Peter Shull on the Art of Teaching, Writing, and Building a Literary Community
Author Interview
INTRODUCTION:
Why Substack? Why do any of us do this?
Because the traditional publishing world is a locked gate with no key? Because waiting years for someone else's approval is dead time? Because it's better to build something up for yourself than to beg for scraps? It’s about more than that.
It’s because control matters—over voice, over reach, over what you say and how you say it, over how the final product is packaged. Because the audience is there, even if you have to find them one by one. Because maybe the idea of being read still means something, even in a world where attention is currency and everyone is broke. The answer varies. For me, it was about audience growth. A future readership. A platform to promote my novel without the glacial pace of publishing. Eleven years of writing and rewriting, still tangled with a developmental editor, waiting months for publishers to even glance in my direction . . . . That’s what getting published is about most of the time: waiting. Substack can feel like the only way forward, a way to make any kind of stamp on our “flat literary economy,” as
puts it.Talking to Peter Shull was easy. Why Teach? had that same exhausted, cut-the-bullshit attitude I found refreshing in conversations with others in my former line of work. We had a number of earnest, honest discussions. Teaching had become a fight—culture wars, students addicted to their phones, AI corrupting assignments, academia unraveling history into something mutable and unrecognizable, perhaps unteachable. We talked about that. We talked about how the job had changed. We talked about how it had changed us.
We talked about books in his comment sections. He has a way of facilitating discussion, making his Substack more than just a place to publish—it’s a space where people converge. His moderation is sharp, engaged, precise. Discussions range from “Shakespeare and Empire” to “Céline and Censorship.” Each chapter he releases becomes an event, a debate, a way for readers to work through the ideas he lays out in his serialized release mode. It’s rare to see that kind of engagement handled with such control, but Peter manages it, making every discussion feel essential. Beyond the comments, his curation of content in his Notes section is impressive. He pulls together a community not just through discourse but with an underlying sense of care—a rare quality in digital spaces. There’s love in how he moderates, how he steers the conversation, how he creates a space for readers to engage and challenge one another without losing focus. That’s something worth watching.
In his recent appearance on
Rap Fiction podcast, Peter sounds exactly like you might expect: measured, polite . . . a little hesitant. There’s a quietness to him, a careful observation of the room before he speaks. A teacher’s tic. I could imagine Peter, standing in a quiet, empty classroom, speaking into the mic between classes . . .Writers who don’t make it right away end up in classrooms (we can’t all be Bret Easton Ellis). But the job is brutal. It grinds you down. Imagine teaching Macbeth to a room of eighteen-year-olds. Education bureaucrats love acronyms: in our current SCT (“Student-Centred Learning”) culture, you ration your words. You manage egos. You fight to stay relevant while drowning in invoices for “output” with the most minimal actual output. Maybe it's a necessary shift in teaching, but maybe we’ve strayed too far. Complete student autonomy means complete anarchy.
It grinds you down, depletes your resources. Still, I’ll go back to it someday. Peter’s book made me believe I could. It’s the only job where you get a real-time read on how people engage with literature. If you’re lucky enough to get certified and teach Shakespeare, or Mary Shelley, or Tennessee Williams, it’s a privilege. The only real way to gauge the most up-to-date responses to those texts. That being said: about a third of my peers as an English Lit major went on to teaching degrees. I’ve been surrounded by teachers from all over the English- and non-English-speaking world for a third of my life now. It’s a weight you carry home.
Peter’s novel nails it:
If I was angry—outraged—incredulous—then these emotions were partially muted by the fact that I had already spent so much time in the last two years being angry, outraged, and incredulous. They were also muted partially by the fact I didn’t have time to engage with these strong emotions. Deprived of the materials I had planned to use, I needed to scramble to prepare other materials for the upcoming classes I had for the week. I planned for the rest of the morning and spent the afternoon sifting through the piles of district materials I had been given over the last eighteen months to find the worksheets and packets that seemed least bad, then went home feeling, not freshened at the conclusion of my winter’s break, but depleted by the revelations and hardships of the day.
You remember the names, the faces . . . there are students—even colleagues—who haunt you. Why Teach? understands this. Some names I wouldn’t even give to a dog now. The only way through it is having people who get it. When it works, there’s nothing like it. When it doesn’t, it’s hell.
Peter reads Austen, Lethem, Chabon. He’s also a realist, and Why Teach? unfolds with such meticulous detail, such attention to character and scope, that it recalls the episodic nature of a Dickens novel—where a chapter feels like an hour of prestige TV.
His realism spans the full range of human emotion, yet there’s a consistent warmth to his tone. Why Teach? tackles timely, even controversial topics, but Peter’s voice is the farthest thing from bitter or hostile. He steps back, absorbed into his characters. What makes his novel remarkable is how seamlessly he conjures a polyphony of voices, perspectives, and stances—which is what realism at its best allows which no other “rendering” of the novel does in quite the same way.
What makes Peter even more compelling is how he launched his Substack and Why Teach?—how he knew exactly what he was doing from the start. He had a strategy, a clear path. He didn’t flinch. That’s something to pay attention to.
Peter is a Kansas City-based writer, placing him in the lineage of great Midwestern novelists. Marilynne Robinson, Denis Johnson, and Jonathan Franzen all emerged from this landscape, carrying that stark, unsentimental eye for American life. Peter fits into that tradition. But beyond his fully embodied characters, he is also a masterful writer of setting, shaped by the environment that shaped him. His prose is sharp, unpretentious, and deeply aware—a style rooted in a world that still values the weight of the novel. If we want novels like this to survive, we need to support writers like him.
As I last checked in with Peter, he was entrenched in the work—endlessly reviewing the text, approving digital and physical copy edits. He was in the minutiae—checking pagination, scrutinizing fonts, making sure line breaks fell exactly where they should. Every decision, from the formatting of dialogue to the spacing between paragraphs, had to be combed through, tested, adjusted. On Substack, publishing isn’t just writing—it’s design, it’s marketing, it’s knowing when and how to release each chapter to keep the audience engaged. It’s the grueling, invisible labor no one thinks about until they’re doing it themselves. And yet, despite the grind, despite the relentless attention to detail, Peter carries himself with the same attitude that made Why Teach? what it is—hard work, integrity, and an unshaken belief in what comes next.
Peter Shull is the author of the novel Why Teach?, currently being serialized here on Substack and due for physical and e-reader release on March 4th. Links for pre-orders coming soon!
1.) “Why did you choose Substack as the platform for publishing Why Teach?”
After deciding to self-publish, I was initially going to do most of my public outreach and marketing through YouTube. When I created a channel and began posting videos, though, I found that YouTube as a medium flattened me out. I felt myself veering into my ‘teacher’ voice, which is a voice I’m comfortable with, but not the voice I wanted to use to advertise myself as a novelist. While I’m very comfortable speaking in front of a class, I prefer my written ‘voice’ to my spoken one, and I felt I couldn’t quite express myself in the ways I wanted to in the video/podcast format. When I did express myself in the ways I wanted, it seemed to be a mismatch with what the platform and its users seemed to want. More than anything else, I didn’t enjoy making, editing, and posting videos.
I had begun hearing whispers of Substack some months before, first at AWP, which I attended in Kansas City last February, and then in some of some of the YouTube videos I had been watching. So at first Substack was something I was going to use to supplement my YouTube usage–something that I thought might bring me to some of the more ‘literary’ people who I felt I wasn’t finding on the talking-head website. I set up my account on a Friday night and picked up my first subscriber a few days later, and then I was hooked. Everyone I wanted in an audience–readers, writers, teachers, college professors, the wildest, most interesting people from all walks of life–were all here.
I wasn’t initially planning to serialize on Substack, but then I saw that people were doing it–in particular, I was inspired by
and , who were putting out high-quality literary products. I thought, Well, here I am without an audience, and here’s this way to share my work and begin building up an audience–why not try it? I think I decided on a Tuesday and dropped my first chapter that Friday–it’s been going well ever since!2) “How do you think the serialized format influenced how readers engaged with the story?”
I think the serialized format has intrigued readers, but I’m not sure it’s been a complete and successful sell. Going long with fiction on Substack–going long anywhere today–is a hard sell. People’s lives are busy and their attention is a premium product. I’ve found a great core of devoted readers, and have received messages from people who liked the book well enough to say they wanted to wait and read the physical copy when it came out–that they would buy a paper book and read it all at once rather than read an on-screen version for free. I suppose that in an age of short attention spans, manifold distractions, and a variety of reading tastes, new authors like myself should try releasing their books in a variety of ways to appeal to readers with a variety of reading styles and preferences.
3.) “What strategies did you use for the rollout of the novel, and how did you balance building anticipation with maintaining the integrity of your storytelling?”
My initial strategy on Substack was inspired by a pair of speeches from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Pt I. There’s a line from Hal’s early soliloquy in the play where he says, speaking of holidays, that ‘when they seldom come, they wished for come.” Later in the play, this sentiment is echoed when his father, the king says, “By being seldom seen, I could not stir/ But like a comet I was wonder'd at.” I took these sentiments to heart when I came to Substack: I wanted to limit my posting and only post when I could do so meaningfully. By being seldom seen, I’ve hoped to be like a comet wonder’d at.
By limiting myself to one chapter a week, I’ve hoped that my readers might look forward to my postings, and that I won’t drive anyone to fatigue or exhaustion with my sharing.
In terms of building anticipation and maintaining integrity, I find that it’s been easy as long as I stick with my desire to build my readership slowly and deliberately. Sure, I could spoil a lot of the best and most enticing bits of my novel to try to play the eyeball-catching game to catch easy readers, but I wouldn’t have earned honest connections, and many of the readers I attracted would be short-term glancers, not the good, patient readers I’ve written for.
4.) “When did you know you would self-publish? How did you decide?”
I had done several rounds of queries over a few years, dating back to 2016, with a lot of tinkering, rearrangements, and two full-blown revisions as I went. In the first total rewrite, I swapped the novel from 1st to 3rd person, moved the inciting incident up, and tried to do things to 'please the market' and compete for agents. I sent it to 30-40 agents over a few months--various query letter approaches, after spending far too long studying querying--and got nothing. Then I enlisted a developmental editor, and completely rewrote it the way I wanted--1st person, entire new structure, excise of ~45k words, new additions of ~35k(?) words, massive overhaul . . . and I was so happy that I knew it was what I wanted, that I had achieved what I wanted to achieve, that I could be successful without the help or approval of anyone in the industry–and that I wasn't about to let them have any say or sway over my art. I knew I was done when I knew I had produced a piece I was sure of that I knew I could give to the world on my own.
5.) “Publishing online can be unpredictable. Were there any surprising challenges or advantages you encountered during the serialization process?”
Since I didn’t predict anything–or, rather, since I expected serialization to be slow–I’ve found serialization rewarding and exciting. I go over my chapters early each week, schedule them for Friday morning, and wait for the release with a steadily growing smile on my face. Every time I get a ‘like,’ ‘comment,’ new follower, new subscriber, or even see that my views are climbing, I’m delighted. When things move slowly, I remind myself that it’s the nature of things to move slowly–that I’m planting seeds and the harvest will come.
6.) “Your novel critiques the education system while capturing the profound struggles and joys of teaching. How did you decide how to organize this?”
In my first drafts of the book, I wanted to take on the bureaucratic absurdity of public education under mid- and late-stage No Child Left Behind–the ways we were sacrificing everything that really mattered for the sake of this test that wasn’t even a very good test and didn’t really matter. I was interested in the ways the institution of education had been inverted–how the kids had to show up for the benefit of the adults instead of vice-versa. How this thick layer of bureaucracy had been built into the system over a few short years–more principals, curriculum specialists, reading specialists, various ‘coaches’--and much of it hindered classroom teachers instead of helping them. And of course the banning of the books–the ludicrous mistaking of the forest for the trees . . . I had been reading Heller’s Catch-22 and Kafka’s The Trial, and I was teaching Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried to my American Lit juniors, and it kept occurring to me how closely my situation as a teacher felt like it echoed Yossarrian and K’s situations in their books–and how much being a young teacher felt like being a soldier in the trenches of education. Pride and ego and ‘keeping up appearances’ for the sake of reputation play such a big role in O’Brien’s book, and there’s tremendous pressure to ‘play the role’ of teacher as opposed to actually teach, which is really something so much different than the performance of ‘teaching’ or the imagined role of ‘teacher.’
So the first drafts featured more characters, and there were more scenes with big meetings. I had more administrators, and the ‘Head of Literacy’ Mrs. Hirsche was supplemented by a hapless, unhelpful ‘reading coach.’ The book was bigger and looser than the current iteration. It held together thematically, but the narrative arc for the protagonist wasn’t as tight or easy to follow.
As I moved into further drafts–and worked with my excellent developmental editor–it became increasingly clear that the character arc was more important than the bureaucracy arc; that the window through which my readers needed to climb to understand the troubles and triumphs of teaching was William. The book needed to be closer to him; the dilemma needed to be the smaller ‘to teach or not to teach?’ instead of the larger ‘look at all the ridiculous ways we’ve ruined education.’
6.) If you could redesign the American English curriculum, what changes would you make to foster a love of literature in students better? (Perhaps a better (or simply bigger) question is how can we simply improve education and a love of learning in students?)
I’ve started a few different essays about this. The truth of the matter is that education should be simple. Kids should read, write, collaborate, and speak in front of others. They should read widely. They should write for a number of audiences in a number of situations. The curriculum should be rooted in the history that has gotten us here, the present world we live in, and the future we anticipate. I think the curriculum we had evolved into using pre-NCLB – pre-‘test-prep era’--was actually a very good one. When they ripped it out and replaced it, the messaging was very much ‘the old curriculum doesn’t work anymore’; ‘we’re too mired down in the past’; ‘schools should work more like businesses’; ‘decisions should be data-driven’; and ‘newer is better.’ There was a complete disregard for the fact that the curriculum we were using was one that we had evolved into using over years of tweaking and fine-tuning; that it wasn’t ‘old,’ but rather ‘achieved over time.’ The expertise, complaints, and warnings of experienced classroom teachers were largely ignored in favor of legislative pressure, business pressure, and zealous academics. If I could remake the curriculum, it would look more like the old curriculum. There would be more reading and more writing. I would mix classic literature with contemporary and would bring in more nonfiction.
Having assigned this curriculum, I would of course update it for modern needs. I think that logically, you design systems with the end in mind, and the ‘end’ you want from k-12 students in America concerning English is that they can read sophisticated texts, write for many audiences in a number of modes, speak to and with others to present and collaborate and have both a) an understanding of history that allows them to begin to understand how we’ve reached this point on the historical timeline and b) have a baseline understanding of our world and national social and cultural contexts. To do this, I think you have students read quite a bit, write quite a bit, collaborate with others quite a bit, and present some. I think you read ‘classic’ texts and contemporary ones, fiction and nonfiction.
The problem we’re having right now is that the ‘end’ we have settled on is ‘higher test scores,’ and ‘higher test scores’ is, well . . . it’s a shitty end. This is partially because we shouldn’t turn kids into test-taking robots who partially believe their worth is equated with their test scores, it’s partially because incessant testing turns out to be really bad for kids, and it’s partially because, frankly, we’re giving shitty tests and we’ve decided to measure stupid things. Here’s a truth: the more something matters, the harder it is to test. Here’s another: when kids are tested about stuff that doesn’t matter very much incessantly, they develop strategies to deal with the tests and game the system. We’ve raised a whole generation of kids who think the most important things to learn are things that can be tested by way of multiple choice, and we’ve raised them to game the system because credentials are what matters, not genuine learning or education.
I’m not sure if that’s what you want, but that’s what I’m going to say. I could probably write about 80 pages on this–I’m going to leave it at this for now.
7.) “The protagonist of Why Teach? grapples with a teaching atmosphere that seems oppressive to educators. How much of that reflects your own experiences, and what do you believe teachers need most to thrive in their roles?”
This is a tough question. Education has been under siege for quite a while. I get it. The United States posts low test scores in reading and math. Our civic and scientific literacy, writ large, are abysmal. The news in our country is now–and has long been–often shared on an 8th-grade level to accommodate our rates of sub-literate citizenry. This isn’t all to say we don’t have some fantastic students. The United States absolutely produces some of the best students in the world–but in aggregate, we’re doing pretty terribly. The atmosphere now is oppressive to educators. There used to be an understanding that education was a shared responsibility: that the teacher and student each held some responsibility, and that they met one another more or less at a halfway point—and I don’t know any teacher who wouldn’t go a little further for a kid who needed more help. Since NCLB, there’s been a sense that all children must pass, and that if they aren’t passing, it isn’t the students’ fault, but the teacher’s. This is problematic on a number of levels: three of the most obvious are that teachers and schools have watered down education in order to pass more students, teachers and schools have passed more students who haven’t demonstrated the skills or knowledge they needed in order to pass, and a number of students have been deprived of one of the most powerful and effective lessons a person can learn—failure: an awareness of one’s limit’s; an awareness that there are consequences for coming up short; a motivation to strive harder and improve. There are obviously other problems as well—we could talk about the ‘customer service’ mindset, the bloated bureaucracy, the myriad problems with mandatory standardized testing; problems with validity and reliability of tests; we could discuss funding, class sizes, AI, the trickle-down effect of animosity in politics; cell phones, social media, mental health, and kids’ lack of hope; the fact that the profession has become undesirable: that fewer people want to become teachers, fewer people who embark on the career stay in it, and fewer teachers report that they would encourage their own children to be teachers… I don’t know how you solve all of these problems. To offer a few suggestions:
a.) Recognize that ‘passing every student’ is a chimerical dream that has been detrimental to education, causing us to lower standards and lie about kids’ proficiencies. Further: recognize that failure is one of the most powerful lessons there is. We need to stop protecting students from learning from the failures they earn, and clear teachers from the guilt of thinking that their students’ failures are all their own.
b.) Recognize that when schools fail, it isn’t because of the teachers and admins, but because our society is failing and schools are one of the canaries in the coal mine. Schools don’t fail because of their teachers and administrators; they fail because the kids at them–and those kids’ families–aren’t having their needs met.
c.) When I say ‘needs,’ I mean this in a Maslow’s Hierarchy-type of way: the kids are hungry; they aren’t getting enough sleep; they aren’t getting enough quality time with their parents; the aren’t being read to our enjoying the benefits of ‘text rich’ environments; their homes aren’t stable–the list goes on. We live in a society of haves and have-nots; the have-nots aren’t set up for success, and don’t have faith that the educational system that should lead to personal, civic, and professional achievement can work for them.
d.) Recognize that learning happens in classrooms, not offices or administrative-buildings. We need to cut back on the bureaucracy: we need fewer building-level administrators, fewer district-level administrators, fewer building ‘instructional coaches,’ and more teachers.
e.) Class sizes need to come down if we want teachers to build quality relationships with students and quality teaching and assessment to take place. The teaching to the (standardized) tests needs to stop. We need real, meaningful, engagement. I’m planning to write some “provocation” essays on these topics and a few others in coming months after I release my book.
8.) “Your novel features a strong sense of place. What role does the Midwest play in shaping the themes and atmosphere of Why Teach? and how did you ensure its landscape felt integral to the story? How do you approach crafting such evocative settings, particularly your portrayal of Midwestern America?”
I grew up in a part of the country that’s commonly referred to as ‘flyover country.’ And, like most Americans, I’ve subscribed to a television and film diet that has largely painted the big, coastal cities as superior and smaller towns as small-minded, backwards, and provincial. I have, frankly, been envious. Envious of the educations people can get, the big-city amenities, and the culture. There was a time when I was young—adolescence through my twenties—when I wished I lived in a bigger city. As a writer, I craved the legitimacy the big city ‘scene’ confers. Many of the most respected producers of ‘high thought’ and literary output are named for big cities: consider The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review. If your taste swings toward the ‘high’ literary, as mine does, you feel pressure to write ‘big city’ books, or ‘elite college’ novels. But there are ‘high’ authors who write of other places as well, of course. Jane Austen springs to mind. Faulkner. What I came to understand was that those coastal, big city, and elite school materials were other people’s materials; that my material was mine, for better or for worse. And the more I began to work with my material, the more I began to write, the more I saw that my square of Western Kansas was actually quite rich: a ‘big’ small town, more culturally and ideologically diverse than most people imagine, my own Yoknapatawpha County, so to speak. Holy shit, I realized several years ago. I have a lot to work with here. Looking back on this novel being finished, with two more in varying states of completion, I can’t believe how lucky I am to have been gifted the material I was born into.
9.) “Serializing a novel live on Substack is a bold experiment. What have you learned from this experience—both as a writer and as someone navigating new publishing models?”
To my thinking, serializing a novel on Substack hasn’t been an experiment or risk at all–it’s been a no-brainer. Since I realized it was possible, I’ve felt I was following in the footsteps of other great serialists: Charles Dickens, Henry James, and others. Five years ago, I think serialization would have seemed fruitless and illogical. With so many viable readers available on Substack, it feels like the past has become the future.
As someone who initially planned to traditionally publish–who had a book all but finished in the late stages of revision and proofreading–I’m not sure I’ve learned much. The experience would be entirely different if I was making the book up as I went–that’s not something I would do. As I have a ‘finished’ book that’s largely ready to share, I’ve learned that serializing is fun and rewarding–that there are readers out there to be courted, but that it takes patience.
10.) “With a physical book release looming, do you find that views go up because readers want to read the book early, or do they go down because readers would prefer to wait for the physical or e-reader version of the book?”
“This is a good question. I’ve had readers message me and tell me that they’re waiting for the physical copy, but I also think that the weekly ‘teasers’ for the chapters–the previewing synopses and the quoted key lines–are bringing me a steady trickle of new readers. In general, it’s hard to tell because my total number of readers keeps rising, and I’m not getting into the subscriber data to see if people are consistently opening. Even if I did, I’m not sure it would be very telling; I think several Substack readers open emails and don’t read them.
11.) “Many aspiring writers struggle with sharing their work. What advice would you give to those—friends of mine included—who have finished manuscripts but hesitate to publish independently?”
With all the love and respect in the world, if people are hesitating, I think they should hold back. I’m publishing now because my book was ready. It was bursting out of me. Followers of my Notes feed have seen me intimate and articulate some problems I have with the publishing industry as it currently stands. One of these problems is that it seems to me that—despite the perpetual complaint that the industry is slow—it seems to me the industry is pushing out too many books too fast—or at least under-edited in many phases of the editing game. There have been complaints about this recently from published authors on the platform, but it goes back to before the pandemic, certainly, to my thinking. The news cycle moves fast, and it feels like there’s a push to match books to current cultural moods and discussion topics. It’s exciting to get a book out, I’m sure—and great if it’s contemporarily relevant—but I think there’s disservice being done to a lot of writers. The developmental editing and copy editing isn’t there. A number of these books, if given another six months, a year, or two years–if given more developmental editing, more copy editing—could be much better books.
I think a number of people–most people–feel that if they can just get it good enough to get in the door with an agent, the agent and the publishing houses will help them get it the rest of the way, and I just don’t think this is what’s happening. I think hesitating writers should give their work a little time and space and go over it again.
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Excellent interview. My stepdad used to be a teacher and took early retirement. All those issues with the US education system were my stepdad’s complaints with the UK system, and I imagine it’s even worse now.
Fascinating to read Peter’s thoughts on publishing, too. I’m going to subscribe to him. I’m intrigued.
After reading all the posted chapters of "Why Teach?" over the past month or so, it's great to learn more about Peter and his work in this great interview - thank you!