Memento Mori: An interview with Hanif Abdurraqib on his early career

"I think that it would be a detriment to the world if you did not do another thing.”

Hanif Abdurraqib is an essayist, poet and critic. His bestselling, award-winning books include GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN,¹ A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA, and most recently, THERE IS ALWAYS THIS YEAR. They’re about (respectively, ostensibly) his relationship with the band A Tribe Called Quest, the history of Black performance, and Ohio basketball, though as any reader of Hanif’s will tell you, the signature of his work is that his chosen subjects are the starting block that propels his explorations of his Big Themes—grief, place, devotion.² To read Hanif is to watch magic without tricks, and to be torn between wanting to figure out how he pulled it off and letting yourself fall under its spell.

Hanif is also a client and friend. I wanted to interview him about the early years of his career because his experiences show a writer making deft use of the materials close at hand. I don’t just mean “write what you know,” but how Hanif’s beloved Columbus and the Midwest’s punk scene became a means for him to find writing mentors, friends and an audience. This context influenced his subject matter but also the qualities of his work that makes it so unique and beloved—its intimacy and kinesis. I’ll admit that one of my motivations in getting this on paper is that I am often asked by young writers whether they need to get an MFA or move to New York City to make it. My answer is read this interview before you wire any substantial sums of money.

I got the transcription for this interview back during the Paris Olympics (hence the starting blocks on the brain), and the games got me thinking about how Hanif’s early life as an athlete shaped how he writes. Hanif addresses this himself in the interview—he practices, he trains, he believes in putting in the hours. But he also approaches each book like an Olympian facing their one big meet (or whatever sports word is appropriate here). For him, it’s never been about the fist pump of the book deal but rather about the singular opportunity each shot at publication represents. His strategy, if he has one, is not to think in terms of professional stepping stones, but to approach each publication as if it may be his last. Leave it all out on the field, as it were (and I promise to stop with the sports metaphors until at least the World Cup).

Rereading this interview as an agent, I was struck by how important early words of encouragement were in fueling Hanif’s career. In working with writers for a living, I often focus on how I can improve their writing and in “showing my [editorial] work.” I feel satisfied and good about my day when I have a clear vision of how to markup a proposal and get to see my little red lines all over the page. Yet more often than not, what my writers thank me for in their acknowledgements is believing in them. Seeing how well Hanif remembers who showed faith in and encouraged him, I’m reminded that my words of praise will likely stay with my clients far longer than their memories of when I perfectly rearranged a paragraph.

This is another long one, and as life being short is this week’s theme, here’s my TL;DR. Read if

• you’re interested in writing paths that don’t involve MFAs or starting with a Big Five publisher

• you want inspiration on how to use your local writing community to grow as a writer

• you love the Midwest, punk rock, and/or poets with side hustles

• and/or you love Hanif as much as I do.

Yours with thanks,

Alia

PS: Two semi-related asides. First, if my weekly letters leave you wanting more of moi [said in a Miss Peggy voice], please join me and Poets & Writers at 6:00 pm pm February 26 for this online workshop on publishing creative nonfiction.

Second, Hanif talks a lot about mentorship in this interview. Mentorship is magical, but what if you don’t (yet) have access to great mentors? Take inspiration from Rachel Cockerell’s TEDx talk on how to make mentors out of people who don’t even know you exist or as I would title this one if they put me in charge of these things³ “Mentorship for Introverts.” It’s chock full of excellent writing tips.

Yours with thanks,

Alia

❦

I want to talk to you about your early career and education, broadly defined. How do you understand it now, when you look back on those early years as an author?

Well, as an author, I only wanted to write one book, really, one book of poems. I had been freelance writing and writing in music zines for a long time.

I count freelance writing as your career!

In that case, I started writing in my earliest 20s. I was in the punk scene, and for people at that time zines were the thing. Zines were how news of a scene got transmitted from one place to the next, but nobody really wanted to write them, people just wanted them. And so I just wrote in zines.

And to be clear, you didn't have your own zine, you were writing in other people's zines?

Yes, big Midwest zines. Columbus had a couple, but there were ones out of Chicago that were bigger. So I just kind of latched on to those.

I also was trying to just stay out of trouble. There was a point in my life where I was just writing in these zines and it means I got to go to shows five times a week, which means five times a week I'm not getting caught up in any bullshit because I was constantly on probation and constantly one thing away from going back to jail for a bit. And so I was like, this gives me something to do.

Because of that, I only ever wanted to write one book, and that only came about because of Eve Ewing in a way. This is kind of circuitous, but I had stopped writing all together. I stopped writing freelance, I stopped writing music criticism, because editors were saying that my work was too poetic and too meandering. So I just said, “Well, I'll just figure out how to write poems, and I'll start to write poems.”

So you actually made something that was seen as a deficit into the discovery of a genre.

Yeah, because I wasn't getting paid anyway. So I was like, “Well, I might as well just lock myself away and write poems.” And I'd never written a poem, or even really read poems. I got a bunch of books and read and then kept reading and then writing.

I was learning poems, and in around 2011, I started reading and performing my poems. In 2015, I met Eve Ewing at a party on Memorial Day in 2014. We'd been friends for a while on the internet. And we just hit it off. She had started this website called Seven Scribes with Van Newkirk and Josie Duffy Rice and some other writers.

Eve and I were talking at this party about the song “Trap Queen”. I had this theory about how it was in line with the Great American Love Song formally, and Eve told me I should write about it. I hadn't written about music in three or four years, but I wrote it anyway. This was at a time when the essay could still go viral. So the essay went viral in a big way. It was on CNN and shit.

[An editor named] Jessica Hopper, who I knew from the punk scene scene, was at Pitchfork at the time, and she asked me to write for Pitchfork. And I wrote a couple things for Pitchfork in an issue with MTV News, and they asked me to join them at MTV News. And so I did. But in the midst of all this, I only ever wanted to write one book of poems, and I got to write one book of poems.

And the reason for that was, I had a steady job. It was hard for me to get a job because I had a

record, and I had a steady job for the first time ever. I had a salary and benefits at this healthcare startup. And I was like, “I can't afford to not have this job.” So I just want to write one book. I can write this book of poems, and then tour while I'm at my job. So I wrote my first book with Button Poetry. THE CROWN AIN’T WORTH MUCH came out in 2016, and I only got a chance to write that book because I lost a chapbook competition that I submitted to, but Button asked, “Do you want to make this a full length book?”

I didn't know anything about making a book of poems. But I did it. That was gonna be it. I put that book out and for a few months after, I just assumed that was gonna be it for me. And I was happy. I was content, at least. I had a nine to five. I had a book that people liked. The book did really well, for a poetry book, but I never had an understanding of how popular my writing was until we did a release party for that book in New York, Eve and I. And I remember that night, because - I forget where it was, but I remember people were outside and couldn't get in. It was over capacity. Then after the reading, we sold books out of the trunk of Eve's car, and people were lined up around the block. And I remember Eve being like, “Man, I think this book is really big, like for poetry, this is big.” But at no point did I think, well, I'm going to stop working my job. You know, this author thing is my career. It was kind of just like, cool. I released a poetry book that's popular. And now I get to just do my little marketing gig.

But it sounds like there was something about seeing that it was popular that made it, and tell me if I'm misunderstanding, that made it possible for you to imagine writing more. What happened with that trunk--of-the-car moment?

Well, it's funny because I never considered it - I knew nothing about authors, about book writing. I never considered that there would be a what's next? I knew the authors I loved had written multiple books. To be fair, I grew up reading a ton so I knew about that, but I didn't really know. The first author I ever met was RL Stein, when I was a kid. And that blew my mind because I used to read those Goosebumps books all the time, but I thought those books just arrived. I didn't know that someone wrote them.

But yeah, so people started to ask me after that New York release, and that's how THEY CAN’T KILL US came along, people asking what's next? And I had never considered that as an option. Even though I knew the authors I love have written more than one book. But I also knew that Ms. Morrison, that Toni Morrison had kids and a family and all these responsibilities, and it seemed to me that the fact that she was able to produce books was miraculous.I kept pushing people off. I kept telling people No, no, no. I was so afraid of losing stability. I came from a background where I didn't have stability. I was unhoused for a bit, and I grew up really poor, and I was just like, No, no, no, I did the thing that I set out to do.

And then THE CROWN AIN'T WORTH MUCH was a finalist for the Hurston Wright Award. One of my early mentors is the poet Terrence Hayes, who worked with me on the book, sent me this letter. He sent me this thing that I still have. He found this kid's book in a store and cut out poems printed out and cut out his American Sonnet poems, some ones that aren't even in the book, and glued them over the art in the kids book and sent it to me. And at the end of the note, he was kind of like, "I think that it would be a detriment to the world if you did not do another thing. It doesn't matter what it is, but you should do another thing.”

And that happened at the same time that Brett from Two Dollar Radio hit me up and was like, we would love an essay collection if you got one. And I said no to him for a couple months. Because I didn't really want to do it.

You were imagining your "writing career" as from a place of scarcity, like “how could it grow up between the cracks of my life?” Looking back on it, how did that feeling of scarcity shape the work, if at all, or shape what you thought was possible? And does that affect how you think about it when you work with other younger writers or mentor younger writers?

Something I still apply now is this idea that everything I'm writing has the opportunity to be my last thing. So make it your best thing. I went into THEY CAN’T KILL US, and I wrote THEY CAN’T KILL US, the bulk of it, in two weeks. My ex-wife and I had newly separated. This was Thanksgiving 2016, she went to go be with her family, and I went to Provincetown. A couple days after Thanksgiving, I drove up to Provincetown in the winter, which is not where anyone is. And I wrote THEY CAN’T KILL US in two and a half weeks and sent it off. And I was, again, in his mode where I was like, this has to be the best thing I can do. Because I have this amount of time. My life is changing in this massive way. And I'm not going to be in this headspace forever where I'm feeling motivated and trying to escape.

So it's not just a scarcity of resources. It's also just a scarcity of emotional clarity, which I think is still present in my work now. I'm not going to be in this space forever, and so what can I do now?

I want to go back to what you said about deciding that you were a poet, which was more like somebody telling you you were a poet, and you're like, I'm gonna go read some poems. You go to the library. What do you start reading? What was that kind of self education?

I was lucky in that Columbus has such a great group of poets built in. My earliest mentor was the writer Scott Woods and Will Evans. I just went to them, and I was like, Y'all know poems. Who is a poet I should read? And Will, or maybe Scott, told me they were reading the book Apocalyptic Swing by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. The problem with that was it was new at the time, and I couldn't afford a new book. And so I was like, Okay, I'll write down this poet's name. And so I went to used bookstores looking for Apocalyptic Swing. And then instead, I found this book called The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, which was Gabby's first book. I wish I was at home so I could show you this because it's wild. But I bought this book, and it was so marked up and annotated, because whoever had it before wrote all these notes in it. And that was a real gift for me because I had never read the poems. And I had this book that was kind of guiding me through how to read the poems.

I grew up reading liner notes on records to find out what samples there were and all that. I was like, “Okay, I read this book, and I like this poet and this book. But where do I go next?” And so I just applied that logic to poems where I was like, oh I'll read the back and see who Gabby thanks. And then I'll go find the books and people Gabby thanks. So I got to Adrian Matejka, and I got to Terence, and I got to Yona Harvey. And I worked backwards. And so I got to Robert Hayden, and Lucille Clifton, all these poets I love, you know, Gwendolyn Brooks. And I kept working backwards until I got to Plath and Elizabeth Bishop and Mary Oliver. That was all just from reading the backs of poets' books and seeing who they thank.

By winter 2011, I just had this massive stack of used books in my bedroom. And I would read poems for three to four hours a day. This was at a really great time, because I worked at a breakfast diner. And so my shift was always 7am to 1pm. I was younger, I was barely sleeping, and I would get home at around 1:30, and I would read from 2 to 5pm. And then I would try to write some poems of my own until, like, 7. And then I would go out, maybe go to a poetry reading and read or go to a show, and then get home and then read some more poems before sleeping a few hours, and then doing it again. So I had this really - I still think like an athlete, in a lot of ways. I played sports my whole life. I was treating it like I was training for something.

1. In book publishing, for reasons I’ve never determined, we capitalize book titles rather than using italics (correct) or quotations (also correct, but only if you are British). This is one instance where it’s just too hard for me codeswitch so grant me grace.

2. Hanif has spoken elsewhere about how every artist has themes they return to again and again, or as he terms it, their Johnny Cash Three. For Cash, it was Love, God and Murder. For Hanif, it’s the trio above. I love this idea and I think it also applies to how, as a reader and as an agent, the subjects and stories change, but the same themes have obsessed me for decades.

3. Jackie Kennedy once said that the job she really wanted was to be “Art Director for the World.” I think about this a lot.