An episode excerpt for your weekend: Aisha Sultan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Latest interview is with a feature writer and columnist, often writing about family life
Trying something different here, inspired by reading the newsletter, Your First Byline.
This week’s episode of the podcast is an interview with Aisha Sultan, an award-winning feature writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and nationally syndicated columnist who writes to help people feel seen and heard. She often writes about family life and is also dabbling in filmmaking.
A five-question excerpt of that interview is below. I hope it gets you to click and listen.
How do you describe your beat when people ask you about it?
I get to write about whatever interests me, whatever moves me, and whatever I think will be helpful to other people. So, in many ways, it's kind of the best beat that you can create for yourself in our job.
My specific interest, because of my background in education, because of how much I think and write about, parents and families and children and child rearing, is about how what's happening in the culture or what's happening in policy and politics trickles down and affects regular people.
I'm not out there covering lawmakers or the minutia or the day to day or the big breaking news of what's happening there, but I'm really wanting to write about people's lives, what they're thinking about, what they're talking about, and how some of these other decisions are affecting our lives.
I also just try to write about things that move me and inspire me because I feel like if something makes me feel a certain kind of way, then hopefully I can make someone reading it feel a certain kind of way.
Who do you think that you're writing for when you write?
I'm writing for multiple audiences. I'm writing for people who feel like they either don't have a voice or they feel unseen in their communities, and I'm also writing for people who may not ever get to experience a world, or think about a place, or have a life experience, what someone could share with them.
It's two things. I want to give voice to a person who's going to feel empowered by sharing their story with me, and I also want that story to make someone else maybe think about their worldview or the community they live in a little differently.
What's it like to write about the experience of being Muslim?
When I first started writing my column, I was very nervous about sharing something. very personal about myself because I had been through my work trained to write about other people and to tell other people's stories, and to just shift that focus on myself felt very uncomfortable, felt very weird felt like I was breaking rules that had been like pounded me for so many years, and I actually turned to another columnist, who had written political columns, Leonard Pitts.
I met him at a conference and I said to him ‘How do I out myself as a Muslim to my readers who may never have met one or, may have a lot of stereotypes in their heads or judgments, preconceived notions?’ He (said) you just need to be very matter of fact about it and just work it in as part of who you are into your stories.
The first time I think I wrote about it was either a wedding or a holiday or Thanksgiving, my family's way, culturally-specific way of celebrating Thanksgiving. And it got such a tremendous response from people who were like, Oh wow, I learned something from you. This is so cool.
Not all feedback is like that, but there were enough people at the time who were intrigued and interested and that I felt like whenever I can kind of find a reason to let people see a more multidimensional way of how Muslims live in America, what our families are like, then probably it's worthwhile.
What kind of ideas do you have percolating for stories and columns that connect to the presidential election?
The very first time Donald Trump ran for office, my columns became much more political because I saw the ramifications in my life.
As an immigrant, as a Muslim, as a woman, as a journalist, every identity of mine felt very much under attack in my relationships with people, and I knew I was not the only one. A lot of relationships, and I like writing about relationships, were being tested and tested. Torn asunder.
And so this thing that I care about so deeply, the truth and every human's dignity and kindness and finding common ground and appealing to our better selves and all of these things that I really care so deeply about, felt very much under attack.
So as you can imagine, being in a red state that voted heavily for Trump, a lot of the columns I was writing, people were very, very upset about. And the temperature, the political rhetoric was at a very high levels. It was probably the most abuse that I've gotten in response to things that I've written.
And if anything, it just made me think, if not me, then who? Like, if I, in this moment, cannot share my truth and the fears that I hear from people in communities that feel threatened, then when else am I ever going to do this work?
It took a huge emotional and mental toll on me because you are under attack in a way, Journalists are always getting hate mail, but it was on a different level and it was of a different intensity and a different threat level and so I was not in thrilled to revisit this political moment. After the war in Gaza began, I also was writing in a very personal way, people's personal stories about that and getting a lot of angry response, some really unhinged responses.
And honestly, just thinking about the fact that, Oh my God, we're going into less than a hundred days of this election. It would be easier for me not to write anything political. Something inside my conscience and my soul will not let me ignore what I feel like is the truth. A story of my generation, a story of when our country is at a crossroads, and about the impact this could have on so many people.
So, this weekend, I'll be writing about the childless cat lady comments that have been so much in the discourse because of vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance's choice of words and commentary about this, and what that really means. Sometimes I try to look in these little moments and say, okay, this was a news bite for a day or a week, but what does this really mean about us as a society, the way we think about women, the way we think about motherhood, why this matters politically? That's what I'll be writing about.
That's my sort of approach to it. In addition to writing about what I think is at stake, like what's at stake for women, what's at stake for families, what's at stake for my daughter, my children, I will be writing those columns.
One other exchange I liked
The best things about my job is how many people come to me and say, you should write about this, or I want to tell you about this, or so and so is in this situation and I immediately thought of you because this is the kind of story that you would write.
You're a story collector and a story sharer, so to speak.
I am, I am a story collector, I am, even in the most literal sense, because My husband, to this day, we've been married 24 years. So from the day that we met, he has saved every physical copy of every story that I have written in the Post-Dispatch.
So we have boxes and boxes of newspapers in the basement. I think a few might've gotten away from him, like if we were on vacation or somebody needed a copy of a column and they didn't have a subscription, so I gave it to them. But yeah, so he literally has these boxes of printed stories of mine.
Don’t tell him about Newspapers.com!
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