Judy McClure is a nonfiction writer whose work explores relationships, teaching, grief, queer life and culture. She lives in Boston with her wife and is a student in GrubStreet’s Essay Incubator. Her essay “The Importance of Running” won first prize in the 2021 Charles McCorkle Hauser Prose Writing Contest on Chautauqua grounds this summer, and her essay “The Heavy Book” will appear in Chautauqua’s third online Resilience issue. I caught up with Judy to talk about her work, writing, nature, and the importance of running away in the world we live in.
JAMES KING: I wanted to talk about this essay—it was a first-prize winner, right? What was your experience like in the Chautauqua prose-writing contest?
JUDY MCCLURE: I had known about the contest for a few years but had never submitted anything. Then I had that piece, and I thought it might work, even though it wasn’t ready yet when I first thought about submitting it. With any kind of submission, I have to have a sense of curiosity about what’s going to happen, because mostly you get rejected. But I had this sense of curiosity about it. And then when I won, I was really excited. I didn’t know I had won first place until the actual ceremony.
JAMES KING: Really?
JUDY MCCLURE: Yeah! I only knew that I had won something, so I was prepared to get third place or honorable mention or whatever the choices were, and then I got first place. It was great.
JAMES KING: What’s your history with Chautauqua Institution?
JUDY MCCLURE: I’ve been going to Chautauqua for a long time. My father actually lives there year-round, which is unusual. And my mom lived there as well when she was living—she passed away almost eight years ago. But they fell in love with the place early on: my dad had spoken there, then my kids grew up going there every summer, and then several years ago I discovered the Writer’s Center. That was a big shift for me in my experiences with Chautauqua. I always loved the theater and the art and the water, but the Writing Center really opened things up for me. Especially over the past couple of years, with all the online offerings that they had.
JAMES KING: Did you get to go at all during season this past year?
JUDY MCCLURE: I was there during the season. In fact, I worked on the essay there. The deadline for the contest was while I was there, visiting. It’s a little bit of a Chautauqua story as well because I had started the essay a couple months earlier, and I had written a draft, and then my writing group read it and advised me on it and really helped me find the theme. I worked on it and I revised it and then I set it aside for a few weeks, and then I took it with me to Chautauqua. I needed the book—I didn’t bring my copy of My Side of the Mountain with me, the book I reference in the essay—so my wife went to the library and checked the book out for me, and then I wanted to print out a copy to revise, so again, I went to the library and the librarian helped me get my computer connected to the printer. I submitted the essay from the home of some really good family friends that I was staying with, so it very much was a Chautauqua essay. Then I came home, and I was in a Chautauqua class with Susannah Felts. I didn’t know that she was judging the contest, and she didn’t know that I had entered the contest. And then she ended up being the judge. There she was at the ceremony, and I found out that she had been the judge. So that was kind of cool, also.
JAMES KING: It is funny how small the writing world can be sometimes.
JUDY MCCLURE: Isn’t it?
JAMES KING: You were thinking of submitting this essay when the contest came out. What about this essay made you want to submit to the contest?
JUDY MCCLURE: I felt like it had the sense of Chautauqua to it, somehow. There was self-reflection; there was this appreciation for nature; there was a literary reference, so I felt like it fit the Chautauqua theme. I wrote it very quickly: a couple months is really fast for me. I usually take a very long time to write an essay, and I just felt like it had some energy to it and needed to be finished and sent off somewhere.
JAMES KING: What was that process like? Did you start on that childhood memory that you begin us with?
JUDY MCCLURE: Part of the process was similar to how I usually write. Often, I have a significant object in something that I write—I didn’t necessarily have that in this one as much—but I was thinking about my own tendency to either run away or have the fantasy of running away. Then when I started really writing, and not just ruminating and thinking about it, the idea of the childhood memory came up. The idea came first, and the memories came second. And the book, My Side of the Mountain, I had been thinking about quite a bit, and then I realized it was the same timeframe of my childhood, where I was reading the book and where I ran away and imagined myself out in the wilderness and all that.
JAMES KING: I think one of the things that resonated with me about this essay was the attention to the nature and the wilderness. Wilderness or nature—is that a common theme in your work?
JUDY MCCLURE: Definitely. I have a background in biology; I was a science teacher for many years, worked with kids outside in environmental education. These days, I’m especially interested in urban nature and accessibility to natural spaces for everybody, especially groups of people who are often not welcome there—because of race or physical ability or gender or sexuality or any of those things. Urban natural spaces are incredibly important. I’m always interested in kids getting out into nature as an antidote to screen-time and stress. I feel like nature is the balm for all that. So nature plays quite a role—always has—in my writing and my life.
JAMES KING: Especially now, we need it more than ever, don’t we?
JUDY MCCLURE: We do need it more than ever. I feel like nature and the arts are what kids need the most of and probably get the least of, right now. Adults too.
JAMES KING: There’s a real theme in your essay about that middle place between freedom and confinement as sort of being its own special space, deconstructing that binary a little bit. I was curious how you find that happy medium between confinement—either in terms of form or subject matter—and freedom in your writing.
JUDY MCCLURE: I’m so glad you got that. In terms of just process, there’s this point between the time when I feel in a perfectionist mode—which is usually how I start—and then the opposite of that point, when I get to the freedom of writing, when I’m going and moving and not thinking. But that in-between spot—and I find this in other places in my life—it’s very still. It’s like the dog hovering over the land, before she hits the ground and starts running. In terms of structure and form, I’m really drawn to hermit crab essays, where you borrow a form that’s already in use and then you write with it. You make a list, or you write a recipe, or an email, in the form of an essay. That seems to me something in the middle, where you take the form but you’re doing your own writing within it.
JAMES KING: I really get that sense of play in this essay.
JUDY MCCLURE: There’s definitely a serious tone to it, but it’s not a “serious” essay, I guess. There is some sense of not being stuck in the seriousness. It could have been really serious; it probably was more serious when I initially wrote it. And the childhood memory I found quite amusing: here I am, out with my little suitcase. I’m not sure where I was going. It’s kind of funny.
JAMES KING: On the other side of it, there was that element of this essay about the return. In what ways—in either writing or your life—can you approach things differently for having run?
JUDY MCCLURE: Often in life, or in writing, what I think is the really important thing, when it’s right in front of me, is not necessarily the most important thing. To run away from it for a while—to unfold it and stack it up in my head in different folders, to see what comes up—means that when I come back, I have a better sense of what’s important. That time running away from it, either walking or going somewhere else, or talking with friends, or whatever it might be, it makes that thing that you’re so stuck to back off a little bit. Then the truth of it can come to the surface.
JAMES KING: Any advice for the amateur runaway?
JUDY MCCLURE: First of all, there’s going to be a voice in your head that says: “you can’t run away; it’s irresponsible; you have to stay and do this.” I think setting that voice aside for a little bit and trying to run away is a way to do it. I guarantee that that voice will be there when you return. In terms of writing, when I need to run away is when I feel like the writing is really forced. I can’t confuse that with the writing being difficult, because difficult is good: you can keep working with difficult. You can’t pop up and run away every time the writing gets hard. You have to find out for yourself where that line is.
JAMES KING: Your bio says you’re from Boston. Do you have any favorite escapes around there?
JUDY MCCLURE: I definitely have some places. The Arnold Arboretum is just a mile from my house, so I go and I get a little lost walking over there. I like to walk in cemeteries. I actually have an essay about walking in a cemetery. There’s a place that’s closer—Boston Nature Center—that I’ll run away to. It’s not huge; it’s in the middle of an urban area, but I really like it there. If I really get to run away, then I might go to Chautauqua or California or the Cape. That’s a real escape.
JAMES KING: Do you think getting lost in familiar places has helped to train your writer’s eye?
JUDY MCCLURE: I’m always interested in place, and maybe that’s why I like it so much. You’re absorbing new ideas and your brain is softening to what’s around, a discovery of things you hadn’t noticed before. Especially if you can do it. Sometimes when I’m walking, I’m so wrapped up with what’s happening in my head that I don’t even see what’s around me. When I do, that’s when it becomes interesting. Of course, sometimes you get this great idea when walking, and then you start writing it down and you think “This doesn’t make any sense. This is silly.” Which is kind of nice: that it’s not accessible except in the actual experience.
JAMES KING: How has this practice been during the pandemic?
JUDY MCCLURE: The pandemic made it so difficult to run away. There was this balance of really needing to run away, because it was just so awful, but there was also a need to stay and pay attention to what was happening. I followed case numbers for a while, really closely, and what was happening with vaccines, all of that. Then at the same time, we had everything happening around race and George Floyd. There was really a lot that was serious to pay attention to, and nowhere to go to get away from it. But like I said, there was a lot of time spent walking in the neighborhood; there was a lot of time with my neighbors. I have a friendly street and I got to know people. I read a lot; I cooked a lot. That was a way to run away, like a lot of people.
JAMES KING: Who have you been reading lately that’s been keeping you going?
JUDY MCCLURE: I read a lot of essays, so I’m always reading the Best American Essays of whatever year it might be, or contemporary essays. There’s a new book out—it’s not brand new—about the contemporary essay, edited by Phillip Lopate, and I’m looking through that. I’m waiting to read Crying at H Mart, which is a memoir. There’s a novel from last year, it’s called The Life of the Mind—Christine Smallwood is the author’s name—and it’s supposed to be funny and deep all at the same time, so I want to read that one.
JAMES KING: In your own work, I can see that balance between the interior and the exterior. Where do you find that balance in your writing between inside and outside?
JUDY MCCLURE: I have to be careful, because I can get too interior and too reflective, and there could be no one else in the essay except my thoughts of people. I sometimes force myself to write a scene, where something’s actually happening, instead of just ruminating about stuff. When I’m revising, I do a technique taught to me by a writing teacher: you highlight everything that’s a scene, everything that’s a reflection, everything that’s summary. I often find that the color for scene, there’s not much of it, and I have to pump that up.
JAMES KING: Is there anything that you’re working on right now that’s got you particularly jazzed-up, or that you’re excited about?
JUDY MCCLURE: I have a piece about lipstick that I’m working on. I was in a workshop with Eula Biss through Chautauqua last fall, and I workshopped it there. I have a piece that I’m working on about an antique sofa: of course, they’re never about the things that you say they’re about. I’m about to take a class about writing picture books, so that’s something that I’m interested in. I’m also a worker-owner at a cooperative bookstore that’s getting started in my neighborhood in Boston. My writing is one thing, but it’s also about the bookstore stuff.
JAMES KING: Would you want to tell me a little more about that?
JUDY MCCLURE: It’s called Rozzie Bound, and it was started by someone in the community maybe a year and a half ago. It’s only online right now, and he started it on his own, got to a certain place and decided he wanted it to be a worker-owner cooperative bookstore. It’s run by a community. We haven’t incorporated yet, that’s coming up within the next few months, and then we’ll start to have pop-up events in the area once the pandemic’s more under control. Eventually, we’re hoping to get a brick-and-mortar space and have an actual bookstore.
JAMES KING: You talked a lot about libraries. What’s your experience like with libraries?
JUDY MCCLURE: Libraries are the best. I spend a lot of time in them. There’s a big push in Boston to renovate the local libraries. There are a lot of local neighborhood libraries in Boston. The one closest to us just reopened, so I’ve been there a lot. I’ve done a lot at a place called Grub Street Writers in Boston, which is a writing center, and they also have a program called “Write Down the Street”, which takes place at two different libraries in Boston. It’s a kind of neighborhood outreach: the classes are free. That program helped my writing immensely. And I’ve always loved libraries. As a kid, I went to the library all the time. I can still see it and smell it, exactly what it was like. There’s nothing like them. One of the pieces I had published last year was actually through a library—it was a journal run out of a library in Florida called 805 Lit & Art.
JAMES KING: You’ve made a real connection in your writing community. How’s your experience with fellow writers in Boston, or in general?
JUDY MCCLURE: Boston is such a literary town. There’s so much writing going on here, and I’m grateful for that. I have this writing group that formed online during the pandemic through those Write Down the Street classes. My writing group— Column A Writers, we’re called—is great. We meet every week and workshop somebody’s work. There’s five of us, but it’s a diverse group of writers in terms of genre. Grub Street is a great place. I’ve taken a lot of classes there; that’s a strong community for me. And then Chautauqua has become a writing community for me. I feel really supported and very grateful for all of those connections. Writing is so solitary when you’re doing it; you need the support. You need to get out of your own head and have somebody else to talk about it with. I think that though a lot of writers are not necessarily introverts, there is a great pleasure in introversion when you’re writing, and it’s good to get pulled out of that.
JAMES KING: Escape, again, right?
JUDY MCCLURE: Exactly, running away.
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