Maintaining the Narrative Spell with Hilary Plum

Hilary Plum (00:00):
I would also like to just invite all writers...if there's a space to thank people, you can not thank them on that stage.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:07):
<Laugh> You specifically not thank them. I love it.

Hilary Plum (00:09):
We can use that more these days.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:14):
Welcome to Page Count, presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. This podcast celebrates authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, literary advocates, and readers in and from the state of Ohio. I'm your host, Laura Maylene Walter, the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow and author of the novel BODY OF STARS.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:37):
Today we're joined by Hilary Plum, whose latest book is the novel STATE CHAMP, which was just released May 13th by Bloomsbury. Hilary, welcome to the podcast. We're so thrilled to have you here today.

Hilary Plum (00:49):
Hi, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:51):
Well, we have a lot to cover in this interview such as reproductive rights, hunger strikes, making friends with cockroaches, maybe, question mark? <laugh>. But I thought we could start where we usually start here at Page Count and discuss your Ohio connection.

Hilary Plum (01:06):
I came here in 2017 for a job at Cleveland State University and specifically at the CSU Poetry Center, which has been around 63 years, I think it's, and rather mysteriously, is older than Cleveland State <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (01:23):
I don't think I knew that. That's interesting.

Hilary Plum (01:25):
I don't understand it, but I have been told it. So, however we can picture that first there was a poetry center and then a university coalesced around it.

Hilary Plum (01:35):
So the poet and editor Caryl Pagel worked at CSU and I, you know, knew her work and we'd worked together on another project. So I got a job and came out here and since then I've really sort of remade my life in Ohio and my mom moved out here, my husband moved out here. So I've been really honored and moved to kind of get to be part of the Cleveland literary community and cultural community and to like keep learning about Cleveland and know myself as a Clevelander. Now I'm from New England, which does feel like very different but also is less welcoming <laugh> so well it's been a great place to land. And my brother's in Cincinnati, so we kind of have reconstituted our family life in Ohio. And this book is, it doesn't name its setting, but it's set in a kind of rust belt sort of city, or that phrase kind of floats around sort of in scare quotes, according to the narrator's feelings <laugh>.

Hilary Plum (02:33):
So you know, this book was thinking about this place, both this city, particularly in cities like this city, which is often, I often write in a slightly, a little bit of a fable of reality, like a real place that's also a fable of that place. So hopefully this novel speaks a little bit about Ohio.

Laura Maylene Walter (02:51):
Oh absolutely. I think Clevelanders who read this book will absolutely see the Cleveland in it, even though again, as you said, there's no no names, there's Lakeview Cemetery, I recognized, of course the lake and just the industry of the past that the city was built on that does not exist anymore. So yeah, and I think anyone in the Midwest or the Rust Belt will recognize that. And I like the way you put that: a fable of a real place. I think as a fiction writer, that can free us up to you can make things up.

Laura Maylene Walter (03:18):
It doesn't have to be exactly Cleveland, it can be just a sketch of it in a way. Let's dive in and talk about the novel. STATE CHAMP surrounds Angela, who is a receptionist at an abortion clinic. She goes on a hunger strike to protest her bosses imprisonment for illegally performing abortions after a heartbeat law was passed. Angela tells her story through a kind of a diary, but it's also kind of a letter. The novel I just found really propulsive and terrifying yet really funny and of course extremely timely in our political landscape today. But I thought we could start by hearing when you started working on the book, what was the genesis of the idea? How long have you been working on it and how did Angela's story take form for you?

Hilary Plum (04:06):
Yeah, and also it's just, it's really nice to talk to you about the novel 'cause I'm a really big fan of of your novel, BODY OF STARS. And I feel like it's on overlapping themes and horrors <laugh>. So I started writing this novel in the summer of 2020 and at that point, you know, writing about like heartbeat laws and stuff like that was speculative <laugh>, which is kind of <sarcastic laugh> like "ha ha ha." So I had really had written the whole thing by the time that the Dobbs ruling came through and you know, state by state this chaos was really unleashed. And you know, briefly in Ohio there I think the heartbeat law went into effect and then was overturned. We had, as with many states, this sort of cascade of what rights in healthcare you might have available from one month to the next until we had a referendum here that did put some protections for our reproductive rights into the state constitution, for which I'm grateful.

Hilary Plum (05:04):
So anyway, I started it before all of that when it was more, you know, more an act of imagination. A lot of my writing is about protest and art as protest, like what does it mean for protests to be effective because they often don't seem directly effective, like art <laugh>, even though they seem like they're the more direct version. But maybe it's better to think of them as the same thing, like interventions into the imagination or a way of modeling a kind of practice or a care or a new way of relating to people or to a structure. Those are the sorts of things I've thought about a bunch of my novels, and this is kind of a continuation of that because of this particular person embarking on a protest that she sort of invented herself without anyone telling her it was a good idea. My original impetus, I guess, well, I had had two thoughts.

Hilary Plum (05:57):
One is I wanted to write about someone who was a bad employee, because I'd been thinking more and more about becoming a bad employee <laugh>, and maybe we were all in thoughts about kind of what work was and what our relationships to institutions and to jobs was in the wake of Covid. And also I had a lot of a certain kind of joke that I'd never been able to find a place for, you know. I think <laugh> you'll understand as a fiction writer, it's like you have that somewhere but you've never found a place to put it all, like a certain kind of quip or something. And I was like, oh, if I could just get this out. So her voice was kind of started as that, as a kind of like dark humor that was also like, or at least I felt it as, pretty like desperate and furious, and that the humor was part of a way of like talking about things that are sort of unspeakable.

Laura Maylene Walter (06:46):
Yeah, yeah. And Angela is such a complicated and rich character, so we'll definitely be talking about her more, but her form of protest is a hunger strike. So let's talk about that a little bit. Can you share some information with listeners about maybe some of the history of the hunger strike as an act of protest? What can you share about this extreme physically dangerous form of protest that she undergoes?

Hilary Plum (07:14):
So I was thinking about the hunger strike as a kind of a latent speech, like a kind of speech that people have, you know, when everything else has failed. That's a sort of speech that's available to you. And I read a really good book about it. Am I going remember its name? I think the author is Kevin Grant, and it's scholarly book. It was a book about hunger strikes in protests of the British Empire, and of course the sort of most famous example and the one that we know the most about are the Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers in the eighties in Ireland. Let me find the name of this book really quick.

Laura Maylene Walter (07:46):
I just found it in your acknowledgements. The Kevin Grant book is LAST WEAPONS: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890 to 1948.

Hilary Plum (07:56):
Perfect. I kept thinking "Last Resort," and I was like that's not the name. Anyway, LAST WEAPONS, it was really good because it was talking about sort of how hunger strikes spread as a kind of anti-colonial tactic across different places and sort of appeared in different places in response to empire and as a way of protesting political imprisonment or making a case for oneself as a political prisoner, which it was for Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers. That was the key point was that they were no longer being treated as political prisoners and they were trying to reclaim that status. And one thing that was really interesting and moving and intense about that book's observations and scholarship was an understanding of the hunger strike as working because of how it affected guards working in the prison. People really don't like to see other people starve to death.

Hilary Plum (08:43):
So one reason that the hunger strike had effects as a form of speech is that it's sort of called out to other people's humanity because it's a very slow horrifying and preventable form of suffering. So I was kind of thinking about that and about you know, kinds of speech or almost like political thinking that are latent in the body and that to me, you know, when I was starting the novel seemed related but in a way where I needed to think through the relation to things like abortion, which is a decision making about the body, right? Like that is both really intellectual and is like really is both part of our language lives and beyond our language lives. And so, you know, I wanted to think about ways that our political activity and our political selves are embodied like that. And I was also interested in thinking a little bit about athletes, which Angela is is the title to that.

Hilary Plum (09:39):
She's like a former athlete and the kind of like messiness of that. It's such an impressive and socially like lauded achievement but it also often is quite destructive to the people who do it, so that it seems more like something that was exploited out of them rather than something that they got to do. You know, it's like both. When we watch great athletes, it's a little bit implicating, because it often comes at a cost to them. That's more than we would want to see if we got to see the whole lifespan of that. And for me, I was thinking about that in relation to sports like long distance running that often that have a lot of eating disorders in them. Everyone kind of knows that they do, and there may or may not be a lot of action in response to that.

Laura Maylene Walter (10:22):
Yeah, so the novel's title STATE CHAMP comes from the fact that she was a state champion in long distance running, which is part of her identity and throughout the book and also seems to stand in contrast with the ways she might feel she has failed since that time of becoming the state champion. But when I was reading the book, you know, I can't turn off my writing brain thinking about how you must have done this. And I thought a lot about the structure. Angela is throughout the book recording her hunger strike day by day. She skipped some days, of course, but it is in that way a linear progression through her hunger strike, which I thought, oh, as someone who's currently struggling with interweaving timelines and a current manuscript that is a giant mess that I'm really struggling with, I was like, "Oh, Hilary did it right." This makes so much sense, it just makes narrative sense to be going through her hunger strike. But of course that chronological nature of it, it's contrasted with the fact that because she has little to do on this strike but starve and think, we get to travel through time in her mind and we get to see her life before the hunger strike. We get to kind of jump around a little so there's freedom in that movement. So I'm really curious how that structure developed for you. Was it from the beginning you knew it would be a movement from day one—or day two, actually, because as Angela says, anyone who starts counting their hunger strike on day one isn't going to make it <laugh>, you have to at least go one day without eating before you start counting. Anyway, can you talk about that structure, how that came together for you? Was that always an innate part of the book, the chronological versus more free flowing nature of her thoughts?

Hilary Plum (12:02):
I'd really never written a plot before <laugh>. I had an idea that if you could just tie it to something bodily then that would give you everything. You know, it would give you suspense, it would give you an arc and an intensity.

Hilary Plum (12:13):
You know, I have two previous novels, and I like them a lot. They don't have any plot <laugh>. Like, for the second one, a review once called it "literally plotless." The reviewer meant it as a compliment more as like a recognition <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (12:27):
Yeah, like a statement <laugh>.

Hilary Plum (12:27):
Yeah. Like not as an insult, but it is true. Like I was very focused in that other novel, my second novel, you know, I was really against certain kinds of development, and that's what I wanted to explore. And then you sort of keep going as a writer and you're like, well plot can do a lot of things like it's a certain kind of engine, it can let you do some other things. So I was like, okay, like how do you write a plot? Some things might be like a pregnancy and some things might be like a hunger strike <laugh> sort of.

Hilary Plum (12:55):
I just started with the sense that if you were a writer who didn't know how to write a plot but you like to write about protests, this might be a good fit for you <laugh>. And I think it's not exactly believable, but no one so far has protested this, but it's not exactly believable to keep a diary that long into a hunger strike because most people I think can't really write that much or that consistently after a certain point. You know, novels don't need to be like totally realistic. That's not the point. They're asking us into an act of thinking that's like about reality and beyond reality, but it doesn't have to be exactly real, and I think that's fine, but you need to keep the spell going. If you break the spell, you lose everyone. So I was like it has to just all be her because if you step out of it you'll notice that it's terribly unrealistic.

Hilary Plum (13:39):
So that's why it's one long blast of her voice and her thinking. She's a bit of a loner, but in this moment she's looking for connections, she's trying to intervene in a situation which means she like needs to activate all of her connections. So her thinking kind of follows how she's trying to do that and how other people are maybe trying to do that with her.

Laura Maylene Walter (14:01):
Yeah, and I think this is a good lesson for other writers in creating that spell for the reader and maintaining it. Because I would say the spell held very well throughout this because as her hunger strike goes on, there are physical symptoms, she's getting weaker, her thoughts get more scattered and confused. So it's very clear that she's being affected by this strongly. She was already underweight when she went into it. Well I don't know if she was underweight, but she had previously struggled with eating disorders.

Laura Maylene Walter (14:31):
She has a doctor who visits her who expressed some concern over that. Like especially for you with your history and where you started from, this is extra dangerous. So yeah, as you say, maybe it's not physically fully realistic but it's convincing the reader that it is, which is often so much harder to do than it is to say you're going to do it. And then of course her voice too. Her voice carries the book. So let's talk about Angela. You already mentioned that she's maybe thought of as a bad employee and she is really complicated. You know, she's not some saint or some angel. She's not someone her colleagues would have expected, would sacrifice her health and her body to this extent to protest her [boss's imprisonment]. Her boss didn't seem to particularly like or respect her or her work. Her colleagues don't like her. She is acerbic and sarcastic and dark and sometimes difficult, and she's also just really funny. How does she take shape for you as you were working on this book?

Hilary Plum (15:31):
First of all, thank you. That was the kind summary. Writing is always so mysterious because your intentions are fuzzy to you, but then as you write they clarify. And so having reached like the end of that project, I think I understand more why I went looking for a voice like hers. And I think it has to do with the questions of sort of like privacy and like decency that abortion raises, or like is. I didn't want, well, I didn't know what I wanted, but looking back <laugh>, I didn't want it to be like about someone kind of saintly and admirable even though I do I think that people working in abortion are extremely admirable. Like that is how I feel.

Hilary Plum (16:11):
But I thought it was important maybe to show a different kind of person in part because whenever we talk about things like abortion and maybe a lot of things that involve like people who are women, there's like this need for justification or the sense of what's good and that you would need to be good or be justifiable. And so I think what drew me to a character like Angela was looking for a way around that where there would be an idea that you can have an abortion. Like Angela's not a terribly perceptive person. Like she doesn't know a lot about other people around her. She knows a little bit, and I think she cares about other people, but she doesn't exactly know what to do with that care. Like, she's not great at connecting with them, maybe. Or that's how I'd put it.

Hilary Plum (16:59):
That's just my take in a way. Once the novel's in the world, it kind of doesn't belong to me and my thoughts anymore. So other people might put it differently. But I think what that also means, she knows that other people don't know her terribly well either. So there's a sense of like privacy. She just sees people for little snapshots and she's not someone who would investigate their whole situation. But that's also like a moral stance. Like I think she's just like, it's your life, it's your choice. It's not up to me what you do or don't do, and it's not up to me to even ask you to justify it. And I feel like in any way that we share, like it's very important to share abortion stories, but also they have a sense that they're explaining something, you know, they're justified.

Laura Maylene Walter (17:41):
Yeah, I was thinking about this. I mean this is not a spoiler at all listeners, but Angela, it's not that she has this origin story where her life was saved by getting an abortion at this clinic last minute and that's why she's going out there to help these women. It's nothing like that. It's on a very basic level, almost uncomplicated for her. Like, "these women should have the right to do this. It's the right thing, it's the right thing for them to have this bodily autonomy, and so this law is wrong, and my boss shouldn't be in jail" <laugh>. So I think that's really important for her character. And yeah, sometimes it feels like in the advocacy for reproductive rights that as you say, I think it's also important for people to share their abortion stories. But I also think they shouldn't have to, it shouldn't be women trying to convince everyone that they're people and have a right to healthcare.

Laura Maylene Walter (18:32):
That's my personal thought. Yeah, so they shouldn't have to, and I thought it was really beautiful in the book that we see these snapshots of before the clinic closed, of the women who would come in and get abortions. And Angela's at reception, so she is often the first person to talk with them. Throughout the book when she's thinking of them, we just see these snapshots of them and the kind of collective name she uses for them is "Rose," and it's really beautiful. It's this sense of privacy. It's not that she's reducing them all to one kind of person because they're very distinct, but that she is sort of remembering them in in this collective because, in a way, they are all just human beings who need medical care. I feel like that would be tricky as a writer. The women getting the abortions are the ones whose rights are being fought for, and so it's important to get them in the book. I guess I'm just curious how you approach that in the writing process.

Hilary Plum (19:29):
I wanted it to be just those little glimpses, and I also feel, kind of related to what we're talking about, that just like that would be very open to readers as to whether they think that's effective or not. Like, is that the right way to do it? I don't know. But I wanted it to be glimpses in part because it's like, it's just one part of your life, it's just this one moment, you know? And one act of decision making in healthcare. So in that sense, it might seem counterintuitive, but giving folks the same name as a way of how Angela the narrator thinks of it is that it's just a name people have for being in a situation.

Hilary Plum (20:04):
So when they need care they're "Rose," and then they go back to their life <laugh>. And so it's both the convenient way of doing it in fiction because, as you know, to navigate a lot of characters without names, you have to come up with sort of like monikers or ways of kind of making it happen, and the pros of that can be a bit unwieldy or somehow more reductive. Whereas Rose, once you have a name that you reuse, you're sort of freer. So that's why I was thinking about that. But also because I was thinking of it as someone in a position needing care. Like that is how I defined a Rose. And that once she receives the care, she's back to where whoever she is and that's her business <laugh>, like that question of just like privacy and decency where you wouldn't have to justify yourself to anyone or be the right abortion patient or something.

Laura Maylene Walter (20:54):
Well, and being set at an abortion clinic, clearly protesters—anti-choice protesters—are going to be part of the scene. And there's one protestor named Janine who comes around a lot. And Janine, by the way, felt like a perfect name for this character...apologies to all the Janines out there <laugh>. Angela describes her as the Instagram type of protester. So she's not one advocating to kill abortion doctors or anything like that. She's someone who claims, "We're here to empower women, we're here to protect women, to love women, to free them from the oppressors trying to pressure women into getting abortions. Like, we're here because we love women." Which I thought was a really interesting way to portray the main protestor figure in the book. Do you want to talk a little bit about Janine and your journey with Janine?

Hilary Plum (21:50):
Thank you. Janine, I think that name was in my head from like this nineties band Soul Coughing <laugh>. They have a song called "Janine" that was probably like lurking in my head. Janine's a real professional and she is definitely better at what she's doing than Angela is, and Angela I think knows that <laugh>. One thing I wanted to get into in this novel was like relationships between women at work and like in a professional context and ways that that aren't like ideal, that are part of how our, whatever you want to call it, our big old patriarchal context works is that it's actually harder for women to relate to each other. I wanted to explore that and how these relationships are real and they matter but they're not perfect.

Hilary Plum (22:40):
And so her relationship with like Janine is really a professional and Angela is like kind of a little mesmerized by professionalism because she doesn't know how to do it. But she's interested in it, and she's also mad about it because she knows it's bullshit, but she also can't do it. So that I think I wanted to sort of show their back and forth, and I also wanted to explore opposition to abortion is about misogyny and about patriarchy but also there are a lot of women who are on that side, and I think there's sometimes erased. A lot of our anti-abortion policy and legislation, there have been women who are very key to it. So I wanted to have a character like that. There are a few different women that I was reading about who maybe like fed into who Janine is. And Janine is also, like, we just get the surface of her.

Hilary Plum (23:31):
I don't think we know her interiority terribly well. But I was also thinking about those relationships between women on sports teams which are like competitive but also supportive. They're like close and they're distant, that kind of thing. I was sort of just trying to look at some things, things like that of ways that women relate to each other in public.

Laura Maylene Walter (23:48):
Yeah. I'm thinking now about Janine, and you might have to write a follow up in Janine's point of view, not necessarily about protesting, just Janine living her life. I feel like I'd be weirdly compelled by that <laugh>. What would it be like being in Janine's head? And this is just bringing to mind thinking of protestors. There's a brief memory Angela has about other protestors. A man who is carrying a sign that has nothing to do with abortion. It's Islamophobic, it's homophobic.

Laura Maylene Walter (24:17):
And she says to him, "Are you lost? This is an abortion clinic" <laugh>. Which just makes me laugh so hard. Like that is Angela. Like I think that sums her up, right? She is really sharp about things and not afraid of just stating them in a confrontational way. And she's also kind of clueless about things as well. So it's just so fun to be in her voice. "Are You lost? You should be directing your hate in the appropriate spot." <laugh>.

Hilary Plum (24:43):
I think I got that sign from a like a YouTube video, like I think I just took it from a real protestor sign. Uif I remember correctly that was just someone's sign <laugh>. You know, I feel like that's like a little bit part of the question of opposing abortion and I think, of course, anyone has the right to not want to get an abortion or to oppose abortion personally, but you have to like track out what happens when it's banned.

Hilary Plum (25:08):
You know, what are the actual, real consequences? And that's where I think that decency question comes in. Where you're like, it will mean that people are treated completely indecently just inhumanely, and it will be tied up in this matrix of other cruelties and forms of hate, like that sign, and like the current really intense transphobia that's happening and opposition to trans healthcare which is caught up and then tied up in this opposition to abortion care.

Laura Maylene Walter (25:34):
Absolutely. And we should briefly talk about Dr. M, because she is the reason Angela goes on the hunger strike. So Dr M performs the abortions and after the heartbeat law passes. A heartbeat law, in practical terms, ends up making most abortions illegal because many women don't even know they're pregnant until it's too late, essentially. But Dr M is still able to provide some limited legal abortions when the law passes.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:03):
But what she's doing is performing secretly after hours having women come back who are beyond the legal limit and giving them the abortions and she gets caught, goes to jail, and the clinic shuts down. One thing I thought was really interesting, there's another character in the book who points out that if Dr M hadn't done that, the clinic would remain open, and some women—way, way fewer—would still be able to get that care that they need. And by doing it illegally, she got caught and went to jail, and everything shut down. That is a choice that she made to do what she felt was right. I don't know if you want to talk about kind of that conflicting sense of what is legal, what is right, what is for the greater good overall based on the risk.

Hilary Plum (26:51):
Dr. M, what she does seems a bit like foolish, you know, it's just like very desperate seeming. It's not strategic to just be like, "oh I'll just keep giving abortions." So in that sense it's again, it's not exactly totally realistic. Like it's probably not what someone would do in that situation or what most people would do. But I think like with Angela's protest, it's not exactly advisable and that's something that Angela is very obsessed with. She's really angry that the minute you try to do something, everyone jumps down your throat and is like, "Why didn't you do a smarter, better version that I never did?" Which I do think is really, really true of acts of protest, or when people try to do anything that's disruptive or visionary or politically active, there is immediately this wave of like, "Well, couldn't they have done it better?"

Hilary Plum (27:35):
And you're like, "Well, what were you doing?" My book in 2022 is an essay book called HOLE STUDIES, and a lot of it is about sort of acts of kind of spontaneous disruptive speech or ways that people suddenly took an opportunity to say something in public, like Sinead O'Connor's protest on SNL tearing up the Pope's picture, or some other like small moments, including like Kanye's Hurricane Katrina moment from way back before his, you know, more recent evolution of <laugh> where he's at now. These very powerful moments that felt spontaneous, like maybe "desperate" may or may not be the word for them, but they weren't like strategic, they didn't come with a movement, but they were really human and they were sort of a leap of faith. And I thinkI am really interested in moments like that 'cause I think they have a lot of potential and especially they kind of call into their audience to be like, how do we receive them?

Hilary Plum (28:28):
When someone takes a leap like that they're kind of asking for us to receive them and we may or may not. And so I tried to show with both Dr M's and Angela's acts are thinking about that question of like why protests are held to this some kind of standard that they should have been more, like, academic, or they should have been focus grouped or something beforehand, where you're like, what what made it possible was like the moment and the energy. Or like how people were like so mad that Occupy didn't have a better plan. And I was like< well <laugh> like I don't know. So in that way I was like thinking about the protest more like art where it doesn't have to have a plan, it's supposed to have an energy that reconfigures our thinking in some ways. So I think of Dr M, I guess I think of the sort of potential like foolhardiness of her act as showing the intensity of her anger.

Laura Maylene Walter (29:24):
Well, I think also in terms of how a protest is received, that brings me to my next question, which is for Angela, her success as she sees it really hinges on the press. I mean, the point of of a protest like this is to get attention. She wants journalists to write about it, she wants to have what she's doing come to the public eye, and she really struggles with that at first. And the person John that she's partially writing this blog to is a journalist. And so she's asking him for help of contacting other people and getting the word out. She's relying on, in some senses, on old-school journalism of making this be worthwhile.

Laura Maylene Walter (30:05):
So can you talk a bit about that? About the way she seeks press attention and the way she sometimes fails to get it and the way she maybe succeeds in getting it and how that impacts her protest?

Hilary Plum (30:16):
Yeah, I thought it would be like funny if she was like bad at getting the publicity she needed <laugh> and didn't know how to do it.

Laura Maylene Walter (30:25):
Yep. She's just alone in a boarded up, closed down building, you know like at first no one even really knows she's there. It's bleak.

Hilary Plum (30:30):
Yeah, <laugh> she didn't have a plan for that. I find things like that both like potentially beautiful and funny. I have a few different thoughts about it. And one, you know, I have a chronic illness, it's a neurological condition, which means like sometimes I'm just like really holed up, you know? And so I wanted to write a novel that was maybe a little bit more from that experience, like what that experience is like.

Hilary Plum (30:53):
And to me this novel is more of a sick novel, where your experiences of sickness are what it is written from. And so for anyone in an experience of long illness, there's a lot of moments like that where you're like, "What if I was just suffering a lot, and it really didn't matter to anybody?" I mean, not that it doesn't matter. Illness can understandably become very solipsistic in part because you're just suffering a lot and that's how it works. So I was thinking about that, where you're just like, "oh yeah, like that's how illness and suffering feel where you're like whoa, what if I was having the most intense suffering of my life and the world just like continued and it didn't matter at all. You know? So hers is like that but it has an extra edge 'cause she's like trying to get attention.

Hilary Plum (31:36):
I was thinking about that, too, in relationship maybe to our current political world, where this question of like what what is doing something? Is it doing something or is it like posting about it? You know, is the visibility of something the thing itself? And so maybe I was trying to get a little bit of that question into this situation because she is, in fact, doing the things she's doing, but she does need people to know about it for it to have any effect. But she's not someone who's good at like social media or like performing herself in a public way. You know, what if you were good at having a politics but you weren't good about posting about it? So I think that's what I was something I was trying to explore with her situation.

Laura Maylene Walter (32:18):
Yeah, and there's something extra dark and rough about starving yourself to death slowly and if people aren't even noticing or paying attention. And she definitely does have people, she has a doctor who visits her and she has certain people who visit or stay in sporadic touch with her when she'll answer her phone. But mostly she's really strict about her hunger strike. She's not someone who's going to cheat. She is locked in this boarded-up place where her only company are kind of the rustling of cockroaches, which I really love. They're not a big part of the book, so if anyone out there is creeped out by cockroaches, don't worry, it's not like a graphic cockroach book. But they become this sort of lyrical rustling presence in her mind and in her environment. But yeah, she's really strict about the hunger strike. I just found this so darkly funny when she is thinking if someone takes her out of there, the way she puts it is like, "They'll give me the tube," like THE TUBE, you know, a feeding tube, and to her that would be the worst thing

Laura Maylene Walter (33:14):
And she is someone who had an eating disorder, and I wonder if we could talk about that a bit more, about how that plays into her hunger strike. I do want to point to the acknowledgements in your book, in the second paragraph: "to those who helped me survive my own eating disorder, even through small gestures, deepest thanks. To the medical professionals who did not help, I do not thank you."<laugh> Which felt like an Angela-like thing to say <laugh>. I love it, though. I love pettiness in acknowledgements...like, that's not petty, I gues, just...

Hilary Plum (33:45):
No, no I know what you mean <laugh>. Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (33:47):
So as much as you would like to share, how did your own struggles with an eating disorder, inform Angela, or more broadly, how do you think her history of having an eating disorder is affecting her relationship to the hunger strike?

Hilary Plum (34:01):
Yeah, and I'd also like to just invite all writers...if there's a space to thank people, you could not thank them.

Laura Maylene Walter (34:07):
<Laugh> You specifically not thank them. I love it.

Hilary Plum (34:11):
We could use that more these days. It's messy, the relationship between what she's doing and her history of an eating disorder, because in a way she's drawing on a very dark aspect of her past and herself in order to do this thing and she is proud of what she's doing. So that's complicated, right? I'm very against eating disorders, and my eating disorder was very dangerous to me. When you look back on that time, a time of really intensity and disorder, it's such an incredibly dark time. It's just this sort of madness. I don't know if that's like a correct way to put it but that is how it felt to me. So I'm very, very glad to be free of it at the same time that's me.

Hilary Plum (34:50):
Like, I was that person. It's part of my history and who I am. Particularly with eating disorders, there's not like a purity of moving past them because the substance that was your problem is a substance you have to keep interacting with. You know, every day we're eating and not eating, we're making all these choices around eating, and we're continuing to live in a society that has really incredibly unhealthy messages about dieting and body image and that is idealizing really impossible bodies. And so you have to keep living there and you have to keep making choices every single day around eating and not eating, eating and not eating. So there just isn't the same kind of like a sobriety that's as clear, you know, just because of the nature of it. I guess I wanted to think about that with this character. Character in terms of like she's using a dark tool but it's a tool that she has because it's part of her history.

Hilary Plum (35:44):
And I guess I feel like honoring ways that when we do things it's with our whole history, it's with our whole selves <laugh>, not just the ones that we're most proud of. And I also think there's always something shameful about admitting you had [an eating disorder], which I understand, but I also don't think people should have to be ashamed of that. So that's what I was thinking of. And the tube, you know, when I was 13 or 14 I had to have a feeding tube 12 hours a day. I would put it in and take it out myself, which seems crazy. That's why I was like "Don't give me the tube!" Anyway. <laugh> Obviously we know that imagery from people on hunger strike at Guantanamo, hunger strikes remain a very, very active form of protest particularly, and again remaining like in an anti-colonial setting in like in Guantanamo and Palestine, people are often on hunger strike but it doesn't always catch the American media.

Hilary Plum (36:32):
So more people are maybe in a situation that's a situation kind of more like this made up one in the novel than the most famous version. The Bobby Sands, the 10 men dead. Like they had a really, really active strategy. Like they had a media strategy, they had a whole kind of political apparatus. Anyway, just that people are in that situation. Yeah, I think it's messy that it's implicated in her past but that feels real to me and maybe feels a little bit more about that our politics are our bodies, and we don't like choose everything about our body. We don't choose anything. We choose very little about our bodies.

Laura Maylene Walter (37:05):
And one detail I love from the book that from can lead us to talk about your process a little bit is that Angela is writing this diary/letter on the, like, the paper, the table paper in a doctor's office. I don't know what that is called, hygienic paper, I'm not sure. But she's writing on those long sheets of crackly paper. I just love that image. And so thinking about her <laugh>, her process, I'm curious about your process for this book in particular or your writing process at large. And have you ever used unusual writing material like that kind of paper in a doctor's office to write?

Hilary Plum (37:45):
I think it's probably not possible to write on that paper because it's waxy, but maybe there's probably different versions of it.

Laura Maylene Walter (37:51):
I just assumed she had the right kind of pen <laugh>.

Hilary Plum (37:54):
Yeah. Since I started writing this novel, whenever I go, I like touch the, I'm like could you write, could you <laugh>? Some of them are more papery and some are a little waxier. So if she had a papery version, I think she could have done it.

Hilary Plum (38:07):
I just liked that especially 'cause it's like that's what you lie your body on. You know, I do write longhand so that is part of my process, just in a normal journal though. I think it's good that it's a little slower than typing because when I go a little faster I don't think it turns out quite as well. So there's a stage I write by hand, then I kind of read over by hand and do a light revision, then I type things up and sometimes when I type things up I revise them more. But I often go back to the slightly earlier version because revising more, I'm making quicker decisions. So I think there's something about the slowness that's helpful but it's hard to preserve because our lives are so type-y.

Laura Maylene Walter (38:47):
So you wrote the whole first draft on paper?

Hilary Plum (38:51):
Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (38:52):
One time I tried to write a story on a Chipotle bag. Um it did not amount to anything. But anyway <laugh>. So this book just came out and it's published by Bloomsbury, an independent publisher but one of the larger independent ones, if that's the correct way to characterize it. I would love to hear about your experience working with them, and maybe your larger relationship to corporate publishing versus smaller press publishing. Tell us about that.

Hilary Plum (39:22):
So this is my sixth book, and my first five books were all on small presses. And that's really like where I live. I work as editor at two small presses, CSU Poetry Center and Rescue Press. And I previously worked a few different sites of like independent publishing and academic publishing, but never at like a big house. So I was kind of nervous, you know, I was nervous to make that jump. But for us as writers, it's appealing to maybe have at least one project that has more readers.

Hilary Plum (39:54):
The problem with the way the market is now is small press books just don't have access to more readers. You know, like they can't get in the channels that would reach more people. They're pretty thoroughly excluded from them, as much as we try <laugh>. I mean it's actually, it is kind of interesting because more of big publishing is like small publishing than one real, you know like when the antitrust Penguin Random House trial was happening and they had to like show all their <laugh> like notes. You're like, oh they actually, a lot of their sales figures are like ours. It's just that, you know, a little chunk of them aren't <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (40:27):
Right. They have bigger padding through other things. But yeah, some, some writers assume if you go with a big publisher you're all set in terms of publicity, in terms of marketing, in terms of book tours, LOL.

Hilary Plum (40:39):
But yeah, that's not always the case. And I think it's like both big and small presses can publish really good books that only sell like somewhere between 500 to 3,000 copies or you know, something that's like a modest number, but the bigger presses are the only ones who can do more than that. So that's sort of the question. So with this book I was like, I think this book could be published in a bigger way. Maybe it's one that would be appealing to people. And I've really loved working with Bloomsbury, and I want to credit my agent, who's Nora Gonzalez at Gernert, and Callie Garnett at Bloomsbury. And just that whole team has been wonderful. I think that's kind of the question anywhere small presses we are like more community-oriented, but people can have a bad experience at a small...you know, like a small community can also be bad <laugh>. You just don't know, like you have one conversation or something and then you're like, "Here's the most important thing in my life right now. Will you guys take care of it?"

Laura Maylene Walter (41:34):
Right. Can you talk about the cover a bit? What was your input like on the cover? And of course listeners you'll see images posted online but yeah, tell us about the cover process.

Hilary Plum (41:45):
I loved that process because I'm not great at visuals. In my publishing life, I tend to defer, you know what I mean? Like I try to be chill about covers <laugh> because I know I just don't have a great eye, and my ego is like very robust in other areas. So I try <laugh> try to like balance it out. So for this one, what was funny is I was like, I just think the one thing we shouldn't have is a figure of a woman on the cover. We should have a non-figural cover. Everyone agreed with that and understood why we would say that.

Hilary Plum (42:13):
Especially, you know, I have a lot of anxiety about nothing in this book idealizing a thinness or something like that. So I was like okay no women. And then they came back with this cover and I was like, oh that's great though. She's pretty messed up looking <laugh> .

Laura Maylene Walter (42:28):
And it's not your typical woman figure. It's not like a headless woman, you know, walking off into a rainy street or something. It's very different.

Hilary Plum (42:37):
Or floating in a pool, like she's always floating in a pool, or maybe there's a hat.

Laura Maylene Walter (42:39):
Like Ophelia. I like how the outline makes it look like she's disappearing, you know, I think that's really great.

Hilary Plum (42:49):
In the acknowledgements, I think the Teaches of Peaches, that album from the early 2000s, the opening song of that album, taught me a lot when I was writing this novel.

Hilary Plum (42:58):
I don't know if people know the classic song, "F*** the Pain Away." Peaches has this like, "Huh? Huh. What?" <laugh>, you know, like this way of just using single syllables. Angela oftentimes just says "Okay" or "What" <laugh> when people talk to her <laugh>. And so that was really informative. So the Bloomsbury team said the designer had been listening to the Teaches of Peaches while making that cover, and that was very convincing to me. I was like, yeah it feels like that <laugh>. So I don't know, that was just the only one that we looked at, and I liked it a lot was a good lesson for me of like disagreeing with exactly the thing that I'd said for myself.

Laura Maylene Walter (43:38):
Well, we're starting to run out of time, but just quickly, we can also talk about your podcast a little bit? Index for Continuance, which is about small press publishing. Can you maybe point listeners toward a few episodes that you think might especially highlight or feature what you're doing with that podcast?

Hilary Plum (43:56):
The podcast is based out of the Poetry Center, and a shoutout to Caryl Pagel, who directs the Poetry Center, and then Zach Peckham is the co-host of the podcast. I think what we were really trying to capture, one, is that there's not a lot of ways to learn about editing and publishing. There's a few like books that are good that are kind of collections of writings by editors but people don't speak about it in public too much. You know, it's kind of a discreet kind of work. And also what to me is so special about editing and the editorial relationship and also small press across different sites of publishing is its practices like is its ways of trying to like collaborate ethically and like responsibly and like make some really non-commercial stuff together.

Hilary Plum (44:37):
Like really lose money <laugh> that's cool in a way that everyone feels great about. So we're trying to approach those conversations as a way that kind of show how it feels and how it could feel and like a little bit of the politics of small press or of editing like which isn't necessarily a politics in the Republican democrat sense but a sense of like how people relate to each other and how they try to build a structure that will work for everyone and that will let everyone come together and make a thing that no one could make on their own. There's just like a special place in my heart for all of these episodes. Let me think <laugh> I think to this conversation, the one with Danielle Dutton is great in terms of like thinking about you know, maybe feminist-informed publishing and also a history of kind of like 20 years of especially on the fiction, kind of on the experimentally or outside the mainstream fiction side of things.

Hilary Plum (45:27):
I love talking to Lit Cleveland folks, Matt Weinkam and Michelle Smith.

Laura Maylene Walter (45:31):
Yeah, we just had them on Page Count. They are stars <laugh>.

Hilary Plum (45:34):
It's so great. I love talking to Suzanne from Mack's Backs.

Laura Maylene Walter (45:37):
Oh yeah. I loved your episode with Lucy Biederman. That was really good. I'll link to all these, listeners.

Hilary Plum (45:44):
And I guess the other one I would, I like a lot for if people are looking to investigate publishing, I recommend all of them, which is biased of me but is with Jeremy Wang-Iverson and Samara Rafery, because that's about sort of the publicity side and how you publicize books if you're not a big press. And also what are those moments where books kind of break through. So I think that that one is also like important for thinking about how smaller arts endeavors can like explode into the mainstream for a little minute or kind of shift the conversation.

Hilary Plum (46:14):
So yeah, I recommend people listen to all of them <laugh>, but those are some starting ones.

Laura Maylene Walter (46:21):
And then also quickly would love to hear a little bit about your work as an academic. You teach in the NEOMFA program at Cleveland State. I always run into writers who are curious about MFAs. They think they either need to have one, they have to do it or they have just a lot of anxiety around it. So curious more about your work and also if you would have any advice for an aspiring writer considering an MFA program.

Hilary Plum (46:46):
Yeah, I think that the MFA, it's like a complex question because the MFA has kind of occupies a fraught place in kind of some conversations, but they're usually not, you know, as I think Zach Peckham once wisely said, he's like, they're usually not talking about programs like the NEOMFA. They're talking about like Iowa and Columbia. Those conversations about the MFA and its relation to industry or aesthetics or things like that.

Hilary Plum (47:07):
So I think the MFA can be really, really useful because in a culture that just hates reading, <laugh> and art making <laugh>, it carves out this little bit of time and it lets you meet other people or helps you meet other people who are interested in that. Those relationships can be really powerful and that sense of taking yourself seriously in your practice as someone who's going to make literature and going to make art and make culture, it's a powerful way to do it. It's honestly not the only way to do it. Like people don't need to go do that. But I would always recommend that people seek out the good things about it in another form then, which are the community and kind of making sure that you're meeting other people and connecting including like collaborations that aren't perfect. You know, 'cause we can't do it on our own.

Hilary Plum (47:49):
There's a sense that writing is solitary, but it really isn't. It's very, very communal. And then also the sort of pressure, I mean is the main thing, just that we give deadlines <laugh>? Like you have to do it and you have to read a lot and you have to keep turning your writing in. That is very useful and it creates a kind of intensity that helps your work. It helps you try a lot of new things because we all have the things that we're good at and the things that we're less good at. And you don't want to just keep playing to your strengths.

Laura Maylene Walter (48:17):
I think I've said this before on the podcast, but I was in my thirties when I finally decided to do an MFA, and I already had already found literary community in other ways. I was already doing it, but I mostly wanted to leave my office job for a few years <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (48:31):
And you know, if, especially for the programs, if they're funded or if they provide health insurance or if you're able to swing it, being in an environment for two years with other people who so deeply care about poetry, about fiction, about trying to grow as a writer. Unfortunately, our world is not set up that way at large. And so if you can find these places, it can be really meaningful. And I mean, yes, people could argue that we shouldn't have to rely on academia or on these structured systems to do that, but that is one structure that can provide it for people. So I think that's good. The NEOMFA in particular, because I've guest-taught just a few courses there, and the type of students who are just so passionate and who are there, like really bringing it to the program and being so engaged in it...I think is really special. And it's a great thing for Northeast Ohio to have for sure.

Hilary Plum (49:24):
Yeah. And I love the NEOMFA. It's special place. I was just thinking when you said that you were like other people who are like, we shouldn't be relying on higher ed to do this. And I'm like, well, good news for you <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (49:35):
I know. I realize we could talk for another hour about that. It's so strange to be having these conversations right now, in some respect, in terms of the future of our academic institutions, which we all need, and the resources for writers that they provide. Think of all the literary journals that are published at universities and so much more. So listeners, this is beyond the scope of this conversation. We're already over the time we can't get into it.

Laura Maylene Walter (49:58):
But as we wrap up, if you're listening to this on the day it drops, and how could you not? I just assume everyone out there jumps to listen to their literary podcast as soon as it comes up, you know? But Hilary will be reading on May 21st at Loganberry Books for Literary Cleveland's Plum City reading series, the relatively new reading series, which is fantastic. And it is not named after Hilary <laugh>. "Plum" Is from that failed Cleveland city slogan, "Cleveland is a plum," which I think is from the eighties. So anyway Hilary will be reading, and if you're in the Cleveland area, please come out. And I think to wrap up, speaking of independent bookstores, where would you like to recommend that listeners buy STATE CHAMP?

Hilary Plum (50:42):
Oh my goodness. I mean, any anyone's personal beloved bookstore, I call you to. I live in Cleveland Heights, and I just love to go to Mac's Backs. That's a special place for me. So I'll say a little shout out to Mac's Backs <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (50:57):
Well, Hilary, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about your new book and to talk about writing and art and protest.

Hilary Plum (51:04):
Thank you so much for having me and for all your great questions.

Laura Maylene Walter (51:17):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review for Page Count wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more online or find the edited transcript for this episode at cpl.org/podcast/pagecount. Follow us on Instagram @ohiocenterforthebook or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org and put "podcast" in the subject line. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.