Welcome to Something Out of Nothing, a newsletter about meaning—making it, finding it, offering it. I talk about the writing life, teaching, thrifting, books, travel, obsessions and idle interests, and much more.
‘Taking Care’ is a questionnaire about how we manage our inner and outer lives as creative people. Of Midwestern origin and Pacific Northwest affinity, Ty Phelps is exactly what you imagine: considerate, humble, outdoorsy, self-aware in his corniness, and stuck in the ‘90s. I can say all of this because he is a dear friend. We met upon his arrival in Richmond for graduate school—two years into the same MFA program, I was assigned as his “peer mentor”—and it’s been an absolute boon for the local writing (and music!) community that Ty has stuck around long after graduating. His fiction can be weird and surreal at times, yet point-blank emotional at others. He has worked like a dog on a giant fantasy novel for years now. There have been many, many hours spent writing across from each other in coffee shops, at picnic tables (pandemic life), and even next to each other at a sports bar. May there be many more.
Ty Phelps’ work can be found at Poets.org, Barstow and Grand, Clackamas Literary Review, Poet Lore, Streetlight, Zizzle, and elsewhere. He won the 2022 Nancy Ludmerer Flash Fiction Fellowship, Virginia Commonwealth University’s 2019 Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize, and The Gravity of the Thing’s 2016 Six-Word Story contest. He holds an MFA from VCU and served as VCU’s 2021–22 Cabell First Novelist Award Fellow and as the 2023–24 Writer-in-Residence at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. He is the co-host of the Flying South Reading Series and plays drums in several bands around Richmond.
Ty! What are you working on?
My debut novel (just finished my third draft and am now querying agents), some lyrics for my first few ventures into songwriting, my Substack, and eventually assembling a story collection and poetry chapbook.
What is something you once thought about yourself that you no longer do?
In my younger years, I felt unadventurous. I also once felt that I struggled to make friends. My adulthood has really put those notions to bed (mostly).
I’ve moved across the country three times, twice to places I’d basically never been before. I’d never set foot in Portland when I moved there in 2006. I’d been to the suburbs of Richmond for a wedding weekend in 2015, but that was all, when I moved to Richmond in 2019. Now combined, I’ve lived in on the coasts for 16 of my 42 years, over a third of my life. I also think about a 22-day canoe trip in the Boundary Waters in my early twenties.
As for friends, well, I count my blessings. I have a lot of friends, and they are perhaps the very best feature of my life. I just love people a lot of the time (even though we’re a fucking disaster at the species-level sometimes) and making a new friend is one of life’s great joys. Spending time with very old friends is another.
When is bedtime?
Anywhere from 9:30 to 11:30pm, usually. I’m not very regimented about it, perhaps to my detriment. But every day feels a little different for me, so bedtime often is, too.
What’s a habit or behavior that feels like taking care of yourself?
Boy, this is hard. I actually have a bunch of decent-to-good habits, but when I hear the word, I immediately associate it with “bad habits,” of which I’ve had plenty: smoking, drinking, drugs have all been major parts of my life at different points. I still bite my nails, same as I did as a little kid. I struggle to work creatively at home, going out in the world and spending money I probably could put to better use elsewhere. At the same time, I can’t say I really regret any of it, though I’m glad I’ve put tobacco behind me.
But good habits?! So much harder to notice. But here are a few: I do morning pages more days than not. I do Pilates 1-2 times per week. I have stretching and weight routines that I do regularly. Most weeks, I play music at least one night thanks to band practice, and sometimes with other projects, jams, or personal practice, I’m playing an instrument 3-4 times in a week. All those things rule, and are good for me. Oh, and listening to music, especially without doing anything else. Like, just put an album on the headphones and close your eyes and just listen.
What did taking care of yourself look like in your twenties?
Not smoking all the cigarettes, only some of them. Working out, usually while listening to Blondie’s Parallel Lines or Pink Floyd’s Animals. Being a bike commuter.
How do you prepare yourself to write about particularly difficult subjects?
I don’t really prepare myself to write very often. I sit down and I open whatever I’m working on and I start working on it. When I take the time to transition, which seems a worthwhile habit to cultivate, I sometimes makes lists ahead of time, or do a little journaling about a thing I’m thinking about.
How do you recover after doing intense creative work?
I tend to get very weird and wrung out and need to hole up after a lot of creativity or socializing. And I keep thinking I could cultivate some actually restorative activities to greater effect here. But I typically play spider solitaire on my phone and rewatch parts of The Good Place.
What self-care advice rings false for you?
Good vibes only kind of stuff drives me crazy. And anything about “optimizing” I find immediately suspicious. Smells like snake oil mixed with bullshit to me. And so much of the wellness industry is like this. It’s just the commercial impulse creeping deeper and deeper into our personal lives, into our bodies, into our time, and it feels very corporate and extractive. Like a branding exercise. I’m susceptible to it myself, but I intensely dislike and distrust the idea that the reason we care for ourselves or each other is to optimize our personhood in some way. It makes me sad and angry and I think that stuff is actively harmful.
How do you manage the way ambition feels?
Check back with me if and when I find someone to put out my book! Right now it feels like there’s a lot of momentum and also a lot of doubt and a lot of uncertainty.
How can you tell when you’re coming up on burnout?
Like, I will feel utterly fried. Sometimes this happens because I’ve been up too late or had one too many drinks or been going all day every day for two weeks. I am a very busy person: multiple bands, a full-time job, writing projects, lots of friends doing cool stuff that I want to support and enjoy and attend, a reading series, and and and. I’m realizing I need to schedule rest days or I will wind up canceling on people a bunch.
What’s the playlist of late?
This is going to be all music. Broad strokes, I’ve been on a huge Kristin Hersh kick for the past several months. Notable mentions: Bob Mould. MJ Lenderman. Lauryn Hill. Waxahatchee. Big Thief. Jethro Tull. Wu-Tang Clan. Pixies, particularly Come on Pilgrim. The Breeders’ Pod. Kendrick Lamar. Mudhoney. The Coup. Car Seat Headrest.
How does money, and your relationship to it, provide care or support?
I’m wrestling with this more these days, because a while ago, for the first time in my life, I took a job just because it paid enough that I could be materially comfortable to a different extent. Like my life could have some convenience upgrades. I could make "pleasure purchases" pretty regularly. But what I really wanted was to buy time as I finish the book and lower my debt rather than tread water with it. And I did that to some extent, but I hated working for a big corporation so goddamn much I left after nine months to teach high school again, which is its own kind of completely batshit overwhelming insanity, and is unsustainable in a completely different way. But at least the fights there are worth having. I can say no to things like AI and bad incentive structures. You can't fight with CEOs when you're an at-will peon, even a well-paid one, doing mind-numbing and repetitive work within icky, competitive, metric-based surveillance structures, so I'm going to try to never work for a large-scale CEO ever again.
What do you want to give a shout-out?
Flying South Readings Series, which I co-host monthly here in Richmond!
There’s a new Throwing Muses album that came out in March. And any time Kristin Hersh releases something, it is a cause for rejoicing, I say. A reminder that a (mostly) uncompromising creative life can be forged even in late-stage capitalism, that people will respond powerfully to authenticity amidst all this schlock that gets churned out, and if you can afford to be patient and focused, you can make a living doing highly idiosyncratic work even if you aren’t a megastar. What a career she’s had. I look up to her hugely.
What is comforting to you?
Peanut butter toast, Calvin and Hobbes, and Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York. I think these are all comforting and poignant both, though peanut butter toast is admittedly less poignant than the other two.
*Unless labeled otherwise, all photos courtesy of Ty.*
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