Office Hours

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi everyone, my name is Giselle Kowalski, and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University. You're listening to Office Hours, and today I'm here with Adrianna. Adrianna, what's up?

Adrianna Elias:
Hey, how are you?

Giselle Kowalski:
I'm good, how are you?

Adrianna Elias:
Good.

Giselle Kowalski:
So you got to speak with Ben Reed, who is a creative writing professor. How did that go?

Adrianna Elias:
Really awesome. I think it was one of my favorite interviews I've done thus far. He's very relatable in a lot of ways, and very interesting career journey, to say the least.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, and he's also very funny. And when we interviewed him, he had his birthday that day.

Adrianna Elias:
Yes.

Giselle Kowalski:
Happy belated.

Adrianna Elias:
Yeah. Happy birthday, Ben.

Giselle Kowalski:
We hope you had a good time, Ben.

Adrianna Elias:
Yeah, hopefully. Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
Awesome. So we hope you enjoy this conversation between Adrianna and Benjamin Reed.

Adrianna Elias:
So to start us off, what's your name, what do you teach, and where are you from?

Benjamin Reed:
My name is Ben Reed, teach creative writing, literature. I teach other writing classes as well. Where I'm from is the hardest question. Born in Houston, family is from San Antonio and Austin. I grew up in the Bay Area, partially because my dad was in the Navy. Came back here for college. I went to UT in the late ’90s and early aughts. And I've been in Austin since '98, so I can say I'm from here now, I guess.

Adrianna Elias:
Yeah, I think so.

Benjamin Reed:
Yeah.

Adrianna Elias:
For an icebreaker, what's the last thing that made you laugh super hard?

Benjamin Reed:
My kids. I can't remember a specific thing, but my kids crack me up all the time. They're very performative.

Adrianna Elias:
So what was it like when you grew up?

Benjamin Reed:
My mom worked for only part of my childhood, but we were left alone a lot. We would explore. I grew up on an island in the San Francisco Bay called Alameda, kind of near the water. And so we would go kind of just muck around in the mud and go hunting for crabs. And you just grow up going to the beach every day. If you're from Galveston, it's probably the same thing.

Adrianna Elias:
What was your first job?

Benjamin Reed:
My first job ... My first gig, I think it had to have been selling hot dogs at the Stanford Stadium. My first job was as a caterer. I was a waiter and a caterer for a catering company, kind of a upscale catering company. And so I did that on and off for several years before I moved back to Texas. And so that was interesting because the pay was really good. It's also interesting to be 18 or 19 years old and have seen 300 weddings. There's no mystery, there's no romance.

Adrianna Elias:
How'd you know you wanted to be then the major you chose?

Benjamin Reed:
Probably by the time I was about 14, realized that sort of my game was books and living in books and writing. It's one of those things where we, in my field, I'm sure we'll get to this, I have an MFA, which is a master's in fine arts and writing. And there's this perennial evergreen conversation about talent, and is talent real and can creative writing be taught. And people take sides in this debate. I think that talent probably is real. A lot of it has to do with luck though, so it's really hard to sort of talk about it in quantitative material terms. But you end up sort of gravitating towards what you're already good at.
If I'm being honest with myself, when I was a little kid, I wanted to be an artist. But I'm six foot five now. I was always the biggest kid. I couldn't really control my hands. All of my friends were better drawers than I was. But I could write well, and so I was like, "I'll do that." And I was already kind of good at language. My mom speaks only in metaphor. She just is constantly speaking this most poetically. She has no college degree, she's first-generation American. Her father came from a country that doesn't exist anymore. And she just has this gift for good vernacular, kind of working-class American West Coast English. She's from San Diego. And I was just given books a lot growing up.

Adrianna Elias:
Nice. So you mentioned you went to UT for your bachelor's, right?

Benjamin Reed:
Yeah, I got my bachelor of arts from the University of Texas. I was a midyear transfer, so I started in spring of '98 and I graduated right after 9/11. So December 2001. It was really interesting time. And again, because I took that year and a half off and I was already a little bit older from my grade, so I was like 24 when I actually got my diploma. I had just turned 24, so I was on the older side as well.

Adrianna Elias:
And your MFA, where'd you get that from?

Benjamin Reed:
Here.

Adrianna Elias:
Here?

Benjamin Reed:
Yeah. We have an excellent MFA program here. It's a three-year writing program, and I had a really good cohort. I got really lucky with my classmates. If you go to an MFA program, it's often seen as a luxury. It's sort of thing that privileged rich kids get to do, which is substantially accurate. However, with the Texas State, it's a three-year degree. So it's not just studio arts where you're sitting around doing workshop and work-shoping your short stories and you go knock off and go to the bar and then rinse and repeat.
We take theory courses, critical theory courses. We take literature courses with our master's, our MA lit cohort, and those faculty. We work on the journal, and we can take some of the cognit classes that branch out a little bit away from sort of the more elitist liberal arts stuff that a lot of MFA programs cater to.

Adrianna Elias:
Was that one of the challenges going into that? Or was there other challenges in college that you-

Benjamin Reed:
For undergrad or grad school? Because those two-

Adrianna Elias:
Either, yeah.

Benjamin Reed:
Because they were separated by nine years for me, so I was a radically different person. Undergrad was tough because I had just moved back to Texas and even though I had roots and family here, it was a weird time because I wasn't quite prepared for it. I was kind of going, not really realizing at first, but sort of going through a long-distance breakup.
I also, because I sort of restarted my college career, the irony is that I had been to several countries. I've been to Russia, Kazakhstan, I've been all over the world. I had a real big boy job. I had my own car, I had my own money, had my own credit cards. I was all kind of established. Ironically, I found out at UT that I was not emotionally mature enough to be a full-time college student, because I'd sort of never done that. Because I went to this commuter school while working on the docks, and so I'd never had this, do your homework, go to bed dummy, you have class in the morning. I would just be like, oh no. All my friends were going out to the show. And so I would just go to the show. And then 8:00 a.m. would roll around and I'd be like, nah, I'm not getting out of bed.
And of course my GPA suffered and I was on academic probation. That was my arc at UT was academic probation to dean's list. I managed to make that transition in four years.

Adrianna Elias:
That's awesome. So now we're going to get into the now of it all. So where you are now? You write short fiction and novellas, and you teach literature and creative writing. What was it like getting into this industry? And how do you keep pushing for this dream?

Benjamin Reed:
I was sort of doing it already. That's kind of why I came to get my MFA. I wanted to get better at writing. I'd already published a couple stories by the time I got here. And yeah, I just wanted to take it more seriously.
What had happened over that intervening years before coming here for graduate school and graduating Texas with my BA, is that I was sort of bouncing back and forth between these really good food service jobs, mostly bartending because I couldn't turn down the money. That's what I did in college as an undergrad, I just got sucked into it. And I would try to break away and I would do little bits, little gigs here and there. I would do copywriting. I would work for standardized testing company writing essay questions for seventh grade. And then I would just get pulled back into bartending and stuff like that.
And it was just this cycle. And I was just had this moment of clarity where I'm like, this is as far as this is taking me. This is as far as this bachelor's degree and my experience and my situation is going to take me. And by that point I was married, owned a home in Austin, I wasn't going anywhere. And so my grad school options were basically completely reinvent myself, or follow what I'm already doing. And so I applied here and I got in. And so I was just basically continuing what I wanted to do. I didn't actually know I wanted to teach. The fact that I've been teaching for the last 10 years as a full-time senior lecturer is surprising to me. Every single day, I walk into this office, I'm like, "Man, what happened?" I'm very happy with where I am, but for me it's very hard.
Like for you to ask me how to trace how I got here from there, it's sort of like I would have to draw on some storytelling and sort of connect these dots in maybe a fictive way that sort of makes sense because it isn't necessarily make sense.
But in terms of sticking with writing and publishing, I get rejection letters all the time. It's mostly rejection. It's mostly rejection. I've had agents that are not my agents anymore. You have to cope. You have to have strategies. But if all of your strategies are negative and self-defeating, you're going to have to find a different path or get very, very lucky.

Adrianna Elias:
So how do you get your ideas for your stories? Is there any media or person that kind of inspires you?

Benjamin Reed:
They come a couple of different ways. There's ideas that are sort of nag at me that I carry around for years and years and years and then I develop, and then there's things that sort of just pop at me out of the blue. You're seeing something and being unsatisfied with the way it's executed is a really good source of inspiration. But then sometimes weird things happen. One of my more successful stories is called "The Weigh-In" and it was inspired ... I was standing outside of Flowers Hall 10 years ago. We're not supposed to call it quidditch anymore, but we have a quidditch team. And so this young woman was walking by in her quidditch robe, but she was glum and she had her backpack on over her robe, and it was this weird just visual contradiction. And she was kicking her robe out with these aqua colored tennis shoes, but she's wearing this bright festive robe like she was in a choir or something.
And I ended up publishing the story and it got nominated for a Pushcart prize. It's called "The Weigh-In." And so this is a sort of social science fiction story where everyone whose BMI goes over a certain amount has to wear a robe until they get it back down to a healthy weight. And it's a story about toxic body image culture, what's going on in the United States with our fluctuation between being nominally body-positive, but also being super, super critical of people's appearances when it comes in certain categories. And living that contradiction, as we all do in this country, of being sort of big people who are obsessed with beauty.
But that contradiction of being sort of glum but dressed festively for somehow in my mind came out as a story, as a contradiction between being body-positive but also self-erasing.
The only thing I've ever heard that's resonant of my experience is when somebody says they miss-hear a lyric in a song and then go write that song. That's my process a lot. I think if you're making something and you don't know what it is, I think that's a really good place to be in, because then you know that you've sort of left the realm of emulation.

Adrianna Elias:
That's cool. I definitely feel like I do that, and I always feel bad for doing that, but that's what makes my art mind is the combination of all the things that I'm seeing put into my work. In an interview, you said that your students are between the ages of 18 to 20 and quote, "They've just made the tremendous terrifying leap from a small, noble world into a cosmos of uncertainty." What was that leap like for you? And how does it shape what you teach?

Benjamin Reed:
At the beginning of my career, the first five years, the first half of my current career at Texas State where I was teaching more freshman comp, so 1310, 1320, a little bit tech writing. But honestly, I don't think about myself in college as much as when I think about myself in high school. Those are kind of when I encountered a lot of the ideas that are part of our curriculum for those lower division classes: rhetoric, argument. And I just try to remember how I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what anything meant. I didn't know why it mattered. I just knew that I was interested in some things and not other things. And so that's where I try to meet my students.
As an instructor, I think if you are sort of forcing your students to learn stuff, I'd be like, "Here, this is important. Learn this. See how these things are connected." We already kind of lost the game, because your best-case scenario is your students are arriving at observations and making connections on their own. You just want to sort of steer them into a position to where they can make connections between their communications class, their art history class, and be like, "Oh wait, I see some of the same themes happening across place and time. Oh my God, these same things happening to me. Oh my God, I'm contributing while consuming it."

Adrianna Elias:
So finally, if you could go back and tell your college self one thing, what would it be?

Benjamin Reed:
I guess the real answer is think about the future a little bit more. I've always been, or I've always wanted to be kind of a romantic person who's very much invested in the present and who doesn't sort of overplan things. But when I was in undergrad, I had people who wanted me to go MFA. It was Elizabeth Harris, one of my writing teachers at UT. She was like, "You're just going to MFA, right? Because your stories are really great." And I was like, "I don't know what that is and I don't care." No, I'm going to travel the world. I should have just listened to people and said, "What is this future you're talking about? What are the different things I could do there?"
I think you should be present and you should be invested in this moment, but it doesn't mean you can completely go out of scale and only care about the here and now and just never think for tomorrow. Because tomorrow is a place where you're probably going to be there. Be here now, be present, but also think that your future's going to be your future present. And so maybe pay that Visa bill. And maybe when people want to mentor you and get you into a good graduate program, maybe you should listen to them instead of starting from scratch nine years later.

Adrianna Elias:
That's perfect. That's all. So thank you.

Benjamin Reed:
Thank you. This was fun. Appreciate it. This was a lot less painful than I thought it would be.

Adrianna Elias:
Just a little convo.

Benjamin Reed:
You did a great job. This is great.

Adrianna Elias:
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Office Hours. We hope you enjoy this conversation. Make sure you tune in next time to learn more about the experiences of our amazing Texas State faculty. Also remember to follow us on our social media at TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the host and guests, not of Texas State University. Once again, I'm Adrianna and I'll see you next time.