On the Passing of Gabe Hudson

A truly great person is no longer here, but his presence lives on.

I woke up to the news on social media this (Saturday) morning that the writer Gabe Hudson had passed away at the age of 52. I don’t know how many of you know Gabe Hudson or his work, but it strikes me that it’s all too common that the first time lots of people hear about a writer is upon their death. Gabe the person is gone now, but thanks to the work he has left behind, it is not too late to know and appreciate his unique spirit as so many of us did while he was living.

Gabe Hudson was an exemplary literary citizen, a writer who was relentlessly and publicly enthusiastic about writing and other writers. His podcast,

Kurt Vonnegut Radio

, is a great example of how he expressed his belief in the potential for writing to achieve something like a miracle in its capacity to bring people together. Perhaps start with his short episode explaining why he named his podcast after Kurt Vonnegut.

Why my podcast is called Kurt Vonnegut Radio

My first knowledge of Gabe Hudson came as a mix of awe and envy upon reading his story collection Dear Mr. President, published in 2002.

Dear Mr. President is to the first Gulf War as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is to the Vietnam War, a work that perfectly captures the horrible strangeness of war, in Hudson’s case by primarily writing about living in war’s aftermath. Hudson had served in the U.S. Marine Corps and had emerged committed to anti-violence, not unlike Vonnegut after his experiences in World War II. The stories in Dear Mr. President are like Vonnegut cross-pollinated with Donald Barthelme, frequently resting on a surface-level comedic premise that generates genuine laughs while smuggling in equally genuine pathos and grief. As someone who endeavored to achieve something similar, I was blown away by the book. It is exactly what I thought literature should attempt to do.

The envy didn’t last too long, as our mutual association with McSweeney’s brought us into contact with some frequency and I realized I was dealing with a kind and genuine soul. When I was editing the McSweeney’s website he was curating a series for us, born from his book, “Gabe Hudson’s Dear Mr. President Letters” in which he gathered an shared open missives to President George W. Bush from people expressing their desires, frustrations, and confusions regarding the world as it appeared in the aftermath of 9/11 and the president’s decision to take us to war in two countries. If you scroll through the 23 installments, you will stumble across the occasional name of a recognizable writer, but the vast majority of them are just regular folks to whom Gabe provided an opportunity to be a public voice. Some letters are silly, one-off jokes. Others are profound testimonies of loss and disillusionment. Gabe’s inclusion of these different voices takes both these sentiments seriously, because why shouldn’t we take both of those things seriously?

Gabe was a long time between books, and when his second one came it was in the form of a high school coming-of-age story from the point of view of a dragon.

Gork, The Teenage Dragon is sweet, sentimental, and funny. It is serious about its unseriousness, which allows it to come full circle, resulting in something quite moving. I don’t know if it’s the book I anticipated from the author of Dear Mr. President, but it seemed like it was very fun to write, and I hope that’s why he did it. Is it ungenerous of me in this moment to wonder what other stories Gabe Hudson might have had to tell because I would’ve liked to read them? Is that selfish?

I don’t know that I can claim Gabe Hudson as a friend, though I have a sense he might have used the word to describe me because of his belief that anyone engaged in the work he valued was a friend. We met in person only once, otherwise exchanging occasional emails usually at his initiation when he’d seen something I was associated with that he liked, a generous act made more meaningful because of the degree of my admiration for him.

Judging from my social media feeds, Gabe had many friends in the literary community, literally hundreds of writers, editors, booksellers, and readers recognizing and mourning his passing. Gabe was clearly a positive presence in the lives of many, many people.

What is there to say about a person who is gone too soon, who did so much good, who had much more good work and life in front of him, other than it is a loss?

Today it seems right and good to simply feel that loss.

Links

My Chicago Tribune column this week is about how I broke my no self-help book rule to read Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things and lived to not regret it.

The Washington Post has their 10 best books of 2023 (and lots of other lists). The New York Times has released its list of “100 Notable Books” for 2023. Two years ago in the newsletter I covered some ground on what we should think about when we see the word “notable.”

A.S. Byatt, author of Booker Prize winning Possession, among many other books passed away this past week.

33 typewriters from some very famous people (Hemingway, E.M. Forster, Shirley Temple, the Unabomber) are going up for auction on December 15th. You’re going to need some serious ducats to come away with one of these.

And finally, from McSweeney’s, written by Carlos Greaves, “Popular Dystopian Fiction if it were Describing 2023,” including:

Recommendations

1. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
3. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
4. Horse by Geraldine Brooks 
5. Deep River by Karl Marlantes 

Joe M. - Naperville, IL

A list of solid, satisfying reads here. Since Joe does mind a little of the speculative in his fiction, I’m turning to Colson Whitehead’s first book, probably still my favorite of what he’s written, which is saying a lot: The Intuitionist.

1. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
2. The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells
3. The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates
4. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
5. Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott

Jandy H. - Santa Clarita, CA.

For Jandy, I’m recommending the slim, but absorbing work of speculative history Matrix by Lauren Groff.

Got a decent supply of requests in the queue, but don’t hesitate to ask for your next read. If they stack up too much I’ll do a midweek, recommendations-only installment.¹

I hope my fellow USians had restful and restorative Thanksgiving holidays. If there’s someone whose work is meaningful to you and you’ve been putting off telling them, send them a note of gratitude in honor of Gabe Hudson. You won’t regret it.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. All books linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and the Teacher Salary Project, which is advocating to establish a federal minimum salary for teachers of $60,000 per year. Affiliate income is $304.40 for the year.