Introducing Unsentimental Letters Podcast
Why I Started a Literary and Arts Podcast That Doesn't Perform
I’ve been writing seriously for most of my adult life. I’ve written for institutions, for advocacy organizations, for people who needed words they couldn’t produce themselves. I’ve written things I was proud of and things I published too early and things I kept in a drawer for years because I didn’t know yet who they were for. From my first policy job as an intern for Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messenger (D) at age 15, to serving on the Hispanic Task Force for Senator Ensign (R) years later, to working as a public servant, lobbying for nonpartisan special interest groups, to textbooks, a novel, essays, policy, fiction, and poetry in three languages.
The common thread in all of it was this: I wanted the writing to cost something. Not to perform cost (anyone can do that). To actually cost something. There’s a version of literary culture that is entirely about performing the weight of experience, and I’ve never been interested in it. What I’m interested in is the moment when a writer stops translating their life into literature and just hands you the thing itself. The raw material. The actual grief, the actual joy, the moment when the poem was the only language that worked.
This is true for any art form, not only writing. And it has never been more obvious than in the present moment.
AI can generate millions of art pieces, books, pictures, songs in no time. But they hold no weight because there’s no story behind them. AI doesn’t feel the torment of Goya’s decaying brain that gave birth to his Black Paintings. It doesn’t understand the pain of living in exile while your country is being taken over by a fascist with the backing of Nazi Germany, a nation’s pain that gave birth to Picasso’s Guernica. It cannot understand why two-tone ska, New York hardcore, and hip hop became such influential forces culturally and politically, and why they still are. Let alone understand why Bob Marley’s music liberated countries, or why Luis Garcia Montero’s book, A Year and Three Months makes you cry even after you’ve read the same book five times. Because art, in any form, is meaningless without the human story behind it.
That’s what Unsentimental Letters is about.
It’s a live literary podcast. The format is simple: I invite a writer to join me, I read all their work beforehand, we talk about the work they built from real life, and then they read it aloud. No summaries, no theme discussions. The actual work, in the writer’s own voice, in real time. Part honest conversation, part bringing the written word to life. The work, and the story behind it.
I’ve been thinking for a long time about what a literary podcast should be. Not an interview. Not a master class. Not a promotional exercise. Something closer to what it actually feels like to sit across from a writer you respect and ask them: how did you make this? What did it cost? What did you learn that you couldn’t have learned any other way? The human story behind the end product.
Unsentimental Letters is my attempt at that. I don’t know exactly what it will become.
The first episode is this Friday, March 6. My guest is Mandy Franklin.
Mandy Franklin has invented something I don’t have a clean name for: prose-poems that score grief with music. She builds a scene, accumulates emotional weight with the precision of a filmmaker, and then lands a lyric like a key change. The song arrives exactly when the feeling can no longer be held in prose alone. It’s a form that requires total honesty about how emotion actually moves in a person, and she deploys it with complete control. Something I can recognize, but I am not capable of imitating.
I know what Friday’s episode is, because I’ve read Mandy’s work closely and the conversation is already alive in my head before we’ve said a word of it aloud. I know what she’s going to read. I know what I’m going to bring to meet it. I know the moment in the conversation when the room is going to go quiet.
I’ve experienced her work. Now it’s your turn. And trust me: even if you’ve already read her, this will be a different experience entirely.
That’s the part I want you to be in the room for.
So Don’t Forget!
This Friday. Live on Substack. Come for the conversation. Stay for what gets read aloud.
Unsentimental Letters, Episode 1: Mandy Franklin in conversation with Edwin Canizalez.
Future confirmed guest include: Zoe Mazah, Shadow Pursuit , Kelly Louise Marshall, Megan, KFitz and Lera Acey
Looking forward to speak to you. Our short call was already such a good vibe
I'm excited, Edwin! We've supported each other from the beginning and it's good we'll finally get to talk 🖤