Writing Practice #4: Claudia Ross
Claudia discusses the collage-like nature of freelancing, longevity, and her soon-to-be-published novel
Welcome back to Writing Practice!
I spoke Claudia Ross at the end of June, just before the announcement of her debut novel BABY, which will be published by Bloomsbury. Details below!
Claudia received her MFA in fiction from UC Davis, my undergraduate alma mater, and we laughed about the semi-depressing design of the campus buildings and the two bars that service the whole town, both of which give it a surprising charm. I discovered Claudia’s writing through her interviews in BOMB Magazine and The Creative Independent. As a journalist, I’m often as interested in the interviewer as I am the interviewee, and Claudia didn’t disappoint.
I most admire Claudia’s fiction work, which captures the quirks of Los Angeles, including this story in the Paris Review about a Los Feliz apartment and this one in Joyland about an archivist for a wealthy family. I can’t wait to pre-order BABY, which is in the same vein as those short stories.
Claudia’s fiction and essays have been published in The Paris Review, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland Magazine, Columbia Journal, BOMB, and many others. She is a frequent contributor at international publications like Frieze, Hyperallergic, FLAUNT, ArtReview, and elsewhere. She currently teaches creative writing to adults at Barnsdall Art Center.
As always, this piece has been edited and condensed for clarity, with a few footnotes from me throughout.
Before you got your MFA, you worked in art galleries around LA. What sparked the move toward creative writing?
I studied art history undergrad and I always loved writing, too. I wrote fiction in high school, but then got to college and wanted to do something else. After that I worked in so many different jobs in art. I worked as a museum security guard at MOCA a couple summers, and as a gallery intern. That’s just where my experience led but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.
During the pandemic I worked at an artist’s studio and was writing some criticism for local outlets on the side. I also had a writing group where I was working on fiction and they kind of helped me reassess what I wanted to be doing. But because it was Covid, I couldn't immediately leave my job, so I was stuck, business was a bit slow, and so I spent a lot of time writing and thinking about what I wanted to do.
Then once I was in grad school, I had an editor at Art Review reach out to me. That was the first bigger publication I wrote for. The relationship with this editor was really helpful, and I started freelancing a lot in my second year of grad school. Then when I graduated and moved back to LA I just started writing about art in LA because it seemed like—it's weird to say, because it's kind of the hardest way to make money—the easiest and most immediate way to make money. And it kind of just snowballed from there.
When you were first writing for local arts publications before grad school, what made you decide to pitch your first story?
In the beginning it was a lot of trial and error. I didn’t have a really firm grasp on the art world. I did in a larger, more historical sense, but I didn't on a more practical level totally know how the art world itself functioned. That's where working in art was actually quite helpful, because you see how artists come to be and the path towards someone becoming more prominent. There are so many shows and so many artists, it's a lot to navigate. And so I was sort of pitching randomly what I thought was interesting and then I was lucky to be guided very well by certain editors. There was a magazine called X-TRA in LA, which has since folded, and I was lucky to work with people there that helped me to understand what would make for good coverage.
And were you just finding editors' emails on Google or had you met people through living in LA?
Almost everything I’ve done has been essentially just a cold email. The good thing about those local publications is that they would read every pitch and every because they weren't getting that many. I think my first thing I ever did was for the Cleveland Review of Books, which was another cold email. Like a lot of writers, I’m at least a little bit introverted.1 The incredibly social world of networking doesn't come totally naturally to me. I am much more comfortable behind my computer, sending an email. Luckily, being in LA, the pressure is a little bit less because the vast majority of the editors I work with are not based here.
You went to UC Davis for your MFA. Did you feel inspired as a writer there? It’s such a small town, so I wonder what effect it had on your writing?
I really missed LA while I was there, and it helped emphasize my attachment to it. I was born and raised here, so I really hadn't spent that much time away. During the pandemic I thought maybe I would move to New York. I just wanted to get out. I was going kind of stir crazy, right? So when I went to Davis, I didn't know how I would feel. Instead, I just found myself getting pulled back to writing about the city, and that kind of worked its way into my fiction in a way that I wasn't expecting.
It also manifested in coming to find the LA art scene more special than I had in the past, and feeling that because I know this place so well maybe I have a little bit of a responsibility to tell people about it.
I really loved all my professors at UC Davis; it is a really small program. It's interesting to be in a college town as a grad student, there's not a lot to do. There's like one bar, maybe a restaurant, not exactly what you want when you're 27. But I really got to focus on my writing. That was good for me. It’s a fully funded program, so it’s a really nice deal.
In a given week, how do you balance being a critic and writing fiction? I know you teach, too. How do you make it all work?
It really is such a mixed bag. I mean, I always knew that if I was going to be a writer, it would be in this very collage-like way. There aren't jobs, everything is underpaid, nothing is consistent. It's so hard. And it's really hard to get these academic positions, which was the other path that was kind of pitched to me, right? And so at a certain point I was like, okay, I am going to figure out how to build this for myself.
When I came back from grad school, I really had no idea what I was going to do. I had a novel draft that I wanted to finish. And I loved teaching, which was something that my grad program taught me, because it was part of my funding package. Everyone teaches intro creative writing courses, and I really loved doing that. It’s not for everyone, but I really responded to it.
I wrote a piece for Art Review about this neighborhood in LA that is being gentrified by art galleries called Melrose Hill. I really loved working on it, and then I had a couple of editors reach out to me after that piece was published, and at Hyperallergic and Frieze, and so having those three publications just led to more consistent work.
That gave me a good introduction back into the city and back into what I wanted my life to be like. And then I was applying to teaching jobs and ended up getting this position at Barnsdale Arts Center, which is with the Department of Cultural Affairs, so I teach creative writing classes part time for them. It’s a nice gig because it works in sessions of eight weeks of teaching and then a month or so off.
More recently, I started leading my own writing workshop separately, which is for people that want a more professional writing workshop, they're working on pieces that are longer and want more support doing that.
Making time for fiction is probably the hardest part, and it definitely comes with a lot of sacrifices. Getting my novel and querying it was really time consuming. It was then that I was really grateful that I went to a grad program that was fully funded so I didn't come out of it with student loans. It gave me the permission to take some time for that. But it was hard.
How did you fit your novel project into your freelancing and teaching schedule when you were finishing it?
I started working on the novel during my MFA program. After grad school, it was the biggest constraint on my time. I knew that I probably couldn't take on a full time job. There were definitely times when I was like, I don't know how I can do this and looking at other jobs. But the fiction did really anchor me.
For me, however my morning goes, is kind of how the rest of the day is going to go. So I try to work on fiction first. It helps to dictate where my priorities are. If I start working on things like criticism or emailing first thing, then I'm just going to end up doing that most of the day. So I think it's important to start off with whatever you want to prioritize. Sometimes I'm on a deadline, and so I will be writing first thing in a critical capacity, and a review or something like that. But I do try and stay consistent in terms of leading the day with the creative fiction oriented work that I do.
Do you work on the weekends?
I do, yeah. I really wish that I didn't, but I always find myself working on the weekends. There have been moments in working on this book that I've been turning around edits for my agent, or whatever it is. So these days, I have not had that much time to stop working on the weekend. Instead, I end up with like a random Tuesday free you know?
I do interviews for The Creative Independent, and a lot of the people that I talk to for that—artists and writers—talk about learning to say no. I also struggle to turn down assignments, because you are always worried that whatever this is is going to be the last. The longer I do this, it becomes easier to kind of plan out my schedule further in advance, and that helps me to stave off some of those impulse decisions. If I can pitch or get assignments that are a couple of months out, it makes my life easier.
Do you feel like that system is a way to make a comfortable living? Is it something that you want to stick with? Or do you imagine getting a full time job sometime?
Ultimately, I do love it. I mean, I have my complaints. Everyone wishes we could be paid more, that it could be more sustainable and easier. But at the same time, I’ve had full time jobs and there’s something about protecting my time that is really important to me. Having control of how I spend my time feels central to how happy I am. I do slip on the banana peel of taking on too much but I have chosen to keep doing this again and again. And I will probably keep doing it, yeah.
Yes, I always find myself circling back to the idea of living small financially and abundantly with my time, instead of the reverse.
How do you find that the day-to-day criticism speaks to the fiction writing that you do, if at all?
They are entwined. A lot of my fiction uses scenarios that are loosely derived from that part of my life. The criticism keeps my brain active in a way that it wouldn't be just writing fiction because it forces me to engage with other artists' projects. Writing fiction is incredibly vulnerable and it can be really difficult to see clearly, so I think it helps to be on the receiving end of going out and seeing a lot of art to get a sense that this really is such a broad spectrum. As a fiction writer you’re contributing to this moment in time. The art that I appreciate is someone who is singular and really rigorous and funny and those are the same things that I value in my writing, or that I have come to embrace about my own process. So it helps me get a little perspective on trying to be an artist or being an artist.
What’s your approach when you go to an exhibit or to meet an artist or a creative? What are you looking for and what’s your note taking process when you walk into a gallery?
I’m super open. I do try to go alone and I try not to talk to anyone. It’s best to have as unfiltered an experience with it as possible, especially for that first encounter. I’ll take notes on my phone and try to maintain anonymity. I’m not someone who has a take right away. Writing longer form criticism is pretty well suited to that. I have time to think about what I want to say.
You write interviews for BOMB, The Creative Independent, and others. What do you get from having conversations with creatives semi-regularly?
A lot of the people I talk to have seen the ups and downs of a career. They talk about longevity and being able to sustain through those lower moments and to understand that everyone has the anxiety of thinking: this is the last thing I’ll ever make. That’s not a feeling that you have to trust. Everyone has a different way of sustaining themselves and generally, the older the person is the more that they feel secure in those things. That’s nice too, to have some hope that if you keep doing this it does get easier. I feel like I see that for myself as well.
When you’re feeling uninspired what do you do to rejuvenate?
It’s different for the different things that I do. For criticism the deadline helps. I have to tell myself that it is in fact a job, and sometimes my job is just to have the job and it doesn’t have to be the best thing I’ve ever done. It can just look like me having a job to do. That helps me get back in the saddle and not be so judgmental of the feeling or the product, which leads to me feeling better and brings some kind of inspiration along the way. Sometimes my job is just to sit at the computer and get started.
For fiction and creative writing, my friend who is an artist talks about how there are periods of production and intake.2 Sometimes when I’m not producing something, it’s an intake period and I just have to be attentive to things that are inspiring, I don’t have to do anything with them yet. Usually just accepting that as a moment in time helps me to move through it.
Good Content by Claudia
Read
I recently read Faulkner's Light in August for the first time. His free indirect discourse in this one is, to me, god tier. His sentences put today's stylists to shame.
I'm really excited about Helen DeWitt's forthcoming novel Your Name Here, which she wrote with Ilya Gridneff.
Everyone should buy my dear friend Sophie Kemp's book, Paradise Logic, which came out this year. It's a fever dream critique of gender, the bildungsroman, and how we twist ourselves for love.3
I really enjoy teaching Kafka's short story, “Before the Law,” to my adult creative writing students. It's so weird and mysterious—what a short story should be, in my opinion.
Watch
The only production company hiring filmmakers in LA right now is ReelShort, a questionable syndicate that produces feature-length movies for your phone, published in 90-second segments. The results are somewhere between AI slop, afternoon soap operas, and TikTok porn. It fascinates me. If you've ever wanted to watch something called "Secret Surrogate to the Mafia King," look no further.
Art
My favorite artist right now is Jill Magid. She is an extremely conceptual artist whose entire career is devoted to seducing authority, revealing its bizarre machinations in the process.
Listen
This year I can basically only listen to JPEGMAFIA when I write, which was recommended to me by the amazing artist Jon Pylypchuk. I also love the New Yorker Critics At Large podcast—Vinson Cunningham is always on the money.4
Jack Johnson talks about a similar concept in this great episode of Tetragrammaton.
It’s the best. I loved this recent one on how grief shows up in art.