Contemporary Authors

• Tonight I'm Someone Else ( essays) Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2018

https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053407 Hodson, Chelsea, author. Essays. Selections Tonight I'm someone else : essays / Chelsea Hodson. First edition. New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2018. pages cm PS3608.O4747 A6 2018 ISBN: 9781250170194 (hardcover)

• Chelsea Hodson - http://chelseahodson.com/bio/

  About

  Chelsea Hodson is the author of the book of essays Tonight I'm Someone Else and the chapbook Pity the Animal. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Bennington College and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony and PEN Center USA Emerging Voices. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Catapult in New York and at Mors Tua Vita Mea in Sezze Romano, Italy.
  Contact

  Agent: Monika Woods, Curtis Brown, Ltd.: mmw@cbltd.com
  Professional Inquiries: chelseahodsonassistant@gmail.com
  Twitter: @chelseahodson
  Instagram: @chelseahodson_

Hodson, Chelsea: TONIGHT I'M SOMEONE ELSE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hodson, Chelsea TONIGHT I'M SOMEONE ELSE Henry Holt (Adult Nonfiction) $17.00 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-250-17019-4
An eerie and uncanny collection of essays.
"I gathered secrets like little pieces of survival, and I was so healthy," writes Hodson early on in the first essay of her debut collection. From the very beginning, the author sets up the tone of the book, which feels crystalized in time and space, oscillating between intoxicating and alienating, exciting and dull, genuine and contrived. Much of this collection of essays feels more related to fiction than nonfiction. The author's word choices capture entire worlds and emotional landscapes, so much so that readers might wonder whether she is indulging in autofiction. However, this is not a disservice to the book, which is filled with enough tangible instances of lived experience to capture reader attention. She shares unusual tips for modeling, one of her previous jobs: "I narrowed it down to one trick, one simple, private action: think of someone you want to touch whom you cannot touch, someone forbidden. Think of a room where there is nothing except the two of you: still, you cannot touch them. Think of the electricity between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence. Now, turn the camera into the face of the beloved and tell it everything." Hodson's language magnetizes and begs for attention without ever feeling overly needy. The author effectively meditates on the development of the self in a highly material world and on the function of female bodies in a society that systematically objectifies and commodifies them. "If I'm sold as an object," she writes, "then I'm no longer a threat. My mind spoken for, contained, no one waiting for proof, my body no longer my own." Such pointed observations pop up throughout the book, occasionally causing disorientation but successfully keeping readers longing for explanations, keeping the pages turning.
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A simultaneously bewildering and compelling body of work.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hodson, Chelsea: TONIGHT I'M SOMEONE ELSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375089/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=e2458173. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375089
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Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays
Publishers Weekly.
265.11 (Mar. 12, 2018): p49+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays Chelsea Hodson. Holt, $17 trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-1-250-17019-4
In this mixed debut collection, Hodson explores "the possibility of ruin, which is always present," in romance, art, and consumerism. Skillful description often takes the place of emotion in her writing, resulting in affectless exercises that reveal her fearless and sometime reckless curiosity, but don't analyze it. Hodson's best essays are those that are most narratively cohesive. "Pity the Animal" finds a relationship between bodily commodification and alienation by documenting Hodson's experience with fashion modeling and flirtation with working as an escort for a "sugar daddy" website that was "quite clearly, a loophole for prostitution." "I'm Only a Thousand Miles Away" observes obsession through her adolescent experience of being a boy-band fan and being the object of a stalker. "Small Crimes" details a platonic summer fling at age 13 with the cool girl at camp, a friendship that only existed because it had an "expiration date we both silently agreed to." These essays offer emotional heft and immersive storytelling. It's difficult to invest in other selections, though, particularly those about her relationships in later adolescence and in adulthood, since they tend to rely on opacity in place of specificity. Though even in the weakest entries Hodson produces some insight and humor, she is at her best working in more disciplined, narrative forms--an approach she embraces too rarely. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 12 Mar. 2018, p. 49+. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531285128/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2941c38d. Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531285128
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Book World: What is a woman's body
worth in America?
Maddie Crum
The Washington Post.
(June 8, 2018): News: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Maddie Crum
Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays By Chelsea Hodson
Holt. 191 pp. Paperback, $17
---
While working at American Apparel, Chelsea Hodson was given a free black bikini in exchange for wearing it in the store. At first, she was tentative, but after an hour she felt in sync with "capitalism's heartbeat," comfortable being viewed as an object in the eyes of customers. If being a woman in America meant performing a role for the benefit of others, she at least wanted to do it with complicity.
This brief anecdote comes from Hodson's essay "Pity the Animal," which appears in her debut book, "Tonight I'm Someone Else." Hodson, who grew up in the Southwest before moving to New York, where she now teaches writing, surveys a bevy of loosely related subjects in a small space. The effect is like clicking through a Wikipedia rabbit hole of her psyche. In "Pity the Animal," she draws connections between her career in retail, a YouTube video of a man talking with a stripper simulation in "Grand Theft Auto," Marina Abramoviyc's performance art, a hunting book from the 1930s and a profile she created on a site used by sex workers.
Several of the essays center on Hodson's feelings about the objectification and commodification of her body - while modeling, while running outdoors and while working at FedEx, where a customer ogled her daily. Her insights are surprising, as she resists the urge to moralize. Modeling, for example, wasn't an altogether negative experience; being touched and directed reminded her of her tender relationship with her mother.
Most of these pieces shift among scenes from Hodson's working life, high-drama moments from her romantic exploits and quotations from other writers, including Roland Barthes and Mary Ruefle. She tries on roles like outfits; she sheds them and moves on. Her style mirrors life online:
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fast-paced and disembodied.
In "I'm Only a Thousand Miles Away," Hodson remembers writing fan mail to a member of the pop band Hanson, convinced that the strength of her desire would bring the two of them together. Later, when her obsession had transferred to a Backstreet Boy, she felt her romantic illusions deflate as she stood in a crowd among thousands of equally adoring fans. Hodson relates this to the more quotidian ways we experience desire from a distance - while chatting online or on the phone. Alone in our bedrooms, tucked away from the world at large, false assumptions abound. In real life, we're more likely to have our beliefs and our desires challenged.
The collection's strongest essays tether the writer's academic interests to experiences from in her past - often from her childhood or the years she spent working in Tucson. In "Red Letters from a Red Planet," she describes doing PR for a NASA mission while she was committed to an unfulfilling and sometimes violent relationship. In "Second Row," she remembers falling for a singer at a punk venue, who in turn fell for a woman who looked just like her. In "Leaving Me," she reflects on her relationship with a classmate who shared her first name and who seemed to her like a more alluring Chelsea. In these pieces, we're made to feel the uncanniness of living in a body. That they are set in Hodson's native Arizona - where her friends carried guns in holster belts, "Wild West-style" - makes the mood of the collection that much more dream-like. It's not hard to understand why Miranda July - a surreal writer herself - is a fan.
Less affecting are the essays that remain in the realm of the cerebral, dealing in Lydia Davis-like non sequiturs, single-line insights stacked on top of each other. These micro-stories are at times undercooked ("When the astronaut spent a year in space, he grew two inches taller, just because he could."), and might even puzzle the most ardent fans of abstraction. I found myself wanting to know what these observations meant to Hodson and was pleased when her koans were more direct, e.g., "Being underestimated is a form of power"; "Like any tool, heartbreak dulls.
The collection's greatest strength may be Hodson's self-awareness. Writing of her desire to be "fractional," or not wholly seen, she joins a body of women writers whose subject is their own self-destruction as a means of escaping domestic ennui. But she observes that, unlike women with fewer privileges, she's always had the option to return to safety. "Girls like me - we get to choose when and where to look," she writes. "We get to choose for how long and when to turn away - that's the real privilege."
These lucid insights, and Hodson's transfixing style, mark a memorable first collection. ---
Crum is a writer living in New York. Her work has appeared in Vulture, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Huffington Post.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Crum, Maddie. "Book World: What is a woman's body worth in America?" Washington Post, 8
June 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541835355 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=3f5e1503. Accessed 14 July 2018.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A541835355
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"Hodson, Chelsea: TONIGHT I'M SOMEONE ELSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375089/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e2458173. Accessed 14 July 2018. "Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 12 Mar. 2018, p. 49+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531285128/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2941c38d. Accessed 14 July 2018. Crum, Maddie. "Book World: What is a woman's body worth in America?" Washington Post, 8 June 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541835355/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=3f5e1503. Accessed 14 July 2018.

• Nylon
  https://nylon.com/articles/chelsea-hodson-tonight-im-someone-else-interview
  Word count: 2199

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  Chelsea Hodson Writes About Women’s Desires, And Moments Of Heat
  ‘Tonight I’m Someone Else’ is out tomorrow
  by Kristin Iversen · June 04, 2018
  Chelsea Hodson Writes About Women’s Desires, And Moments Of Heat

  "It's an honor to be so distracted, so consumed, to leave my mind"—Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else

  An hour before I met Chelsea Hodson, the sky over New York was cloudless; a tight, thin, white-blue membrane over the city, the kind that makes it easy to forget that, basically, there are infinite miles of darkness beyond it. But by the time we entered a restaurant in Chinatown, choosing a table right next to a wall of open, floor-to-ceiling windows, the sky had shifted into something heavy and low and gray. And at the exact—or close to exact—moment we sat down, a giant gust of wind swept in through those windows, clearing most of the restaurant's tables of their place settings and knocking down vase after vase of flowers, so that the floor was instantly covered in pools of water and recumbent white carnations.

  This felt appropriate, as Hodson's debut essay collection, Tonight I'm Someone Else, recounts story after story of near-disaster, almost-destruction, "the possibility of ruin"; those times when you most realize the fragility of the world and your place in it. It also offers something else, a chance to look at the ways in which we avoid disaster, how we sometimes do so through mere chance, and other times, we survive thanks to something more innate, through our intuition. All to say, our table was one of the few that remained unscathed in those first few moments of the storm, before the windows were closed, and the rain really started to come down.

  I'd had a semi-strange experience reading Hodson's book, in that I wasn't reading one copy but going back and forth between the two copies in my possession; I kept one in my bag and the other by my bed, and would pick up with one where I'd left off with the other, though it was always an imperfect exercise, because I read the same pages more than once, underlining different parts along the way, noticing different things in the same words, transferring my experience and energy, warping it ever so slightly, along the way.

  "It almost lends itself well to the book," Hodson said to me after I told her how I'd been reading, "where these multiple selves exist, and there's all the doubling."

  These multiple selves of which Hudson speaks are a key part of the quicksilver feeling of these essays, the mercurial slipperiness on the page, reflecting the lightning fast way the mind can conjure up a million different realities, all in the amount of time it takes for a stoplight to turn from red to green. Though these essays portray different parts of Hodson's life—from an intense, adolescent best friendship at a summer camp, to a part-time early job at a copy shop, to spontaneous moves to unfamiliar cities, to Hodson's boundary exploring work as a performance artist—they don't exist in any kind of chronological order, because, as Hodson explained to me, "It’s not what I’m interested in writing. I don’t need a neat beginning, middle, and end. I've always embraced both reading and writing in a more messy sense, that we can be both good and bad at the same time, or that something makes no sense and there is no ending. I’m excited about that ambiguity and mess."

  That excitement about ambiguity and messiness is palpable on the page, only Hodson explores these maybe amorphous concepts with a crystalline lucidity, pulling abstract concepts into focus, as if life were one big magic eye poster, one wildly colorful blur that suddenly takes on a specific form once you've finally let your eyes relax. Her ability to find definition in chaos is, in part, due to the spare nature of Hodson's prose, which speaks to her background in both poetry and journalism (not normally two fields that merge, or merge so well), but also it feels reflective of her work as a performance artist, a medium grounded in spontaneity and reactiveness, something that seems deliberately at odds with the planned nature, the excessive editing and reparative aspects, of writing.

  "I’ve been thinking a lot about how performance plays into writing itself, how the element of persona plays into writing essays," Hodson explained. "Even if I’m able to tune it out, deep down knowing that I want it to be out in the world someday, that changes how I describe something or look at something. That idea of doing something without performing is something I have to work on and practice."

  It's interesting, of course, to think about performance in non-fiction, if only because so many people don't want to admit the role that perspective plays in the telling of truth—whatever truth means. One of the parts of Hodson's writing that resonates deeply is her refusal to participate in the notion that an essay needs to be a point-by-point recitation of facts; that it needs data in order to be honest. In playing with the idea of truth—among her lines I underlined most emphatically: "It seems I might be able to pretend anything into existence... It might be my greatest work: inventing the problems of my life"—Hodson subverts the traditional notion of the essay, and, in doing so, gets to some higher plane of understanding. She said to me:

  The reader thinks everything is the truth, or at least as close to the truth as it can be, but then I’ll lift off into a very fictional realm, where it’s clear that it’s impossible. Like in "Pity the Animal," there’s a part where I end up on an island where there’s versions of myself on all-fours. I like the idea of these surrealistic images appearing within something that’s more straightforward or more devoted to the truth. You can definitely do that in fiction, but, for me, I’m more interested in blurring that line in something that, on the cover, says “essays," where I'm almost dancing in between these ideas.

  This blurring of the truth is also something that feels distinctly feminine, a reminder of all the ways in which women are told that their truths, their experiences, are not the "real" ones, or at least not the ones that matter. "Facts" are often a synonym for the kind of terse recounting of events that have been a hallmark of the male experience, while "feelings" are those ephemeral things used to dismiss women who speak out about their pain and their fears. Female intuition plays a big role in many of Hodson's essays, and, she explained to me, she was interested in exploring the concept because she felt like she hadn't "yet read about that almost female intuition, that I feel like sometimes I’m able to tune into, where it feels almost impossible to describe, which makes it ripe to explore... I’m always interested in the leftover animal parts of ourselves. The things that are still present but were more important centuries ago, but that are still lingering in our bodies, even if they are no longer present all the time."

  Another element of the animal self, something which has been, it feels, light bulb-ed and smart phone-d out of existence, is our innate relationship to time. Where once our bodies were attuned to some universal rhythm, we now have different ways of experiencing the cosmic patterns all around us. Hodson is aware of this loss, and of the ways in which time can stretch as long as a piece of taffy between ever-parting fingers—endlessly, until there's an end. She told me about the role she feels time played in an instance of her female intuition, when she realized that a man who had been stalking her at her job would not be doing so anymore: "Time almost slowed, it became something unimportant. Time felt amorphous, like, not linear at all. Time felt simultaneously super-short and like I’d been there all day."

  And whereas many writers might fear exploring something so ambiguous as that within the realm of an essay, Hodson had no such qualms, and told me: "I like the way nonfiction can mess with that, where you can have one second last 10 pages. It seems so ripe for literature." She explained to me that this type of exploration of the temporal is one reason that "there’s a lot of driving in the book," because it lent itself to "all this empty alone time in between all these moments of heat."

  This, then, is what Hodson does with real artistry, sliding back and forth between the quotidian languorousness of life and those electric crackles of enlightenment, those times when we feel like we've seen beyond the veils, lifted the mask from our eyes, and discovered the way things actually are. The world will doubtlessly blur again, and we'll need to go on searching for new experiences that offer that same electrifying sensation, that opportunity for enlightenment, but we'll know those white-hot moments are out there. And we're lucky to have Hodson writing about them; as she told me not long before we headed back out into the yellow-gray world of a post-storm New York, where everything was cooler and wetter and softer: "There’s a lot more to be written about women’s desires in particular. And there’s space for me to contribute to that... I’m interested in documenting these moments of heat."

  Tonight I'm Someone Else is available for purchase here, starting June 5.

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• The Negatives
  http://jaaronsanders.com/thenegatives/2018/05/29/interview-with-chelsea-hodson/
  Word count: 2697

  May 29, 2018 By Admin
  Interview with Chelsea Hodson

  I met Chelsea at a book launch party when Lauren Cerand, the publicist, introduced us. I recognized her name from literary events around New York City, but hadn’t heard her read. She promised to send me a copy of her forthcoming book, Tonight I’m Someone Else, and a few days later it appeared in my mailbox.

  I began reading the collection with curiosity. My first reaction was how she had captured a certain kind of melancholy. Throughout the essays, we see a constant struggle to fit in, like when she works for NASA, and a desire to escape, like when she travels from city to city without telling anyone. There are darker moments, like the commodification of her body, and lighter ones, such as when she confesses to having been a fan of teen pop sensation Hanson.

  I caught up with Chelsea at our neighborhood bar to discuss Tonight I’m Someone Else, documenting her life, pretending to be people on the internet, and how she is finally learning to be less private.

  ***

  MACALLEN: I know a few of the essays had been published already, but did you conceive of this originally as a collection or were they written as standalone essays?

  HODSON: Years ago, I felt I was working on a collection for a while years ago, but it felt very young to me. I couldn’t quite parse what themes I was even working with. I started writing the essays after college, so I was still finding out what I was even interested in beyond poetry.

  MACALLEN: You were involved a particular poetry scene in New York City that I feel excludes itself intentionally from the more mainstream literary and book publishing community.

  HODSON: Yes, I think it does reject that in a lot of ways. What I first became involved with was the now-extinct “alt lit” world. When I moved to New York, that was big—I liked that world a lot and that’s how I met a lot of people I still know today. Those were the readings I went to when I wasn’t working.

  As I write about in the essay “Pity the Animal,” I had studied journalism in collge, but I had a lot of trouble getting a job in journalism without having a full-time internship. I was down to do it part-time as an unpaid internship to prove I could do it, but I needed to have another job, and nobody wanted to let me do that. So I thought, well, I guess I won’t be a journalist.

  MACALLEN: The unpaid internship is a huge gatekeeper. You have to have the ability to work for free for a certain number of years.

  HODSON: It was never my dream to be a journalist anyway—if it was, I would have fought harder. It’s just what I studied and I really liked the training—things like getting rid of adjectives and useless extra word. That really impacted my poetry and then my essays. I like having studied journalism without having to pursue it. I feel at ease with that.

  MACALLEN: Do you find yourself approaching these personal elements as a journalist would and trying to pick apart the facts?

  HODSON: In the beginning I did. With “Pity the Animal,” it started as more academic than personal. I thought, “People will take this seriously if I do all this research and keep myself out of it,” and I approached it in a journalistic way. It was boring to me and I think it was a boring essay, so it evolved into something else, something more personal.

  MACALLEN: A lot of this is you being in these experiences. It has the feeling of Gonzo journalism. Were you looking at those elements?

  HODSON: To be honest, I think a lot of that has to do with listening to This American Life as a teenager. In high school, I heard Ira Glass speak about putting the personal into journalism and that is essentially what pushed me in that direction. It allowed me to say: it’s not invalid for me to be in it. I think once I started embracing that combination, things started to happen. In the beginning, the writing was very formalized and the later essays are much more instinctual.

  MACALLEN: Even though you are putting yourself in the essays, a lot of these are about playing other people and playing different characters on the internet. You must know the classic A/S/L [age / sex / location] from early days of internet chatting.

  HODSON: Oh, yeah. I used to say I was 13/f/Miami when I was a fifteen-year-old in Phoenix. I remember thinking Miami sounding very exotic and exciting. It’s like fiction in that way. I would go into chat rooms and try to lure people in thinking I was cool. I don’t remember how far it would extend–never more than a day at a time.

  The internet conversations I mention in the book were from a site called Purple Moon, which was pre-Instant Messenger. It was a CD-Rom game with an accompanying website that had a chat system on the site itself. The site had predatory men using it in addition to the young girls, which was scary and exciting, and that’s why I was interested in writing about it.

  MACALLEN: Did you ever feel you were the predator in those situations?

  HODSON: I definitely wasn’t the predator, but I remember being able to mirror them really well, which is a weird thing to reckon with. People underestimate young girls’ ability to emulate adult behavior.

  MACALLEN: I think this segues naturally into discussing your time as a model and having people touch you. Do you see those internet sessions as having prepared you? Were you having an out of body experience as a model? You were playing these characters online…

  HODSON: Yeah, it is a lot like acting. I never formally acted, but there’s definitely a link between those two, between taking on something for the day. I always felt like I was out of place. How did I end up in the NASA room in a historic place, and then how did I become a model? I had these moments throughout my life where I was like: how did I get here? It was such a strange place to end up and I have had that feeling several times. What decisions led to these points? The essays are a way of exploring those questions.

  MACALLEN: Are there any regrets of those decisions?

  HODSON: I’m trying to document those moments that stayed with me whether they were good or bad. I generally don’t regret anything that I feel taught me an important lesson.

  MACALLEN: I never got the impression from these essays that there was a moment of “I can’t believe I did that!” But was that you masking that or was that intentional?

  HODSON: I think of the essays as a portrait of something and not always having a reflective response to it. It is about writing it in a vivid way that describes the emotions I had at the time. I’m not interested in writing, “Now that I’m sitting in a chair looking back on this…” I always cross out those kinds of phrases. I find it weighs the prose down. I like events to have a heat to them, and reflecting on the events cools it down.

  MACALLEN: In any kind of narrative, you have to worry about keeping that drama there. You’re dealing with real events. Were you worried more about keeping true to what happened or with holding onto the drama?

  HODSON: In some instances, I would simply work around the real events in order to keep a sensation going. In “The Id Speaks” essays, for instance, those are composites of people, so, instead of slowing down to describe multiple people, it just becomes a “you.” I don’t think of that as a lie. Those essays are meant to be documents of a sensation, not a narrative memoir.

  MACALLEN: As a poet, I think there’s some of that influence in terms of the fractional narratives. Like “The End of Longing,” is more like individual aphorisms. Is that a way of bending those truths and getting around the fact that a story is maybe worth telling but doesn’t have a traditional narrative structure?

  HODSON: Yes, certainly. Some of those aphorisms are things I tried and failed to write a whole essay about. At some point, I realized, maybe they work better as a one or two or three-sentence story. That’s not sad to me, that’s perhaps all the space they deserve.

  MACALLEN: There are a few of the essays that are very short and that variation in length I really enjoyed. Were you worried about that? Was it an anxiety-producing moment of structure?

  HODSON: I have a lot of obsessive compulsive tendencies, so ideally, all of the essays would look the same and be the same length. But I wanted there to be more variation in the collection, so I just had to fight my instincts. My partner is a musician and he helped me think about collecting the essays and ordering them the way an album is organized with a variation in rhythm. That helped a lot.

  MACALLEN: He comes up several times in your essays. Did you show the essays to him in their early phases?

  HODSON: No, but that’s mainly because I didn’t really show them to anyone. I’m extremely private about my writing, but I’m trying to become less private. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing, I just felt protective of them at the time. The only people who were reading the essays were my teachers and that’s because I had to.

  MACALLEN: Some of these narratives are about a dark part of your past. Have you shared, not necessarily the essay, but the background of the essays with the people close to you?

  HODSON: Not really. Despite writing such a personal book, I’m extremely private. There’s a line in the book that goes, “I like seeing my friends but I don’t want to tell them about my life,” and that’s true. I genuinely enjoy learning about other people and am content not disclosing anything. Again, I don’t think that’s a good thing, necessarily, it’s just how I am.

  MACALLEN: You have that essay about all the times you went places without telling people. Do you still do that?

  HODSON: No, I don’t really. That essay was about the excitement that can exist within a secret. I really romanticized it.

  MACALLEN: You talk a lot about money. Is that an ongoing anxiety? There are things you do to monetize your body, and you write about American Apparel and how they cast you as a specific type of person.

  HODSON: I resisted writing about American Apparel at first because I prefer not to use company names in my essays… it feels gross to me sometimes. My editor proposed the idea of writing about what money means to me, so I tried writing about working in retail because it had a big impact on me and how I approach life and work. I think American Apparel is weirdly interesting now that it’s dead and the culture of it is totally lost. It was very early 2000’s.

  MACALLEN: It was this dreamscape of the mid-aughts.

  HODSON: It felt like it was going to last forever.

  MACALLEN: It did. And then the economy collapsed, the dream of American Apparel collapsed.

  HODSON: Money has always been an anxiety for me. I worked full time throughout college. I moved to New York with the promise of one part-time job then I immediately piled on other part-time jobs. I had a couple full-time jobs after that and always quit them. I don’t like the structure of them and I honestly prefer when every week feels different—I still like that element of fitting different jobs together in that kind of freelance way.

  MACALLEN: How is freelancing as a lifestyle? Do you find yourself doing all sorts of weird things at weird times?

  HODSON: I like the unreliability of freelancing in a way—it keeps me alert. And I like that I can work really hard for one day and then maybe take the next day off, or take a nap in the middle of the day. That kind of freedom has been really good for my mental health.

  MACALLEN: You write in the collection, “I’m trying to write down my life before it’s too late.” Do you find yourself feeling that you’re running out of time?

  HODSON: I don’t have that active anxiety but I do think there’s a sense, like a neurosis, or an anxiety about being the one to tell my story. I feel possessive of it. I have a lot of friends and ex-partners who are artists and there is something about me where I want to be the one to tell my story.

  MACALLEN: Do you worry about the people around you–about what they have to say about you, about their right to tell their story?

  HODSON: I am very mindful of it. Not when I’m writing about it, but I am mindful of it afterwards. I’ve made writing the top priority in my life, and I’ve caused suffering for other people based on that sometimes selfish devotion to my own work. Any time you write about someone, it’s inherently a reduction of who they actually are, and therefore it’s perhaps offensive or problematic no matter how you do it. Whenever I write about someone, I think about it as an act of love, but I understand that the people being written about won’t always see it in the same light.

  MACALLEN: Have people written about you at this point?

  HODSON: Yes.

  MACALLEN: Do you ever want to respond to those people in writing?

  HODSON: Yes.

  MACALLEN: Are any of these essays reacting to anyone specific?

  HODSON: Yes, but I won’t disclose any more than that. Writers and artists are always responding to something. None of the essays are written out of revenge, but one of them is written as a response. I think there is an energy in knowing that I’m responding to someone or something in particular.

  Ian MacAllen‘s fiction has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Joyland Magazine, Queen Mob’s Tea House, and elsewhere; his nonfiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Fiction Advocate, The Billfold, and elsewhere. He is the Deputy Editor of The Rumpus, holds an MA in English from Rutgers University, and lives in Brooklyn.

  Filed Under: Archive, Columnist, Featured Columnist Tagged With: American Apparel, Brooklyn, Chelsea Hodson, Electric Literature, Fiction Advocate, Gonzo Journalism, Ian MacAllen, Ira Glass, Joyland Magazine, NASA, Pity the Animal, Purple Moon, Queen Mob's Tea House, Rutgers University, The End of Longing, The Id Speaks, The Rumpus, This American Life, Tonight I'm Someone Else, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
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• The Lifted Brow
  https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2018/6/7/hieroglyphs-a-review-of-chelsea-hodsons-tonight-im-someone-else-by-emma-marie-jones
  Word count: 1734

  ‘Hieroglyphs: a review of Chelsea Hodson’s “Tonight I’m Someone Else”’, by Emma Marie Jones
  June 8, 2018

  Macmillan

  When I was in love with someone who didn’t love me I went to a psychic because I needed to be told otherwise. I was young, I was captivated by the narrative of my own longing. The psychic told me I would have a baby. I knew it would be his, I knew we were connected. We must be. I loved him so much I had gone looking for him in my future and so he would be there, it was certain.

  While the psychic told me that his reasons for not loving me were circumstantial, I imagined what he might be doing. It felt necessary to make my movements anticipate his movements. There was, in my body, a desperate blind faith in the kinetic. I would cast myself into ancient forms that would supplicate me to him, that his eyes would understand but his brain would not, that would make him love me. If I put my arms this way—if I painted my lips this way; if I held objects in the ways I had been taught—I could become the figure that was loved by him and him alone. I could change the future even in the moment that the psychic was making it concrete.

  I told the psychic: circumstances can be overcome. I know that this is true because I took home an audio recording of the session. There was determination in my young voice! But he never loved me. He got a different girlfriend.

  I have lived like a hieroglyph. I have stared out of windows with a face composed especially for staring out of windows. Do our bodies speak languages, or are they their own languages? We are messages, forces, we pull near to one another, we orbit and collide. Our bodies surge with secret power like rivers after rain. Desire, admiration, aspiration, envy: the essays in Chelsea Hodson’s collection Tonight I’m Someone Else know this surge, they ride it effortlessly. The writing is turbulent, fluid. As the surge passes from one body to another, both bodies change; sometimes they don’t know that they are doing it, the passing or the surging or the changing, although of course, sometimes they do.

  Of all the essays, ‘Red Letters from a Red Planet’ perhaps does most overtly what the collection does, implicitly, as a whole: it takes bodies and turns them into signs, it makes the bodies communicate, implicitly and explicitly, with each other and with the reader. In ‘Red Letters’, two of the bodies are the body of Hodson and the body of her bad-boy boyfriend Cody, which orbit one another in Tucson, Arizona in a way that is normal, predictable, human. The other two bodies are the body of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander and the body of Mars, which interact with one another in ways that make a lot of humans—both in the essay and in memory, in the real world—hold their breath and watch, amazed.

  Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University.

  In ‘The End of Longing’, Hodson writes, “A poem is a way of talking to the person you’re not supposed to talk to anymore”. Hodson’s poems are breathless and surprising. I didn’t think it would be possible for an essay to do what a poem does in a way that is somehow wilder and more human but then—there is knowing that a Martian day, a sol, is forty minutes longer than an Earth day—there is loving a man for the very brutality with which he does not love you back—and there are swift, broad strokes of voice that draw these things together so that they become necessary to one another, so that there could not be a photograph of Mars in my mind without a Tucson I’ve never been to, without a Cody I have never met or loved.

  I read my horoscope, and it tells me there is more power in surrender than in the illusion of control. I think about Donald Trump looking at the total solar eclipse without those special sunglasses. I think about the psychic, telling me my love was unrequited. The planets move vastly, with or without arcane power, around us. I will never touch Mars, maybe I will never touch Arizona, but they both impact me every day, in ways unknown to them and to me. Are Donald Trump’s eyes more invincible than the eyes of other people? Are horoscopes only rendered impotent when you think they are trash? Or can you just become immune to powers that you don’t believe in?

  If such disbelief is a force, conviction is its necessary twin. My bodily certainty, at the table of the psychic: but he loves me back. Saying something aloud doesn’t always make it true, but then again: Mars is dusty and the Phoenix is searching for water. It has this one robotic arm that is always reaching. Hodson recalls overhearing someone at a press conference say: “We will find water; it is there. It was the same tone I used”, she writes, “to announce that I loved who I loved”. With what certainty I have loved! And Hodson loves, certainly, she loves Cody. She loves him even though…yes. She loves him anyway.

  As a teenage girl I had one of those friendships that ruined me while at the same time giving me concrete form. She was someone I loved, someone I never stopped loving, yet she filled me with a hatred and envy so deep and profound I thought I would die. She was bold, she was pretty; I don’t know what I offered the friendship, perhaps in retrospect I was clever and the boys who adored her appreciated my jokes. I don’t know what she does now, it would be easy to find out but I haven’t tried. Her pull is surely still greater than my resistance.
  Every teenage girl has situated herself somewhere on that spectrum of toxic, urgent intimacy

  It’s a classic trope, it’s Lila and Lenù, it’s Cher and Tai, it’s Heidi and LC. Every teenage girl has situated herself somewhere on that spectrum of toxic, urgent intimacy. In ‘Small Crimes’, Hodson enters such a friendship with Bianca, made fleeting by the confines of summer camp. Summer camp! I was a bookish child, I was always reading about wealthy girls in the American wilderness, restless in their cabins. I learned from them about pining: pining for boys across lakes, pining for friends at home, pining for the lost limbs of childhood, limbs that would be cumbersome with womanhood by the end of summer.

  The body of Bianca is like this, arrested by Hodson’s curious gaze in its moments of transformation. Doubling, Bianca is arrested again by Hodson’s retrospect; a retrospect still tinged with curiosity, because of course even though Hodson later went through changes of her own they were foreshadowed by what she had already seen. Tampons in a duffel bag, words like dick and rape, lipstick on the rim of a glass. The two girls set out into the darkness, led by desires Hodson doesn’t yet feel or understand. But the body wants to want. The body orbits its models and learns how to become its future self. In ‘The End of Longing’, Hodson writes, “A theory my friend has: sleepovers are where girls learn to wake up in love. Remember when we knew our friends’ bodies as well as our own?” My teenage friend would sleep in her bed, and I on the floor, I would fall asleep by matching my breathing to her breathing. A thousand secrets hung in the air between us like living things.

  Proximity, maybe, is the surging force, the secret power that pushes our bodies around like they’re dumb things at some casual mercy. There is a scramble for proximity in the magnetism, orbiting, and harm of ‘Red Letters’; there is an urgent proximity in the mirroring and learning of ‘Small Crimes’. Proximity becomes gendered in the collection’s exploration of themes of touch, beauty, and looking in ‘Simple Woman’.

  Hodson was a model. In ‘Simple Woman’ she writes about it in a way that is blunt and deft and clean, there is no filmic glamour. What Hodson remembers about modelling is the touching of her body, how makeup artists and hairdressers would pat or brush her in ways that felt maternal. There is an equation implicit in this recollection: being beautiful means being touched. What Hodson thinks about when she turns her face to the camera is touch. She commands us to try it: “Think of the electricity between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence.” It is this private anticipation, the imagining of another person’s skin and its nearness to the boundary of the self, that makes a face worth photographing.
  There is an equation implicit in this recollection: being beautiful means being touched. What Hodson thinks about when she turns her face to the camera is touch

  A body is an object – yes. A body is a spectacle – yes, too. In Tonight I’m Someone Else, all bodies, the motionless body and the object-body, the celestial body and the mundane body, the growing, changing body and the celebrity body, have their own power and allure. All of them speak differently, and all of them have proximity to, or perhaps momentarily engulf and become, Hodson’s. And as I read, mine.

  Emma Marie Jones is a Melbourne-based writer, and the author of Something to Be Tiptoed Around, a work of experimental memoir shortlisted for the Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers in 2015 and to be released by Grattan Street Press in June 2018. She's a PhD candidate and teacher of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, and is currently working on her first novel.
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• The Believer
  https://logger.believermag.com/post/chelsea-hodson
  Word count: 3617

  An Interview with Writer Chelsea Hodson
  June 5, 2018
  Illustration by Jack Dylan

  Illustration by Jack Dylan
  “IT'S MORE INTERESTING IF THE READER IS UNCERTAIN ABOUT WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT'S NOT."

  Places Chelsea Hodson Has Imagined Herself:
  “The tops of cliffs”
  “A flooded canyon”
  “An island where former versions of [herself] gallop around on all fours”

  When I read an essay, I’m often on a self-interested adventure away from myself. In order to investigate some private question of mine—or maybe just for fun—I want to ramble through other thoughts, other places, other times. But because essay-reading mostly happens in my head, I’m also on a self-contained adventure away from myself. All my readerly rambling never actually breaks loose from my own mind. Lately I’ve been looking for writers who make the most of that paradox, of the vast and multiplex universe that language reveals in our self-bound experiences. Chelsea Hodson is one of those writers.

  In her new book of essays, Tonight I’m Someone Else, Hodson contemplates first-person engagement with distant possibilities in ways both mundane and sublime. On using a treadmill with a video screen, she writes: “Running outside is real, but what I want is the less real: I want the path unfolding on a screen in front of me, I want to run through a place I’ve never been.” Even while considering the most monotonous, solitary chore, she regards possibilities for something dreamily different.

  I was struggling to eat a baguette in a Brooklyn café when Hodson sat down to talk to me about her new book. Its essays are everything my baguette-consumption wasn’t: precise about the most mysterious things, cool, and thoughtfully exploratory. They take the reader through Hodson’s work for a NASA Mars mission, her involvement in Marina Abramović’s Generator exhibition, and her wide-ranging encounters with peril from Arizona to New York. From the title on, Tonight I’m Someone Else draws upon a concentrated attention to self that leads continually toward something new.

  —Adam Colman

  I. Just a Feeling

  THE BELIEVER: I found this recurring idea in Tonight I'm Someone Else of getting beyond the self even while self-focusing. How did you go about coming up with that?

  CHELSEA HODSON: At a certain point I just noticed that I was really interested in writing and documenting moments of intensity. That seemed to be coming from a death drive, or a self-destructive tendency, testing boundaries in sometimes dangerous ways. Those are what stuck out in my mind as formative moments, maybe. That’s where I started leaning into it.

  BLVR: Did you always have an interest in the death drive before reading Freud—did you just intuit “death drive”?

  CH: I think from a very young age, I’ve been drawn to people who were dangerous. I was drawn to the bad girl who had seen all the R-rated movies at age twelve and could tell me about them. I’ve always been interested in people who don’t seem to think about rules or have no concept of boundaries. My sense of boundaries and rules are very clear, to the point where I have a desire to test them because I feel so bound by them.

  BLVR: Can you talk a little more about the vicariousness you’re describing? It seems related to this line, in your essay “Pity the Animal”: “I had a desire to watch the world, admire it from a balcony that held no authority.” It seems like a counterintuitive choice for a first-person, lyric-essay project.

  CH: I think that as an often passive person—who was a passive child, versus an active rules-breaking child—I’m interested in seeing things from other people's perspective. I like reality television, for example. I find myself sucked in again and again purely because I think I’m attracted to the mundane. I really like the sensation of feeling like I’m momentarily living someone else’s life.

  BLVR: Throughout the essays, there does seem to be a sense of inhabiting a mood intensely. Is that a priority for you over narrative?

  CH: In some ways, yeah. But I’m very aware of taking a reader along with me. In early drafts, I’ll collect moments of intensity or memories that stand out, and then put them together in a list. Years ago I maybe would have stopped there. I would have been like, “I collected them and that’s enough.” But as I wrote “Pity the Animal,” the first essay I wrote in this collection, I noticed how interacting with other texts helped me form my own narrative, even if it's just the narrative of what I think.

  BLVR: What other texts?

  CH: The books that show up. That’s why I included the German horror movie, Der Fan. I’d written a version of that essay (“I’m Only a Thousand Miles Away”) before about my stalker, but it didn’t have the right tone to me because nothing happened to me, it was just a feeling, so how do you write an essay or a narrative about a feeling? To me it spoke to other moments of my life where maybe I was the person watching, and toeing that line of almost stalking at the level of teen-girl fandom. By bringing that movie in, and talking about the movie, I was able to piece things together in a way that felt satisfying to me, whereas in the previous version of the essay, I was just talking about me working at the copy shop, it just felt very expected. The girl is the victim, the guy is the aggressor. I’m more interested in where those lines are blurred or where the roles switch in some ways.

  BLVR: Is there an ideal reader experience for this book?

  CH: I wouldn’t say there’s an ideal. I really like whenever people say that it feels like a dream. I write about dream logic and things not quite making sense but going along anyway. One thing leads to the next leads to the next. I am aware of wanting it to be readable in that sense. I don’t want to be so obscure that you don’t really know where you are. But I like the combination of having something really physical, starting with the physical body and then lifting off into a more lyric space, a more meditative state.

  II. Expansive Thinking

  BLVR: I noticed that the word “imagination” doesn’t come up in your writing much, even when it seems like it’s a factor. Are you trying to sidestep a certain tradition of stodgy ideas about the imagination?

  CH: I think you’re giving me a lot of credit by implying that I would do that intentionally. It’s more interesting to me if the reader is uncertain about what is real and what’s not. When I talk about an island where there are versions of myself running around on all fours, it’s presented as if that is possible. Instead of saying “I imagine myself” I think it’s more interesting to present it. Obviously it’s not real.

  BLVR: It makes me think of these moments where fiction seamlessly emerges or half-emerges from these nonfiction essays.

  CH: I just haven’t written enough fiction to designate that in my head, like, “Oh, this is a short story now.” I always pursued the pieces in this book as essays.

  BLVR: You can indulge fictional moments, always recognizing that they're moments—they can’t take over the essay.

  CH: Right. The closest to what we’re talking about is maybe the “Id Speaks” sections of the book. In those, I’m imagining my id literally speaking. Some of it is based on something real, but it’s really just an imagining of the most hungry, lustful, disgusting part of yourself speaking. What would it say? What would it look like? I liked the idea of that existing in a book of essays instead of a book of short stories.

  BLVR: Often this speculative tendency in your essays seems to direct things toward vast spaces. Even moments when you're thwarted or in some way confined actually exist within or lead into spaces for more expansive thinking, whether that means the desert, the void of outer space, or the ocean.

  CH: I like the idea of being alone or with one other person in a very anonymous-seeming space. That’s what I really liked about the desert. I could be downtown with my friend at night and it felt like a movie set. It infuses a different level of tension to something than if you’re amongst people or at a party or something.

  BLVR: There's an almost addictive sense of wanting and craving in these essays. Yet you never let it get hyper-focused on the craved thing. Do you have ways of narrating yearning, craving, and wanting without getting too laser-focused?

  CH: I think for me it comes out of trying to describe the object of my longing to someone else in the form of writing. There’s a part in one of the essays that’s like, “The best way I can think to describe you to someone is...” and I go off. It’s impossible to translate someone’s essence to language and to prose. It’s like: what stays with me enough to help someone understand what was so desirable about that event or that person?

  BLVR: So the act of mediating through language automatically opens it up?

  CH: I think so.

  BLVR: Could you talk some more about how you characterize non-you characters?

  CH: I usually start by writing super descriptive, and super identifiable. Then I take out lines that I don’t think are adding anything. Certain parts do provide identifiable details, but I felt that they were necessary and that they weren’t hurtful. That’s where I draw the line, or at least try.

  BLVR: Has anyone ever approached you and said “I recognize myself in that”?

  CH: Not enough people have read it yet. I’m sure someone will say that.

  BLVR: It’ll be okay.

  CH: I accept it. I’m interested in documenting parts of my life and presenting it as such. If I didn’t commit to that, then it would be fiction, which is fine. But that’s not what I’m interested in portraying. I like the idea of having a document from my life.

  BLVR: You would say this is a documentary project.

  CH: The fictionalized aspects, to me they're still very true to my life. If it’s a meditative essay, then I think they're in some way warranted. You can go off on that fictional tangent and come back.

  III. "Almost" Moments

  BLVR: Is the modular approach that I see in a lot of the essays a constraint you impose, or does it just happen?

  CH: I think it’s the result of free writes. I’ll write a lot in the beginning. And after I feel like I have enough of a draft to work with, I’ll physically cut it out and rearrange it. Even if it’s a block of text, I’ll cut out the parts that I feel like could be paragraphs and see how they feel. My work can feel imaginary to me if it’s inside my computer. It helps me to see it laid out, and only then do I have the key to the next step. It’s very much like piecing together a puzzle. Some people can do this really effectively on a computer, but for some reason I can’t.

  BLVR: So the connective tissue between these modules or paragraphs is one that you physically sense out?

  CH: Yes, because only then I can see the links, and the weak links. I can see where I have to build it up.

  BLVR: I can see, in those leaps, a dreamy association; is that how you would describe the connections?

  CH: I’ve worked on these so long that I do see the connections, but that’s the result of working on them a lot. For "Red Letters from a Red Planet" I tried to align the captions of the essay with the photos of Mars, to tell the emotional narrative. There’s a part where the robot doesn’t find what it needs, so it reaches out for more. That to me seems like, no matter where you drop that into the essay, it helps the reader understand what’s going on in my mind or in the speaker’s mind.

  BLVR: Is there ever a point where you think, “This essay has too much of a thesis?” Do you actively evade thesis statements?

  CH: I wouldn’t say I actively do, but that’s just not the kind of writer I am, where I say, “Here’s an essay about this.” It’s always evolving. I try to use titles in an interesting way. At the end, if I feel like there’s nothing for the reader to hold onto, I’ll try to add something in the title. The titles often change. I probably had ten drafts of a lot of them.

  BLVR: The title will give the reader some direction, but it’s not going to define the thing?

  CH: Yeah. For me I think it’s become just a matter of trying to sharpen my instincts. If I read it out loud to myself, if by the end I feel some sense of satisfaction, then that is enough, I don’t really feel like I need to outline much beyond that.

  BLVR: You’ve used the word “satisfaction” to describe the payoff, and yet these essays are so much about dissatisfaction or longing or non-attainment. How do we square that?

  CH: For me, the satisfaction comes from collecting these moments, these “almost” moments, of almost understanding something, almost reaching something. For me that seems more realistic and true to my life than a memoir that has a really clean book-end beginning and “this is my journey” end. To me it’s just not about a journey. It’s about changing your mind about something or learning a very small thing. Which is maybe not something you can really write a plot around, but I think you can write an essay around it.

  BLVR: Is there a direction you’d like to see the essay form move in the years to come? Do you have a vision for how it ought to be?

  CH: I would never say it ought to be anything. I understand why you’re using that in a question, but I’m really against prescribing. But I am interested in the anthologies that John d’Agata has put together, disrupting what a lot of people think of as the essay. I have a lot of students, for instance, who think that it should be one thing, and I think sometimes in my teaching and my writing I’m trying to disrupt that in a way that I sense from John d’Agata. Of like: “It can be this, or it can be this.” To me, the collage element of lyric essay really speaks to our time, and just the way that we’re always absorbing different information, always looking at our phone, absorbing snippets.

  BLVR: You mentioned certain conventions that students bring to the classroom that then you try to disrupt. What are the student conventions? What do students tend to go toward?

  CH: I see a lot of clean endings, which I sometimes will resist. Because to me if you’re writing something that’s true to your life: was it really that clean? That’s always my question at the end. “Was it that clean for you? Because congrats if it was, but...” I like things where you can feel the writer working something out on the page. And I don’t think all essays do that. I think a lot of essays are trying to do that, but I like that element of working something out along with the writer, even if they don’t come to a solution at the end. That’s the kind of reader I am. I think a lot of people don’t like that, but I like that.

  BLVR: I’ve been irritated by something similar to the clean ending: the essay about how the writer made the right decision. “Ah, and that’s how I won this thing.” Basically a story about this person’s victory.

  CH: Those are nice now and then, but it’s certainly not what I can write. I’m not interested in that kind of pursuit.

  BLVR: This is, yeah, it’s not a self-advancing book.

  CH: I would love that blurb.

  Adam Colman has written for The Believer and The Organist, the podcast from KCRW and McSweeney’s. His book, New Uses for Failure, is forthcoming from Fiction Advocate.

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  The Nowhere Man Who Was Everywhere: by Jim Knipfel →
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  The After-Monkey Blues: By Boyce Upholt
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  Willie Seaberry didn’t show for work one Wednesday. But that was unremarkable: Willie was a day laborer on a grain farm.
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  An Interview with Amen Dunes
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• The Big Smoke
  http://thebigsmoke.com/2018/06/05/book-review-tonight-im-someone-else-by-chelsea-hodson/
  Word count: 700

  Book Review: Tonight I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson
  June 5, 2018
  Joseph Edwin Haeger
  (Author Photo by Ryan Lowry)

  Joseph Edwin Haeger reviews Tonight I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson. (Holt Paperbacks)

  Chelsea Hodson’s new collection of essays, Tonight I’m Someone Else, is an exploration into desire and the fascination with the unknown. Hodson is taking us through a personal history where she looks for openings in life to insert herself, oftentimes to learn more about herself. Partly why this book is so compelling is because we are as clueless to Hodson’s past motivations as she is in the moment. The effect is that we feel as if we’re learning about her at the same rate that she is learning about herself. These essays inhabit their subject more fully than the majority of books I’ve read, and they allowed me to understand the inner workings of Chelsea Hodson and the way she operates in the world.

  Some of the essays in Tonight I’m Someone Else are multi-layered. Hodson has grounded these essays in her own life but will take detours into much larger subject matters. Whether it’s Mars (which she worked on during NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander project) or Eugenie Clark’s 1953 memoir about her years as a fish scientist, Hodson is using them as ways to round out and contextualize her own experiences. Sure, she went to work where a land rover explored a different planet and sent data back for analysis, but most of her brain energy is spent trying to understand her relationship with a boy. It’s an intriguing way to write an essay and it offers multiple interpretations. It creates a larger scope for how she interacts with the world and gives us a better picture of how she processes her past.

  Chelsea Hodson’s new collection of essays, Tonight I’m Someone Else, is an exploration into desire and the fascination with the unknown.

  Hodson tends to take on a passive role in these essays. She goes to concerts and waits for a boy to talk to her, or she follows the whims of a friend she meets at camp. All the while, she is observing and calculating. She isn’t doing things she is uncomfortable with or doesn’t want to do. Simply because she is reactionary doesn’t mean she’s a pushover. Quite the opposite. She is gauging herself in relation to these different circumstances. She learns more about herself the further into other people’s lives she goes and the endurance it takes to adapt to them.

  “Read Letters from a Red Planet” starts Tonight I’m Someone Else and she quotes an investigator on the Phoenix mission, “Somewhere in that vast region there are going to be places that are more habitable than others.” Not only was the Mars mission able to strengthen that one essay, it also speaks to a larger theme threaded throughout the book. Hodson enters into different relationships and jobs hoping for the best but being realistic enough to know the likelihood of the arrangement working out. It’s kind of a bummer because, by the end of the book, we’ve seen these situations that didn’t quite stick—whether it was modeling or pursuing journalism or even working customer service at American Apparel—and we are not able to see her in a place where she is at ease. I have to assume, since I’m holding this book in my hands, she made it to a point of contentment, but the lens has been turned away from the reader by that point, and that should be telling enough.

  Buy from Holt Paperbacks

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  Joseph Edwin Haeger
  Joseph Edwin Haeger

  Joseph Edwin Haeger is the author of Learn to Swim (University of Hell Press, 2015). His writing has appeared in The Pacific NW Inlander, RiverLit, Hippocampus Magazine, and others. He lives in Spokane, Washington with his wife and son.
  View more posts by Joseph Edwin Haeger

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2018/06/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-142-chelsea-hodson/
  Word count: 1725

  The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #142: Chelsea Hodson

  By Yvonne Conza

  June 28th, 2018

  In 2015, at a New York City gallery where terrible box wine was being poured, I first heard Chelsea Hodson read. Under stage lights, Hodson’s commanding presence combines with a soulful voice of authority. Her narrative flow is precise and unsparingly vulnerable with charged interior of thoughts belonging to an observer, journalist, writer, poet, photographer, lover, friend and consummate artist.

  Those occupations, obsessions and, relationships are effortlessly imbued into Tonight I’m Someone Else, her new essay collection. Her writing is without barricades or gimmicks. It’s not raw, nor is it safe.

  In “Near Miss,” a Russian roulette game is devised: a jump rope tied to a butcher knife is hung from a whirring ceiling fan. With two friends, Hodson sits below on the couch and watches the blade circle above them at top speed. “Anything could happen, so, for a moment, everything did.”

  Recently, Hodson and I talked about documenting desires, vulnerability as power, and the uncertainty within truth.

  ***

  The Rumpus: In Tonight I’m Someone Else, female vulnerability doesn’t minimize how sexuality is complex and charged, or how a woman can be drawn towards places of darkness. How do you give yourself permission to be vulnerable?

  Chelsea Hodson: Does vulnerability ever minimize the complexities of sex? I think many people assume vulnerability equals weakness, but being vulnerable is the only way I’ve been able to truly connect with another person, and seeing someone else being vulnerable allows me to understand them in a new way, so, really, it seems like a form of power to me. If I didn’t allow myself to be vulnerable on the page, I wouldn’t get anywhere. My worst, most complex emotions and experiences are behind a carefully constructed veil that I’ve trained myself to lift as I write.

  Rumpus: Some of your essays explore longing, responsibility, consent, and uncertainty about consent being given. How difficult was it for you to balance those elements?

  Hodson: The process was extremely difficult, but possible with enough drafts. It takes me forever to say what I really want to say, and I basically have to trick myself into it—by doing things like blindfolding myself, or drinking so much coffee that I become temporarily fearless. Once I’m able to quiet the perfectionist side of my mind, I think I’m able to access a more animalistic, instinctual logic where I can begin to write about something difficult and complex, like consent, or lack thereof.

  Rumpus: What develops first for you in crafting an essay—an idea, an image, the tone, an argument, or a question?

  Hodson: An image, question, or title is usually the first thing I begin with. Any sense of argument or ending doesn’t come until much, much later. I will also often have an idea for an essay’s structure, which is enough to get me going, and then I abandon it later. I’m unsentimental about getting rid of possessions in real life, and I’m the same way in writing—once I realize it needs to go, I don’t hesitate.

  Rumpus: The complexity of “Red Letters from a Red Planet” is expansive and amplified during a second and third read. One memory twines with another without meddling with outcomes: The narrator is an undergraduate journalism student who writes image captions for NASA. Her lover is a bad boy who is big, tough, and tattooed. He graffitis buildings.

  How did this essay develop? Did you intend for it to be the guidepost for the reader to think about terrain and connections to the other essays?

  Hodson: I didn’t think of it as a guidepost until the very end, when I began to see it as a metaphor for the entire book—this search for something that may or may not exist. I’m always looking for unlikely juxtapositions in my essays, so I became very fond of the idea of pairing a scientific Mars narrative with a sort of Wild West atmosphere. It’s a good thing I liked the idea, because it took about four years and a hundred drafts to get it right.

  Rumpus: Established early on is your impulse to be intrigued, maybe even flirt with danger and self-harm that feels seductive, yet also worrisome. How did you strike the balance?

  Hodson: I don’t know if I struck the balance, but I was attempting to document an aspect of my desires that felt complicated and often illogical. I resent the idea that female desire is safe and tidy—it feels messy and amorphous to me, and I thought that narrative was sometimes missing from the things I was reading or watching. So I thought I might try and write it. What feels like a pursuit of true love can later be revealed as utterly self-destructive—a person truly in love can’t tell the difference. Or I can’t. Or I couldn’t. It’s easier to see these contradictions years later, so that’s usually when I begin to write about them.

  Rumpus: In “Red Letters from a Red Planet,” you wrote, “Many of the photos I captioned were actually composites of photos—different camera captured different angles, and the images needed to be put back together. By the time I saw them, they appeared whole.”

  Did you intend to examine all the essays somewhat as composites, from different camera angles, where images are put together one way, but years later, viewed from another perspective, with more, or even less, certainty?

  Hodson: Yes, certainly. I think it also speaks to the idea of different aspects of the self—I often have trouble recognizing myself within certain behaviors or memories, almost as if I’m remembering a dream. I like the idea of uncertainty paired with the truth of my life, since even “truth” seems totally uncertain to me. A memory becomes a memory of a memory of a memory.

  Rumpus: What goals and concerns did you have as you were putting together the order of your essays for the collection? How did they reveal themselves to you?

  Hodson: I didn’t think about the order until the very end. I thought about it in terms of emotional information—without chronological order, what kinds of things might the reader need or like to know about the speaker in the beginning versus the end? My partner, who is an artist and musician, encouraged me to think about it as a record—the first song has a different impact than the last song does, the single comes a few songs in, and so on. I don’t just write essays because I like writing in short form; I like the idea that they can influence each other simply by being presented in a certain order.

  Rumpus: How do you determine balance in an essay that has components of poetic journalism, cultural criticism, and lyrical/creative nonfiction threads?

  Hodson: When I began putting outside sources and research into Pity the Animal, suddenly it gave me something to react against in my own voice, and that was an important lesson for me. When I feel truly stuck, I wonder, How might I bring the essay back to life? What could I introduce that complicates the essay and gives me something to either bristle against? The balance of these elements never has a mathematical equation to them; it’s always an instinctual decision for me—what feels right versus what doesn’t.

  Rumpus: What were your biggest challenges as a writer who writes about her life?

  Hodson: I think it’s difficult for me to know how much to disclose about someone I’m writing about. As a writer, I want it to be a detailed, vivid portrayal, but as a person, I don’t want them to be identifiable. I found myself working around a lot of physical descriptions or details that might “give them away.” I think of the book as very secretive in some ways, so that was my way of keeping certain things private. It’s never my intention to hurt anyone through my writing, though I certainly have hurt people in the process. Writing about someone is always a reduction, even when it’s done out of love. I’m still learning to live with nonfiction being an imperfect and sometimes hurtful genre.

  Rumpus: Was there a working title for your collection prior to Tonight I’m Someone Else?

  Hodson: It went through about twenty titles over the years, but the most recent working title was Awful Form, which was a reference to the line in the book about all the “awful forms of love.” I felt quite fond of that title, but I think Tonight I’m Someone Else suits the book much better.

  Rumpus: Is there a new project you’re working on?

  Hodson: I’ve been working on a novel. Somehow, writing essays for so long has freed me from my fear of writing fiction. I stopped thinking about the genres as such separate entities—I see how one can lead to the other.

  Yvonne Conza’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Joyland Magazine, Blue Mesa Review, F(r)iction #5, and Funhouse Magazine and her author interviews can be read on The Millions, Electric Literature, The Bloom, and elsewhere. She has performed at The Moth in NYC, is a Pushcart Nominee and a finalist for the: Penelope Niven Award in Creative Nonfiction, Cutbank Literary Journal, Tobias Wolff, Barry Lopez Creative Nonfiction, Blue Mesa Review and The Raymond Carver Short Story. More from this author →

  Filed Under: Books, Mini-Interviews
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