I invited these three authors to be on the panel because in addition to admiring the hell out of their writing, I know how hard they work, not just at writing, but at the other jobs they juggle in between all the creative stuff. Truly you cannot knock their hustle! Edgar Gomez is the author of the memoir High-Risk Homosexual, winner of the American Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award, as well as the memoir in essays Alligator Tears, which is, in part, about the many jobs he did on his way to becoming a published writer. Katie Yee is the author of the novel Maggie: or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. She writes by night and at day holds down a full-time job at the Brooklyn Museum. And Mia Arias Tsang is the author of the book Fragments of Wasted Devotion, as well as the founder of Pocket Publications, a mini zine press she runs from her bedroom.

Unlike our past episodes, this one is a little less like a convo and more like a straight-forward Q&A. There’s a lot of gold in here for writers at any level, but especially those of you who are new or feel like you’re early on in your creative journey.

Ritual, Not Routine

When discussing when they find time for writing, Katie said that there are periods of time where she doesn’t write at all. She continues, “I am not a disciplined person and I want writing to feel fun, I want to keep the play aspect of it alive. That’s not going to happen if I’m berating myself like, I didn’t write today. While I don’t have a sense of routine, I do have a sense of ritual. I think that distinction is important, because to me routine is your relationship to time, but ritual is your relationship to yourself.”

I won’t spoil what Katie’s ritual is! But I love thinking about that distinction, and it brought me to consider how I can be more intentional about my own writing-related rituals. Do you have rituals that you do before or during writing? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Just Publish The Thing, Damnit!

Mia has started her own zine press and also published a beautiful book of short pieces through Quilted Press, a publishing cooperative. Essentially, Quilted Press is a group of authors who have banded together to help and support one another through the self-publishing process, and the books they put out (like Mia’s and Alex Alberto’s essay collection Entwined) are so unique, and interesting, and well designed (Mia’s is illustrated by a friend of hers, it’s very cool). I ask Mia about this specifically, since it goes against the conventional wisdom of “get agent then get published by a Big 5.” Mia had no regrets, only enthusiasm for publishing on her own terms, outside the system. She says:

“Essentially having a book out, no matter how long it is or how fancy the publisher, is the best way to start getting your name out there! Because now you can tell people, I have a book out. I can do a reading. I can table at this book fair. I find that no one seems to have the hangups that I was concerned they might around my book being self-published.”

So if you’ve been sitting on a book, frustrated it hasn’t found traction in the traditional ways, your best course of action might be moving ahead with it on your own or, better yet, in community with other like-minded folks.

The Work of a Writer

Finally, I love this, from Edgar:

“I strongly believe that the work of a writer is to write a bunch of terrible drafts that slowly get better. And once you’re in the final drafts, you go back and make it look like you always knew what you were doing.”

Those perfect books you love and find inspiring weren’t always so perfect! Trust the process, move slow, and be kind to yourself. Eventually, things will come together, and when they do, you can bring the whole draft in line to that vision, so it seems like you knew where you were going from the start.

There’s so much wisdom in these thirty minutes. Big thank you to the panelists and also the audience, some of whom provided the questions.

Next up: we’ll be back two weeks from today, on September 17th, with Saskia Vogel, writer, translator, and editor-in-chief of Erotic Review.

Till then, sending creative vibes your way, along with many thanks,

Brian.

Javeria Hasnain and Jenna Tang, who both teach for Writing Co-Lab, discuss what drew them to translate literary works in the first place. For Javeria, that’s the poetry collection Eyes, Eyes, Eyes, by Sara Shagufta, which she translated from Urdu, while Jenna has published works in translation in The Paris Review, Lit Hub, McSweeney’s and also published books by Taiwanese feminist authors Lin Yi-Han and Lâu Tsí-û. Jenna is a board member at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and in our conversation we discuss the role that community plays in the field of literary translation.

I approached this conversation as a complete outsider! I only know English, so the possibility of translating anything is beyond me. I was fascinated to hear in-depth about the translation process, from choosing what to translate, to actually getting the work done. What’s even more special is that both Javeria and Jenna read from a work in its original language, then share their English translation of that work, and talk about some of the choices they made while translating.

Feeling Inspired? Get Involved

Both Javeria and Jenna have classes coming up at Writing Co-Lab!

The ghazal is an ancient poetic form that originated in Arabia before traveling to Persia and beyond. As old as it is, the ghazal remains an active, living tradition. In The Wounded Gazelle, Javeria will introduce you to the ghazal and, more excitingly, provide you ample opportunity to take part in that tradition through generative exercises. It seems like the perfect time to take a deep dive into one of the most beautiful, creative elements of Iranian culture. All welcome, no matter your experience level. Learn more and enroll.

While Jenna has two offerings:

First, a class that will introduce you to international work in translation, Burning Down the House: Writing About the Strange and Surreal. You’ll read, discuss, and have the option to share work — and it doesn’t matter what genre you’re working in! If you’re interested in exploring the strange in your work, and investigating how others have done the same in literature from around the world, then don’t be a stranger to this class.

Jenna is also back with another session of her popular introduction to translation, Crossing. This class will show you the pathways of how to break into literary translation, from discovering work to translate, to going about actually doing the art of translation. All languages and genres welcome!

As Javeria and Jenna both make clear in this podcast, language skills only improve with practice. So if you’re interested in translating work there’s no better way to hone and improve your skills than actually giving it a try. Funny, right? Whether you’re writing your own work or translating someone else’s, the best way to improve is to just do the thing.

Next up: two weeks from today, a special presentation of a Writing Co-Lab panel on getting started as a writer, featuring Edgar Gomez, Mia Arias Tsang, and Katie Yee.

Till then, sending you creative vibes and many thanks!

Brian.

Spawning Season is about Joe’s experience of almost becoming a biological father and co-parent with a lesbian couple he had known since college. It is at once a meditation on queerness, desire, family, and grief; a scientific exploration of reproduction in both humans and salmon; and a bold personal story written in the exquisite prose that has become Joe’s hallmark. I was thrilled to talk with him about it for the latest episode of In Collaboration With….

During our conversation, I was not surprised to learn that Joe is a reader of theorists who are, like him, big thinkers but also beautiful stylists – Barthes comes up in our conversation, in a hilarious way, as someone who might be into gooning – as does bell hooks and Judith Butler.

Speaking about his engagement with theory, Joe says, “Theory is hard. Marx is hard. Butler is hard. Everyone talks about what a drag it is to read these books, but if you put in the work, they can be incredibly transformative. In a way, you come out of those texts carrying marks of them within your psyche. The time that those books take, and the hard work that they require, is a part of that transformation of self – or certainly it has been for me.”

As someone who built their own major around applying literary and narrative theory to cinema, I’m in agreement with him there. But that comes later in our conversation. First, we talk about the time required for Joe to grieve and process the experience of almost achieving his lifelong dream of becoming a parent, part of which entailed tens of thousands of words of free writing as well as reading and research, driven entirely by his own needs. It was only years later that he realized he could, as he put it, “carve out” a book from this raw, unstructured material he had produced. That process was an entirely different kind of creative endeavor, one that required not just facing himself, but looking outward and thinking of a reader. Speaking on that, he defines craft in a way I adore:

“The thing about a book is that we writers are asking for a huge act of generosity from a reader. We’re asking for a huge amount of their time, as well as their intellectual and emotional energy. Craft, to me, is about how to earn that time. And it’s about how to share this personal experience we’ve lived with a reader.”

Midway through our convo, I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to thank Joe for his work, which, as someone who identifies as queer, and a gender nonconformist, means so much. The subtitle of Joe’s book – an experiment – feels apt, because experimentation is part of what being queer is about, I think, as we search for ways to express, know, and love ourselves. This is a long and sometimes painful process of trial and error, one born of necessity, since we don’t see many models out there in the normative world for us to follow.

“There was no model in the 1980s and early 1990s in my small Washington town for nurturing men,” Joe says. “They did not exist. Men were either emotionally distant or physically violent. End of story. The only emotion you were allowed as a man was anger. There is the feminist argument that gender roles don’t just harm women, they dehumanize men. I’ve always believed that. Even today, I get so many questions why, as a young person, I identified more with motherhood than fatherhood. But that’s why.”

Ultimately, the process of writing this book allowed Joe not just to put the container of story around the messy, traumatic spill of grief, but to turn some of the care he had been giving to others back onto himself in ways that proved transformative, which the book itself conveys to the reader. “These are the gifts that writing can give us,” Joe says. “Some of the internal work, the realizations, you work out on the page.”

If you’re a fan of memoir, or a writer of nonfiction–hell, if you’re a writer at all–then I think you’ll find something of value here, and I hope you give our conversation a listen. If you do, please let me know what you think in the comments!

Next up: two weeks from today, Javeria Hasnain and Jenna Tang talk about the art of literary translation.

Till then, sending you creative vibes and many thanks,

Brian.

On Visiting The Same Place Again

When I asked Matt if he travels to the same place multiple times – as I have, with a few special places – he surprised me by drawing a direct connection between this practice and that of writing. He said:

“It feels, I think, very writerly, actually, to visit a place again and again to study it in different time periods, in different seasons, in different moods. You in Vienna at 21 is different from you in Vienna at 34, at 45, at 62.”

So, not only do you notice how the place has changed, you notice how you yourself have changed over time.

Travel Writing Values Place Over Narrator

Matt grew up an immigrant in America and, as a child, only traveled abroad to visit family in the Philippines. In early adulthood, he fell in love with traveling while on trips to Europe. As his career developed, he began writing about his travels and recently he served as an editor at Condé Nast Traveller – Matt knows the genre, as both a fan and a publishing professional. I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to ask Matt the existential question: what, exactly, is travel writing? He said:

“At its most base, travel writing is about bringing a particular place to life. … giving the sense of a place as filtered through the lens of one particular writer. … Good writing is good writing. But I think if you are an adjudicator for an award for travel writing, I think you’re more interested in learning about the place rather than the person telling the story.”

Going on Literary Vacation in Paris

Just a couple of months ago, Matt made the decision to immigrate to France. Because of that, he’s been reading both historical and contemporary work that centers Paris, and from that reading has developed a four session series of classes called Reading Paris. Matt said, “It feels very summery to be able to travel from your couch!” as this class will take students on an imaginative journey through Paris both past (Hemingway, Baldwin, Janet Malcom) and present (Sanaë Lemonine, R. O. Kwon). You can take these classes session-by-session, or sign up for all of them at a discount.

Need more incentive? Students who take the class get first priority in a retreat Matt and I are developing that will take place in Paris next year!

Find out more and enroll here.

You can also learn more about travel writing from Matt in his popular class The Art of Travel Writing: How to Read – And Write For – Travel Magazines, which runs again in October.

As always, if you like what you hear, please subscribe and spread the word. We’re trying to get this project off the ground, and every little bit of word of mouth is helpful!

Next up: two weeks from today, Joe Osmundson on his new memoir, Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood.

Till then, sending you creative vibes and many thanks!

Brian.

It’s fitting that Julie is our first guest. I first crossed paths with Julie at some literary event or another here in NYC, but got to know her better when she ran the education program at Catapult (RIP!). At the time, I was pretty new as a writing instructor in a continuing ed environment. Julie’s advice and feedback was so helpful, and she taught me to think carefully about my syllabi as a kind of story, taking the student on a journey from beginning to end of the class. She’s someone whose care for craft – both of teaching and writing, those ancient arts – comes through, and I often think of her now when working with teachers at Writing Co-Lab, along with other Catapult angels like Gabby Bellot and .

Parental Mystery as Precondition of Writing?

Also? Personally, we share biographical similarities, having grown up in working class environments not knowing our biological fathers, something Julie wrote movingly about in an essay for ’s anthology What My Father And I Don’t Talk About. In Famous Men, Will (short for Wilhelmina) Miles has a similar background, and when I asked about how Julie’s paternal mystery provided her insight into writing Will, she said:

“I was interested in the ways not knowing the answer to a question like that can turn somebody into a little bit of a seeker. Like, if you don’t know the answer to a foundational question about yourself, some part of you is always trying to find it, right? … I’m not going to say that everyone who doesn’t know something about their parents becomes a writer, but I think it’s almost like a precondition for writing, because your imagination is immediately turned on to secrets and omissions, and you have encouragement from the gaps in your own story to make things up that could explain it, all of which are all writerly tendencies. Speaking personally, I think it’s one part of why I do this. And it’s a habit that started really young, of asking questions, and wanting to know answers, and fleshing out a story around this absence that I had in my life.”

Why Characters Sometimes Feel Real to the Writer

To be clear, as Julie is in the conversation, Famous Men is not an autobiographical novel, though like many (every?) artist she draws on experiences and thoughts and questions she’s had in her life and explores them through Will’s story, a process that took her six years. When I asked her about character development, she said this wonderful thing about how, despite what some authors might say, it’s not like the characters are speaking through her, making decisions on their own.

“I’ve always resented that as a way of describing how a character works, because there is no such thing as a character making a decision, you make the decision as the writer, you are in control of that, even when you feel like you are not. Which can happen when you’ve made enough decisions about how a character functions over time in the context of a story, and so you’ve accrued a sense of a character’s personality that feels like it has its own life. It’s like, because I’ve made 52 other decisions about him I know that the remaining decisions available to me in any given scene are only four or three or two or one.”

Community Is The Thing

I also love what she had to say about the role community has played in supporting her through her writing process, something which, in some ways, feels more profound that the actual experiencing of publishing the book. As she put it when thinking about her students:

“I remind my students that the gift of writing is the thing that we’re doing right now, which is coming together in the workshop – if the workshop is a space that is productive, supportive, rigorous, engaging, and not destructive. Those are the kinds of spaces we try to create at Michigan, and that we tried to create at Catapult, and that you create in your workshops, and that most of my colleagues and friends make in their communities. Being a part of that? I think that’s the whole thing for me.”

I hope you’ll give it a listen! Let us know what part(s) resonated with you in the comments.

If you like what you hear, please us spread the word. We’re trying to get this project off the ground, and every little bit of word of mouth is helpful!

Next up: two weeks from today, I talk to Matt Ortile about the art of travel writing.

Till then, sending you creative vibes and many thanks!

Brian.

PS: If you prefer listening to podcasts on Spotify or Apple Music or other platforms, you can find us in those places too!

Connection is at the heart of what we do at Writing Co-Lab – bringing together writers and readers, helping to support creative folks at all points on their journey. We do it in part because it’s what we desire too: a sense that we’re not alone, nor are we in competition with one another; we’re part of a vibrant literary community made up of compassionate, smart, ingenious human beings all struggling to bring what is inside of them onto the page. Maybe that’s done through a big book deal with a corporate publisher or on the xeroxed pages of a zine or in a private journal or maybe your creativity manifests in some all together new and different manner. We are as excited about the ways in which people make and distribute art as we are about the art itself. Human ingenuity kicks ass!

To that end, In Collaboration With… will present authors at all different points in their career along with other publishing people and literary community members in warm, intimate, and informal conversations about their lives and work, distributed here via podcast and transcript, and also available wherever you stream podcasts. At heart, this show grows out of last year’s incredible 100 Days of Creative Resistance project. As in many of those pieces, we’re going to hear how writers started on their path and what keeps them going, especially when the going gets brutal, and we’ll be hearing too about the other people who have helped them along the way, the sometimes unseen community of people and books that inspired, assisted, and carried them through their darkest times.

Our first conversation drops in mid-July, so watch this space and subscribe!

Subscribe now

That’s right — we’ve turned on the paid subscription stream because we are a hardworking group of teaching-artists who are always on the hustle. Co-Lab values the labor of artists and teachers and never exploits or takes for granted our employee-members. If you’ve got the means and would like to support our mission and this project, which will be made available to any who want to listen/read, we really appreciate it, though it’s by no means expected or required.

If you’re not familiar with Writing Co-Lab, we run online classes, seminars, workshops, and accountability programs. Community is our jam.

Coming up we have our annual Summer Camp program for writers, which is geared toward both new and emerging writers seeking to build a practice and establish routines, as well as experienced writers seeking a jolt of creative adrenaline and some structure in what can be a formless part of the year. Our faculty this year includes , , , , , , , , , , and . There are daily writing sessions, weekly feedback groups and panels, and weekend sessions for generating new material.

The program runs from July 11th to August 1st, and this weekend it’s on sale! Use code July250 to take $25 off the price, bringing the total cost to $325. You can find out more and enroll here.

Yours in collaboration,

Brian.