An Interview with Mickey Hess
A multi-layered email conversation where Editor Matty Byloos talks with writer Mickey Hess about a recent 24-hour blurbing challenge on The Rumpus.
A Multi-Layered Email Chat With Writer Mickey Hess
I knew Mickey Hess existed through the online magazine, The Rumpus, and then heard about him again through Daniel Nester’s lit community blog: We Who Are About to Die, where I’ve been doing a little bit of writing lately. This time around, there was a little bit of commotion about how if you sent Mickey a link to your book, he’d flip around a blurb for you in 24 hours or less. Now, jacket copy can be important, both to the potential reader as well as to the author and publisher, so I was intrigued. I emailed him a link to Don’t Smell the Floss, didn’t hear back after 48 hours, and then sent a email reminder follow-up thing. Here’s where the conversation got started:
Mickey Hess:
Shit, you slipped through the cracks, Matty. Sorry. I was drinking while I blurbed.
Here ya go:
Matty Byloos’s Don’t Smell the Floss: “Matty Byloos escapes the use of characters to make a novel come vibrantly alive. How? Through almost obscene means.” — Mickey Hess
Matty Byloos Email Response: Shit slipping through cracks seems somehow far too appropriate given the name of the book and the content between the covers. Your efforts are most appreciated. Sorry I just typed like Darth Vader’s assistant. And thanks for the blurb.
A few moments later on my way to the bathroom, I thought — what would The Rumpus think if an author took a blurb, that may or may not have been intended as anything more than a comedy on the whole process itself, and then used that blurb on a book, attributing the quote to “The Rumpus,” where Hess published several of the blurbs in a few different articles. So I asked for an interview, which started here:
Byloos: In light of the blurb-a-thon for the Rumpus, how would you feel if someone referred to you as the Twitter of Marc Schuster (small press reviews) book blurbers?
Hess: I don’t know who that is, or how I’d feel about it. Did it happen? Did somebody say that?
Byloos: Marc Schuster is the guy behind Small Press Reviews.
And the going word is that he reviews lots, if not everything, always finds something nice to say, etc. I think he’s great and helpful, and had a ton of insight into my book, so maybe those jokes were well-intentioned.
And I said that. To myself, on my way to the bathroom about ten minutes ago. Which prompted me to then ask you if you’d like to do a conversation style interview over email.
Byloos: Did you and Rumpus editors discuss the possibility of people actually using the blurbs, in press materials or on actual books? What if they did, and attributed them directly to The Rumpus? Would that be ok? I saw a blurb for Tao Lin, and I don’t have to imagine too hard that he’d use it somewhere, for example.
Hess: I asked Tao Lin if he’d blurb my book last year, and he said:
“Dear Mickey,
I’m going to “pass” on the blurb. It is not lame at all to ask, but I’m not
doing blurbs except for one or two people, at this point.”
Byloos: Tao and his quotes. I just read a comment from him somewhere where he was talking about his three styles of writing, which were something like deadpan, deadpan with metaphor in quotes, a third thing. He also just “passed” on doing an interview for my magazine.
So now seriously — what if someone used a blurb you had written for this exercise, and it showed up somewhere as a quote from “The Rumpus” — would that ruffle any feathers?
Hess: [No response.]
Byloos: Just saw a tweet about Richard Yates not blowing away a member of the Rumpus book club. I have no idea at this point how to situate a character like Tao — as a writer, etc. In my mind, he’s more like a performance artist using contemporary modes of communication to write long-ish form things, and mirroring his own position in the culture (apathy, detachment, everything a surface to be marketed). What do you do with him, and his writing?
Hess: Tao Lin? He’s a writer, someone determined to tell the profane truth in a few paragraphs. If we begin to accept his mythical frameworks (through reading), we begin to see that he exposes America. Reading his theoretical poetry, filtered down to us through his fashion, we can see understanding for decades. Everybody knows that Tao Lin has been portrayed in movies. Tao Lin is an author. Tao Lin is an obscene feminist. Tao Lin is remarkably rich. BED is as good as movies such as Pleasantville.
Byloos: How and why did you end up writing about hip hop?
Hess: When I first heard Run DMC when I was a little kid I was like wow, I have never heard anything like this before (I learned later that they didn’t invent hip hop, only perfected it). I first wrote about hip hop as an undergrad when I took Introduction to Country Music. The early histories of the two musics are actually pretty similar as far as the role the labels played in branding the music and selling it to the masses. Now I teach Hip Hop and American Culture at Rider. I have Greg Nice coming to speak to my class in September. He is a hands-down legend, to me. He’s a master of the non-sequitor.
Byloos: Given this description of your book: “Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory is about choosing what you want to be when you grow up, and finding out you still have to wait tables on the weekends,” and the fact that you teach at a college, how do you reconcile your own insight into college education and one’s desire for a particular career, and the fact that one might not actually lead directly to the other, despite what young people are told and despite how colleges market themselves?
Hess: As an undergrad I was told both that I would not become a writer and that I would not become a professor, so it drives me crazy when I hear my co-workers make these same kind of comments to students. There’s a real elitism among writers and professors. I don’t think it’s just my perception. There’s this idea people have that even though THEY did it, the next person couldn’t, especially when the next person is an 18-year-old wearing pajama pants to class at one in the afternoon. Professors look down on their students because they tend to have gone to better schools than they teach at. Maybe it’s not this way in the Ivy League, but I went to the University of Louisville and my professors went to Iowa or UPenn or Yale. Schools should stop marketing themselves as a career training ground, but it’s also fair to address the material side of your field. It is really hard to publish a book. It is really hard to publish a second book, or a third. And when you do publish your book, you’re not likely to get much money out of it. Students should know that reality, but they should also see some options for how to deal with it.
One thing I do at Rider, where I’m a professor now, is bring in a lot of guest speakers — writers, publishers, editors, literary publicists, and rappers — to talk about how they came to have their career in the world of writing. Some of these folks write and only write. One of them told us he was sleeping on friends’ floors and his yearly income was in the “single-digit thousands,” and another had just had two movies optioned from his novels. But actually, that last one is a writing professor too, so even he can’t live off writing alone. So my students get to see lots of sides to the story and ask these folks a lot of questions about how they write or work in writing and live their lives at the same time. Masta Ace talked about having majored in marketing but taken creative writing classes on the side, which was cool, I thought. That’s the perfect college curriculum for a rapper. Maybe for writers, too, but I wouldn’t want to torture myself with the marketing courses.
Last semester, I also took one day that I’d left kind of unplanned on the syllabus and did a little presentation I called “Mickey Hess: My Ass-Backwards Career in Writing.” I talked about how I wrote a novel called Nobody Likes a Smartass when I was 19 and didn’t know the first thing about where to send it or how publishing stuff worked because my creative writing classes never talked about it. I went to the public library and looked through Writer’s Market and sent it to a bunch of agents, who all turned it down, and some smaller publishers, who all turned it down. At the time I was listening to a lot of music from Lookout! Records because my girlfriend had all their stuff, so I got to thinking why not put this book out myself?
I had no idea at the time that there was this whole world of zines out there, and this was before the Internet (maybe some people had the Internet in 94 but I didn’t. I had a $200 Smith Corona Word Processor). But I had seen this local poet’s name on fliers in coffee shops around Louisville, KY, where I went to college, and I sent it to him and he ended up wanting to publish it through a little company that his brother-in-law had started. The publishing deal — and the publishing company — fell apart pretty quickly, but what this guy did help with was getting me out there in front of an audience at readings. He taught part-time at a couple universities, and he read out loud from my book in his classes and I started getting a few people writing me up asking to buy the book or coming out to see me read from it in a coffee shop. I met some other writers trying to do the same thing I was, and I found out how much I love reading my stuff in front of people. So I tell students to do that. Go read your stuff in public.
Then I talked about writing my second book, El Cumpleanos de Paco, and having this crazy idea to print 1000 copies and give them all away for free. I sold ads in the book to pay for a chunk of the printing cost, and then I left them in record stores, laundromats, bars, wherever I could hand off a stack. I hit up small record labels I liked for ads, and a few local business too. I remember one guy told me he’d pass because I was publishing an “alternative” book and he was a mainstream second-hand shoe store. So that new thing that everybody’s talking about, the idea that ads in books are on the horizon, I came up with that ten years ago. I took books to Iceland when I went there and got a terrible, terrible review in the Reykjavik morning paper.
So I talked about all that stuff with students, and bring writers to class, and get students out to reading series and to read their own stuff out places. Rider is crazy active in writing right now. We have four literary journals, three of them started in the past two years. Some Rider grads have formed the Broad Set Collective and they do readings in Philly, New York, and all over Jersey. There’s a lot of energy there. Students come back to campus two years after graduating to see an author we’ve brought in.
So … this is a long answer to your question about careers and dreams. Having worked in a few English departments, I’ve seen a few confusing tendencies:
1) When English majors can specialize in either creative writing or literature, faculty who teach lit courses try to steer students away from creative writing because they don’t see it as leading to gainful employment. And they’re right — literary crticism is SUCH a lucrative market these days. Parents, tell your kids to become literary critics.
2) Advisers tell students who want to do creative writing they’ll never make a living at writing unless they specialize in business writing. This is bullshit advice, like telling someone who wants to drive racecars that she should get a job selling Oldsmobiles.
3) A lot of English professors aren’t big readers. That’s why you rarely read anything vaguely current in your lit classes.
You can find more info on his book, Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory, here.
Follow Mickey Hess on his blog, Road Trip of Self Discover, here.
And check out his 24-Hour Blurb-a-Thon installments at The Rumpus, too.