About Your Host

Jon Sealy is the author of four novels, most recently The King Street Affair, as well as the craft memoir So You Want to Be a Novelist. A South Carolina native, he lives with his family in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia. Learn more and download a free short story at jonsealy.com.

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Why ‘The Speakeasy’?

My first novel, The Whiskey Baron, is a Prohibition-era southern crime novel about a small-town sheriff and a bootlegger, but it was also a meditation on crime, society and the limitations of the law.

I’ve always appreciated that illegal taverns were once called “speakeasies,” as if there was something illicit about freedom of speech. I also like the word for its hint at first drafts, before the rigors of revision.

This Substack is about that space — freewheeling first drafts of thought around books, writing, culture and the like.