Writing As Paying Attention: An Interview with MC Hyland

photo of MC Hyland
photo of MC Hyland by Jeff Peterson

By Parmis Parsa

MC Hyland is a poet, scholar, publisher, professor, and public artist. Having published two-full-length books of poems: “THE END” (Sidebrow 2019) and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010), as well as being a founding editor at DoubleCross Press, she is already proving herself a noteworthy critic and artist. I had the opportunity to take a class called Reading as a Writer with her at New York University, which has been one of the most enjoyable college classes I have taken to date. Being or aspiring to be a writer in the 21st century is not easy, but when we see success stories like Hyland’s—poets who are capitalizing on their positions as both artist and teacher—we begin to view this endeavor as less daunting and more inspiring. I conducted this interview over email.

Could you describe what it feels like to work on a creative project that is close to your heart, or your writing in general, and finally have it shared with the public? How do you begin to form themes from small pieces you’ve worked on; when does the full picture start taking shape? And once the final product is produced, how do you respond to the critical reception received from it?

So I think there are two parts to this question: one about writing and one about publishing. As a writer, I’m a poet who works at the unit of the group of poems. I hardly ever sit down, feel inspired, and write a single poem. Honestly, I know there are writers for whom “inspiration” is a thing, but for me, writing is more like a muscle–I have to keep it in shape, and I do that by working on projects. I tend to come up with an idea of how I’ll write something long before I know what it’s about, and I also tend to write long projects that take a few years to complete. When I was younger, I didn’t understand that was my pace–it was a huge relief once I realized I didn’t have to be stressed about finding a new inspiration every week, that I could just give myself an assignment and go from there. So, for example, my book “THE END,” which came out this past summer, was a project where I wrote 100 poems, all of which were called “THE END,” and all of which were composed of sentences with similar syntax. I told myself, at the beginning, that I’d write a hundred of these poems, and as I was working on the project, I often told myself that my job was just to write short sentences (on my phone or in notebooks or sometimes on my computer), and not to think about how they went together until later. Once I had a page’s worth of sentences, I’d sit down and assemble them into a paragraph, and move them around until I liked the ways they were talking with one another. Sometimes that editing process made individual sentences mean different things than I’d first intended–I always find it really exciting when a piece of writing opens up in that way. Because that project was about hitting a target (100 poems, each at least a half-page long), I could think about form and about process, rather than about content, and that helped me write about a lot of subjects that would have been harder to come at head-on. 

Bravery Comes With Practice: An Interview with Alexander Chee

photo of Alexander Chee
photo of Alexander Chee by M. Sharkey

By Nick Fell

The following interview was conducted over email.

You probably get asked this a lot, but it feels like something that needs to be covered, especially in a publication for college students: what is/was your journey to the literary arts? Have you always been passionate about writing? 

Most of this is in my essay collection, but maybe what isn’t perhaps is this: I was a passionate reader as a child, more or less compulsive. But I also loved inventing stories, for myself and then for others. The first book I made up was for a book report in grade school. I did it to see if I could get away with it—could I invent a book in a book report such that my teacher wouldn’t catch it? I got away with it, and while I never felt the need to do this again, I was hooked on the idea of making something up (and getting away with it). If this seems dark, it could have been. 

What I found next was Dungeons & Dragons, as a Dungeon Master, which taught me the power of storytelling. And then a teacher in high school encouraged us to write journals, and that is where I learned to tell a story about myself that was true, as it were. I wrote my first poems in that journal, and he encouraged me to send them to a contest, which I then won.

Writing let me take the good (reading a lot) and the bad (seeing what I could get people to believe) and put it into the service of art. Using these powers for good, basically.