That’s the stuff that wakes me up in the morning, gets me angry. I mean, every once in a while, somebody will just be shafted on pay or a job or unionization or something. As somebody who’s both a victim of it and cannot stand seeing other victims of it.

Kashana Cauley: Systemic injustice bothers me deeply. And so I just decided to throw random jokes at them every day until I got a style I liked, and that ended up being successful beyond my wildest dreams. And I had this Twitter account, but I have like 200 people.

I was freelancing a little bit, but I always want to learn how to tell jokes. I started telling jokes on the internet because my son got big enough that he wasn’t putting random things in his mouth. Kashana Cauley: Oh I skipped a bunch of stuff. But anyway, the essay goes viral and then from there, what? I think we would know if it was really fucking people up, like in mass. I’m like, Do you have children? I’m kind of paranoid about what I put in my body and I sort of get the temperament, but, so many millions and millions and billions of people are vaccinated. That’s relatable, because I always say I think about people who are anti-vaxxers. One of the essays goes viral, essentially.īrad Listi: And then you had a kid. So you start you start writing these essays. And then I met a woman at a party who was like, Is there any way you could do an essay about my kind of gross hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, which has major issues that people don’t love to have to talk about on things like race.īrad Listi: Okay, Wait, wait. I started sending things to literary journals. So I wrote, you know, badly before I could write better and started sending my work out. But, yeah, somewhere in that transition I just decided to go back to that whole school thing. And then I had a really supportive English teacher. I was like, I’m going to write noir and I’m gonna illustrator it and I had no idea what like detectives even were when I was ten.Īnd then I wrote bad poetry, and then I wrote good poetry and then I wrote bad prose and then I wrote good prose. But to be a writer was something that I wanted to do since I was ten. I think it’s important to tell the truth about that. Kashana Cauley: Well, I have a financially and emotionally supportive husband. Can you just talk a little bit about getting from antitrust law to entertainment? I think there’s a show called The Great North, if I have that right. You had a lawyer job and then somehow you go from that to having a really funny Twitter feed, to writing for Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show, to Pod Save America.

You’ve been able to transition to a creative career with a plum, and I want to track that because I think listeners will be curious, how you did it. Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!īrad Listi: But you have had a very, from the outside looking in, varied and successful career. Her debut novel, The Survivalists, is out now from Soft Skull Press.

The survivalists kashana cauley