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I'm Hua Hsu and I teach in the English department.
[pause]
My academic work is more about Asian American literature and the history of the trans-Pacific
post-war stuff.
But on the side I also write about music, sports... I write book reviews, film reviews.
I write for a variety of magazines,
in grad school I started writing for the Village Voice and the Slate, and a British music magazine
called The Wire.
Since graduate school, since starting at Vassar, I've written for The New York Times, The Atlantic,
and I'm currently a staff writer at ESPN's Grantland magazine.
[pause]
I think there is a mis-understanding between creative writing and critical writing
being two completely different spheres of writing.
I remember being really influenced when I was in high school and in college.
On one hand I was reading a lot of 'zines, music magazine, small press magazines.
On the other hand I was reading a lot of University Press cultural studies kinds of books,
and I really thought they were actually in conversation with each other.
It just seemed as though everyone was interested in this sort of
unpredictable juxtaposition of ideas and images, the collapsing of high and low culture.
I actually think there are a lot of spaces for creativity within critical writing,
within academic writing.
That's something that I am really interested in.
[pause]
At times I feel somewhat mis-patched in the English department because
I don't think my sort of primary reading of culture is via written texts or books, per se.
Maybe it's just because I grew up in the late '80s and '90s in the heyday of cultural studies...
but it seems as though anything can be read or sort of unpacked as a text.
That can kind of lead to its own complications, but, I'm just really interested in finding
the
mythologies and the narratives that sort of underly the way we access culture
and the way we allow ourselves to imagine what culture can do,
but also the limits of that imagination as well.
If we think about a novel as a container of ideas, then, you know, a song or
even a sporting event or an athlete's career or a film, these are also containers of similar
ideas.
I think I try and approach everything a similar kind of scrutiny, even if
at times the juxtapositions might be kind of untraditional.
[pause]
I think one of the intersections between my interests in music and my interests in writing
is sort of an awareness of rhythm.
I remember I had an editor at the Village Voice who was always more interested in how
the
rhythm, the rhythms of the sentences, and how you could really communicate a lot
in terms of having long sentences and short sentences, or sort of long, incomprehensible
sentences.
I think, thinking about things at that really granular level
of words and of syllables and sort of how two words sounded next to each other
and avoiding repeating words that sounded alike in the space of a paragraph, for example.
I think that's something I actually got from listening to music and
paying attention to details of arrangement, or if a single note
had been left off key or things like that.
[pause]
When I write I'm usually really focused on how I begin and end a piece.
I can't write anything, whether it's an academic journal article or
this book I'm working on or
even, you know, a short, 500 word magazine piece.
I always need to have a sense of where it's going to begin and where it's going to end.
Once I figure out sort of how I want the beginning to sound,
I start just writing different body paragraphs.
Then there are a few hours of struggling to figure out what the right sequence of ideas
might be,
to persuade the reader in the most efficient way.
I'm a very... It's very scattered, my writing process.
I think the revision process is really important in that way because I don't really
write pieces in a very linear way.
I think part of how I use that in the classroom is, you know,
often times you think you know what the thesis of your essay is going to be, but,
you really need to write it, and then go back and read it
and think about whether or not you've proven the point you intended to prove
or whether you've actually written something far more interesting.
[pause]
Teaching has really influenced my writing in
in ways I wasn't prepared for, actually.
I think of my academic work as sort of a longer conversation.
I'm interested in themes and ideas that no magazine would pay you to write about.
Even though, I think a lot of those themes and ideas are present in
my magazine and newspaper writing as well.
Having to teach, and sort of encountering a new crop of students every semester,
I'm always thinking a lot about notions of audience, and what you are capable of doing
with a given audience and with their expectations.
I think it has forced me to be a bit, you know... To think about things in terms of
whether I'd want to be a polemical writer, or whether I want to be
a writer who just sort of leaves you with a bit of disquiet.
All these issues of how you want your audience to perceive you
are things that are in play every day in the classroom.
[pause]
I think there is this ongoing tension, this perception that, you know,
what we learn in the classroom or what we teach in the classroom is, you know, kind
of useless
once you got into the real world.
I think It's a real anxiety.
It's something that people are talking about more and more now
with sort of "the humanities in peril" and things like that.
But I actually think that the skill of writing and of being able to size up your audience
to figure out how best to make an intervention,
to figure out the most efficient way to persuade someone,
and, mostly, how to translate ideas.
You know, how to get someone to think about a critical idea,
To think about...Marx, or something, without having to drop that name
and instantly sort of turn the conversation in a drastic way.
I think that skill of being able to translate ideas for a wider readership,
or, you know, even just to explain things that I think in the academic world
would require a lot of qualifications or a lot of citation work,
is something that I find very useful sort of "out in the real world."
But I think, for students as well, it's important to keep in mind that
that's one of the things you're learning how to do:
to take a lot of the things that are abstract and theoretical
and not only find application but explain to someone
why these ideas are interesting or important.