Why Dopamine Hits Won't Get You the Creative Life You Want with Maya Popa

About this episode

Maya C. Popa discusses the realities of writing, publishing, and the creative process with host Sarah Fay.

Nearly 400 people showed up to listen to Maya C. Popa and I talk about: - The realities of pitching, publishing, and rejection - Mindset, motivation, and the myth of “having it all together” - Substack strategies, authenticity, and audience growth - The dopamine loop, validation, and the writing process and more… Maya is a poet, prose writer, exceptional human, and someone I’m so lucky to call a dear friend. She’s the author of three books of poetry: Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023), named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry; American Faith (Sarabande 2019); and her third collection coming in 2026, which we’re all going to make sure it gets on the bestseller list. She’s also the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly . She’s been teaching for thirteen years at NYU and is just such an exceptional human. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Granta, the Nation, and elsewhere. What I love most is Maya’s Conscious Writers Collective (CWC) , her online school and writing community that offers a rigorous, MFA-level education for writers without forcing them to take on the debt an MFA program would. Having…

People in this episode

Host: Sarah Fay

Guest: Maya C. Popa

Topics covered

• creativity
• writing process
• publishing
• mindset
• audience growth
• Substack strategies

Keywords

• dopamine
• creativity
• writing
• publishing
• Substack
• audience growth
• mindset
• motivation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NYU, Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Granta, the Nation

Books & works: Wound is the Origin of Wonder, American Faith, Conscious Writers Collective

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