HOLE STUDIES by Hilary Plum
Book Cover Photo Courtesy of Fonograf Editions
Hole Studies is a book about care and the forms it may take. An essay collection on writing and labor, art and activism, attention as a transformative practice, difference and collaboration, adjuncting and the margins of the academy, whiteness and its weapons, professionalization and its discontents, the radical importance of surprise, friendship at work, the self and its public and private modes: Hole Studies keeps listening. What is it we need from each other? What could we still make happen? This book looks for forms of responsiveness and moments that matter. It honors everyday acts of thinking and trying. Essays explore the music of the Swet Shop Boys, the literature of the US’s brutal war in Iraq, the career of Sinéad O’Connor, the aesthetics of the Dirtbag Left, the legacies of the “war on terror,” feminism on the job, and illness in America. Hole Studies is an intimate document and a critical guide. Hole Studies would like to work for you.
“When Sinéad O’Connor ripped up the pope on SNL, in 1992, I think I was more changed, more moved, as a human, woman, and artist, than I’ve ever been able to articulate even to myself. Courtney Love, in 2005, warned other women about Harvey Weinstein on TV, 12 years before it was at all ok to do so. Hole Studies is a space to watch and describe and repeat these kinds of utterances—these miracles—and to shine that unflinching, flexible, responsive and feeling kind of light (that light of dignified presence) into all these dustbins and hollows and holy hell holes full of maggots and molesters, colonizers, CEOs, all our bloated most belligerent ogres. Hilary Plum articulates to me what these real utterances have meant and I leave this book only thinking of the ways, one way, I might say something of value—off-script— before I’m dead.”
—Caren Beilin, author of Revenge of the Scapegoat
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR HOLE STUDIES
“I didn’t realize how much, in this moment, I needed to read about literature as a space of “radical hope” until I was in the midst of Hole Studies. Literature, in Hilary Plum’s brilliant, generous analysis, is at its most potent when it enacts language and form to create a space of sharing, care, and transformation, where the stakes are the stakes of how to be together in the world—which is to say, the stakes of love.” —Sara Jaffe
“If Montaigne returned today as a feminist and Sontag a poet, they might have together crafted an essay collection as astonishing as Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies. Plum rigorously examines her many subjects (from a history journal’s MLA citations to Sinéad O’Connor’s infamous televised protest) and then rigorously interrogates her examinations. Each page holds more brilliance and artistry than should be possible. Hole Studies is an exciting read and a conceptual achievement, and Plum is one of the best American essayists around.” —Jeannie Vanasco
“Hilary Plum offers a vital interrogation of our very reason for being in this striking volume of essays. Her explorations range from the personal to the global, from the expansive traumas of war to the exponential reach of pop culture. Her reflections are often debilitating, yet she ultimately guides us toward the beginnings of forms, frameworks, and reasons for why we might want to keep moving forward in a destabilized world.” —Andre Perry
EXCERPT FROM HOLE STUDIES - MY MIND WAS RARELY EMPLOYED*
In my corner office the thoughts that occupied me, that fed my conversations, rarely touched the work I was meant to do there. My mind was rarely employed. I was very alive elsewhere. This was the hospital, the marriage, a book or two or three or a dozen, a poem you sent me, a book of poems, my own face in the bathroom mirror, a series of faxes I sent my Republican senator, Trump’s Muslim ban and the spontaneous protests at airports I only read about, the end of a book I wanted to write, an article for a feminist journal on body cameras, a man singing to a man a poem written centuries ago for a mythic woman, a murmured argument, a book I recommended you didn’t like, smell of cigarettes on my fingers, a happy hour or another, a benefit for an Egyptian writer absurdly imprisoned for two years of his life, a book, a song, a poem, a book, a coffeemaker that overflowed repeatedly into a carpet I sudsily cleaned, another manuscript I printed illicitly, research on the Ferguson uprising you asked me to mail to your address in prison, forms of literature in which I was trying to live. When I walked back from the hallway bathroom, I forgot my face could be seen by others tucked behind cubicle walls. They could glimpse anyone who passed by. Did my face betray me, my distance from the place I was? As I was consumed—as we say—by my thoughts? What of my refusals were public, vulnerable, legible? Of what argument were they evidence? Your face appears in histories you won’t write, can’t read. If your face appears.
*From “Work, or the Swet Shop Boys” which was first published on Granta.com in September 2020. Please visit here to listen to Hilary Plum read this excerpt from HOLE STUDIES.
Hilary Plum (she/her) is the author of several books, most recently the novel Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Her poetry collection, Excisions, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence. She was the recipient of the GLCA New Writers Award for the work of nonfiction Watchfires. She teaches fiction, nonfiction, and editing & publishing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program, and she serves as associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. Recent work has appeared in Granta, College Literature, American Poetry Review, Fence, and elsewhere.
E-book available here. Hole Studies playlist, curated by Hilary Plum. For more information about this title and others at Fonograf Editions please visit their site here. Fonograf can also be found on Instagram, Spotify, Bandcamp.
