Conversation with Sonya Huber

You chose to write about a gritty industrial place with a great deal of lyricism. Tell me about that.

Growing up in the Rust Belt Midwest, I saw it as having astounding beauty, and the way it looked, with this rough beauty, seemed to also be a lesson in how to live: to find the shining moments amid the challenges. I think children's eyes are set to look for beauty, to be in awe, so this was the place that imprinted on me. I found it to have a deep impact on my aesthetic and also on my personality, and it's made me feel a kind of allegiance with other places that collect judgments.

Your essay "All in the Family," in which you write about your parents' work disposing of nuclear waste, is one of my favorites in the book. You write, "the glowing rods and core of my childhood, the money that powered my escape, my education, even my ability to sit here at this glowing screen, are still tightly wound together, still radiating their ghostly power." And you write, "I am proud that my family has done this dangerous and vital work, but I’m far removed from it, and they are a bit suspicious of the work I do at the keyboard. I think they might see me as another leaky barrel emitting dangerous traces from old stories. I understand the risks of attempting to shed light, and I would rather mark the places where the danger is buried." Talk to me about the class schism that education and opportunity creates in a family. What is the risk of your writing?

Thanks so much! It's been a challenge partly because of the deep schisms in this country, the way that intellectual work and writing has been portrayed as separate and out of touch from working-class life. Education has been set up by right-wing talking heads as a privilege that separates one from their roots. It doesn't have to be this way, but such sentiments have been used to divide the working and middle classes. Writing nonfiction in particular has been portrayed as a privilege, as opposed to a trade with skills just like anything else, so in writing about the classes I come from, I'm trying to heal those divisions in a small way.

The full title of this collection is Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook. Can you speak to "workbook" as a moniker?

Absolutely! That subtitle is a nod to a Bob Mould album called Workbook. He's from Minneapolis, and the album came out when I was in college. I love his music, and I find it to be sort of melodic and industrial and beautiful. I loved workbooks when I was younger, both for school and little books that you could buy with puzzles and tests. I love the idea of naming a book a "workbook" because it engages with labor, and I love the idea of a book being named a workbook because it is a record of my work.

You write in one essay, "If Chicagoland were a theme park, I would pay to visit, and then I would feel empty, wanting the ineffable that would be absent." This captures a sort of longing that stretches throughout the book. What is it to love something "empty" and "its contaminated chain-link squares of earth"?

I wouldn't want to imply that Chicagoland is empty; to me it's a very full place. I think the emptiness inside me comes from this fantasy of wanting to feel a sense of complete belonging from a place. That's an unrealistic expectation, partly because I have left the traditional sense of work that would have given me complete belonging. In describing the place, even in naming its scars, I'm enacting a kind of betrayal with my honesty. There's something about description, about taking inventory and being honest, that is rebellious, whereas part of the ethic of my place is to stay "in my place."

This book wrestles with labor, holding work in its teeth with both reverence and aggression. I'd love to hear about how your relationship to work evolved over the years covered in Love and Industry.

It's funny--while I was writing these essays, I was also and still am consistently active in labor activism, and those actions don't show up much in these pages. Now I'm the head of a union organization at the university where I work, and I've been able to continually and in daily practice work toward cross-class solidarity with that activist labor. Through chronic illness, I've had to remake my relationship to work, and to see how hard I've always worked, and to honor my need for rest, to see my emotional labor as part of my work. I've moved from a place of imposter syndrome to understanding that I do my work well. And the books I've written reassure me that I've worked hard to honor where I come from.