Most of my content in 2025 is free, but I appreciate the support of readers who make my craft series possible.| joshuadolezal.substack.com
If you watch streaming TV, you’ve likely internalized its formula for plot, how the opening scene introduces a murder or illness that the heroes spend the rest of …| joshuadolezal.substack.com
Rebuilding a life and a writing practice after leaving academe. Click to read The Recovering Academic, by Joshua Doležal, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.| joshuadolezal.substack.com
Tobias Wolff begins This Boy’s Life with an epigraph from Oscar Wilde: "The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has discovered." Few understand Wilde’s aphorism more keenly than memoirists, and I want to think a little about the inventions that constructing a narrative persona in nonfiction requires.| joshuadolezal.substack.com