Hugh Ryan on Writing Lifestyles and Learnings, and uncovering Queer History
Hello, creators and welcome to the latest installment of the creation stories podcast. Today, we have a very exciting episode with the writer and social justice advocate, Hugh Ryan, who is someone I am very fortunate to have gotten to know through our work together at the New York City based Urban Justice Center
Hugh is a writer, historian and curator focused on all things queer and New York city. His debut book When Brooklyn Was Queer received numerous accolades, including writeups as an editor's pick in the New York Times and it was listed as one of Harper Baazar's best LGBTQ books of 2019.
His most recent book, The Woman's House of Detention was discussed with none other than Terry Gross of NPRs fresh air and talks about the 20th century women's house of detention in the West Village. S It has already received numerous praise from many outlets, and by some of my own personal favorite writers like Melissa Febos. Hugh is a fantastic writer and also an educator now back teaching at Bennington College, where he received his MFA.
And you can get some of that education through our conversation, as I sure did. Make sure to stick around for his recommendations on some craft picks to read.
More Hugh Links here!:
Full Interview Transcript:
Apologies, as always, for any typos / grammar errors in transcription - cons of a one man shop :)
Jack: Would love to just start with a bit about your background, talking about how you got interested in writing, but also specifically in, in queer culture and history, since it's what a lot of your work has been focused around.
I know you grew up around here as well, and there's a lot of focus in New York city in your work also. So I'd love to hear about how that's influenced you.
Yeah, absolutely. I always loved writing. It's been my favorite thing. The subject I was best at in school, but I never thought it was a career you could actually have.
Hugh: My mother is also a writer and she worked as a teacher and then a principal her whole life. And then when she retired, she started writing travel journal articles and mystery magazines. And so I just always thought that would. The kind of like direction that I would go in. And I started off as a social worker, actually in New York city.
I have a degree in women's studies and I came to New York to work at the Harvey milk school which is the school that works with LGBTQ, mostly homeless youth. Although I don't see that many homeless anymore. So that was what I did for a number of years, but I found that. The social work side of things really burnt me out.
And that I wanted to use my writing to do justice work, which is how I ended up at the urban justice center, which is how we know each other, but that I wanted to write to at least try to see if it could be a career. And so for a number of years, I just tried a lot of different things.
I wrote kids books. I ghost wrote kids books. I wrote travel articles on silly websites, and I wrote essays and monologues. And finally I decided that what I really needed to do was to go to grad school because the problem I was having was that I didn't write enough, not the stuff that I cared about.
You know, if I got an assignment, I would write what I was written to do or told to do, but I didn't sit down and write the stuff that I thought of as. And what at the time I thought I was doing was funny satirical essays, a la David Sedaris. . So. And in grad school, I really started to grapple with nonfiction. What is it?
Not just, what did I enjoy reading, but what was the genre? What did I enjoy writing? Cause it turned out that I didn't like writing personal essays very much at all, but I did like nonfiction and I liked thinking about my myself as a lens for the world, you know, as a way , I didn't wanna write about myself necessarily, , but I did want to sort of embed myself in my work and to write about things that I cared about which is how I came to write about culture in New York city, both two things that are near and dear to my heart. I grew up in Westchester I'm queer. I had been working in all these queer areas even before this.
And so I just kind of naturally inched my way closer and closer. At the same time, I was also a curator. I had started an organization called the popup museum of queer history. And we were doing these locally based history shows that were told through art. And those two things kind of came closer and closer together.
I was doing more writing for the popup museum then the popup museum was bringing me to more places that were about queer culture and cities. And eventually. As I was doing the research for what would be our pop-up museum queer history on Brooklyn. I got a grant from the New York public library and the library said to me, when you're done doing this research, you should also have a book proposal together.
Wow. And that's when I realized I was writing a book.
Jack: Oh, that's
really cool. How did you start with the popup museum idea? Was it because you saw a gapin museums in what we have in New York about some of these places, or what gave
you that idea?
Hugh: It was actually all about a show in DC at the Smithsonian called Hide & Seek difference in desire in American portraiture, which was the first ever specifically queer show at the Smithsonian.
And it was in 2010, I believe at the national portrait gallery. And they had some works by one of my favorite artists this guy, Wojnarowicz. And when one of them. A complaint written about it in a, an online right wing Christian website, the Smithsonian caved immediately and pulled the piece from the show in 24 hours without ever contacting the curators.
And there was this huge outcry. All around the country, the piece which called fire in my belly quickly became the easiest David Wojnarowicz piece to see in the world. It was just everywhere. And there are all these protests in New York that I was going to. And in the middle of one, I just had this moment where I was like, wait, why am I protesting a removal of like a single piece of queer history from a museum in DC that I'm probably never gonna see when there's nothing I can go see here. That's when I sort of started to think about this idea of what would it mean to have a museum that was about queer history in a queer space, told by queer people to queer audiences, a place where we could never be removed because we were too queer. And the popup museum started as a one night somewhere between a party and a like performance art piece and 300 people showed.
Jack: Wow.
Hugh: And I knew I'd sort of hit a nerve and a group of us got together afterwards and wanted to keep it going.
Jack: That's really cool. That's pretty amazing turnout for the first one. And what made you think of the popup idea? It's funny because now when you think of popups, it's like retail thing in New York.
Mm-hmm like, not necessarily like this really cool more alternative of what is traditionally permanent, like the archives and museums, for example,
Hugh: Yeah. You know, what really sort of made me think a lot about it is that we were still pretty deep in the 2008 downturn, the recession, and there was all this empty space.
And I had been traveling a lot before that I'd left New York for about a year and I'd been all over the place. I'd been upstate New York and I'd been in Puerto Rico and I'd been in North Carolina. And I had just seen all these places that had the same thing, empty space. That could be used for something mm-hmm
And so that was kind of tickling around in my brain. And then when the show happened and that piece was removed, they came together for me. And I was like, oh, this is a way to turn all of that empty space into possibly useful gallery space. There's a nonprofit in New York city called Chi Shama that actually works with corporations to turn their unused space into art galleries and shows and all of this.
And so very quickly after I sort of had that idea, I connected with them to find out how they did their work. And yeah, I think there was a lot of us who were looking at the empty real estate spaces of 2008, nine, and 10, and thinking, what can we do with this?
Jack: . Well then awesome organization as a way get variety from some of the urban emptiness, you know, that did hit during the, the recession. I wanna go back also to the MFA because I liked what you're talking about. I think it's can be hard to explain why folks do the MFA and you're talking about actually learning what the genre means, which is funny, you're applying for a specific discipline you go in, what were some of the things that helped you feel like you found your groove there and, and also
as I know you went to Bennington, what, what was special their model? Because it is unique.
Hugh: Yeah. Especially back then, there were very few low residency MFA programs that did non-fiction. And what I loved about it is that I was worried that if I went to a traditional residency program, that I would like a lot of my friends I would graduate with a thesis that was hopefully publishable, but without the work habits that I knew I was gonna need to have for the rest of my life, because, you know, queer nonfiction doesn't pay very well. So I knew it was likely I'd be working other jobs. And I needed to inculcate in myself a sense of Personal responsibility and a sense of when it was that I did my best work and how to get those habits together.
And so I figured a low residency program where I had to do it on my own, where I was still working full-time would teach me those skills, but also give me the scaffolding so that I wouldn't just flail, you know, , I deal real well with deadlines. A deadline really moves me forward. So the program really helped me in that.
And then the fact that it wasn't a full residency program meant that there were so many people from around the country around the world. It was a really broad, diverse range of ages. I was not the oldest returning student at, you know, 30, which I thought there was a chance that I might be. A traditional residency program.
And I just loved that. I loved the broad nature of all of the people that I met. I loved the intensity of going up there for a 10 day residency, where all you did was eat, drink, sleep, breathe, writing, and then going back home and having almost an apprenticeship with professional writer who looked at my work every single month.
Wow. In every way I think the program was really what I needed. Yeah. That's really cool.
Jack: And I like the. Takeaway also of learning some of the discipline because you're right. Sometimes in the traditional programs, you think it can be tough when you're in your own world for so much of it that you forget, like, oh yeah at some point, if I wanna make the living from this, I'm gonna have to set my own own deadlines. , was it something you learned as part of the program or just by nature of the program being what it was to set your own deadlines or what were some of the tips you learned to be able to do that?
Hugh: I mean, that actually wasn't anything specific that I learned through the program. It was simply knowing that I had these deadlines. I found myself writing at different times in different places, in different ways and slowly through the repetition, through trying things, coming to what worked best for me, which turned out I had spent my whole life thinking of myself as a night person. In general, I am, or at least I used to be, but I write best first thing in the morning, like at 7:00 AM. Wow. That was a learning process. And when I finally gave into that, I found that my work just got much, much better, but I only got there because I was having to do work at all these different random times to keep up with all the deadlines.
Jack: Right. Yeah. I think that is probably true for me, but I haven't swallowed that pill yet, you know, of, of being able to get up early
Hugh: it just really, it turned out to be necessary for me. And my head is just clearest first thing in the morning. Yeah. And that is what I need for my work, but those kind of things, those habits really only come.
And, and I think getting better at writing really only come from doing it, and that's the program made me do every month. I had to send in 20 to 25 pages of new writing to a professor, as well as rewrites and little mini essays on what were the craft elements of the books I was reading that I was interested in.
Mm-hmm .
Jack: And what have you done outside now that, you know, once you graduated, you obviously didn't have to do that. How did you continue to maintain some discipline around it? Or what do you do today, then that, that has been helpful for that.
Hugh: By the time I graduated, I knew what my best writing schedule was. So even if I wasn't able to keep to it at all times, I had goals. I knew that if I could get up in the morning, if I could carve out three hours from 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM, that I would do my best work. So it meant that I didn't have to guess to figure those things out. Yeah. And then I was able to stick with them as I moved forward.
Also the other thing about getting an MFA is that you meet a lot of professional contacts, which are hard to make when you're not already in the writing world. And by the time I graduated, I had a friend in the program whose wife was in a different MFA program and she got a job as an editor at a, a kid's imprint. And they were looking for non-fiction writers to ghost, write a series. Middle grade nonfiction books. That project didn't actually end up happening, but then she knew about me and by the time I graduated, she had hired me to go strike some other projects. So, because I was in the program, I both learned better writing habits.
I learned what I wanted to do in terms of nonfiction. And then I got a job which was not ideal, but at least was in the world of writing, allowed me to meet people, keep up connections, keep up my habits. And that really all started right around the time I was graduating. I unfortunately wrote a thesis that was not very good. I didn't like my thesis. I knew by the time I was done that I didn't like the thesis. So I knew I wasn't gonna be publishing right away. And it would've take me a little while to get where I was going. And the, the kids writing really turned into a, a great sort of stop gap.
Jack: Could you talk a little bit about, then some of those initial publications, obviously you mentioned you were doing some that you found maybe silly or more assignment oriented at times. When did you start moving towards pieces that, that moved, you know, moved the needle for you or were exciting to you? Like if I look at your website, there's a lot going back for so many different publications that you wrote for which is amazing. And I feel. You see that? And I can, can imagine, you know, having so many bylines, but going back it's like, how did you get that first start, or get the ball rolling rolling.
Hugh: The big thing that moved me into the world of doing what I wanted to do was interviewing artists, writers, and creators, and then reviewing their work. That was the easiest way I found in. So they're all different ways that I did that. One thing that I did while I was in grad school is that I looked at all of my favorite publications, all the literary journals that I wanted to be published in.
Eventually I wanted to have features in them. Yeah. But what I realized is they're just. Any other publication, they have columns and those columns have set rules. They need new content every month or quarter or however it is, it comes out and I could start looking at them and taking them apart and saying, which ones can I aim to get into to get into these magazines?
So at that time, for instance, tin house was one of my absolute favorite literary journals. They had a back column called, lost and found where. Quarter, I think they were, they had four or five reviews of books that weren't new in fact books that had generally been forgotten. I was already reading all of these kind of historical materials, just outta my own interest, particularly queer ones, you know, looking for interesting books in queer history that I might be able to write about or do something with.
And so I was reading these books from the twenties and the thirties and the forties that had largely been forgotten. And I knew instantly that that was my way into tin house. Right. I had to find the right. Sell them the compelling pitch write a great review. That was also an essay. So it showed my skills, but I did that basically everywhere. I wanted to write for the New York times travel section. Oh. So I started off writing 50 word capsule website descriptions for their travel blog. Oh, interesting. But through that, I got to know the editors and once I made the editors and had their email addresses, I could pitch them, you know, so it was a sort of a measured attempt to work my way up into what I wanted to do, but it was.
Almost honestly, from, even before I went to grad school, I had started doing book reviews and other things. I wasn't very good at it, but I knew that that was the stuff I was interested in. Yeah.
Jack: Yeah. That's cool. It's also interesting because I think, I don't know if you felt that way at the time, but you, when I think about myself or my friends, you don't always know the world of literary journals can be intimidating.
Right. You read such great work in. And then you think mm-hmm, , you talk yourself out of submitting them to them in the first place, but also think like, actually there is a process to get to know these editors and to get your foot in the door. And I think those hearing some of those technical steps makes it feel a lot more accessible than just, yeah.
Reading something from a writer you love in, in tin house and thinking, oh shit, they'll never publish me ever.
Hugh: I spent a year working for free or interning as a, a reader for the non-fiction pile at a public space. Another journal that I love, because I wanted to understand what was coming into the slush pile and what was making it out of the slush pile.
Yeah. But it's all of those little technical things that kind of teach you what the genre is and where the places are that you can publish. And unfortunately, a lot of that has changed now. I mean, so many of the literary journals that I used to love are either gone or no longer doing print or mostly making their money through classes.
And so I, I don't know how well that technique would work now. Yeah. But I figured it out by reading the places where I wanted to show up as a writer and looking at how I could get into. Yeah, that's a, that's a
great point. I mean, it is interesting. I was, I have the last copy of the believer on my night sales still, that's kind of surreal because also I thought even people who are not big into, into writing themselves, like knew, had read about something in the believer if they're kind cool.
Interesting story. Yeah. So kind of, kind of crazy to see, but hopefully I'm seeing some new ones pop up, you know,
hopefully it's. Just to change. And now in a way that was not available when I was in grad school, you know, through social media, I think it's easy to meet editors, easy to stalk them, get a sense of what stories they're sharing, because those are the ones they're interested in, right.
Even if it's not their publication, get a sense of what they're asking about what they're interested in. You know, there's always a way in, but it requires research to find it.
Jack: Have you
found on social media as a writer now, you know, helpful to your career
Hugh: or. And I'm really only on social media for my career. , I would have left Twitter by now. It is it's necessary. Yeah. It, I do think it is because
Jack: I think specifically Twitter I find is, you know, writers putting themselves out there in that way. I didn't really realize until you start following a lot of writers and you know, it is such. A marketing self marketing piece, right?
Like no way around it. Hopefully I need to start, you know, beefing up my Twitter at some point, but ,
Hugh: I mean, I'm not even someone who talks a lot on Twitter though. I do share things as I publish some of they come out. But I do listen a lot on Twitter. I look to see what people are talking about, what editors are interested in. What's currently the hot topic in the literary world, you know? Right.
Jack: Yeah. That's super interesting. I think that's good advice too, cuz I do follow some of the literary minds, but I think following more writers is probably a good I good idea too. I'd like to also go back to come some of the curation piece because you talked.
The technical side. And you just mentioned this in what you were doing in the south at conference at south Hampton, which is the research piece, I'm sure. Starting with the popup museum, as you mentioned, kind of led into the book, but is that where you also learned some of your research chops or do you think it started as through the MFA or,
both
Hugh: honestly, I think for me, it started in ninth grade when I had a teacher who was given the ability to do an honors version of a social studies class that he'd been teaching for many years. And we were the first class and he said to us, I don't know what an honors version of this class looks like. So what I'm gonna do is just keep making it harder and harder and harder until you fail then we'll know that I've gotten, as far as I can go with an honors group of ninth graders, he didn't fail any of us. Yeah. But he did really push us. And suddenly I was writing 20 page papers at 14, and I had to do research for it. And I had never done anything like that, but I liked it and it was exciting.
And then when I got to college, you know, for the rest of the time I was in high school, but there was some research obviously, but it just, wasn't a big part of the high school curriculum. It was, you know, it was a public school. But then when I got off to college, I started doing a lot more research papers.
I often found that the, the syllabus classes I was in were fascinating, but when it came time to write my final papers, I wanted to go beyond them. I found that there just wasn't enough there. We talked everything to death already in class. And what was I gonna write about? And so I often found myself in college doing research papers, going into the library, and it just kind of became second nature for me on purpose. I didn't even think about it as like training for writing. I just didn't know how else to do the work.
Jack: I mean, I think that's what I've paid more attention now is as I've grown as a writer and a reader really is you also start to notice that even in books, just generally a nonfiction, even on the more creative non-fiction memoir side, it's so many of the books you love have these super nuance references because of all the research that they do. And I think that can be under underappreciated as part of the work of writing. Which is more reading and more,
taking notes.
Hugh: I think reading is one of the most important parts of writing. I mean, you just have to be reading what is going on to understand your place in it and how the genres function and how different websites work or different magazines, what the voice is, what the tone is.
You just gotta be doing a ton of reading. And I think a lot about that, witticism write what you know, and a lot of people see that as a, a block, right? Oh, I can only write about myself or things close to me, but I actually think what that's telling you is to go learn things before you try to write about them.
Right? Like you can know more than you know today, and maybe you can't write the project. You want to sit down and write until, you know, a little bit more and that's research.
Jack: Yeah. I love that also. I mean, I always found that as something. Difficult for me in undergrad where I would say write from my life experiences, like I grew up in farm town, Michigan. I don't really know if I wanna write about that and I felt limited by that but I, I think that's really good advice. And definitely true. You kind of have to do that and, and figure out others, but, okay. going back then, you had started the pop-up museum, you had the grant and then it was kind of the prompting. It sounds like from the folks at the New York public library that made you say, oh, this is actually book worthy. Was the pitch process then, , part of the obligation as this grant or how did you realize, okay, yeah, they're right.
Hugh: No, I was, I sat down towards the end of the grant period and I wrote out what I. Proposal would look like, I didn't know what a non-fiction proposal would look like at that point. I had some ideas, I read some guides online, but I put it together. And just by happenstance at the end of the grant period, I had to give a public lecture and that was really fun and really great.
I liked public speaking and the library did a really great job of publicizing it. And an agent reached out to me and said, I, I heard about this thing that you were doing. I was wondering if you happen to have a book that you're working on. And I was like, great timing. Yeah.
And so I sent him the proposal and he looked at it and he was very client. He said, look, you know, this material is very interesting and this is a proposal for a book, but as a proposal for an academic book, it's not a proposal for a popular book. And I don't represent. Academic books and academic writers.
I hadn't been thinking of it that way. It's just the only non-fiction I really had looked at closely up until that point. I mean, through grad school, I'd done a lot, but with the museum and with college, I was always reading academic texts. Right. And I read popular non-fiction, but somehow I hadn't put in my head the difference between the two, as soon as he said that I understood what he meant that I had divided it up into these, like dry chapters. There was no overall arc to the whole thing. It was just sort of examples. And I was like, oh my gosh, how could I not see that? You know? Yeah. But that's one of the reasons you have agents and you have other readers. And so he was willing to look at a revamped version of the proposal.
So I rewrote the whole thing and gave it kind of more of that narrative arc that pulls you through. Cause I knew I could do that in the writing. I just didn't know that was how I needed to organize the book.
Jack: Yeah, that's cool. I mean, it, because I think what is successful about that book is that it isn't that right?
Like it, isn't just a straight historical film. I, I love the, the little facts that are throughout, but also the chronology of it, you know, going through Brooklyn Heights. I think living in Brooklyn too, you know, you feel special oh, this place was something you never knew it was. Coney island, for example, for me, was the most surprising that that was the, I was like, no way I would've never thought. And I think that's something that's also really cool about it. Like the sense of place that you really loaned to it , I loved.
Hugh: Yeah, thank you. I mean nice thing about writing, about a place that, you know, even if you're writing about it back in time, there are features that remain and you can give that kind of embedded sensory detail that makes people see it for themselves and believe it, you know?
Jack: Yeah. Well, and also like accredit to all the research that you did, you would have little snippets about like certain things that people said in reaction that I know that wasn't just something you found in, in one book somewhere you found out about this per this character here and then go back and research more over here.
Hugh: And yeah, in some ways I was very lucky that I was so slow working on that book that I was really doing it as an exhibit for years before I understood that it was a book because it allowed me this leisure to look at tons of different collections for a long time before I'd gotten that grant. Any time I interviewed someone, any, anyone who had any connection to Brooklyn or queer arts or history at the end of the interview, I'd be like, oh, Hey, you know, I'm working on this other project.
Do you know anything about Brooklyn's queer history? Like literally anything. It can be a name, date a book. It can be a half remembered story. Someone told you at a bar, just anything. Yeah. And so that gave me this really like wide ranging amount of information to come from. It's really cool, which is very different from my newer book, the women's house of detention, which largely draws from a singular archive. There's a lot of other stuff in it, but at its heart, there is one archive that made up the majority of the early parts of the book.
Jack: Yeah, I was actually gonna ask because I think for two reasons, I'm sure the process was different. One, as you mentioned, there's one site that is kind of the center of the action, but as you mentioned, you had kind of the luxury of not knowing it was at a, a book at the beginning.
So maybe not as much pressure, whereas it sounds like this one, maybe you didn't know at first, when you first had the idea, but at least had probably more of an intent around it than you did the first go around was curious how impacted your process or, or changed how you thought about it?
Hugh: I was already working on the second book, I think years before the first book came out that maybe let's see the first book came out in 2019.
I would say at least by 2017, I was doing research on the women's house of detention. I had realized that a number of the stories in my first book continued through or connected to the house of D. and I was so shocked to realize that there was a 12 story, maximum security prison in Greenwich village until 1974. Yeah. That it just kinda hung in my brain where I was like, something does not compute. This is like one, how do I not know this? And two, how is that even possible? Right. And those are always the places I'm interested in doing my work. When I have that feeling of like, literally, how do I not know this? If something is in my wheelhouse, my genre, if it's non-fiction and it's queer and it's New York city, how do I not know nothing about it? Right and so that. Triggered for me, this idea that the house of d was gonna be my next book, but I was still working on the first book and there was not a lot of research out there about the house of d.
So it was again, a slow process in the early years, the first year or two was just truly trying to figure out exactly where I would find the records that I would need to tell the book.
Jack: Yeah. Oh, geez. I can imagine that. Especially as you mentioned, it was so hard for you to find when it's something you're so passionate about?
That definitely means it's just generally very, very hard to find. But that's, that's interesting. I was actually, I was wondering that, cause I saw that you have written about it a few years ago before the first book came out. So it's been a topic kind of in, in the back of your mind at least.
Hugh: Yeah, I don't do well without a project to work and research on. So when I get to the writing phase of a book, I'm not doing a ton of research anymore. My brain always needs to something else to dig into.
Jack: Hmm. Hmm. That's cool. And then I wanted to ask you, because this is something that. I remember when I finished, when both the was queer in the backup, , the acknowledgements at the end, you give thanks to so many different, amazing writers and Alexander Chee, Garth Greenwell, I think.
And can you talk about finding that community? Was it through some of those early conversations you were having with those kind of people or was it through the MFA through kind of that network?
Hugh: A little bit of all of it, you know? Yeah. Like Garth, I think I met originally because before either of our first books came out, I think Mishko the chapter that was kind of the heart of what belongs to you. I think Garth had published that already. I had not yet published at one of those, but I was writing these kids books, but I was working with an agent who knew Garth was trying to sign him. And so she introduced us. He didn't end up signing with her and I ended up leaving. But that was how I met him
yeah. Alex, I met through someone who I knew in the MFA program who introduced us over Twitter. I believe actually at first, then I happened to hear that Alex and Garth were gonna be reading at this event. I think it's a new school. So I went to that, the person who organized it and the moderator on the panel was Steven Thrasher, whose book the viral underclass comes out on August 1st. And so I started to know who he was and it's just incremental. The longer you stay in the scene, the more you get to know people, you have to be part of it if you write . Don't wanna be part of the literary world, that's fine. But it does mean that you're not gonna meet the people who may be those connections that help you down the line.
Jack: Yeah and how lucky are we to be in New York where you can go to all these things and it's a few subway stops away , is pretty amazing. I always felt that. In undergrad for the first time when I went to the university of Michigan, you know, to be able to go to events and definitely more affordable in Ann Arbor than they are in New York, but generally a lot of university runs. So it's, it's pretty cool to, to be a part of that. I definitely need to do more of it too, as I think about it, but. It's hard.
Hugh: You know, I used to be really, particularly when I was in the MFA program. Yeah. Immediately after, when I wasn't yet writing my own stuff. I really threw myself into that. That's when I interned a public space for instance, and, and did all of those things, cuz I was still learning what it was. I was still trying to make my first level of connections. Right. The folks though that I met through my MFA, many of them are still people that I am incredibly close to. I mean, I'm back now teaching at the MFA program in Bennington.
So I, has remained close to my ever since.
Jack: I know you have done this before, but I'm sure it's still a surreal experience how you found balance, because I think one thing that was interested in, after meeting you through, through UJC and knowing that, okay, you have this role, you're doing a lot of research on larger books, but you're also still writing pieces.
Select publications. Now you're doing back teaching again. How have you found balance to focus on the projects that, feel the most meaningful to you?
Hugh: I think what I had to learn is that balance is not a permanent state or a thing. It's something that you are constantly sort of striving for and adjusting towards.
Yeah. You know, it's never the same. My work process habits and load change month to month, depending on which projects I'm working on right now and where they're at. I have to be very organized. I would say that's one of the big things is I, I do , I call it the checklist. It's constantly running in my head.
I wake up and first thing in the morning, I'm going through the list of like, what's this week what's coming up. What haven't I thought about in a while? Who hasn't responded to my emails, like I, I just have to keep it constantly going. I'm always sort of like repositioning a little bit, trying to figure out now, I'm in a place now where I can devote more time to this creative project that maybe hasn't even sold yet.
And I need to figure out what it is. So that's when I have a lot of time, I can put time towards that, , because I don't have to worry about deadlines and making money or this or that. Sometimes. I've gotta really focus in on the book. When I was finishing up the women's house of detention, I took a month's residency at Yado, which was amazing.
They were so wonderful, like the best writing I've ever done in my life. And I had to step away from my day job. And the urban justice center gave me a sabbatical. They were very kind find yourself a good day job, that is a recommendation I give to every author because it frees you up to not have to write, to make money and therefore put out writing that maybe you don't believe in, or maybe is not your best work or you publish it before it's ready.
and then find a job that takes care of you so that when you do need to devote yourself to your writing, they'll give you that time and space.
Jack: Yeah, I think that's such good advice because I remember in undergrad, I was thinking of, I would have to find out how to make all my money from writing. And now to be honest, I , it'd be great.
But like, in some ways that what I's so tied to. Monetary value. I don't think I would enjoy it as much. You're more worried about it from the security standpoint and for some people that they can thrive in that way, but I think maybe makes me too anxious and too much of an anxious type to, to deal with that.
Hugh: yeah. And I also wanna be able to free to be, to say, you know, like with the women's house of detention, when there were folks who didn't want it, I was able to walk away from that and say, you want something else? That's not the project I wanna do. I have this other job. I don't need this to sell to you. Yeah. And that freedom is nice. Yeah.
It definitely gives you more options. It's it's yeah, it's an interesting point. And I don't think it's an advice that's talked about enough and I'm glad that more MFA programs though, it seems are encouraging. Like, Hey, it's actually, okay. And, and low residency model, for example, which allows people to do their work, you know, make actual money to survive while also trying to write, which
has been really refreshing
Jack: yeah, I wanna go back to, I guess, in closing any sort of, well, two parts first, any other habits that we haven't talked about, we talked a lot about your discipline, but would love if, if there's anything else that you've found is kind of helps you get in the zone or, or whatever it is.
And then next I wanna do some, a couple rapid fire questions, but okay.
Hugh: In terms of habits and things, to get me in the zone, This is a weird one, but I spent a lot of the time in grad school and immediately afterwards, trying to figure out what my blind spots were in terms of my writing. What was it that no matter how much I tried, I just couldn't see it.
And I needed other people to help me see it. And I came up with two things, one finding those couple of readers who are gonna be your perfect reader, the person who always seems to get what you're trying to do and knows how to give you feedback in a way that pushes you forward. You will not at least I, and most people I know did not find many of those, but when you find them, I say clinging to them. I have a couple and they're amazing. And when they give me feedback, I trust it. And I know that it's gonna help me move the project in the direction. I want it to move the other blind spot that I really had to learn about myself is that when I am finished with something or think I'm finished with something, when I've put that final period on it, Like an overwhelming urge in me to send it out immediately to just send it out to be like, Nope, I'm done.
I'm done. I'm finally done. And no matter what I have to tell myself, if I have just closed the document, doesn't matter if I wrote the entire thing that day, or if I've been working on it and like five years, and this is the, the final edit. I cannot send it out that day. Yeah. I have to wait. I have to hold onto it because usually within three or four days, something pops into my head. That's like, oh God, you have to fix that. Yeah. This isn't a problem, everyone has right. There are people I know who are like, I have to force myself to send it out after, you know, six months after I think it's done. Mm-hmm, that finding of the blind spot, finding what it is that is your weakness and then figuring out a workaround.
That's a big part. I think of being successful in this job.
Jack: Really good advice because maybe also, because I think I have a similar blind spot of when I get the itch, like to write something I'm like, Now I have to find the audience in the right home now and it's like actually probably should spend some more time, you know, thinking through the ideas, letting it marinate a bit.
Hugh: Yeah. I mean, for me underneath all of that was a fear. I think that if I looked back at something too often, I would see that it wasn't good. Mm-hmm or I would see the holes in it and it's weird to me that my personality's response to that is well, send it out now rather than look at the ways it might be bad.
Because I think what I'm trying to do is avoid having something bad, but it's not gonna get better by not looking at it, you know? Right. Sending it out isn't gonna fix it
Jack: . Yeah, it seems like had to figure that out, both camps you're talking about have the kinda same root anxiety of like, oh, I'll actually think of shit once I say. It's just at what point .
Yeah. And this job is very anxious making, you know, you're spending a lot of time by yourself doing something that hopefully people will like, hopefully it will sell. Hopefully it will not get attacked on Twitter for it. Yeah. But you just don't know. Right, right.
That was great.
Okay. A few fewer rapid fire questions first, and I know that this one might be a hard one to think of. Are there any craft books in nonfiction or other advice sources that you've love, maybe videos or podcasts or excerpt?
Vivian Gornick's the situation and the story absolutely essential. It truly helped me to understand what I was doing in a way nothing else had.
It was like things that I had been naively trying to work out in my head. She had masterfully after decades of experience written out very, very clearly. And it's a short little book too. It is not a tough read. So that's one that I always recommend to. Oh, there's another one called I'm looking on my, my shelves right now because I know it's here somewhere bending genre, I believe is the name of it. It's a book about lyrical essay forms that. Are craft based pieces, but they're also lyrical, which is unusual. There are not a lot of lyrical craft work. And so I really liked that one. I think it's a Suzanne Paula and Brenda Miller, I think, but I'm not sure about that.
And then the racial imaginary by Rankine keen and that looked. Alfredo, I believe I've got this up here somewhere too. Laredo Beth's Laredo. That's another one that I think is really great. It's a little more theoretical than the other two craft books, but I think in terms of when you're writing about non-fiction, this one is particularly about race and it, and it is really good about that, but it's also helpful in just thinking through how we write about identity.
Ours and others that we don't share, which is so much, I think of what we do in nonfiction. So that's one that I really gravitate to. And then there's all kinds of short pieces that I really like T care Maddens Against Catharsis, which I think is really important in thinking through writing therapy, truth.
Non-fiction all of that. I, I love that piece. I recommend it all the time. Naali Elle's piece in the New York review of books glossing Africa, which is in her specific case, she's talking about how, and when did she decide to translate or not translate certain words into English when she was writing the old drift?
Hugh: Oh, but, but I think in nonfiction, we're doing that all the time. Right. We're taking specialized knowledge and presenting it to people. So we have to think about when and where do we explain things and what does it mean to explain certain things? Those are a bunch of ones. I just love off the top of my.
Jack: That was a great list. It's a really good reading list for me. I was talking up to a lot of friends about that who aren't writers, but you know, pretty avid readers about, , when do people decide to translate certain words from their culture, or even if it's in English word that people just it's a specific part of a subculture that people wouldn't understand.
How much you have to explain. And the, the dialogue around it is really interesting. I think with people who aren't writers and also saying, oh, like a lot of our favorite writers who wrote for Esquire in the nineties, like white guys went to whatever middle of nowhere, America, and they could write about whatever and, and didn't have any questions asked, like, Can everyone be granted the same kind
Hugh: Yeah. I mean, I think that, for me, I always think your job is to write it well, right? Yeah. Like that's your job. And most of the time, when I see people get criticized over issues of identity it's cuz they haven't written it very well. They haven't done a good job. They don't understand what they're writing about. What I like about this Elle piece is that she's really just focusing on the, the very technical, like how do we gloss something? When do we gloss something? What are the different methods and what do those methods produce in the reader?
Jack: Yeah, that's really cool. I'll have to check that out. What is one creative tool that you can't live without ever?
Hugh: I don't know if it counts as a creative tool, but it's the way I store all of my research. And it is incredibly helpful. What I particularly love about Evernote. There's a lot of great systems out there for writers or other kinds of researchers Evernote for the long, for longest time was the only one that had this feature.
There, might be some that others that do now, but basically if you take a photo of a page of writing and it's square, you know, it's not at a weird angle or anything. Ever note when you put that photo into a note makes it OCR searchable. So I can go to an archive and take a thousand photos in an afternoon and then search them when I get home.
Jack: That's pretty amazing. That's really cool. Yeah, it is.
I'll have to check that out also. I have never, I've never really realized that the power behind that.
Hugh: That's what I was gonna say. The other tool that I'm always using is my phone. Right. I record voice memos to myself. I record interviews with other people.
I take a million photos and archives. Like my phone is my essential research tool.
Jack: Yeah. Best assistant ever. For sure. My last one is, are there any parts of your process creative projects generally that you don't enjoy? But our necessary step. And then how do you get through the kind of slump in that, in the process for you?
Hugh: I hate the PR and it's necessary. It is absolutely essential, not only in terms of getting people to read your book, but setting up events and then sharing them on Twitter and then being a good literary citizen on Twitter and sharing other people's events and making sure that, you have a presence and all of that stuff.
I just don't particularly love social media. Yeah. And, but it's necessary. And I find parts that I really like, and I found ways to make it work for me. But it, it took me a while, you know, and yeah, that's still the part where I think I'm weakest. I'm regretting right now that I didn't hire a social media manager for the launch of this book, because I think there was so much more that could have be done.
It could have been done particularly by someone who's a lot more engrossed. Yeah. Like, I refuse to learn how to put videos up onto Facebook, Instagram, and I will not touch TikTok. And I know that that is me making myself a dinosaur and that I can't make myself do it.
Jack: It's so
funny. I feel the same way. I mean, with the podcast who I have had friends where, well, if you like did some stuff on TikTok for it, and it's like, honestly, I just don't wanna spend the time on it. I don't care. like, yeah, I can have 10 viewers. I don't care. Like I'd rather have that.
Hugh: Yeah. And it's just, it's so much time and it takes to do it well, cuz it is something you can do well or you can do poorly at it.
Takes away from the rest of your work. Yeah.
Jack: Yeah. It's interesting, funny, funny things in some ways good, you know, democratizing getting other people's voices out that haven't been, but in some ways, just parts that writer's 20 years ago never had to think about. So
Hugh: yeah. Now you are your own PR manager. You are your own events coordinator. You are everything. Yeah. Yeah.
Jack: That's funny. Thank you again. So interesting and seriously so helpful for me. I really think you know, hearing some of this is, is super validating for some of the decisions I'm making and, and going to writing going into writing, you know, more seriously with the MFA, but also just the craft books, which honestly is part of what I'm really excited in being able to dedicate more time to think more critically about the genre.
Well, congratulations. Thank you.
And thank you again.
Jack: Thanks. Once again, to Hugh for taking the time to speak with us, it was a fantastic conversation. And one that certainly grew my reading list, which is always a good problem to have. He is such an awesome writer, and I really encourage you to check out both of his books. Please take the time also to check out his work at www.hughryan.org
There's a number of other articles that he's written over the years that are incredibly interesting and show his mastery over a variety of form. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and as always hope you make today a day to make.
