We’re major fans of Massachusetts journalist and author Luke O’Neil and his Welcome to Hell World newsletter. By extension, and since we are also an experimental independent outfit, we’re super hot for Flaming Hydra, the all-star writing crew he works with on the side. This week, they’re all up in our region, cooking a smorgasbord of bangers on New England, including pieces about Stephen King and Shirley Jackson. We asked Luke how it all came about …
CF: For those who are unfamiliar with the collective, what exactly is Flaming Hydra and how have you all kept it going for this long so far?
LO: Flaming Hydra is a worked-owned co-op of a few dozen writers that we started almost three years ago now. We have a wide spectrum of journalists and critics and artists from all over the country and outside of it as well. The idea was loosely based on the success of other worker-owned publications like Defector, and it’s been really cool to see a bunch more crop up in the past couple years like 404 Media, Aftermath, Hearing Things, Hell Gate, The Flytrap, Ravenous, and Autonomy News to name a few.
Most of us at Flaming Hydra, and most of those others I’m sure, either got burned by or burned out on the corporate consolidation and eradication of formerly independent media over the past ten fifteen years. Particularly in the wake of the destruction of Gawker by the coward Peter Thiel. In fact we just published a print issue dedicated to the legacy of Gawker a month or so back. Many of the names writing for Flaming Hydra people might recognize from the wider post-Gawer and The Awl diaspora as well as some other well known people like Anna Marie Cox, David Roth, Diana Moskowitz, Hamilton Nolan, Tom Scocca, and others.
More than that though, and as someone who came up in the world of alt-weeklies with you in Boston, it really has that alt-weekly feel to me. We publish two stories a day, on the site and in a newsletter, (as well as in occasional print issues and book anthologies) where we are given free reign to cover pretty much whatever strikes our fancy. The writer’s dream! Whether that’s long form reportage, book or art or film criticism, comics, or, as I often do, music writing or poems and fiction. We’ve got I think around 10,000 paying subscribers, which isn’t enough for all of us to make a living on, but it’s growing all the time.
Are you the resident New Englander / Masshole of the crew? And how core to your writing would you say is that part of your identity?
If anyone is familiar with my books “A Creature Wanting Form” or “We Had It Coming,” almost all of the stories are set in either Maine or Massachusetts. Many of my pieces for Flaming Hydra are set in or are in fact about various coastal towns like this one, “Round Pond, Maine,” or this one, “The Song You Wanted It to Be,” about Gloucester, MA, or this one: By the intensity with which something is being said, which is about Cape Cod.
There are a couple others from here, like Amy Chu, a great comic artist, who contributed one to New England week, and lives in Cambridge, and Jennie Rose Halperin, who wrote such an interesting piece this week about Blanche Ames Ames, an extraordinary renaissance woman in turn of the century Massachusetts who lived in her hometown of Easton. They don’t live here anymore but old Boston media favorites like S.I. Rosenbaum and Josephine Riesman are involved as well. A bunch of others, like with any publication I suppose, went to school “near Boston.” Many of the rest are godless heathens from New York City unfortunately.
As I wrote introducing New England Week – and we’ve done others weeks on things like MAD Magazine or The Wicker Man or Moby-Dick – I was trying to think of something that I really care about that I would want to solicit and edit a dozen or so pieces about and all I could think of was New England. I really, really love New England. (And if you want to read my rankings of the states and the cities you can find them in there.) Fortunately New England is a pretty broad category, and everyone who turned something in came at the idea with a really unique perspective. I particularly liked Miles Klee trying to wrestle with what the concept of “New England” even means.
You went pretty hard for this New England week. Give us a rundown of the pieces you are featuring and tell us what you were going for. (Just start with the list you already included below and add in some context, thanks).
Already this week we’ve had Carrie Frye on Stephen King’s early writing years in Maine working on “Salem’s Lot” among other things. Rax King was great as usual on Shirley Jackson’s time at Bennington in Vermont and the real life origins of her famous story “The Lottery.” Our fearless leader Maria Bustillos did an extraordinary piece on Oscar Wilde and Okakura Kakuzo and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Joe Macleod wrote a really funny one on his first Sox/Yankees game. We’ve got a few more coming out on Providence and Maine and New Hampshire as well. I’ll likely publish a few of my maudlin thinly-veiled siucide note poetry about Rockport and Duxbury and other coastal towns.
Starting today or tomorrow we’ve also got a fundraiser starting with a bunch of cool perks and signed books and such from our contributors so check that out here.
