"... when I headed into prose, I wanted a threshold to open; I wanted to shake up my relationship to language and writing."
an interview with Christine Hume on her new book, Everything I Never Wanted To Know
Greetings! I’m happy to share my first interview. When I discovered Everything I Never Wanted to Know (Ohio State University Press, Essays in the 21st Century Series, 2023) back in the spring, I couldn’t wait to read it. Not only did I study with Christine during grad school at Eastern Michigan University, but this book also focuses on Ypsilanti, where I spent the majority of the ‘00s. And since I love considering and working within the intersections of prose and poetry, I wanted to learn as much as I could from her craft here. As to be expected from Hume, this book is thrillingly roving, fearless, and kept me up at night. I’m grateful that it exists. I hope you enjoy our chat and pick up her book if you haven’t yet.
Born into a military family and constitutionally restless, Christine Hume lived in over 25 places in the U.S. and Europe before landing in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Since 2001, she has been faculty in the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University. She earned an MFA from Columbia University in 1993 and a PhD from the University of Denver in 2000. After publishing three books of poetry—Musca Domestica (Barnard New Women Poets Prize), Alaskaphrenia (The Green Rose Award, and SPD’s Best Book of the Year), and Shot, her writing evolved into prose forms, especially documentary, experimental, and lyric approaches to the essay.
Everything I Never Wanted to Know (Ohio State University Press, Essays in the 21st Century Series, 2023), her new collection of essays, is “mesmerizingly articulate” according to The Los Angeles Review of Books and “a dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence,” according to Publishers Weekly.
NT: Your book draws from a fantastic range of research and sources. Could you share a bit about your research process for this book? As a writer, I am an avid researcher but sometimes struggle to not go down deep rabbit holes. Can you speak to that balance?
CH: I love a good rabbit hole, and that’s where you’ll often find me. It’s also an exploratory space for thinking and speculating and dreaming as well as information gathering. For me, the problem is often becoming overly attached to research and figuring out what is essential for the piece I am writing, especially when the piece meanders and follows whims. What’s the difference between a wild goose and a red herring? As you know from your own experience no doubt, you have to keep looking, keep listening, keep reading, and pushing for latent or suppressed information. You have to keep pursuing fascinations and questioning yourself.
So much of what happens to sex offenders is not readily understood. I had to talk to people—activists, people convicted of sex offenses, criminologists, and so-called law enforcement—to even know where to begin. I wouldn’t have discovered the nylon riots at all without surplus research into nylon (initially for a piece for an art catalogue), and if it had been easy to track down anything at all about this overlooked moment, I don’t know if I would have found myself on the microfiche machine, making myself motion sick and patriarchy-sick reading misogynist journalism about the riots. At some point, your material has to inspire you to make use of it. When I found out about the frozen indigenous woman whose body was mined to sequence the flu vaccine, I was astonished. I want my readers to also feel that sense of discovery, wonder, and (sometimes) outrage.
NT: In your acknowledgments, you list many people who have read and provided feedback on your work; you also collaborate regularly. I get a sense that your work gains a lot of strength and nuance from your community. Can you speak to how that worked for this collection? And what do you suggest for those of us writing from a more isolated situation, working outside of academia?
CH: The people I list are not my readers or people who gave me feedback, but friends I discussed what I was writing about with, who had conversations with me about it, and who shared their own experiences related to my interests. Only three people read the manuscript, at various stages, before I sent it out to publishers. Then, of course, the editor at Mad Creek Books/ OSUP read it and worked with me on it. Finding readers is hard because it’s a lot to ask someone, and it requires a lot of trust. I don’t want to be encouraged; I want to be excellent. Who will push me and hold me back and make hard-to-stomach suggestions?
Most of my writer friends I met through poetry, and now that I’m writing essays, I feel l need a different kind of reader. One of the most valuable parts of attending writing programs in the academy is finding readers who will stick with you, who will grow with you, and who will call you out on your bullshit and bad habits. Be on the lookout for readers like that—in writing groups, at literary events and conferences, and in friendships that begin through writing and reading. Also taking time with your own writing lets you step away and come back to it with fresh eyes, as if it were written by someone else. I tend to need to send a “finished” draft to a friend or journal, then immediately read it, horrified. I think my reader friends have become accustomed to my READ THIS ONE INSTEAD emails.
NT: My favorite essay in the book is “Frozen Shoulder”; it’s just stunning, especially for my perimenopausal self. Could you share your process of writing that particular essay?
CH: Thank you! It started with disgust at the medical industry and the silence surrounding all the things that regularly happen to women’s bodies. I guess because I was desperate to find a solution to my “frozen shoulder,” I briefly saw the world through my condition. It was like my shoulder was not only frozen but magnetized and attracted material as I moved it through the world.
In other words, there was a moment when I could make almost anything related to my frozen shoulder, which was also the first undeniable indicator that I was going through menopause, so a kind of metonymy. I was terrified to go through this much-mythologized experience, this transformation into one of the most despised creatures on the planet, a hag. Turns out, I had a very easy experience with menopause, and I’m thrilled to be a couple of years solidly in because not having a period is amazing!
NT: Recently in Kenyon Review, when discussing her shift from writing poems to essays, Fleda Brown said “I tend to write more prose when I’m struggling emotionally. No surprise. It’s hard to lift off when you feel heavy. I think prose digs around in the subconscious to unearth not meaning, but to find the places where meaning has slipped away. It’s the excavator of the subconscious.”
Do you find this to be true in this collection? In past interviews, you’ve been asked about your shift into prose and I wonder if you have anything new to say after this collection. Can you speak to what you are learning or enjoying as you work with nonfiction more frequently?
CH: Brown’s response is surprising to me because poetry is where I go when I’m struggling emotionally, when I don’t have language for my experiences, and when I need to focus inward, to say the unsayable, to derange syntax, and to lose myself in the pattern’s mastery. Difficult feelings require difficult language. Finding poetry as a college student was a revelation, an acknowledgment of rich inner worlds I had until then been rewarded for suppressing and ignoring. I don’t necessarily fully believe in the differences between poetry and prose—and certainly, some of the best writing comes from a blurring of the two or an unusual way of combining aspects of them—but when I headed into prose, I wanted a threshold to open; I wanted to shake up my relationship to language and writing.
Prose provokes me to ask myself questions that allow me to understand more about how I live and the world. Though I thought I was writing about sex offenders, at least at first, I realized I was also necessarily writing about my relationship to sex offenders. I had to situate myself, my experiences, my voice, within my topic and not pretend I was observing all of it as a transparent eyeball. As I began to be less afraid of taking up space and expressing myself directly, I began to gravitate toward sentences. Then I also think of Gertrude Stein’s trust in process and accretion, “sentence aren’t emotional, paragraphs are.” This, for me, is because the space between sentences is often where all the feeling and thinking takes place, where the meaning bubbles up.
NT: I personally find it challenging to write about some of my personal stories as well as political issues, like racism. Your book is a contemporary classic in both regards. What advice would you give to writers who want to cover these types of topics?
CH: Knowing that it is difficult, that you run the risk of being didactic and/or vulnerable maybe helps. Knowing that all stories have politics maybe helps. Our stories are inherently political and personal, even if they try or claim not to be. My advice is to allow for complexity, revulsion, fear, sentimentality, hope, complicity, and process. Do I contradict myself? Very well, how can I hold paradox? Some of my questions while writing this book were: How do we live within an epidemic of sexual violence? How do we address the problem of sex offense and why isn’t it working? How do I reconcile the overwhelming numbers of people, mostly men, convicted of sex offense, with the understanding that the Sex Offender Registry is yet another way to criminalize people without economic or racial privilege in an empty theater of safety? At what point does my child’s individual safety become inextricably linked to a larger, societal wellbeing? And what is my responsibility, therefore, to the latter?
In America in the 21st century, the responsibility of keeping a child safe—from police, from assault rifles, from depression and suicide, from toxic gender norms, from the steady destruction of our planet—feels impossible. It is impossible. but what are some ways we can reframe the responsibility?
NT: Living in Ypsilanti in my 20s and attending Eastern Michigan for both undergrad and graduate school in the ‘00s made this a powerful read. I couldn’t put it down. Now having finished it, I’m struck by how so much of what you covered around sexual violence and racism wasn't really discussed much locally or at EMU when I was there. And that's what makes your work so vital to me. I wish I could be on campus during the release of this book. How do you see things changing on the ground now or in the near future?
CH: Thanks for sharing your reaction; it’s great to hear. I’m also sorry that was your experience of EMU. There are lots of possible reasons for this. Universities have a way of keeping students in the dark and counting on the fact that they are only temporarily invested in campus life and necessarily have short institutional memories. It can make for some uncomfortable and tricky moments, but I think it’s essential to bring issues of social justice into the classroom and tell students what’s going on that they may not be aware of on campus. I’m part of a group of faculty who are committed to addressing violence—white supremacy, misogyny, and transphobia for example—in the classroom and working to make campus a more equitable space where vulnerable and marginalized populations can thrive. We (all women I might add) are working toward a Survivor Center on campus and substantiative infrastructure that focuses on gender-based violence prevention and education. That’s just one tiny example!
NT: What gives you hope for the future, in terms of the world your daughter will inhabit?
CH: Her generation is so much more determined and uncompromising, much more inventive, collaborative, engaged, in pursuit of social justice than any previous generation. The planet may be uninhabitable by the time they can make a difference, but my hope resides entirely in Gen Z, once they put down their phones!
NT: Are there upcoming projects we can look forward to in the future for you?
CH: Anna Maria Hong and I co-edited a folio for The Hopkins Review on walking as a creative and conceptual practice and as a place where private reveries and public perception intersect. We invited writers who have mostly been left out of the literary tradition of walking, and for whom walking, in nature or cities, entails physical and psychic risk and greater danger. I’m super proud of the wealth of material we gathered—30 writers in both print and digital platforms—employing the walk as a forum for mental meandering and as a form for talking about how we move through particular locales as women, writers of color, queer writers, and authors with disabilities, contending with the possibility of harm and harassment, while claiming walking’s physical and intellectual pleasures and reclaiming public space. It’s coming out in mid-August 2023, and we have two launches planned for it—one in Detroit and one in LA.
I’m also finishing a manuscript right now, a collaboration with photographer Laura Larson, All the Women I Know. It’s a text-image collaboration that archives women in acts of resistance and seeks to inhabit and metabolize the gendered scripts and postures available within patriarchy. Our experimental documentary/speculative nonfiction approach exploits collisions and misalignments between text and image to address how power and pain move through the body and the body politic. We started this work in the early days of the pandemic, and it has been such a sustaining and generative project that I both want to get it into the world and never want it to end.
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Learn more about Christine’s work: https://christinehume.com/
beach glass is an interview series focused on writers based in Michigan run by Natalie Tomlin. A freelance writer and editor, Natalie’s chapbook of prose poems The Sound a Car Door Makes was recently published by Michigan Cooperative Press. Her writing has appeared in many magazines, including Belt, Dunes Review, The Hopper, Split Rock Review. Her nonfiction has been nominated for Best of Net, the Pushcart Prize, and was selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2018. Her criticism can be found at Diode, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and New Pages.