The Monday Media Diet with Shannon Deep

On Caleb Hearon, Lisa Taddeo, and Marie-Hélène Bertino

Shannon Deep is a writer based in Paris.

Tell us about yourself.

Nice to meet you! I’m Shannon, an American expat living in France. I’ve been in Paris since 2020 after spending a decade in New York City and growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Outside of work, you’ll find me writing fiction, painting with watercolors, failing to gentle-parent my elderly cats, and enjoying every orange wine and matcha latte I can find in the City of Light.

Alongside Kevan Lee, I’m the co-founder of Bonfire Collective. We run a brand storytelling agency, an online community, and in-person retreats for creative-minded folks at career crossroads. (Because been there!) Our newsletter, Around the Bonfire, unpacks our journey from in-house marketers to small business owners through the lens of crafting an intentional career—business advice books be damned.

I started out in theater as a freelance dramaturge and script consultant, working with playwrights and directors on scripts in progress and rehearsal processes. That was about as financially lucrative as it sounds, so for most of my 20s, I hustled for whatever other freelance writing work I could get. Even after I left freelancing to work at a branding agency, then later at tech startups as a brand and editorial director, storytelling has been the one constant throughout my life.

So the TL;DR ‘about me’ is: I tell stories. The medium is often writing. (I’m querying my debut novel while working on my second.) But sometimes, the medium is a performance or a curated experience, like at our in-person retreats, or when running a years-long campaign of Dungeons & Dragons for friends. And sometimes, the medium is creating a brand for our clients—because strong brands build their own worlds through story.

Describe your media diet.

Lotta podcasts I’m realizing, plus a whim-forward mix of fiction and nonfiction books, probably too much TikTok, a digital New Yorker subscription, and some newsletters I dip in and out of. To elaborate:

Podcasts

I wouldn’t say I’m the biggest comedy head, but weirdly I listen to a lot of podcasts by standups and comedians, sometimes specifically about their creative processes. (I am a sucker for anyone talking about HOW they make art.) I love Mike Birbigila’s Working It Out; Caleb Hearon’s So True; Handsome with Mae Martin, Fortune Feimster, and Tig Notaro; and Pete Holmes’s You Made It Weird. I especially love YMIW because Holmes injects a healthy dose of non-dual spiritual teachings. (It’s nice to flirt with ego death every once in a while, as a treat!) And then just for the sheer entertainment value, it’s the McElroy brothers’ My Brother, My Brother, and Me and The Adventure Zone.

If I’m not listening to smart comedians, I’m listening to inward-looking thinky-talky podcasts—like real therapy sessions, meticulous reportage on things like sub/cultures, linguistics, psychedelics, etc., and deeply felt human interest stories. My favorite in this genre is couples therapy podcast Where Should We Begin by the iconic Esther Perel. Something that isn’t therapy but feels like it is Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight, in which he takes it upon himself to investigate and resolve people’s most intimate and haunting unanswered questions. (“Why did that one girl ask me out to prom and then stand me up?” “What happened to the baby my mother chaperoned to his adoptive parents?”) Honorable mentions here go to Articles of Interest by past Monday Media Diet-er Avery Trufelman, and her spiritual predecessor Roman Mars’s 99% Invisible.

Books

I went through a long stretch in my mid-to-late 20s where I stopped reading fiction almost entirely, probably a subconscious response to the combination of wanting to write it and not having structured my life to support that, and being obliged to read and evaluate 4 or 5 new plays every month for a gig with a theater’s literary department, which kinda filled up my reading slots.

Now, I try to read a few books a month, flipping back and forth between fiction and non-fiction depending on my mood, what might pique my interest on BookTok or Threads, and what my friends are finishing on Goodreads. I’ve found I’m not really a commercial fiction girlie, or rather, that I can only read so much of it before I’m starving for masterful prose over a page-turning story. I fear I can come across as a big grump when it comes to what’s popular, and I instead look for books that pair beautiful craft with a weirdly wonderful or weirdly worrisome premise.

Books and authors that scratch exactly that itch include:

• Anything by Marie-Hélène Bertino. Beautyland is her recent sorrow-streaked delight, but Parakeet had me on the edge of my seat and laughing out loud.

• Anything by Lisa Taddeo, whose fiction and non-fiction read with identical lyricism, painful honesty, and grit. Three Women is a must. Try Animal only if you don’t get queasy easily.

• High-stakes domestic dramas with all flavors of twists like Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and My Husband by Maud Ventura, translated from French.

• The Guest by Emma Cline, if you’d like a panic attack in the form of a book. (I do!)

• Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson for blowing the dust off the literary device of a narrator + “frame tale” with an electrically compelling concept and refined prose that puts juuuust enough on the page to keep you freaking out basically the whole time.

TikTok

I follow lots of therapists, lots of feminists, lots of slow-work advocates and anticapitalists, lots of visual artists, and lots of cats. It’s an excellent combo—recommend!

TV & Film

I spend almost no time browsing streaming services these days, usually only checking out specific things that are recommended to me. But I absolutely will get down with new seasons of uplifting/off-beat competition shows like Taskmaster, Drag Race, The Great British Bake Off, Game Changer, and The Great Pottery Throw Down. I love watching people be creative/crafty, and all of these shows answer that call in different ways. I find quotidian reminders of human ingenuity equal parts comforting and inspiring.

Newsletters

Never has the great plight of the current moment been so philosophically dissected as in Cy Canterel’s Abstract Machines. Dense and devastating.

What’s the last great book you read?

I’m not saying anything new at this point, but Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass will jostle awake your relationship to the natural world—if you let it! I finished it not that long ago, late to the party.

As far as fiction goes, I loved Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, a spare and uneasy work of speculative fiction that was written in the 1960s (again originally in French) but feels shockingly contemporary. It confronts what it means to be human in the (literal) absence of humanity.

What are you reading now?

It seems that an obsession with polar exploration is a rite of passage for many writers, and it’s finally my time. I just finished travel writer Sara Wheeler’s circumpolar survey The Magnetic North, and I’m hopping back and forth between her Terra Incognita (opposite pole!), and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, a travelogue of his experience on the team of Captain Robert Scott’s tragic attempt at the South Pole in 1910-1913. (I was also captivated by explorer Peter Freuchen and his Greenlandic travels in the early 20th century as portrayed in Wanderlust by Reid Mitenbuler.)

I’m in a non-fiction moment, and I’ll be scanning this Substack for my next fiction read…

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I haven’t had a print copy of an English-language publication since moving abroad, but my strategy when I did: I save my favorite sections for last!

In the New Yorker, for example, I’m absolutely saving the fiction for dessert, but I’ll let myself read the poetry along the way as snacks. If the big feature story is something I’m interested in, that might be my penultimate stop, but if not, then it’s Shouts & Murmurs, because who doesn’t want a little whimsy in their lives?

I have no problems flipping past a story that doesn’t interest me or abandoning something halfway through. Life is too short. (This is also your permission to leave a theater show at intermission if you don’t like it…but at intermission only!!!)

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

General answer but: Women writing contemporary fiction. It’s somehow the Year of Our Lord 2025 and we still have “Women’s Fiction” as a genre, which would be slightly more ok if “Men’s Fiction” were also a genre, but no! Instead, we market men’s experiences as having universal interest while we market women’s experiences as primarily appealing to other women. Hmm. Don’t let reductive marketing practices keep you away from great books! (And feel free to roll your eyes at this gender binarism anyway.)

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

I have exactly three game apps on my phone: One has all the classic word games from the New York Times, and the other two are Monument Valley and its sequel! They’re beautifully designed and simple little puzzle games where you have to guide a lost princess through labyrinthine, M.C. Escher-like levels that defy physics in the most satisfyingly clever ways.

Plane or train?

Train. If you’re an American and you don’t fall in love with practical train systems when you travel, I don’t know how to relate to you. I can get to a train station in 15 minutes from my apartment, walk directly onto a train, sit comfortably for an hour or two, and be in another country without showing anyone my passport, waiting in a line, or endlessly reshuffling my belongings in and out of bins in some inefficient transportation humiliation ritual.

And the trains in Japan? A whole other level.

What is one place everyone should visit?

I’m a simp for the coast of Maine. I spent about two months near-ish Acadia National Park in the first autumn of the pandemic and when I talk about it, I feel like the Bill Hader character Stefon describing his favorite new nightclub: It has everything! Forests, lakes, mountains, beaches, wonderful hikes, great food, charming towns, and a pervasive soul-soothing calm that comes from the heavy and ancient peace of the natural world still largely untouched.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Fungi are so fascinating! Seriously. Scientifically and taxonomically, they’re not plants, but not animals either. Without them, the entire earth would be literally buried in un-decomposed organic matter. They make decisions about what to eat, react to stimuli, can share interspecies nutrition resources and information, and their lifecycle stages (spores to mycelium to fruiting bodies) are so varied from one another they don’t even seem like the same organism. And don’t even get me started on lichen—some Arctic lichens can be around 5,000 years old. (Special interest crossover episode!)

I can’t remember if I read Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake or Mycophilia by Eugenia Bone first, but that led me to Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, which is, uh…sort of about fungi. I recommend all three books!