Author Interviews

We interviewed Dr. Hogg in the writing department of TCU.  I found her comments about the changing audience and ways to put your writing out there interesting.  She talked about writing for internet sites, and doing things like critiques of TV shows.  Because of the internet, there is so much more out there to be posted and read.  She also talked about the immediacy of the audience.  How a writer can publish on the website, and within minutes gets tons of feedback.  I'm not sure how I feel about being able to comment directly on writing.  I think there needs to be a gatekeeper, similar to readers writing in to newspapers and then the paper chooses which to publish and respond to.  I think the immediate feedback can sway some people's point of view and also take away from the writing.
I also really enjoyed hearing about Dr. Hogg's inspiration.  How she was inspired by specific, real life events.  People saying negative comments about her hometown, or seeing a concert that turned out to be somewhat pathetic.  I think that is one of the core's on writing, taking you everyday and making it into something meaningful and polished.

Dr. Hogg

M:Who or what inspires you as an author?

C:I guess I’m inspired by a lot of women writhers, so and a lot of writers of memoir and particularly place-base memoir.  So one of my favorite authors would be Mary Clareborne Blue, she writes a lot about Idaho and Montanna and living on a ranch.  Linda Hasselstrom, she’s not very well known but she lives in rural South Dakota.  There’s this whole group I studied a lot in graduate school before I wrote what became my first book, which became a lot about planes, planes women and how they wrote and stuff like that.  So I would say that inspires me quite a bit. 

M: Was it mainly in graduate school that you found this group that you really liked to study?

C:Ya, I actually grew up in Nebraska and then went to get my masters degree in Oregon State.  And when I moved there, people would say things to me like, “Well now that you’ve left Nebraska, life can begin” and they were so negative that I thought “Hey, there are good things to say.”  So I started reading all these authors, and there was this book that was really popular at the time called Dakota by Cathleen Norris, and it was getting a lot of good buzz and I read that.  Even though I didn’t agree with a lot of, some of what she said, I thought this is the kind of work.  So ya it was in grad school where I got started in that. 

M: Who or what motivates you, it sounds like that’s very much about your grad school findings.

C: Ya, sort of the defensiveness I felt that led me to other stuff , that sounds like a negative inspiration.

M: Most often, where, when, and how do you write?

C: I used to believe a lot more in rituals.  In grad school I would do things like I would have certain music or I went through a spell where I lit a candle and I had a cat who would burn its’ tail and it clearly wasn’t very effective.  So I kind of quite all those things and then my job got so busy and I started to think I couldn’t just create this sort of perfect, ideal space.  I had to find a place to work, so I don’t have certain rituals as much anymore, I do try to, I don’t necessarily write and grade and do work in the same space.  So I don’t write here in this office, I take my laptop to a coffee house because this seems more of a place where I do that other kind of work, so I try to keep in separate in that way, so I think that’s probably the biggest sense of ritual that I have now. 

M: Was it hard adjusting from moving from your rituals to having to just sit down and telling yourself you need to work?

C: A little bit, and plus I just don’t get as much writing done , which I don’t think is about the rituals, you just lost time to write. 

M: How is technology changing print culture, especially regarding authors and readers? 

C:  I think one of the things, and obviously Dr. Williams could speak more about what’s happening to publishing.  But in terms of a smaller scale, what I see is, for example, I’m teaching a class right now, Creative Nonfiction I, for students to learn about writing essays, and different types of that genre.  When I taught the class, it’s been a long time since I taught it.  When I went back and looked at how I was going to re-do the syllabus, I thought, wow, I need to have a whole new section of the syllabus that talks about online writing specifically.  And not just blogging.  One alumnus I can think of is now doing freelance blogging work, so she does things like critiques of the bachelor, in a really humorous way – she’s getting paid to do that.  So I thought it was really important to know that there are those kinds of writing opportunities.  So one of the things I look at is helping students see that there are lots of different ways now to get your work out there and what that means.  You might have to adjust your sensibilities as a writer, but also about how your sense of audience might change.  An another thing that’s really changing, another former student of mine, got an essay published in salon.com.  Which has a really wide viewership/readership and he told me, it got posted on it and the next day he said ‘I’ve already got “ you know, I can’t remember how many comments, but a lot.  And so he had this instant feedback.  You know, most authors are desperate for any kind of feedback at all, and so he had this very instant feedback.  And I thought “What a different world” you know when you send something to a literary journal, it gets published you don’t really know who’s going to see it, who’s going to read it.  So there’s an immediate sense of, not only that there is an audience, but what the audience thinks.  And some were totally misreading what he was trying to say, having these little battles in the comments.    There’s a whole different sense of things being much more immediate and present in a way.  And it disrupts that sense of a writer being solitary- which I don’t think the writer ever was in some ways, but there was that perception. 

M: When you write, who is your intended audience? 

C: Well, for my job as a professor, I’m writing some things for more scholarly audience at times.  But I have a little bit on ambivalence about that.  My first I ended up studying rural women in my hometown who were not academics or scholars.  And I wanted them to be able to read the book and also have them open it and think oh this is jargony, I don’t want to read this, this is boring.  I really try to think about potential different audiences, or potentially borader audiences.  And then when I write more creative writing, like essays or fiction, I’m thinking of you know still those little pockets of literary journals that don’t really have a big audience,  but are looking for that sort of work. 

M: How much did your manuscript change during the publishers editorial process? 

C: That’s a very good question.  It changed a lot, it had originally been my dissertation. So when I was wanting it to have a broader audience I ended up taking out some of the more jargony, theoretical stuff. And I think then, what the editor did was send it to reviewers who were more of that new, intended audience. And they wrote back and they more wanted to meet me to amp that up more. So, stories about the women, character profiles about the women, they wanted a lot more of that. And so I added a lot of that. And so I added a lot of that, um and then I think I had something originally in my dissertation that was about what this might mean in the classroom when I don’t think that really applied anymore. So I took that out. So for that book I didn’t have to do a – I mean I changed a lot – but there wasn’t a lot of back and forth. Sort of, after I made the changes after the reviewers read it, um there really wasn’t another huge, big ground to revision. And sometimes, ive done other projects where, then you go back and there’s more and then a whole-nother round and, yeah. It’s intense.

M: That does sound intense. Um, how did you find a publisher and how long did that process take?

C: I found a publisher – I got some advice from my dissertation chairs about possible places to send my dissertation when I revised it and then I sort of didn’t take their advice. They’re amazing, smart people but – because I had then sense of this somewhat broader audience in mind, I looked at a press that was more plains oriented for stuff on the Great Plains. And so, I sought the University of Nebraska Press out for that reason. And in terms of the timeline, you know, essentially I think I queried and then I sent, I think the whole manuscript I had by then, because it had been the dissertation first, and the think the review probably took a few months, I got it back,  I made those huge revisions, and that probably took me – I mean I spent a summer really devoted to it, but it had probably taken a bit longer, either sitting on my desk or doing the small things. Um, so I don’t even know if I could add up all the time it actually took. But I’d say the process back and forth was at least – probably a couple of years before it then hit the light of day.

M: Do you have a definite and specific organization and structure in mind as you begin writing? It sounds like, especially if you went from writing your dissertation you would.

C: Yeah, I did for that project. And I think it’s good for a big project like a book to have a plan. So you know, when we have graduate students writing dissertations they have to write a perspective or proposal first. But the end dissertation never even really looks like the plan. So, I think it’s good to have a plan so that you don’t feel so overwhelmed and daunted that you completely feel like you’re stumbling. But you have to have in mind that it’s a pretty flexible plan. And when I, writing something shorter, like an essay I actually don’t do a plan at all because I think that you have to be able to know that the writing and the thinking are going to sort of happen at the same time. So maybe I have an idea that I want to tell this story about x, but it has to be a,b, and c. So I think that that can maybe limit you a little bit too much. So it kind of depends on the length and the scope and stuff.

M: How would you describe your writing process? I feel like you’ve kind of answered that in bits and pieces.

C: Yeah, I guess… well let me think if there’s anything I think I can add to that. I think just the sense of now that’s more sort of obvious back and forth where there’s still that time where you’re sitting alone and writing but I try to have a writing group and give them stuff and get feedback and then revise so it’s still essentially, you know, you write, revise, go back, and you know, back when I was an undergrad and you could sometimes get by with doing the first draft and you write that for them and you do well, so who cares. And it just doesn’t really work that way.

M: We talked about rituals, do you write in multiple genres? Sounds like you do.

C: Yeah, some of them more scholarly and some of them more creative. It’s really hard for me, though to find the time to do both. So I say that I do and technically I do but I’m not getting much of the creative work done when I’m focusing on the more scholarly kind of project.

M: Right, do you feel like you really need to separate them?

C: No, I think it’s just the way – I think there are some people who can work on a ton of things at once and I think I’m just not really that way. I wish I were that way, but I’m not.

M: What was your first publication and what do you think of this now?

C: Well, my first publication was actually an essay in a literary journal and it was an essay about Davey Jones who was the Monkey. And it was about – it was really – I mean that was the topic – but what it was really about was about being a fan and what it means to be a fan and we sort of get obsessed with these things and why do we do that. So I was sort of going back and – because I ended up seeing him when I was older in concert and the difference between like, being a fan when you’re fifteen versus like going to a concert in your late twenties. So I sort of explored what all of that meant. But it started when you were asking about the structure, if I have a big plan, I thought oh there’s a really funny story about me going to concert to see him and there was hardly anybody there and I thought oh I’ll just tell that story and it ended up being about how it was kind of sad, to go there and see him in front of not a very big audience and so I thought oh there’s got to be more to this. And I thought about how obsessed I was about it when I was little, and so that became what the essay was about.

M: Besides teaching and authorship, have you had any other jobs in the writing field?

C: That is a good question and I think, no, I haven’t. I only took a year between my bachelor’s degree and graduate school. And I did surveys over the phone, so I didn’t do much. But I got very good at not taking it personally when I got hung up on.