“Interesting stuff leads to more interesting stuff” - Mandylion Press
Alex Sujong Laughlin is an award-winning audio producer, launching multiple podcasts with defector media and now her own, 'Try Hard', which we recorded live at Ludlow House a couple days ago.
Alex media as an outsider with no family connections, hustling her way from a big Southern state school into her first newsroom job—where, during her very first performance review, she learned coworkers were gossiping about how “young she acted”. Everything changed when she joined Defector to co-create 'Normal Gossip'—where she owns part of the IP, is trusted completely, can make wild sound-design choices.
The intellectually feral 'Mandylion Press' was interviewed by Laughlin, where founders Madeline Porsella and Mabel Capability Taylor kiki about the origins of their press, the challenges of launching a creative business while working full time, and their joyful celebration of weird girls across space and time.
Currently Mandylion has been working on a podcast themselves, '1-800-1800', in which they dial into random years in the 19th century to discuss history, literature, art, and scandal.
On their Substack, they have essays on literary history, bookish scandals, and forgotten stories — for example, they’ve written about 19th-Century hoaxes like The Fortsas Hoax. Then they have whole excerpts on Addison Rae and the parallels with Victorian era novels!
Recently they published; 'The Morgesons' — by Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard. A caustic bildungsroman about two sisters (“wild girls”) in 19th-century Massachusetts, featuring a visual glossary to contextualize the social history.