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.