Michael Arceneaux makes the tightrope walk between vulnerability and hilarity look easy. His debut essay collection I Can’t Date Jesus landed him on the New York Times bestseller list, and his essays, which have published in Essence, Teen Vogue, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The New York Times, and more, tackle tough topics with wit and panache.

In the latest installment of our Dear Reader writing residency with Ace Hotel New York, Tin House invited Michael to spend a night at Ace and, while there, write a letter to an imagined audience. The contents of his letter have been kept secret, but today, it will be placed in each room of the hotel. To celebrate, we caught up with Michael to talk justice for Zora Neale Hurston, morning routines, and the Real Housewives of literary history.

TIN HOUSE: If you could correspond with any fictional character or literary figure via letters, who would it be? And why?

MICHAEL ARCENEAUX: I would love to write back and forth with Zora Neale Hurston. I tend to read mainly nonfiction, which I know is like “whew chile, the ghetto” to a lot of the more refined writers and what not, but I am a fan of hers, especially a lot of her short fiction as I do enjoy a lot of short story collections. I have always appreciated her use of Black dialect ’cause I’m country. Also, I think the way she used it made for a much better understanding of her characters. The obvious character would be Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, but it’s true of much of her fiction.

However, I know that some were critical of that at the time (along with other matters related to her work), so while I know this may make me sound like the Andy Cohen or Nina Parker of The Real Housewives of The Harlem Renaissance: Reunion, but if I could write, “Sis, Richard Wright needs to have a sip and shut up about this book,” I’d be totally into it. I apologize to the ancestors and living elders in advance if I’m already offending y’all. But seriously, I do value her work and I hated that she died poor. It’s honestly been one of my fears in trying to have a career as a writer that I would die poor and only be truly appreciated until long after I was gone.

Do you map out your writing, or do you discover your path as you go? How often does your work go in directions you never expected?

As a working writer, particularly one who writes heavily for various outlets across Al Gore’s internet, a lot of my writing assignments are time sensitive so generally I have an idea of what I want to say when I pitch or am pitched to. When it comes to my book writing, I have a general outline, too, because one, you already sold your book on proposal so the template is already there, and two, I’ve just become wired that way after having done largely digital media work for nearly a decade. I apologize to fans of spontaneity and the rush of unforeseen creative inspirations that transforms prose. However, there were instances on I Can’t Date Jesus in which two chapters ended up a lot differently than I anticipated. One chapter in particular about my father wasn’t trashed per se, but had to be changed after I had a talk with my sister. In learning more about my dad’s relationship with my uncle before he died, I didn’t have to put aside my feelings and experiences, but she added so much more context. So I had to sit with it. I mean really sit with it; not to just react to new intel, but table it, process it, and then go back and pour myself out all over again. It made everything for the better.

I have more recently been making much better use of the Notes app. I like to hand write a lot of things, but I’ve come to realize doing it on the phone is better for me because I can jot down some idea, and while traveling—particularly on that awful MTA in NY—I build little by little on it. A lot of my second book ideas came out from toying with the Notes app and handwriting an outline while eating brunch solo and casually talking to a beautiful bartender that isn’t into men, but what the hell, he’s still cute so I’m going to chat anyway.  

Dear Reader tasks you with writing for an imagined audience of strangers. How much do you think about your audience when you write? Have you ever been surprised by who is drawn to your work?

My main intentions with my work are to make people laugh and to make people think. I try not to think too heavily about anything else because it can become distracting. Like, I’m aware and conscious of the things I say and how I say them, but I try not to overthink because if I do, God, it’s just going to take me so much longer to get anything done. I want everyone to read me so I do the best I can and hope it reaches as many as possible.

I still think of myself as a bit under the radar (to the boos and hisses of select friends and colleagues), so I am always pleasantly surprised when anyone reads my work, but I am actually never surprised at having a diverse readership. One of my very good friends and former editors once told me “You write for Black people.” What he meant was I don’t focus on the white gaze nor do I concern myself with worries that if I sound too uh, colloquial, that I will alienate non-Black readers. I Can’t Date Jesus is a book I wish I had growing up as a working class, southern Black gay boy. I wrote it from that perspective and knew people like me would be the first to gravitate towards it. I’m so proud of that, but there are also a lot of white people in their 70s reading it. I know because they email me all the time. Others—namely in publishing—felt I would be “niche,” but I write about religion, intimacy, doubt, fear, and learning to love myself and enjoy pleasure. Those are universal themes, so while I may be not surprised the book is connecting with a wide readership, I’m glad they are surprising the people in publishing who often fail to give non-white writers the benefit of the doubt.

What’s a book that you wish more people knew about?

Bitch Is The New Black by Helena Andrews. She is probably tired of me saying this, but I adore her as a writer, I love her book, I love her voice, and I think she was, in hindsight, somewhat ahead of her time because she definitely paved the way for a new generation of Black memoirists and deserves her flowers. This is also just another good way to publicly push and get more books out of her. If I can get a bonus, Bulletproof Diva by Lisa Jones.

Do you have any rituals, ceremonies or requirements that accompany your writing process?

I shoot up at 6:00 a.m. pretending that I’m going to immediately get to writing, but in reality, I’m just going to turn on Morning Joe because my body literally now wakes up to its schedule. How long I watch depends on how quickly someone on the panel says something that annoys me so then I go freshen up. Next up: my morning jig, a thing I do every morning in which I dance to some song in order to have a little joy before someone tries to ruin it. Eventually, I decide to write a little on my phone because I’m not ready to sit at that desk yet. I’ll have some caffeine – ideally something I already have in the fridge or I’ll convince myself that paying $5 for an oak milk latte will really get me going when I know this is just me wasting time and I have private student loans—meaning I shouldn’t be in that coffee shop anyway. Obviously, hours have passed and then I finally settle down to write after Wendy Williams finishes Hot Topics, of course.

I don’t really get to writing until I end up using the Freedom app to block me from the internet so I can spend hours writing. I don’t recommend this, but in my defense, my discipline has waned because I have yet to take that vacation that’s probably seven years overdue now.

Dear Reader is a collaboration of Tin House and Ace Hotel New York.

The heavyweight champion of paradox, the pioneer of parasitical writing, the disinterrer of lost authors, the crazy godfather of the Spanish avant-garde, the crypto-torchbearer of high modernism, Enrique Vila-Matas has spent over forty years charting out a literary terrain that is all his own. His work is notorious for intensely feeding off of other texts—most notably, those written by European titans like Beckett, Joyce, and Walser—as well as for drawing liberally from his own strange life. Hovering somewhere between plagiarism and homage, autobiography and multiple personality disorder, his books push the personal essay into a novelistic form, all the while taunting us with coincidences, anecdotes, and facts that seem far too good to be true—or are they actually real?

Vila-Matas’s literature is nourished by its own prodigious paranoia and madness, always beginning from ludicrous premises and red herrings, then relentlessly pushing them further and further until they gloriously break down. His books show how literature can be deadly serious by being resolutely playful; his language delights in speaking truth through creative misprision, evasion, and outright deception.

I discovered Vila-Matas in 2007 through the release of his first two English-language translations, Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady. I’ve been a reader ever since, steadily consuming the regular translations of his works (now  nine in total), as well as working my way through his Spanish-language list. I keep coming back because the books themselves are marvelous, and also because I know that whenever I read his work I will come away with a list of new writers to investigate, new ideas to explore, and new stories that I must try to verify the truth of.

For this interview I corresponded with the author over a leisurely few months. Vila-Matas was always a courteous and prompt respondent, and he treated me with the highest respect and seriousness, but I could never quite escape the feeling that much of what he was telling me was made up. Whether that’s the truth of the matter or just the byproduct of conditioning built upon a decade of reading Vila-Matas is a thing I leave to the reader to decide.

—Veronica Scott Esposito

Veronica Scott Esposito: Let’s start with where it all started for me: your 2000 novel, Bartleby & Co., a breakthrough in terms of your fame and prestige, and a very difficult-to-classify work. This novel is couched as a series of footnotes to an “invisible” text, and the common theme is that of writers who inexplicably quit writing. (The title is a reference to Melville’s famous Bartleby: “I prefer not to.”) The book combines a number of elements common to your work: copious anecdotes from literary figures famous and obscure; quotations; paranoia; conspiracy; autobiography; and of course many, many works of literature (many real, but perhaps also many fake?) that you weave into the fabric of your text. It’s a book that makes literature out of the inability to write literature. Have you ever been tempted to disappear from writing, as do many of your protagonists and literary heroes?

Enrique Vila-Matas: I wrote Bartleby & Co. because I was strongly attracted to the drive toward negation and wanted to abandon literature. This was paradoxical because by thoroughly occupying myself with those who had quit writing I was able to succeed in continuing to write. In these denials of culture and literature there is a strong passion for what is denied. Bartleby & Co. goes with Montano’s Malady and Doctor Pasavento to form a trilogy in which negation and disappearance from literature are central, and where I develop my idea of how the avant-garde’s fate to disappear from literature makes it possible that, after the end of literature (the end of the Gutenberg era, as I call it in Dublinesque), I could continue writing. To put it differently: I think that I find myself among those who recently discovered that the only way in which literature isn’t dead is to write being conscious of the fact that it has already died.

If you like good poetry and/or smart entertainment in general, chances are you’ve encountered the work of Fatimah Asghar. Her debut book of poems, If They Come For Us (One World 2018), published this summer to well-deserved raves. Her beloved web series, Brown Girls, was nominated for an Emmy and recently acquired by HBO. She’s a member of the Dark Noise Collective and the creator of a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And as of this month, she’s our latest letter-writer-in-residence.

As part of our Dear Reader series with Ace Hotel New York, we at Tin House invited Fatimah to spend a night at Ace and, while there, pen a letter to an imagined audience. What she wrote has been kept secret until today, when it will be placed bedside in each room. To mark the occasion, we caught up with Fatimah to talk Toni Morrison, why she makes art, and the power of a good walk.

TIN HOUSE: If you could correspond with any fictional character or literary figure via letters, who would it be?  And why?

FATIMAH ASGHAR: Probably Toni Morrison. Her writing has just opened up so much possibility for me, and the world at large. I would love to talk to her. Though I don’t know what else I would say other than “I love you” over and over again.

Do you map out your writing, or do you discover your path as you go? How often does your work go in directions you never expected?

I only map out my screenwriting, but usually even then half of the map goes out the window once I get to page. There’s only so much you can plan for until you start writing, I think that the language and the characters definitely take you someplace different from your head once they are active and living on the page. But that’s beautiful, because it’s a process of a discovery. I don’t map out poems. I don’t know anyone who does that. Sometimes I have an idea of where a poem might end or where I am building to, but never a map.

Dear Reader tasks you with writing for an imagined audience of strangers. How much do you think about your audience when you write? Have you ever been surprised by who is drawn to your work?

I think about my audience a lot! I make my art to feel a little less lonely in the world, so audience is huge. Even then, I’m always surprised by who is drawn to my art.

What’s a book that you wish more people knew about?

Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Midnight’s Furies by Nisid Hajari. Midnight’s Furies is a book about Partition, so much of my book wrestles with Partition. I think his book is written in a way that is really accessible and nuanced and a great account of history. I just finished reading Heavy and feel like it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It made me feel so many feelings I didn’t know were even possible. Everyone should read it.

Do you have any rituals, ceremonies or requirements that accompany your writing process? 

I like to meditate and stretch beforehand. If I get stuck, I like to walk or exercise. A good walk does so much for my brain when I’m stuck. It’s just helpful to move when you’re at a desk for so long.

Dear Reader is a collaboration of Tin House and Ace Hotel New York.

Jamel Brinkley’s extraordinary debut story collection, A Lucky Man (Graywolf), came out this summer to rave reviews. The New Yorker called it “a trenchant exploration of race and class, vividly conveying the tension between social codes of masculinity and the vulnerable, volatile self.” The Root called it “revelatory.” And now we can all call it a National Book Award Finalist.

Jamel is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University but recently made a trip to New York, where he became our latest Dear Reader author. Over the course of a night at Ace Hotel New York, Jamel penned a letter to an imagined audience—a letter that’s been kept secret until today, when it will be placed bedside in each room. We caught up with Jamel to talk James Baldwin, questioning assumptions, and the perfect pen.

TIN HOUSE: If you could correspond with any fictional character or literary figure via letters, who would it be?  And why?

JAMEL BRINKLEY: The first person who comes to mind is James Baldwin. His combination of brilliance, insight, warmth, humor, and rhetorical mastery would be incredible to engage with, especially during these trying times.

Do you map out your writing, or do you discover your path as you go? How often does your work go in directions you never expected?

I’m definitely the kind of writer who discovers my path as I go, even at the risk of taking the wrong path, having to retrace my steps, and then trying an alternate direction. An unexpected path isn’t necessarily a wrong path, however. Part of what makes writing fun for me is encountering something unexpected, unintended, and wonderful.

Dear Reader tasks you with writing for an imagined audience of strangers. How much do you think about your audience when you write? Have you ever been surprised by who is drawn to your work?

I think about my audience to the extent that I want to remember that writing stories is an act meant to be shared, not something just for my own private pleasure. I try to keep in mind, especially during revision, that what I’m doing at every turn is attempting to communicate. When I do imagine the particular readers that might make up my audience, I think of people like me or my family and friends. It seems important for a black writer to think of his or her readership as black or of color. Too often, discussions of readers, or notions of “the reader,” seem to assume that one’s audience is white.

What’s a book that you wish more people knew about?

One book I’ll mention is Oreo by Fran Ross.

Do you have any rituals, ceremonies or requirements that accompany your writing process? 

I have to write at home. I can’t work in libraries, cafes, or other public spaces. I compose first drafts on my laptop, but I revise using a printed copy and a pen. My pen of choice is a Pilot Precise V5 (Extra Fine) Rolling Ball pen. Using anything else to revise feels strange.

Dear Reader is a collaboration of Tin House and Ace Hotel New York.

Our cover artist, Pablo Gerardo Camacho, thinks his fascination with snakes may have started with his mother’s phobia of them. He believes beauty is something to be feared and honored and he sees snakes as representations of this sentiment. He says, “All beauty should and must be [treated] with respect and love” or it “could kill you.”

Tayari Jones may have rocketed to new heights of fame with her latest novel, An American Marriage, but she’s long been recognized as one of the most important storytellers of our time. In addition to An American Marriage, which is a New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, she’s the author of Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow. Tayari has been honored with a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, an NEA Fellowship, and many more.

If you’ve read An American Marriage, then you know what Tayari Jones can do within the format of a letter, how much power and poignancy she packs into a single missive. So of course, we invited her to be this month’s letter-writer-in-residence at Ace Hotel New York. As part of our Dear Reader micro-residency, we invited Tayari to spend a night at Ace and, while there, pen a letter to an unknown audience. What she wrote has been kept secret until today, when it will be placed bedside in each hotel room. We caught up with Tayari to talk the breathless anticipation of writing, the joy of manual typewriters, and why she wants to correspond with Harper Lee.

TIN HOUSE: If you could correspond with any fictional character or literary figure via letters, who would it be?  And why?

TAYARI JONES: I’d love to correspond with Harper Lee. After reading Go Set a Watchman, I understood why she never published another novel after To Kill A Mockingbird. She must have felt horribly misunderstood to be famous for a book that lionized Atticus Finch. From everything I’ve read, she was haunted by her own father’s descent into racism and hate and tried to sort it out on the page. The editors didn’t like the ugly stuff and instead urged her to publish only the part that represented her wide-eyed childish love of her idealistic father. And then that sentimental view became her identity. I think I would like to have been her pen pal so we could talk about other things, so she could get out from under the weight of her own complicated success.

Do you map out your writing, or do you discover your path as you go? How often does your work go in directions you never expected?

I like to feel the same breathless anticipation writing a book as I feel reading it. I wouldn’t want to spoil the experience for myself by mapping out the characters’ trajectories and then following a clearly marked road. Good novels don’t come with google maps or GPS. I write to explore and I am often stunned by my destination.

Dear Reader tasks you with writing for an imagined audience of strangers. How much do you think about your audience when you write? Have you ever been surprised by who is drawn to your work?

When I am writing I don’t think about audience—I need to be intimate with my characters, much in the way that a marriage is between lovers, with no studio audience. However, I do think of audience when I am revising because revision, for me, is all about legibility.

I am not often surprised by who is drawn to my work, but I am frequently saddened by people who confess to have loved my writing despite our surface differences. I’m glad the novels connect across lines of race/gender/sexuality etc., but it breaks my heart that this connection comes as such a surprise.

What’s a book that you wish more people knew about?

The Darkest Child by Dolores Phillips.

Do you have any rituals, ceremonies or requirements that accompany your writing process? 

I like to compose on manual typewriters. There is something so satisfying about making such a joyous ruckus as I put the words onto the page. Also, my Smith Corona is not connected to the internet.

Dear Reader is a collaboration of Tin House and Ace Hotel New York.

Listen and subscribe on iTunes here.

Learn more about Junk: The Podcast here.

Hootie hoo and a nelly nacho howdy-do to you! It’s a poet’s feast this week as we’ve got Angel Nafis, sam sax, and Max Steele on the show with some extremely comely Junk. And being poets of course they talk about Junky love: Junking toward the future of romantic love, Junk as a reminder of the love for your art practice, and Junk as memory for a beloved pet. To finish us off, I’ve got a Cactus Candy-like teensy piece of my long poem Junk wrapped up and ready for ya! Brought to you, as always, by Tin House Books.

Follow us on Instagram to get a sneaky peek at our poets’ Junk this week @junkpodcast.

Angel Nafis: @AngelNafis
sam sax: @samsax1
Max Steele: @billycheer
Tommy Pico, host @heyteebs
Alexandra DiPalma, producer @LSDiPalma
Kenya Anderson, production assistant @kenya_digg_it

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is the Whiting Award-winning author of three books of poetry: Junk, Nature Poem, and IRL, winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, and NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, is a contributing editor at Literary Hub, and co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot. Food 4 Thot has been featured in Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, HuffPost, OUT, and more. 

Listen and subscribe on iTunes here!

Learn more about Junk: The Podcast here!

Wiggly gummy worm what’s up my Junky whatsits! You got thingamabobs? I got plenty. I…want…more? This episode is a bauble if ever I got one—partly a podcast crossover with the clever young fairies from Las Culturistas Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers aaaand one of the sharpest prose writers in the game, Chelsea Hodson! This week it’s all about how Junk feeds our ambition: as a reminder of where we come from, what we pour ourselves into and what feeds us, and what propels our commitment. Followed up with a pyrotechnic spectacle of gassy verse from my long poem Junk. Brought to you as always by Tin House Books.

Follow us on Instagram for a peek into each interviewee’s extra special Junk @junkpodcast.

Bowen Yang, @bowenyang
Matt Rogers, @MattRogersTho
Chelsea Hodson, @ChelseaHodson
Tommy Pico, host @heyteebs
Alexandra DiPalma, producer @LSDiPalma
Kenya Anderson, production assistant @kenya_digg_it

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is the Whiting Award-winning author of three books of poetry: Junk, Nature Poem, and IRL, winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, and NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, is a contributing editor at Literary Hub, and co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot. Food 4 Thot has been featured in Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, HuffPost, OUT, and more. 

Listen and subscribe on iTunes here.

Learn more about Junk: The Podcast here.

Sudsy soda salutations my Junky sussers! This week we’ve got a show recorded variously at the alpha and omega of it all, the Tin House Summer Workshop! Our all-star line-up this week consists of Danez Smith, Jenna Wortham, and Alexander Chee talking all about the world building inherent in our Junk. Sometimes we use Junk to orient ourselves to the world around us, fill our world with reflections of us, and bring our world with us wherever we go. Followed up with a particularly saucy excerpt from Junk the long poem. Brought to you as always by Tin House Books.

Check out our Instagram to see all these lovely ppls *Junk* each week tee hee @junkpodcast.

Danez Smith, @Danez_Smif
Jenna Wortham, @jennydeluxe
Alexander Chee, @alexanderchee
Tommy Pico, host @heyteebs
Alexandra DiPalma, producer @LSDiPalma
Kenya Anderson, production assistant @kenya_digg_it

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is the Whiting Award-winning author of three books of poetry: Junk, Nature Poem, and IRL, winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, and NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, is a contributing editor at Literary Hub, and co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot. Food 4 Thot has been featured in Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, HuffPost, OUT, and more. 

Michelle Tea is so many things: award-winning memoirist and novelist, inimitable documenter of the queercore scene, founder of RADAR Productions and the international Sister Spit performance tours, writer we’d most like to join for a road trip, and much more. Her most recent books include Black Wave (Feminist Press, 2016), a fiction-memoir hybrid; Modern Tarot: Connecting with Your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards (HarperCollins, 2017); and Against Memoir (Feminist Press, 2018), which Maggie Nelson calls “a bracing, heaven-sent tonic for deeply troubled times.”

We invited Michelle Tea to be this month’s Dear Reader author at Ace Hotel New York. While on tour for Against Memoir, she spent a night at Ace and penned a letter to an unknown audience of hotel guests. The letter was kept secret until today, when it will be placed bedside in each room—but first we caught up with Michelle to talk unexpected readers, workhorse crystals, and being alone.

TIN HOUSE: If you could correspond with any fictional character or literary figure via letters, who would it be? And why?

MICHELLE TEA: Roberta Rohbeson, the protagonist of Lynda Barry’s novel, Cruddy—which, were the world a fair and just place, would be held in the esteem of, like, Catcher in the Rye. Sixteen years old when the work was published in 2001, I would want to know, first of all, if she was alive or dead (perhaps this correspondence happens with the aid of a psychic medium), and I would want to know if indeed it does “Get Better” for put-upon teens such as herself; does she still have her trusty blade, Lil’ Debbie; is she queer or simply one of those very tough women who get mistaken suchly throughout their lives? Finally, I would beg her to go on a road trip with me.

Do you map out your writing, or do you discover your path as you go? How often does your work go in directions you never expected?

Traditionally I have discovered my path along the way, but as I work more and more on learning the secrets of screenwriting, I find that outlining and plotting is working its way into my once-upon-a-time stream-of-consciousness writing.

Dear Reader tasks you with writing for an imagined audience of strangers. How much do you think about your audience when you write? Have you ever been surprised by who is drawn to your work? 

 I try not to think of my audience when I write, but I have at points written to impress specific individual authors who I was obsessed with, or have imagined a sort of girl in the world who is essentially a projection of myself, and I write for her. I am surprised on occasion when very young people or very old heterosexual white men have found my work. I’m not surprised that they enjoy it, more that they found their way to it. That is interesting to me!

What’s a book that you wish more people knew about?

Everything by Ali Liebegott—The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, and Cha-Ching! They talk about the deep experience of being an outlier in this world, in Ali’s case via gender and sexuality, income and artistic nature. It is by turns really hilarious and seriously heartbreaking, often both at once, always rendered in a really unique and beautiful fashion.

Do you have any rituals, ceremonies or requirements that accompany your writing process? 

 I can’t really write creatively at home, it’s too distracting. I like to be out in the world somewhere; a loud, busy hum is less distracting to me than silence. I will often bring a crystal with me, one that promotes stamina, creativity, inspiration. I like Calcite, Honey, Orange or Green. They are workhorse crystals. Pieterstine to burst through blocks, Amethyst for inspiration. I used to have more superstitions and then I created a writing retreat that was very close quarters and bare bones and it challenged all I thought I needed to be productive, which is great. All I need to be productive is myself, and for people to leave me alone.

Dear Reader is a collaboration of Tin House and Ace Hotel New York. You can find this interview and other delights on the Ace Hotel blog.

Photography by Seze Devres for Ace Hotel New York.

I first fell for Victoria Patterson’s work when I heard her speak about her debut story collection, Drift, onstage for the Story Prize ceremony in 2009. Patterson’s writing took me someplace I knew well—a listless, shifty Southern California of vacant suburbs and humming sprinklers and apartment complexes where neighbors’ lives play like radio through the walls—but also someplace I didn’t. The emotional landscapes of Patterson’s characters are always surprising, uncanny in the truest sense of the word: I am shown something new about the world through them, at the same time within them I see myself. After publishing three novels, Patterson returns to stories with the collection The Secret Habit of Sorrow and takes this examination further still, particularly as she steps close to the workings of family, and the failings and wants and losses that come with it. It was an honor to speak with Patterson about this work.

***

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky:  What’s changed for you between now and the writing of your first book, if anything, in what you hope stories can be or do?

Victoria Patterson: I remain true to my conviction that stories validate life as valuable and mysterious. Frank O’Hara wrote, “Attention equals life.” I love stories that give voice to outsiders, to the so-called “defeated,” stories that honor the tragic, while also providing hope and connection. Stories are compact empathy-conveyors. They’re sneaky, engulfing the reader, rather than telling him or her what to feel or think.

EKH: Writers always get asked what the first books they loved were, but I’m curious: What the first pieces of fiction you wrote were like? Were you a writer already as a kid?

VP: In the second grade, I wrote a story about my classmates and our teacher banding together to save the school from an alien invasion. My teacher loved it. She had me read it aloud to the class.

The seeds of one of my first attempted (and discarded) novels, sprouted years later to become the short story “Half-Truth.” A few other novels remain buried, though pieces of them still pop up unexpectedly.

I’ve been writing in journals since the second grade. It took years for me to find my way from documenting my days/life to fiction and story telling. Though I wanted to be an author, I was messed up. I remember identifying with that scene in The Squid and the Whale where the character plagiarizes Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” for the talent show, and his defense is that it felt like he wrote it. That’s how books, poems, and stories were to me. I felt them so strongly; I wanted to be a part of that conversation somehow. But it took a long time for me to find my way to becoming a fully functional person. Through it all, I kept a journal. I developed my voice, and then it took more time to move to the fictional. Journal writing is essential and writing itself has always been intertwined with my survival.

EKH: That scene in The Squid and the Whale! I love it, too! What are the books you most feel that kind of connection to, that you wish had your name on the cover?

VP: There are so many. When I was young, I remember reading Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and feeling, eerily so, like it was speaking directly to me. I also grew enamored by John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which I’d discovered in my parents’ sparse library. I was too young to understand, but it struck me nonetheless and somehow cemented that I wanted to perform that kind of magic. Lately it’s more on a sentence level. I’ll underline sentences and think, damn, I wish I’d written that, and it comes from everything, including student work. I often grow obsessed with a writer and read everything by him or her. My last obsessions: Tom Drury and Rachel Cusk.

EKH: What’s your favorite stage of the writing process? Initial drafting? Revision? Are you someone who likes to get a draft down, however rough, and then tinker, or are you meticulous the first time through?

VP: I like knowing I have a novel or a story inside me, and then the whole process of assembling it on the outside, like a consuming, cosmic puzzle. I comb through what I’ve written over and over, usually going back to the beginning, smoothing as I go along, so that it becomes developmentally organic. I read everything aloud multiple times, and I frantically chew gum, so it’s best if I’m alone. Ideally, the only witness is my dog.

EKH: You have the most dexterous touch in calibrating dialogue and scene so that we understand so richly and with such nuance what your characters are feeling without these emotional turns being telegraphed to us. How do you pull this off? How do you know what’s too much, what’s too little?

Thank you! I’d guess that it comes from my copious reading habits and all that journal writing, along with my hypersensitive nature, and also from growing up in a family where for survival, I developed a fine-tuned emotion calibrator. Also editorial help, such as yours–and my writers group.

EKH: Maybe along those same lines, you write phenomenally convincing teenage and child characters, particularly as they confront some of the darkest stuff everyday life has to offer: loss, parents’ divorces, other trauma to their families. I’m thinking especially of AJ in “How to Lose” or Owen in “Half-Truth.” What makes kids such compelling lenses? Why populate your stories with them?

VP: I’m lucky I survived my teenage years, so I often write about teens. Kids are hard to write. They’re sophisticated, guileless truth tellers, and I’m interested in how they navigate the world, and the compromises they make.

I’d like to read more stories about children and parents. It’s such a complex, profound, and fraught relationship. I’m writing what I want to read, what is most meaningful to me, and as the mother of two sons (and as a daughter), it’s what I have to write. Richard Yates said, “The emotions of fiction are autobiographical but the facts never are.” I dedicated this collection to my sons for a reason.

EKH: I’m so interested in what you say about a need for more stories about parents and children—what do you want to see written about in this relationship more than we’re doing presently? What are the questions that circle this relationship that most interest you?

VP: I crave these stories, since these relationships, whether we like it or not, for good and bad and everything in between, are vital, complicated, massively influential. I’ve been working on an essay for some time and realize I’m circling my feelings about both my sons; but particularly, in this essay, my youngest. It’s hard to write about–to define–and to write about it accurately and honestly. The depths of emotion are overwhelming, and it’s always been that way for me as a mother, since their births. But also as a daughter, how I feel about my parents. Literature–more accurately, critical attention–tends to disregard or minimize this deep well.

EKH: If I hadn’t already been a devoted fan, I would’ve become one when you called out Jonathan Franzen for his baffling and infuriating essay about Edith Wharton in the New Yorker a few years back, specifically his essay’s preoccupation with what Wharton looked like. I imagine that an essay like Franzen’s would have a harder time being greenlit today, that at least one editor on staff would have the good sense to object to its misogyny—but I wonder also sometimes how genuinely or how deeply we as a culture have internalized the feminist values we more and more profess. What are your thoughts? What do you make of the feminist moment we’re in?

VP: I’m not sure what to make of it. I hope culture is changing, but I’m skeptical. I feel like we’re in the strangest Twilight Zone-like moment, because of Trump, of course, and it’s like we’re moving in this thick molasses of bullshit.

I’m a vocal feminist. I have plenty of “me too” credentials. My last novel was about rape culture. I am ready to burn the patriarchal house down. And I also want room for conflicting, complex feelings, to make mistakes, to not always be a part of an outrage machine, especially when it seems misdirected, or fear that its wrath might latch onto me if I don’t toe the line, or if I say something stupid.

Life is not simple, nothing is. Rather than projecting something more solidly righteous, moral, and sure-footed, I hope my prose conveys complexity, ambiguity, etc. Literature is messy, otherwise, what?

I also wrote an essay about Dave Eggers’ disingenuous, glowing, one-dimensional portrayal of Abdulrahman Zeitoun in his nonfictional novel Zeitoun. Little complexity or contradictions, a feel good I’m-on-the-right-side depiction, no self-implicating mirror. That, to me, does more of a disservice than, say, prose crackling with misogyny, but also honestly and emotionally grappling with misogyny.

I’ve been thinking about Zadie Smith’s essay on Philip Roth: “At an unusually tender age, he learned not to write to make people think well of him, nor to display to others, through fiction, the right sort of ideas, so they could think him the right sort of person. ‘Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest,’ he once said.”

EKH: You write about southern California in a way that always makes me long to be there, in its beauty and in its particular brand of ennui that I think you capture like no one else. Who are your other favorite California writers, and your favorite books about your state?

VP: Dana Johnson, Michelle Huneven, Jim Gavin, Danzy Senna, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Michael Jaime-Becerra, among many others. Immediately I think of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Recently I read Pacific by Tom Drury, which I loved, and which led me to all his amazing books.

Victoria Patterson is the author of the novels The Peerless Four and This Vacant Paradise, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her story collection, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award, the 2009 Story Prize, and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle. She lives with her family in Southern California and teaches at Antioch University’s Master of Fine Arts program.

The essays of Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This? are lithe, sure-footed things, some companionable, wild-eyed new species of familiar that leads us to their considerations with tenderness and nerve. In language that is lush without ever compromising its precision, Young’s essays travel through and outward from her native New Zealand in exploration of feelings of smallness—of solitude, of lostness in place, of the humble triumphs and consolations we pin our hopes on—with a generosity of spirit that makes the world feel cradling even as it dwarves our concerns. It was an honor to speak with her about these essays, and the particular balm of the world’s tallest stack of waffles. 

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Emma Komlos-Hrobsky: When did you first start writing the essays in this book? Did this project feel like a movement away from the work you do in other genres, or in some way an extension or reimagining of it?

Ashleigh Young: I started writing these essays in a scrappy way around 2008, which feels like a world ago. I was trying to figure out where I wanted to live and what to do with myself, and I think I had too much choice and not enough courage. With this writing, at least I could say that I definitely wanted to write this book, and it was good to feel certain about one thing.

I can never figure out how much my poems have to do with the other writing I try to do. Maybe it’s that in an essay I’m trying to speed my thoughts up and in a poem I’m trying to slow them down. Someone asked me about this at a festival event recently. ‘How do you know when you’re writing a poem and how do you know it should be an essay?’ and I froze and started blathering that the two forms are entirely different in my mind, that my intention for a poem is always entirely different from my intention for an essay. I thought I should sound definitive in the moment, so that people would think I knew what I was doing. And it’s true that with an essay I start with a more defined idea or a question or problem, and a sense of where I want to dig. With a poem I usually, tragically, start with a feeling that I want to unravel. But the truth is I don’t know! All I can say is that the moment I start writing, I do know. I feel the form there, like it’s looking over my shoulder.

EKH: Did anything change for you as a writer over the course of writing the collection? Did your aspirations for the project evolve at all, or your sense of what the essay could do or what you wanted to use it to do?

AY: Ahhh. So many things changed! A lot of time passed and I grew up a bit. After I finished a first draft of this book in 2009, I had to put it aside. My brothers had some objections to what I’d written – and they were right; I’d written my first draft quite recklessly, telling some things that weren’t truly mine to tell – and I didn’t know how to solve those problems; I didn’t know how to recalibrate the essays and still have them be honest. I felt in the end that it was too hard, and that I wouldn’t try to publish the book. I would focus on a book of poems instead, and on writing new essays, which I did. I made a big move from Wellington to London, and that changed my writing I think. I started writing a blog, and something about the temporal, pencil-sketchy feeling of a blog helped me write more freely, with less agonising about whether it was any worthwhile. It was probably as simple as having a new text box to write into. I think lots of writers are like magpies, only instead of shiny things it’s a new text box that gets them all excited. (At my job – I’m an editor at Victoria University Press, in Wellington – we’re often sent these pristine, blank dummy books from our printers, so we can get an idea of the form of the book we’re about to make. They’re perfect for writing notes in. I love it when a new dummy arrives.)

After a while, I felt bold enough to come back to this book and see if there was still any heat in it. Because time had passed, the events I’d been writing about in my first draft felt less raw. I could think about them without demanding of the reader that they share in my anguish and if they didn’t what was wrong with them?! I had some perspective. I also had some new pieces I wanted to include. And then I could see a better shape for the book. I’m so, so glad for that first obstacle.

EKH: Your essays speak with such dignity and affection both for all manner of creative aspiration, however ultimately humble the results. I suppose I’m thinking particularly of the mailman from “Postie,” who spends his lifetime collecting beautiful white rocks as he perambulates his route in the French countryside, then building various grandiose monuments out of his finds—but I’m also thinking of your dad as he guns his plane across the Cook Strait, racing for a new personal best, or the spirit in which the Washhouse Tapes are recorded. What is it that moves you about these efforts? What made you want to write about them? And what kind of work do they make you want to do as writer?

AY: There’s something in my family that really respects strange feats and traditions. For instance every January my brother JP holds a commemorative swim out to a rock to mark the first (and only) fatal shark attack in Wellington (a young trombonist named John Balmer was killed in January 1852). Similarly, JP’s story of walking one hundred kilometres from one city to another at night with a friend became kind of legendary. And my dad and his friends would stage their own Olympic Games in the backyard, when the real Olympics was on. People just get really into things. My dad is also very proud to have won a plane-landing competition a few years ago and to be featured in the local paper. It’s a funny scene – all these men sitting out in deck chairs in a field, roaring their approval as little planes land. It’s a very NZ-spirited thing – this effort to do something remarkable by our own measure. It’s hard to describe this well but it really moves me when I’m watching someone carry out some small tradition that’s meaningful or joyful to them but not significant to anyone else. I want to write about these things because I don’t want them to disappear. Also – the best and funniest stories in my family always seemed to come from the guys, and part of writing this book was saying (desperate as this sounds) that I feel a part of those stories too.

I guess with the short essay about the French postman Ferdinand Cheval, and with the essay about the Washhouse Tapes, although those people really were aiming earnestly for greatness and posterity, they also believed that their ideas were really interesting, and that being quite geographically isolated had nothing to do with it. I don’t want to over-egg this, but, secretly, I try to work in that same spirit. It still takes me a long time to decide that I might have anything worth saying, though.

I also have this sense that maybe people are turning towards smaller stories – maybe to momentarily shield ourselves from the torrent of massive and awful news stories. I followed a story a few weeks ago about a bunch of people making the world’s tallest stack of waffles. A reporter was spending the day with the waffle-makers and was tweeting about the day as the waffle-building progressed, and it was captivating. They just seemed like the loveliest bunch of people, all standing around this big waffle tower. Another one that got me recently was a story about this Scottish woman who came across a bumble bee that had no wings, and she decided to take care of it, feeding it sugar water and stroking it, until one day the bee died. I get completely pulled in by these stories. I was crying everywhere over that bumble bee. It’s funny, how quickly I can feel like I own a random story from the internet, as if it’s mine and nobody else really understands it like I do – but how it takes much longer to feel that there is worth in the stories I already know.

EKH: Again and again, your essays capture so brilliantly the particular kind of companion pop music is to solitude. In “The Te Kuiti Underground,” you imagine Paul McCartney taking your hand as you walk up a lone country hill; Paul and by proxy his music become intimate companions, sharers in loneliness, and at the same time you say you conjure him up to “make an ordinary place, an ordinary moment, more intense, more like a film, something driven towards meaningful conclusion.” You follow this image with the story of the first pieces of writing you sent off for hopeful publication, all the way back in primary school. What do writing and music have to do with each other for you? Are both about ways of approaching solitude? About articulating your own story?

AY: When I was a kid I used to barricade myself into my room and dance to music, or I would run around naked, bopping away. If a song was on, it meant either ‘celebration time’ or … ‘deep sadness time’. (I would’ve been one of those people in the 1800s in France who went into hypnosis when a neurologist banged a gong or waved a tuning fork in front of me, or something.) I took music very personally. A hidden track on an album felt like a secret between me and the artist; how you could be lying there on the floor after the album proper ended, and after a few minutes of silence, staring into space, some new, mysterious thing would begin. It’s sad to me that hidden tracks are pretty much obsolete now.

It took me a long time to stop taking taste so personally. A workmate in a bookshop once said to me gently, when I’d started sputtering because he said he didn’t really like Quentin Blake’s illustrations, ‘You know, if someone doesn’t like the same things you like, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.’ (And then – my head exploded like a chicken in George’s Marvellous Medicine.)

Growing up, I was desperate for my life to feel like it meant something. Obviously it did mean something, or kind of, but I wanted clear signs that this was the case. I wanted tearful-face-filling-a-movie-screen levels of meaning. Listening to music, writing songs, and writing stories were ways of injecting drama into my situation and imagining myself into another, bigger life. I think all of this is probably really basic – I was just hyper-sensitive, and wanted to be comforted.

But now, the escape is more ordinary. It’s relief. Music and writing both give me a feeling of being on the brink of something, at the same time as being suspended in a given moment.

EKH: Some time ago, I was lucky enough to live in New Zealand for a while, and it took only one trip to the local bookstore for me to sheepishly realize how little I knew about the singular rich and wild and inventive landscape of New Zealand’s literature. Even now, I think many American readers will know only Katherine Mansfield or Janet Frame—what contemporary New Zealand writers should we be reading? What essayists and poets?

AY: This is bad because I know I’m going to forget some important writer or other and next day I’ll bump into them at the supermarket and they’ll give me the stinkeye. Well, most of our books just aren’t in reach of the US radar. You have to seek them out especially. I am very excited about some new young poets here. Sam Duckor-Jones has an incredible – hilarious, clever, beautiful – first book of poems out, and so does Tayi Tibble; her work is full of light and grit and this amazing swagger. A lot of brilliant essayists are writing online. I love Talia Marshall’s essays, Madelaine Chapman’s brilliant hilarious journalism, and Anna Sanderson’s book of essays Brainpark is an old favourite – her book was one of the books that made me think maybe I could try to write this kind of nonfiction too. A more recent love is this breathtaking memoir by Diana Wichtel, Driving to Treblinka.

I always get the feeling that the world is slightly rearranged after reading work by these writers.

The New Zealand poets I read when I first started reading poetry are still huge presences for me. Jenny Bornholdt feels like a homecoming. Bill Manhire feels like he’s either talking out of my bones or from somewhere in the ceiling – he is also an astonishing live reader of his work; if you ever, somehow, have a chance to hear him, do. And James Brown … how to describe James Brown? His poems just feel like old much-loved pets to me. Here’s a short piece I wrote about him a few years back, when we went for a bike ride.

I also think the poet Geoff Cochrane should be world famous. I’d actually recommend you read this review by Pip Adam of one of Geoff’s books, as a way to begin.

As a matter of urgency, you should all be reading Hera Lindsay Bird. Start with this poem but do buy her book, Hera Lindsay Bird.

One of my favourite writers in New Zealand is Pip Adam. Her novel The New Animals just won our national prize for fiction. Pip is fearless as a writer. Her work is full of weird darkness and joy. I am getting so happy all over again remembering that Pip won that big prize.

EKH: How did you approach the sequencing of this book? What kind of reverberations and echoes did you seek to cultivate as you found the order for the essays? It occurs to me that process might even be a little like structuring a poem—but perhaps that’s the false metaphor of a prose writer!

AY: People will read things in any order that they feel like, but I still like to fuss around with the sequence of things to see what effects I can make. After writing a book you just want to fuss around a bit. You can change your mind so many times and not do any real harm.

There were logical things – for instance I wanted to show a few glimpses of each family member before they appeared more fully in an essay. I wanted them to kind of wander through the background first. And I wanted a timeline of sorts to be easy for the reader to get their head around. I also did not want the most personal pieces to be upfront and to parade themselves. I wanted them to be like hidden tracks.

But mostly, I wanted to create a sense of continual unfolding. Not of a plot, exactly; but of a scene that keeps unearthing a little more of itself.

EKH: I’m in particular admiration of the conclusions you find for your essays—never on-the-nose, never self-explanatory, but trusting of the reader and of the material itself in its meaning. How do you pull this off? How do you know when a piece has found its end?

I’ve never really known for sure that something is finished, and if not for a deadline, I would gorge myself on revisions. I’m like a dog that needs to have the bowl taken away otherwise I won’t stop eating. The best I can do is judge it by a feeling of having spent everything. But I also think a good ending, in the exact moment that you know you’ve definitely reached it in a book, is already turning into another beginning. It’s started to spin another cocoon before your eyes. All my favourite books suggest that another story is about to happen.

Ashleigh Young is the author of the essay collection Can You Tolerate This? as well as a book of poetry, Magnificent Moon. The recipient of a 2017 Windham Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and an Ockham Award, among other honors, Young is an editor at Victoria University Press in Wellington, New Zealand.

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky is associate editor at Tin House magazine and Tin House Books.