“Just Say the Word, and I’ll Bring My Whole Heart to Anything”: Remembering Gabe Hudson
Gabe Hudson passed away last week. It’s a terrible and unconscionable loss that doesn’t feel real yet, so I’ve spent the last few days reading through his old emails to me. They are utterly boundless in their enthusiasm for life, for writing, for reading, for books, and for everyone who is involved in books. Back in 2016, when he was telling me about his last novel, Gork the Teenage Dragon, he referred to his editor, Edward Kastenmeier, as “heroic.” His agent, Susan Golomb, was “wonderful.” The publicists, the cover designers, everyone was fantastic and phenomenal, and he was lucky to be working with them. Even though he struggled between his first book, in 2002, and his second, in 2017, he never lost any of his child-like bewilderment at being a writer, period, and at every opportunity he wanted to know how he could help the next person get there, too.
The last time I saw him was outside Books of Wonder in New York, appropriately enough, and afterward he emailed to say he was always there to help any of the centers in the 826 network. “Just say the word,” he wrote, “and I’ll bring my whole heart to anything.” That was how Gabe talked and wrote and emailed and texted. He was the most puppy-dog loveable and eager human—a friend who called you “brother,” and punctuated every message with affection and thankfulness and exclamation points. That he was a 6-foot-4 former Marine made him that much more unprecedented.
We published Gabe’s early work, which was extraordinarily mature when he was very young, and it came from a unique perspective, given he’d been deployed in the Gulf War. His hero was Kurt Vonnegut, though, so he took a dim view of American military adventures abroad, and was able to channel his experiences into his brilliant debut collection, Dear Mr. President. That book deserves re-reading as a unique document of that time, and one of the best anti-war books of this century. And true to his nature, he used that platform to elevate other voices, in 2003 curating a fascinating set of letters to George W. Bush from those disillusioned by the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, which we published here: “Gabe Hudson’s Dear Mr. President Letters”.
I hadn’t heard from Gabe in a few years, but a few months ago he asked me to be on his podcast, Kurt Vonnegut Radio. We talked for almost two hours, reminiscing about old times and our favorite writers. The time went by like a dream, and all along I had no inkling that he was in this kind of pain. I guess he was good at masking it, or forgetting it for an hour or two. Those of us who got to know the Gabe Hudson of joy and abundance are far richer for it.
Gabe’s family has reached out to us, and we told them we’d gather memories, anecdotes, and tributes from those who knew Gabe. As with any loss, the ache is dulled a bit when we can hear new stories about someone we’ve lost. It expands our sense of the person, and adds pages to their story. So we’d like to invite all those who knew Gabe to help us remember him. Friends, family, colleagues, former students — please send us memories of Gabe. Doesn’t matter how short or long. Email them to remembrances@mcsweeneys.net, and we’ll post new memories every day.
— DE
From Ben Marcus:
I met Gabe Hudson in 1995 when he was an undergraduate creative writing student at UT Austin. He was reading everything, writing weird and wild stories, spilling over with energy and an infectious sense of possibility. We connected again when he came to Brown for graduate school and I watched him carve out his own language and sense of story, antic and performative and strange and always his own. His book of stories, Dear Mr. President, used his military background and his narrative gifts to craft an uneasy kind of satire. His work was funny and unsettling, and if it made people uncomfortable, in person Gabe was just the kindest, sweetest, most generous guy. I am heartbroken that he is gone. Just heartbroken.
From John Warner, former McSweeney’s editor:
I woke up to the news on social media Saturday morning that Gabe Hudson had passed away at the age of 52. I don’t know how many of you know Gabe or his work, but he 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.
My first knowledge of Gabe 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 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 and 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 packets of letters, 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.