On getting out of your bubble

How do you balance the pursuit of creative fulfillment with the struggle to make ends meet?

I’ve been full-time freelance writing for around seven months. It was a very long road to get there. I got laid off in December so I forced myself in to do the freelance thing. I’ve had to adopt a jack-of-all-trades mentality. I’m doing book criticism, I’m doing journalism, I’m reporting, profiling—and, at the very end, fiction writing.

The grind necessitates that you cover so many things. How do you stay engaged with a sense of purpose and craft through it all?

I very much started out as a book critic. I was reviewing one book a month at [Observer], a small arts magazine that my friend edited. It wasn’t an amazing pay rate, but, especially compared to now, it wasn’t nothing. From there it broadened into other kinds of criticism. I started interviewing authors mostly, but that also expanded. I’ve always had a somewhat lefty bend politically, both in the kinds of books I was reviewing and the way that I was reviewing them. My editor, Erin Taylor, was instrumental in thinking through [pieces] alongside me. That naturally went towards doing more political reporting at places like The Nation or The New Yorker, but that came way later.

I have since had some people who only do book criticism ask me how I started doing reporting. I did a little bit in college, but I was largely self-taught. I didn’t do J-School. I was technically a film major. I do not make films. In a lot of ways, it was a lot of learning as I went. I don’t know if I always have an overall purpose. I have to find the purpose with each piece, which is sometimes a struggle. Or when you’re pitching, you’re sort of like, “Why do I care enough about this thing? Or do I?”

You write about things that require a lot of time, whether it’s reading a book, watching a film, or listening to an album enough times to get a sense of it. How do you know when you’re going to engage with something critically? Is it revealed in your reaction to the work? Do you make space for enjoyment? It’s easy to imagine that if you’re reading a lot for work, you’re going to want to read for pleasure less.

Sometimes I have to convince myself to read for fun. But I do. I read five to 10 books a month usually. Obviously I’m not writing about all of those. Sometimes the way that I convince myself [to read for pleasure] is by telling myself it will all somehow alchemize into how I think about writing fiction. I think of myself as a novelist who ended up doing a lot of journalism, which people perhaps can relate to, whether that is Joan Didion or Susan Sontag. Not to say that I’m in the same league as them. A lot of people end up in that camp, where they want to be writing fiction but the thing that pays for writing the most is often journalism.

When I’m consuming an object, it is hard to turn off the part of my brain that is like, “How would I write about this?” But sometimes you read something, and you’re like, “I have nothing to say about this.” At least when you’re already assigned something, you’re afraid of feeling like it’s dead in the water. Sometimes it’s easier to write about something that you feel mixed about than something that you hate or something that you love. There’s so much more to say when you feel ambivalent about something than when you feel so positive. There are tons of books where I love it but I don’t [have it in me to write] an essay about.

When you’re caught up in the job-like functions of writing, how do you stay connected to the well of creativity that made you want to write in the first place?

There’s a high in writing for magazines. Both having to chase and build a story, to sort of… I don’t know, it’s a very competitive environment. Sometimes constraints can be more creative than having no constraints at all. Magazine writing lends itself to boxed-in ways of thinking. For me, the friction [between constraint and creativity] can be really inspiring, curious, fruitful. Comparatively, I find writing fiction, or even long personal essays, to be really challenging. Because you have to really choose the box. You have to choose the container and the voice—versus with magazine writing, there’s room for style and flair, hopefully, but there’s usually a container that’s given to you. Either, “this is the object you need to write about,” or “this is how many words you have,” or both. And that is in itself, I think, an interesting constraint.

Sometimes even having the dimensions of the box is really helpful. What’s your sweet spot type of piece for mixing creativity and criticism?

I think it’s like a 2,000-3,000-word book review or journalistic piece. That seems to be the sweet spot to have enough room to get into the meat and show some style, connect a few different pieces. But you’re still forced into cutting something down, usually.

What do you do when you notice that you’re in a creative lull? Are there seasons to your creative practice and working on different projects?

I have some friends who say, “Oh, in the winter, I’m more or less productive. In the spring, I’m more or less productive.” I don’t know if I find that to be true. Part of that is the fact that I am, at this point, having to rely on freelance writing for money. So a lot of times when I write nonfiction, I don’t have writer’s block because I can’t afford to have writer’s block.

Well said.

I get stressed and I get scared, but I don’t miss deadlines. Usually I try to be early. I remember hearing from somebody—this is maybe just lore, I don’t know if it’s true—but allegedly, Jia Tolentino said, “I don’t know if I’m the best writer, but I always meet a deadline.” Apparently she said that early on, and she was like, “That’s how I’ve gotten how far I’ve gotten.” I feel sometimes similarly. I like to imagine I’m not incredibly hard to work with, and I’m on time. With nonfiction, it’s really specific in the sense that there’s a continuum, there’s a rhythm. You’re going back and forth in real time with an editor. But with fiction, you can write a clunker for years, and what do you do about that? That’s when the writer’s block comes: when you’ve written something bad and you have to either rewrite it or give up. That’s always a really difficult thing to confront, and it takes time. Often, there has to be a sort of breakdown to loosen up the prose and get into a new rhythm. Constraints in fiction can be bad, sometimes, even if it’s of your own making.

From one Midwesterner to another, how does the Midwest stay with your writing? Has your creative approach changed since you’ve moved?

I’m haunted by the Midwest. I love the Midwest. That’s closest thing I have to an element of tribalism or loyalty. I always say, no one’s allowed to talk shit about the Midwest unless they’ve lived in the Midwest or really are from the Midwest. I hate it when people talk shit. When I first moved to New York, and told people I went to state school in Indiana, and I was meeting people who went to Bennington, the New School, NYU, etc., everyone’s eyes would just glaze over. And I found that to be so elitist and annoying. It’s still very real. It’s interesting to think about how many novels have characters from the Midwest who come to the city and try to remake themselves. That’s such an eternal genre for some reason. I don’t feel I’ve tried to remake myself or whatever. I’m interested in the dichotomy and tension of people who move back and forth, or from one place to another—who feel scarred and made, in both positive and negative ways, by growing up in a place like Indiana or Illinois or Ohio. And a lot of the people that I have met in New York, a lot of my close friends, are people who are from the Midwest. Sort of ironically, we’ve sort of come together as an enclave.

The shared trauma brings us together.

There’s that Vonnegut quote where he has something about, “You can go anywhere and find a Hoosier.” I feel that’s a little true of Midwesterners, as well as people from Indiana.

And I think Herculine is partly about that… It’s about leaving to find home and realizing that there’s a part of home that’s still left behind, or trying to find a new piece of it. Going back and forth, and being caught in the strangeness of it all.

I mean, you could say [the narrator] is possessed by the Midwest just as much as by demons.

The real demon is just the State of Indiana.

Makes sense.

What does your creative community look like right now, on and offline? How do you make sense of the diametric relationship between success and community?

I love and fear writers, and a lot of my good friends are writers. I also have a healthy amount of friends who are not involved in the world of writing at all. My partner is a lawyer. I have friends who are acupuncturists or in bands. But I also have friends who are purely readers, the godliest profession. Over the past few years, it’s been great to have more friends who are writing and freelancing, people that you can break it down with, and talk shit and complain and gripe, and get pointers from and share resources [with], and pass stories onto that you can’t do but wish someone else could. A lot of Herculine was written in this workshop called CRIT that Tony Tulathimutte does. I was working a lot with two of my very close friends, Leah Abrams and Heather Akumiah, who are both incredibly talented writers. One of my other best friends, who I have many, many, many phone calls with all the time, is Leah Hughes, who’s a poet, novelist, critic, thinker… It’s important to balance, to make sure you have a tether to the real world, but also to have some sort of writing community—even if I’m not going to the fanciest parties and befriending everyone there. I don’t know if I’m very good at that. There are plenty of talented people who have different ways of being in a writing community.

What have you gotten out of having a tether to the world outside of writing?

It’s important for writers to be reminded that just because you got rejected from so-and-so magazine, someone else will say, “What? Never heard of it.” Or you say, “So-and-so blurbed my book,” and they say, “Who? Never heard of that person. That’s not a real person.” I think it’s good to have a healthy dose of [remembering that] people are only ever as famous as their bubble. And there are a million bubbles—not even just in the writing world, but in the world. It’s a healthy ego death. It’s also important to have a conception of what people who aren’t in some sort of coastal elite bubble, or don’t read Pitchfork religiously and subscribe to all of the right magazines, are talking about. I love all of those things. But it’s good to know not everyone is as invested in that. There are many things to be invested in. It’s good to direct your energy elsewhere. I’m not very good at having hobbies. I’m really working on it. I’m taking a ballet class right now for no reason. Writers need to do things for no reason, not because you’re looking for a story or an essay. It’s hard to not want to turn everything into material.

What else do you do to find balance?

I go on a lot of walks. That’s a really big contemplative practice for me. Between that and having some sort of a religious practice, those two things have felt [like] an important counterpoint to having a creative practice.

Tell me more about what your spiritual practice looks like right now.

[Herculine] encapsulates a lot of the things that I’ve wrestled with spiritually over the past however many decades. I mean, I’m famously 25. Whether that’s been thinking about Mary Oliver, or going to a Universalist Unitarian church for a while in college where they were reading a much more expansive idea of spirituality. For a while, I was doing a Buddhist sangha and sitting zazen and things like that. This makes me sound like such a hippie dippie… This is the one area in my life where I’m not extremely Virgo and hand-holding tightly to organizational strategies. Spirituality is whatever people want it to be. I’ve been going to synagogue with my boyfriend. I’m working on converting to Judaism; I’ve been taking a few classes and stuff like that. It’s a crazy time to convert as someone who’s very staunchly anti-Zionist. But the synagogue we go to is anti-Zionist and I appreciate all the people in it and like them a lot.

Besides the obvious day-to-day horror of surviving and affording life under capitalism, what is your greatest motivator to keep working and exploring new modes of your work? How do you hang onto it and stay really damn busy?

I feel very busy. I love writing. I love being curious. I love meeting people and talking to people through writing, through reporting, through thinking. I like to write to find out what I think about something. I enjoy the surprise. I enjoy the chase of a story, whether that is fiction or not. And I enjoy thinking through something on the page and sort of wrestling with ideas and characters and history and the archive, and all of those lofty things that I think everybody wants to do in practice. I always like learning. Writing is one of the greatest ways of processing.

That’s an under-acknowledged benefit of writing, even with something like music criticism. You have to synthesize and articulate something beyond, “It sounds good and I like it.”

I’m not a very great music critic, I have found. That is one that I don’t feel like I’ve really gotten good at.

There are bigger fish to fry and you’ve got the pan.

It’s a particular skill, it’s a particular language. Each form of criticism requires a different syntax and knowledge base.