. That's that hook. Why am I going to publish this now? I got a lot of pitches right now. Why is yours rising the top? And why you? Right. And so why you is sometimes easier to answer when you have clips that you can hyperlink to. But for scholars, you know, use the why you is often based on because I have been working with this community for ten years because I have written this award winning book because, you know, but if it's important that the why you is part of the pitch. Right. So usually all pitches are going to have that that what and those three wise in it. And then it's funny that this is hard to find this information about, but I got mentored about this by editors and journalists in terms of how to construct the email itself, that your subject line should be all in caps with PITCH, colon, and then the piffy title. 
So we just had a scholar who's pitching Teen Vogue today, and I was like, make sure you get the word Halloween in the title and the word ghost, because I want them to know it's a pitch tied to Halloween. So the editor knows it's semi time sensitive or it's tied to a calendar event. And you got to get kind of grab their attention. And then it's very short. It's like three paragraphs or not even three paragraphs sometimes. And then you have to expect that you will not hear back necessarily and not take that personally. If you think your email inbox is bad and my email box is pretty bad. If I walk away from my email, I come back. There's 100 in there. 
But editors emails boxes, they're just totally trash. So they just might have missed it. They might have seen it and thought it was interesting enough, but not something they had to jump on right away. And so not hearing back, don't take it personally. And I follow up, depending on if it's timely, how time sensitive it is, I then follow up. So this person who's pitching something that's going to be tagged to Halloween, I mean, we're still in August, right? So it's not a really huge rush. So she can wait a full week before even replying. And then reply to the original email so that subject line's in there with a RE in the front so they can see, oh, it's the second time I've been contacted. 
I'm just circling back to see if you're interested. And always, always only pitch one place at a time. That's really, really important. It's considered extremely bad form to send a piece out to multiple editors because I've had that situation where I haven't heard back yet. And the next thing I hear is they're sending me a copy edited version of the op-ed, especially an op-ed because when you pitch an op-ed, you send a draft. An explainer, you just send the idea, but an op-ed, and I think this is conventional, but I think this is a convention because op-eds are often so timely, they want to get them up right away. But I've pitched things to editors at religion news servers who I know. So I'm like, hey, Paul, I got this thing. 
And I won't hear anything for a day or two. And then they'll send me back a copyedited version. I'm like, okay, well, thank goodness. You don't want to waste an editor's time. But if it's super time sensitive, so if this pitch that she sent to Teen Vogue was tied to Labor Day instead of Halloween, you could say, or something that was in the news cycle this week, you could say, I think it's a great fit for your readers. Given the time-sensitive nature of it, if I don't hear back from you by the end of business today or tomorrow morning or whatever it is, I mean, realistically about how time-sensitive it is, I'm going to move on and pitch somewhere else. And then I always do them the courtesy of before I actually move on, like the 24 hours have passed, say, or it's the end of business, I always say, dear 
Dear Paul, I haven't heard from you. I'm going to move on, pitch it somewhere else because it's time sensitive. Looking forward to moving, working with you in the future. So the pitch is an opportunity to start a relationship and establish relationship and keep that relationship kind of in, nurture that relationship so that, you know, when you, when you have something that's kind of half baked, they might, you know, spend more time with you working on it, or they might come to you. Then, you know, I have editors come to me or journalists come to me. Everything is relationships. And respecting an editor's time and that they know their audience and their craft better than you do probably, right? You might know a lot, but you probably don't know, you know, how the Atlantic readership and editorial sort of process works. 
So sort of being, always being very respectful because they, I mean, people have long memories if you're not, if you're rude. And we've definitely had scholars go through our programs who've had contentious interactions with editors. And I know the editor will never, never work with them again. And it's sort of a lost, it's a missed opportunity. I found that every time I've spent time just being nice to people and being super responsive. Like if I don't hear back from religion news service, and then I hear back, I know they want to put it up that night. I drop everything. This is a hurry up and wait situation where you're the one who's hurrying up and waiting, not them because their time works totally differently than ours does. 
It has to go up today. It has to go up today. If you miss it, you miss it. And the, the, better you get at writing really quickly, which I have to say is not my favorite thing, the more opportunities you'll have to like really be able to jump on new cycles and get a ton of stuff out there. I mean, and the challenge for that is like, particularly if you're someone in a tenure track position, public facing work is more and more acknowledged by institutions as valuable, but doesn't usually count as one of the important academic beings for tenure, promotion, or even merit. So you need to balance, getting the more traditional forms of academic writing done with with the public facing, which can feel, I have to say, more like because it can be so quick and the feedback can be so positive, it can kind of can be like this little bit of a rush. 
I'm like, oh, this is like really great. I really feel like it's meaningful and it's being useful. But, you know, especially for tenure track people, I figure out like what you want your balance to be. Anthea Butler told me once that her balance is 80-20. So she's very perfect, very, it's a ton of public facing stuff, but she does 80% as formal traditional academic writing and 20% is public facing. And I'm more cyclical. Like I'll work on a book, an academic book. And then when the book comes out, I'll allow myself six months where I'll like write anything I want to public facing that comes out of that book. But then I'm like, you know, circle back. Okay. It's time for my peer reviewed article. 
I like, I mean, I like to double dip. I think it's that that's way to, to make it more sustainable to like, if you've already done the work of figuring out something, the work of translating it is still work. But then you're kind of in the mind frame where you're able to stay in the research. I mean, I guess I also think a myth is that the public-facing work takes away from real fundamental creation of knowledge in the academy. And that hasn't been my experience. My experience has been only that doing public-facing work has made my scholarship much better. because it's making me ask more important questions of the stuff that I'm looking at, more questions that matter to more people, not just questions that matter to me. 
And so the last couple of books have really been framed for me out of being more attuned to the publics that I want to talk to, but letting them also fund the research questions that I'm asking. So I'm asking different questions. I'm not so siloed in the academy and asking the questions, the navel-gazing kind of questions that we sometimes ask disciplinary. That's sort of like who cares questions. So yeah. That was a lot of really helpful info. Thank you. One of the things you mentioned earlier is that it can be a little risky or dangerous when you're out there in social media world or posting. I don't know if you feel like you can share what some of that sort of scariness feels like or what you're referring to. 
Yeah. Well, so I was, I don't know why I was surprised by this because I was a middle-aged woman when I finally got got more online, but I was just surprised that just being on Twitter meant that like, I got people DMing me thinking that I was on a dating app. Like I was just, I was, I was like not prepared for that sort of like low level version of like, just for like being online. I also was, I was, guess I was unprepared for, you know, the personal emails that I got whenever I wrote something that were from, you know, because, because of what I write on, sometimes they were from like progressives too. Like, no, no, you're, sound like an apologist for Muslim women or but that sort of like invasion into your to your email. 
I'm pretty careful about what I will write academic book and maybe not censor myself. But if I'm making a decision about what I'm going to go public with in a bigger venue, I may make decisions about not writing about certain things. There are certain topics that are much more likely to get you trolls in the field of religious studies, for example, right? Like if you write about white nationalism, if you write about Hindu nationalism, you know, there are certain things that are just very, they're just very well organized or responses to that. I've also had, I think that a thing to, for social media, for example, is that you're not in control of where, of what things go viral. It's surprising, like the things that you think are like, oh, this is so clever. 
Everyone's going to like, this is going to get picked up. and then like, no one cares. And you write something about, you know, whatever. And then suddenly really big people are fighting about it and retweeting it and tagging you. And you're just like, not quite ready for all of that. You know, I think some tips that we've sort of talked about and have developed to sort of talk to our cohorts about over the years is, you know, again, first, like you don't owe any part of yourself to the public. So again, making these decisions on what parts you're not going to share. I'm very careful about scrubbing personal family content. So like when i had a doing more public stuff. Like my kid is not in my social, my teenager's picture is not on my social media and even my private, not private, my Instagram account is not really for work, but she's not in there anymore. 
And I subscribe to deleteme.com and I have my personal information. So if someone docs me, I docs myself. That's a great exercise. Docs yourself and find out what people can see about you and find about you if they want to, just so you can erase information that you want and have a plan. Like, I think if you're gonna go, particularly if you're going to use social media, have a plan for what you do when it goes sideways, because it just probably will. And that can be something just as little as like a really well-known scholar who you respect, like pushes back and retweets and all their like followers are coming at you and you're like, what is going on? Or it can be like really violent sort of language and from trolls and stuff and just have like a plan. 
So like shut down your account. Figure out how you're gonna lock your account. Figure out who you want to like look at your dms and your emails but you don't have to know if there's any support from your institution. And again, you may be that like, I just want to get on there and lurk and i don't want to be producing content on some of these forums because they are so, they're very volatile right now too. oh I only want to, I'm only going to be posting content that i stand behind and if it makes people upset, like i don't care because like that's part of like, you know, if you're, That's part of what I'm trying to do. Maybe I'm trying to stir the pot a little bit. 
I think of other things that have happened, concrete things that I can share. And we're talking about this partly just so folks know that they're not alone if they're experiencing things like this. We don't always hear about them. I think that's right. And I think that really, we are really focused at Sacred Rites on a cohort model because of this. I think it's really important to have people to go to when it when stuff goes sideways to be like, ah, stuff went sideways. You'd be like, it's okay. Like I'll look at your email or again, to do that gut check. Like I want to write this. I think it's a little bit sassy. Okay. Yeah, that's fine. That's sassy, but you're sassy. But like, oh yeah, no, that is a little bit sassy in a way that you don't want it to be. 
I mean, I've seen a lot of stuff and I won't do specifics because I don't want to have other scholars feel called out, but I've definitely seen some things that have gone a little sideways and cause a lot of conversation the way the scholar didn't intend. that if they had checked in with someone maybe before, like the editor didn't do them any favors maybe by publishing the piece, right? But like if they had had a colleague they had checked in with ahead of time, the colleague could have been like, oh, I know what your point is here, but it's getting lost in this. And this is what the topic, this is what I was going to talk about, right? So having that raft of support, that cohort around you, fostering those relationships before you do anything public. 
I mean, this is just true for any, you know, the, tenure track as well having a cohort makes it a lot easier people you can like call when you're on the job market you're negotiating or people you can ask like you know oh my dean just asked me to do this how do i mean i have this at my own institution there's a bunch of women who are basically now running the university when we started maybe five or six or seven years ago meeting regularly and being like i got asked to do this and they're like oh yeah i got asked to do this and i got this in return for that or you can say no to that or you could figure out how to negotiate 
career things that I can, the same sort of thing, like pooling resources, pulling expertise when you're doing public facing work. And I have senior, I still have people, senior people that I go to and ask for advice, you know, about, you know, trade books or any sort of blowback I get, or, you know, is this interview worth doing? And yeah, I think that there's never, there's, there's always value for having that community. Plus it just makes it more fun, especially on social media. You have a group. I mean, no one would have ever seen anything I wrote on Twitter if it wasn't for the fact that when I first started, I had a group of people retweeting everything that I wrote. Twitter creates Twitter. 
Right. So and the same thing for TikTok that I went from like 300 followers to 11,000 or something almost overnight because someone, the really big biblical scholars on there, you know, duetted with me and was like, oh, my people be here or not. Like my people who like religion, here's one person doing religion. So that makes it also much more fun when you have a community on there, like cheerleading for you and signal boosting. Like really, that's one of the best ways to use social media, which is not that risky. It's just a signal boost to other people. And create resources for other people, like of other people's work for like, so that people can, you know, hear, oh, this just happened in the news. 
I don't write about this, but here are the 10 scholars I know, and here are some resources, or here's who to follow, or here's, and really holding, you know, being a good citizen and being very generous, that's one of the best ways to use social media. Instead of trying to, I have to say, anybody who spends their time on social media just promoting their own work is not someone who I'm following, probably. I don't need to hear about every award you get or every article. Like, if you're not giving me anything useful, it's, I mean like, yay, but like, I don't need that in my feed. Right. So how are you, how are you being a good member, a good community member? And you can do that without very much risk, actually. 
I love, I love those. And I feel like those are people I don't, I've not met in person. I feel like, I feel like I actually have colleagues from social media who do that kind of work who I've never met in person, but I do feel like we are part of my community because they, you know, boost what I do. I boost what they do. There's a whole group of female, um, writers who I now know through TikTok, who I'll never meet in real life, but are, you know, we all got on TikTok around the same time. And we're all trying to figure out how to use book talk, but we're not romance writers or whatever. And I just like every single thing that they post, I like it, you know, and I like that was really great. 
And that just like, that makes it so much Oh, thank goodness, like, like that someone out there saw that and is on my side. And to do that for someone else's like takes off your notes, right? So Yeah. I mean, it is a reminder. Sometimes we wonder, you know, what do the likes mean on social media? But it does. It is a way to support colleagues, friends. And it does mean something to see other people appreciating. Yeah. I mean, I so the the content I was doing on TikTok was about sexual ethics, which is a topic that is repressed by the algorithm. It doesn't TikTok is very suspicious by any do with the word sex. It thinks it might be pornographic or dangerous or violent. 
And so it literally suppresses things, the algorithm, if you have S-E-X in a caption. And I'm not going to go through every caption and change the word S-E-X to people use SIGs or something. I'm not going to do that. So when I first got on for my course, I was like, I'm going to do this as an experiment. But all you people in my class, all 40 of you, I want you to get on there and like everything and repost everything and comment because that will confuse the algorithm. and my and i said the same thing to my followers right they're like and they and they did they're like, yeah, this isn't content. It's not pornographic it's educational i'm gonna help like basically undermine the algorithm and push this out there and have a bigger conversation. 
So you can kind of get people to do that work with you too, by asking. I mean, that's why i do it. It's the like, you know, no one's counting the likes maybe, but like reposting something or signal boosting something or commenting, gets more eyes on it, gets more other people's eyes on it. And it's not very much effort on your part to do that work for someone. Yeah. A couple of questions we're asking guests. One is, what is something you wish you had known about writing or publishing earlier in your academic career? Yeah. So I probably already alluded to this, but I wish I had let myself do more public-facing work early in my career. I didn't. I kept my head down. 
I wrote peer-reviewed articles, university press book. And I did that through tenure. And I did that almost through promotion to fall before falls when I started writing. And I think I wish I had allowed myself to spend time cultivating the art of writing, not just because I would be a better writer now, but because I think it's, I think it's fun. And I think it's, again, it's energizing and it's, you know, do a little Katie Cannon quote, but it feeds my soul in a way that I mean, I can write, I can bang out a peer-reviewed article, but like, man, can I be formulaic and wouldn't when I write that? And so I wish I'd had the space in grad school to think about what kind of public writing I might want to do and to spend time playing with narrative and style and tone before. 
I mean, I just did very late in my career. I did it basically 10 years after grad school. So I guess I wish I knew that that was going to be okay. And maybe it wasn't okay when I was finishing grad school. It is okay now, but I wish... The sort of support for public facing work was on my radar and public writing especially. Was that, was it because it was something you considered and dismissed because you felt like it's not what I have time or was it not even actually much of a thought for you earlier on? Oh, no, I feel like it was very OK. I came from the NGO sort of activism world and I think. Going to grad school was, if I had any hazing in grad school, and I'm actually one of those people who liked grad school, so I'm a weirdo. 
And I went to University of Chicago, and not everyone likes University of Chicago, but I have great colleagues and great mentors. But I do think that I got there and thought to be a real scholar, because I don't have scholars in my family. I don't come from an academic family. To be a real scholar, I have to look like how my faculty look, how my advisor looks. And in terms of their production, I need to produce... peer-reviewed article or two every year. I need to do this work and not do this other work. So for me, it wasn't even just writing. I also thought I couldn't do social justice work. And so those two things are very connected to me. Like the public writing for me is very mission-driven. 
And I mean, I literally promised advisors in grad school when I started my dissertation that I would not go back and do NGO work. I think there was concern because I had come from such an not they would spend less time on me and then I would just like leave the academy. So I think I thought to be a good academic, a real academic, I had to be very serious and very serious meant trying not to be doing activism work, not doing social justice work and not writing with a certain voice. I mean, maybe you can get a sense from me from this podcast. I have gray hair, like I present not distinguished, but at least old, but I'm very informal and I'm, that's my voice in the classroom, but that's, 
actually my real voice in my writing. And that's not my voice in my academic writing. So I think I was both, I think those two things came hand in hand, training myself to write. And I don't think there's anything wrong with the academic genre. I think that there's real value. And probably Martin talked to you guys about this a couple of times last week. But I think there's real value to the academic prose and the academic, like the narrative structure of a peer-reviewed article. There is a narrative structure there, right? And the careful work and the lit review of an academic university press book. But it's not the only way to create knowledge or to translate knowledge or share knowledge. And I think I, you know, I made a conscious effort to do a certain kind of writing, a certain kind of work, so I would be legible in the academy. 
And, you know, in some ways it worked, right? And it was only that now that I kind of wish earlier on I let myself still have, only because this is like way more sustainable and much less likely to like burn out when I'm like, I'm writing a book right now, or I'm working on a proposal right now for a book that like, it is, it is such a public facing book. It'll, you know, it'll be a trade book with a capital T and like that is, and I just, and I just finished a book. And so I was like, how are you writing a book again? I was like, cause I want to write this book, right? This is like very fun to be thinking about this right now. 
So I guess I just wish I'd given myself permission to do that or knew that it was a possibility. I didn't think it was a possibility. And I think a lot of graduate training is about, it doesn't, leave space for that. I think what people do with PhDs is changing. And I think higher ed has not, especially in doctoral training, has not caught up. And it's not really their fault. There's not necessarily people in place. The faculty might not be there who think about this vocationally more expansively or have networks that would support that. But I do think it's a mismatch. I think that there's people who go to grad school to be useful, not just to be tenured faculty at our ones. 
And we should be creating more space for them to think about what usefulness looks like, because it doesn't just look like being on the tenure track. Yeah. I mean, what you say reminds me, a friend who was listening to the podcast was saying that after listening to it, they felt like, gee, why don't grad programs offer courses on this kind of public writing? Since there is acknowledgement that the job market is so impossible and that some portion will be going off and doing the kind of public facing you're talking about. I but it could be sort of part of graduate training. It could be. So we're trying to like actually partner with more and more institutions on like a fee for service. Like, you know, hire us, we'll do it for you. 
Because I think that, again, I think it's hard. Well, look, all faculty are overstretched anyway. And if public writing is not something, even if you do it, it doesn't mean you necessarily can teach it. We learned that actually very early that people who are doing it maybe didn't know how to teach other people. They're just so good at it. They didn't know how to break it down for someone. And again, there might not be internally, there might be faculty expertise that can do it. And they're already, you know, stretched to then you don't want to like take away from something else. But I think that that's right. I think that it's not and it's not just public writing. It's like public, you know, for public communities or public scholarship more in general. 
What does that look like? Part of I mean, I think writing is an easy entry point because we all have to write. And it's a, you know, it's a nice like first step, but it can look like all kinds of different things. I wish that that was, you know, a required, it's a vocational class is really what I'm talking about. I can say vocation because we talk about vocation all the time in religion. Yeah. But like, it's the class where you think about why are you here? Like you were, we were, everyone is very smart. If you were in graduate, this is where I started at University of Chicago. We did that, we did a training film last year. And because I had gone there, it was a really meaningful training for me because I was like, oh my God, this is what I wish I had. 
I wish someone had asked me, why are you here? You could be making more money. For me, I was doing it instead of going to law school. So I could have an easier career, trajectory would have been more clear. Making more money, you could be more job security. There's something that's pulling you here. Why are you here? And I think how do you want to be useful is a good way of framing that too. And what does that look like? And it doesn't have to look like the same for you as it does for anyone around you or anyone even who's going to mentor you. Or you have to find mentors who help with that. It can't be one size fits all. And how are you going to find those mentors? 
And let's create some space for thinking about this so we don't come out of PhD programs freaked out that the job market is a dumpster fire right now because we've already realized that there's other things. Like I was totally fine to go back and do NGO work no matter what I promised my advisor. That was, it wasn't even a plan B, right? I mean, I convinced myself it was a plan B because that was how I became a Zurich scholar, right? But like, and I think that's not only a question of like creating space, but also graduate programs should be inviting back, inviting back alumni and celebrating alumni who are not doing what the faculty there are doing, right? Like students don't know what, but they don't know. 
They don't know the possibilities, right? I don't know the possibilities. I would love to know, You know, who are the alumni who are, you know, working at, I don't know, software tech startups or who are in NGOs or who are doing politics? How have people parlayed their degrees and their critical thinking skills, the research skills or communications? You know, what parts of their portfolio have they parlayed in the other jobs? And let's bring people back and have students interact and meet them and understand like possibilities so that it's not, you know, It's not just like, okay, well, I didn't get the same job my advisor had, so I'm a failure. I want people to invest in time and thinking. I think PhDs are still super useful, but I think it's also super useful to think about how they can be useful outside the academy and for people to feel empowered when they're in grad school and not freaked out and stressed the whole time. 
Yeah. Another question we're asking is about writing tips. If you have any writing practices or habits that are working for you now. Sure. Yes. Life hacks for writing. Yeah. So I have had a couple of things that have really helped me throughout different like periods of time. One is, and I think the biggest overarching theme is that I, although I am actually an introvert and like to be by myself, I am a social writer and that's meant different things at different times for me. So in grad school, it meant I had two other women and we wrote in a coffee shop about maybe just once a week, but we read every single page of each other's dissertation. And that was so helpful for me to have someone, maybe they were not working on anything I was working on. 
Someone was working on Trout, someone was working on Leibniz, I was working on Homanie and John Paul II. I mean, we were just all over the place, right? So that was also actually very helpful. We were not in competition in the job market. We just wanted each other to get done. And I knew that someone was waiting there to read my thing and give me feedback. As I've gone through my career, that's morphed. I actually find right now I don't have time to read other people's work as much as I used to just because of all my other obligations that I have. And so social writing has looked a little different. So sometimes I'm literally marked down on a chart. I was at University of North Carolina before I came Northeastern, and my colleague Paul Silva has this book about how to write a lot. 
Not how to write well, how to write a lot. So like really about how like trick yourself into like writing like lots of things, generating a lot of prose. And there's a chart in that book that's like, you know, how many minutes a day did you write or how many words a day? And I've literally like charted that out as an accountability almost to myself. And then when I stopped, so I stopped being able to read everyone's work. Then I stopped being able to schedule writing time at Northeastern with my cohort because we were all so busy. It was like impossible to find an hour a week where we can meet in a conference room. It was just, I mean, it seems dumb that that couldn't happen, but it couldn't. 
So the thing that I did, particularly when I needed to jumpstart my writing, is I do it over text and I call it wexting. So like texting with a W. And I find someone who's usually in the same urgent position that I am. Like maybe they have a book due at the end of summer as well, a proposal. So my book, Pious Fashion, it was a colleague at Northeastern who was also trying to write a book and we both had young kids and we just couldn't find a time to meet at Northeastern, but it was during COVID. But we knew that we had to get up before our kids got up because then we were like doing whatever, homeschool or Zoom school. So we would promise each other, we would wake up at five o'clock and be in front of our computers at 5.30. 
So at five o'clock, I go down and make coffee and she's already texting me saying, are you up? Like, I'm up. And then at 5.30, we'd say, okay, let's start. And we would break it down to units. So we'd do like a 45 minute unit or an hour unit. And then just having that accountability has really helped me. The book I'm working on now, My Wexing partner is actually based in Dubai. She's a journalist writing a memoir. But we were just both in the same position working on books and working on book proposals. So that, for me, is not that much time commitment. All I'm doing is sending a text. Sometimes we put our FaceTime cameras on, but often not. I'm usually in the bathroom with my pajamas quickly writing. 
And I find that, for me, routine is not everyone's like this. But I find that I have to touch it every day or almost every day. and that having someone like accountable to, it makes that much easier for me. Yeah, that's a really neat idea. Well, thank you so much, Liz. This has been really helpful. Lots of helpful tips in here and we really appreciate your taking time. Oh, absolutely. It was fun to chat. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida.