Literary Podcasting and the Arab World Through Books: An Interview with Ursula Lindsey and Marcia Lynx Qualey, Co-creators of the Bulaq Podcast

Interviewed by Alan Ali Saeed

Ursula Lindsey and Marcia Lynx Qualey are co-creators of the Bulaq podcast, which explores the Arab middle east through the topic of Arabic literature in translation. Ursula Lindsey grew up in Rome, Italy. She is a reporter, essayist and book reviewer specialising in North Africa and the Middle East, as much at home writing about culture as with news and current affairs. She writes for The New York Review of Books. For more information see: https://arabist.net/lindsey.  Marcia Lynx Qualey is the editor-in-chief of the ArabLit cooperative and writes for such publications as Al Masry Al Youm English edition, World Literature Today and the Guardian. She also writes a celebrated blog, Arabic Literature in English (arablit.org).          

At its heart, the Bulaq podcast (begun 2017) is a fascinating conversation about Arabic books in translation conducted between two passionate and thoughtful critics who love literature with the presence of an occasional special guest, who is typically an Arabic language writer. For the listener, it is like being at a dinner party and getting the chance to listen in to their conversation and be entertained, while also learning from Ursula Lindsey’s and Marcia Lynx Qualey’s evident expertise and very considerable knowledge. (For Bulaq see: https://arabist.net/bulaq?offset=1540070662897 and https://www.sowt.com/en/podcast/bulaq)

Dr. Alan Ali Saeed, the interviewer, lectures in Modern English Literature at Sulaimani University, Iraqi Kurdistan. His website is here.

Carried out by voice interview on 21st June 2021 and email interview on 22nd June 2021.

SAEED: Hello. I wanted to ask you both first about the origins of the Bulaq podcast. You are both very experienced commentators on Arab Middle Eastern literature (and indeed the Middle East from the Arab perspective). However, what suggested to you a podcast had anything distinctive to offer an audience, for example, when compared to a website, a blog or writing traditional articles and reviews?

LINDSEY: Hello. The origins of the podcast are basically that I was living in Rabat, Morocco. Marcia moved there, with her family, and pretty much as soon as I heard she was moving there I thought to myself we should do the podcast. We had known each other from before, from Cairo. I had done a podcast with my husband that was associated with the blog that he ran with the Arabist, and I listened to many podcasts, so I largely knew how to do it. I liked the format and soon as I knew Marcia and I would be in the same place, it just seemed like an incredibly fun thing to do. It was done as and was meant to be fun. It was meant to be an exciting, creative outlet for the two of us and because we are both interested in the same things, we were having these conversations anyway about books and it seemed a great opportunity to have those conversations in a slightly more structured way. It offers something slightly different from the other things we are doing because we are both reading and thinking about literature in ways that often does not make it into our writing. I review books, but I only review a small fraction of the books that I read. So, this was a way I think to capture this overflow of ideas and interests and conversations that we had already coming from our other work. 

QUALEY: Although Ramsey Tesdell (who founded Sowt), first urged me to consider a podcast, perhaps as soon as 2009, I never did anything about it, as the idea seemed too daunting. Bulaq was entirely Ursula’s brainchild.

SAEED: Does your collaboration predate the podcast, or did it bring you both together?

LINDSEY: We had not collaborated before, but we knew each other well, and we had lived in Cairo at the same time, over the span of several years. I think we were very happy to be in the same place again and to get to spend time together and to undertake this collaboration.

QUALEY: Although we first met a decade ago or more, this is the first time we’ve worked together on a project. It’s a joy to work with Ursula.

SAEED: Did you have funding to be able to afford technical help when you started? Or did you work collaboratively with others to set up the operation? Did you find it difficult, technically speaking, or do you have a producer who deals with most of the technical issues?

LINDSEY: We had no funding and still have no institutional funding of any kind – I will perhaps come back to funding a little later – in the very beginning my husband, who is Issandr El Amrani (the founder of the Arabist blog) and who had done this podcast for the Arabist several years before, gave us a bit of technical advice and we hosted the show originally on the Arabist site. He showed me how to produce the show and I think he taught me how to do it. 

It is not that difficult. Basically, for a podcast, you need a couple of good microphones, laptops, a quiet place, somewhere to host the file once you have got it up and distribute it. There are various software packages you can use to produce it, but we kept the production very simple. 

We had a technical adviser in the form of my husband at the very beginning, then we learned more. He would help us upload the files and figure out how to distribute them on things like the iTunes podcast platform. Then slowly I took that over. Eventually, when I moved to Amman, Jordan a few years later, the Sowt podcast network (which is a great initiative here in Amman, that produces and distributes podcasts), offered to let us use their recording space (for Sowt, see https://www.sowt.com/en/about-us). They also have someone who helps us with basic post-production and the show is now hosted on their platform.

QUALEY: No, although fortunately Ursula’s partner, Issandr El Amrani, knows about these sorts of things, and we mostly leaned on him. Now, we work with Sowt, and they do production, and it’s fantastic. I appreciated them very much recently, as I had to produce my own mini-podcast series for Literature Across Frontiers, and I was quickly in over my head.

SAEED: Most English language podcasts in the Middle East seem to focus on news and current affairs – though sometimes history gets a look in. (For example, the Kurdish Edition seldom mentions Kurdish literature, perhaps because extremely little is available in translation.) However, what made you specifically focus on literature and culture, as this seems unusual?

LINDSEY: What made us focus specifically on literature and culture? That is what Marcia and I work on and are interested in. I also do news reporting and sometimes we do talk about the news and the political context of literary work. Politics and news make their way in, but the idea from the beginning was that this was a niche thing. We are interested in and knowledgeable about Arabic literature in translation and that is what the podcast would be focused on.

QUALEY: We talk about the world, naturally, because the world impacts the production and reception of literature. But generally, we are not current-events oriented; I am not a newscaster, and there are many people who know better about current events.

SAEED: Do you think of your podcasting as a type of journalism, if so, is it more say, like radio journalism than print journalism? How does it compare, for instance, to the work on ArabLit (where Marcia Lynx Qualey was the founding editor)?

LINDSEY: As a form of cultural coverage, sure. It is more between a review and a conversation. But we do try to be accurate and provide reliable information and context. So, yes, I think it is quite complementary to traditional journalism.

QUALEY: I think of it as a sort of criticism, similar to a wandering literary essay given few boundaries and allowed to address all manner of sub-topics. And I stress about ArabLit every day, all day. I mostly only stress about Bulaq immediately before we record. 

SAEED: Were you surprised at your podcast’s success – and is this, do you think, in any way related to the general resurgence of podcasting in the last few years? 

LINDSEY: I am not sure how successful the podcast has been, but it is very kind of you to say this. We have been pleasantly surprised that people are interested, but you know it does not have a large audience compared to a lot of successful podcasts, which have tens of thousands, or, in the States, hundreds of thousands of listeners. We have received a genuinely nice response in terms of reviews and comments from people, but it is still a niche audience.

QUALEY: I’m not sure how one measures success. It doesn’t have a million listeners or generate revenue, but we enjoy it, and our listeners seem to enjoy it. I don’t think I had any particular expectations for its reception, so I’m hard-pressed to be surprised one way or another.

SAEED: Why did you choose to do it in English? Is it because you thought of your audience as primarily outside the Middle East, or is it because you see English as a language that is now embedded as part of the Middle Eastern linguistic scene? (After all, here I am, a Kurd born in Britain whose first languages are Kurdish and English [but who speaks Arabic], having a dialogue with two Americans, whose first language is English, who specialise in Arab literature in translation, for an interview that will appear in the principal English language literary magazine in Turkey!) Is it connected to your interest in texts in translation? Or is it because it allows different groups within the Middle East to communicate in a neutral way, even if they speak Arabic to some extent? (For example, as a Kurd, I could regard Arabic as a colonial language associated with the many years of forced Arabisation under the Iraqi Ba’ath party, when just speaking Kurdish was extremely dangerous. The Middle East arguably always looks completely different according to where you are looking at it.)

LINDSEY: The reason we do it in English is simply because that is the only language, we are both comfortable in when it comes to this degree of linguistic requirement. We both have studied and speak Arabic. Marcia even works on translations from Arabic these days, but we are not fluent enough Arabic speakers. I could never do this show in Arabic and the other languages that I speak, which are Italian and French, would not be relevant here. It was obviously going to be English because that is the only language that we can do it in. Therefore, it is much more of a pragmatic choice than a conscious one - it is not even a choice.  

I think a significant portion of the audience is English speakers who are interested in Arabic literature in translation and then the other portion of the audience is people in the region, who speak English well enough to listen in on the conversation. Obviously, if the show were in Arabic, it would probably have a much different, probably bigger local audience and a much smaller audience in the west. Ours is kind of split half and a half at the moment.

QUALEY: I think the easy answer is that English is the language in which we can be fluid and comfortable. A second question is: Why should there be any podcast about Arabic literature where people are speaking about it in English? On the one hand, there is the power dynamic of who is the translator / who is the translated. But on the other, I love cross-pollinations, and I would love to imagine there are podcasts about Korean literature in Dutch, about Swahili literature in Malayalam, about Urdu literature in Japanese. 

SAEED: What have been the biggest challenges you faced and solved when creating the Bulaq podcast? I am extremely interested to know what the challenges were and how you overcame them.

LINDSEY: Making the podcast itself has always been fun, there have been times when we felt a little burnt out because we have been doing it for four years. We felt the need to take a break. We have put in a ton of our time and energy into this and as I said it is not something we have done for money. We are just starting to have conversations about including some type of advertising and we have just agreed to do a couple of sponsored episodes. But this is after doing the show for four years with no financial backing. We never figured out grants that could or would apply to us and which would be a good fit and we could apply for. I think one challenge is how to keep the podcast fresh for us, fun and interesting and evolving enough over time, doing enough new things that we do not get tired of doing it. The other challenge is we periodically ask ourselves whether there is a way to produce just enough revenue to pay ourselves back for all the time we put into it, and honestly, we have not figured that out yet. It is something we are starting to think about.

QUALEY: When Ursula left Rabat and moved to Amman, we had to figure out a new way to work together without being in the same room together. Of course, nowadays everyone has mastered this skill. 

SAEED: There are various general factors listed for success in podcasts. People say that having a strong narrative line to the material and focusing on a particular theme is crucial, while others write about knowing your audience and having strong opinions.  Some say you should be concise and not make episodes too long, although others claim you should also be passionate. It is difficult to know what to make of these sometimes-conflicting criteria. What do you think are the most important factors in making a successful literary podcast of the type you create on Bulaq?

LINDSEY: Podcasting is an extremely big field by now, so there are many different formats that can be successful. I do not think there is a rule about a particular format that will guarantee the success of your podcast. And again, I mean, we did not enter this driven by a strong plan to have the most successful podcast. We were really doing this for pleasure as a kind of personal passion and project, so the format is what we enjoy doing and what is doable for us. It is a free-flowing, longish, non-scripted conversation. Like many podcasts, this is a common format, rather like an hour of radio chat and I think as we have progressed, we have become a little bit more focused in terms of having a theme or a guest. I do think we are certainly passionate about books, and we are fascinated by these topics and that comes through, and the people who listen to our podcast are also passionate and interested in books.

QUALEY: Well, it’s easier for me to imagine this question through the lens of other literary podcasts I enjoy, like ‘Browned Off’ and ‘Maqsouda,’ and I’d say the hosts’ dynamism and fearlessness. I value honesty. Nobody wants to listen to a literary podcast that’s just doing PR for books—except PR agents, maybe.

SAEED: Podcasts are often claimed to be a good format for interviews and discussions with guests. Is this something you have found in your own experience and practice? 

LINDSEY: We have more and more guests and we enjoy that, apart from the fact there is always a little more technical uncertainty, as you have to record them as well and make sure the connection is good and that you do not run into technical issues. But we have featured guests more often recently and have appreciated that.

QUALEY: It depends on the guest. I’ve done a few more interview-based podcasts for Literature Across Frontiers (https://www.lit-across-frontiers.org/), and I think it was better or worse depending on the guest’s willingness to throw themselves into the discussion. Not everyone is a gifted public speaker/interviewee. One of our most popular episodes is built around an interview we did with food scholar Anny Gaul, who also happens to be an excellent speaker.

SAEED: They say people listen to podcasts while doing the cooking or driving. I am not sure I could multitask enough to do the former! But it is true that so much time in the Middle East  is spent driving, (or rather being stuck in interminable traffic jams, or seemingly spontaneously arisen road works). I am curious, what do you know about how your audience listens to your podcasts?

LINDSEY: I do not think we know that much about what our audience is doing while they are listening to the podcasts. We know that our audience is split across North America and the UK and then countries across the Middle East, everywhere from Morocco to Jordan. As usual, some of the more populous Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are a significant part of the audience. But, we do not really know what they are doing while they are listening.

QUALEY: It depends on whether you have to read a recipe while cooking. In that case, I find myself losing the plot of the podcast. We’ve never asked, but people do write in saying that they listen in the car, while walking a dog, while doing dishes or otherwise cleaning the house. I’ve never heard anyone say they listen while working out—maybe ours isn’t a workout podcast. I think it’s rare that someone listens to a podcast as a wholly dedicated activity. 

SAEED: Could you take me through the process of creating a podcast please? Do you come up with all the ideas for the podcasts yourself or do guests sometimes come to you with an idea which you then help develop? What are the next stages of developing it from an idea into a workable program? Are your podcasts scripted, or are discussions and interviews more free form?

LINDSEY: As I said above, it is a free-flowing, longish, non-scripted conversation, because to script a show this length would take forever and I think would not be enjoyable for us. Like many podcasts, this is a common format, rather like an hour of radio chat and I think as we have progressed, we have become a little bit more focused in terms of having a theme or a guest. There is now a focus we agree upon ahead of time and some specific issues that we have decided we want to explore, but that comes organically from what we are reading now, what is being published, what we are interested in, or somebody we want to talk to. 

I think I would largely give credit to Marcia for this because Marcia is so well informed about the literary field of Arabic literature in translation, we often are timely in covering new publications or interesting authors, as they are coming out, and then we have a very spontaneous conversation about our reactions to these works. 

QUALEY: We generally develop the ideas ourselves, lately over Skype, and then turn this into a rough outline. When there is a guest, I generally have an introduction written out, and a rough outline/questions taped up on the wall behind me, and we’ll also have readings picked out from the relevant books, although sometimes that happens right before we start recording.

SAEED: In running something like Bulaq, do you find there is a tension between the local and global? For example, in what your audience in the Middle East would wish for and what your overseas audience wants? Do you feel you are addressing two or more different audiences at the same time?

LINDSEY: We, I feel, put something out there and if people are interested then that is great. This is because we are not really approaching this as a business proposition, it is not our main job, it is a sort of a fun side gig. We are doing what we think is interesting and then we hope that other people will be interested. As for the fact we are addressing two or more different audiences at the same time, I think we are very used to that because that is what we are doing with all of our projects. With Marcia’s magazine, with her website, with my own reporting where I am usually reporting for American publications about news, or politics or culture in Arab countries, we are both used to thinking about multiple audiences at once. I think that is the position we have been in for many, many years.

QUALEY: Perhaps there is, although I’m never sure what to do about people’s differing interests. Some people won’t care about Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, for instance, because they don’t enjoy pop or genre literature; some people might not be interested in the wild prose experimentalism of Moroccan author Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. Fortunately for them, they can just skip to the next episode!

SAEED: Inevitably, it is the literature of the wealthy, powerful languages of Arabic, Turkish and Farsi that get translated into English. Do you think there is any way around the problem that you cannot cover, say, Kurdish writing because it is not translated into English? (I do not think there is a way around this, but I thought I would just ask your opinion as experts in translation issues). I personally think my government must do more to sponsor the translation of Kurdish texts into English, as currently there is only one novel by Bakhtiyar Ali, ‘I Stared at the Night of the City’ (Reading, Berks, UK: Garnet Publishing, 2016), although his ‘The Last Pomegranate’ is coming out later this year in English with Archipelago Press. The situation with Kurdish poetry is no better. There are some anthologies and Sherko Bekas’ ‘Butterfly Valley’ (Lancs, UK: Arc Publications, 2018) springs to mind. 

LINDSEY: Yes, I do not know if there is a simple answer for that. Obviously, what we get in English is only a tiny portion of what has been written around the world. 

QUALEY: It would be amazing to have a magazine of and for Kurdish literature in translation. If anyone wanted to take up that project, and they wanted advice from a publisher of a small website and magazine, I’d be happy to help in whatever way I could—sharing resources, etc.

SAEED: What kind of feedback do you get from your audience and how does that affect the podcasts in terms of selection of material and so forth? I guess I am asking about how you successfully engage your audience in a relationship?

LINDSEY: We notice when episodes do well and we try to incorporate that feedback a little bit, but honestly, we often do not know why a particular topic, or guest, or book seems to get more listeners than others. It is kind of a mysterious science. We have a Twitter feed, and we get some comments, we get some remarks, and we get reviews. I think we have had very positive feedback from our audience. We try to make what use we can of the feedback without obsessing over the observations and feedback. We just move along with the things we also think are interesting.

QUALEY: We get most of our engagement on Twitter, I think, although people also send emails. It’s fantastic to hear what people think of any given show, especially when Ursula and I disagreed about something and the person is writing in to say they agree with me. We also have the “feedback” of which shows are more or less popular, although I don’t really know what to make of that.

SAEED: I am not sure I will necessarily understand your answer, (though the readers might), but I guess I have to ask about the technology used to make the whole thing work. The podcasts are noticeably clear and easy to listen to by the way.

LINDSEY: The podcast is recorded using an App called Zencastr which allows you to record people over the internet. It is basically a podcasting software that allows you to call someone over your computer and record yourself and record them and record another person, potentially all at the same time. and then have all those audio files at the end. Marcia and I both have old, good microphones but may be upgrading in the summer. That is the only piece of equipment that has been necessary, and the guests usually do not even have that.

For the production, we get a little help from a producer at Sowt. He stitches together the files and cleans them up, we keep the post-production very simple though and I would say there is not a great deal of work that needs to be done. Currently it is distributed through the Sowt site and through other podcast platforms. I am not a very technically minded person myself but these days the entry barrier to making a podcast is very low and I feel anyone could go online and do some research and reading and find out the options for how to do a podcast. You need a good internet connection, a quiet place, and a decent microphone but not much beyond that. 

QUALEY: We use Zencastr to record, but then Sowt’s producers make the magic of improving sound quality. You’d have to ask them!

SAEED: What advice would you give to someone in the Middle East who was thinking about setting up an English language podcast about culture and the arts? What are the dangers and pitfalls they should look out for in your view?

LINDSEY: What I would say to anyone who is thinking about setting up a podcast? I would encourage them to do it. I love the format. One thing I would say is to have a very big successful podcast with really substantial audiences (which I would say we do not have, for example, very few people have), takes a great deal of time and effort. It is a crowded field. You have to think about what you are doing in the beginning. Are you happy just doing this, putting in the time, regardless of whether there is ever any income from it? To make it financially sustainable is quite a challenge. Most podcasts are not going to arrive at that.

QUALEY: When I was last asked this question, I advised the friend to approach Sowt with her project. I think being part of a podcast network, and having a professional producer, is key not only to avoiding pitfalls, but in being educated about best practices. There are a number of networks out there. Certainly, people can also start their own—in that case, have a very good mic and a mostly soundproofed space to record.

SAEED: How do you hope the Bulaq podcast will develop in the future? 

LINDSEY: Well, we always bat around ideas. It develops naturally on its own, there are always new books that I am excited to talk about with Marcia and new guests I am excited to include. We would like for the audience to expand further, if there are more people who are interested in it. 

We are taking a break this summer and thinking a bit more about what we will do in the Fall season. However, I think for the moment the plan is more or less to keep on going as we have. with maybe just some tweaks and new features, as we feel inspired to include them.

QUALEY: I hope Ursula moves back to Rabat, and/or that there’s some sort of end to Covid, and we can record more shows in other locations. The last one we did remotely was in Cairo in January 2020.

SAEED: Lastly, thank you so much for taking the time and trouble to reply to my interview questions. It is extremely kind of you to share your deep expertise and experience about literary podcasting in the Middle East with the readers. Is there anything else you would like to say, or wish that I had asked you?

LINDSEY: No. Thank you and I look forward to seeing your article.

QUALEY: What are my favorite podcasts? Although I already told you: ‘Browned Off’ (https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/browned-off-diversity2021-K8y4zPqoeZA/) and ‘Maqsouda’ (https://www.sowt.com/en/podcast/maqsouda). I guess I like podcasts with charming literary women.