Offering: An Interview with Hurley Winkler

We talked about her independent zine project 100 Swims

I’m offering something a little different today. As you may have noticed, I’ve written about myself for every post since this Substack existed. And I’m sure the people who love me enjoy getting these personal updates. Instead, I am offering a correspondence between myself and another writer.

I had this inspiration when I was scrolling on social media for a half hour, and decided instead to read this gorgeous zine I received in the mail.

In fact, you should all read the zine, 100 Swims: Last Summer’s Diaries by Hurley Winkler. The zine is physically beautifully crafted, and the insides are raw, real, and inspiring. A curation of journal entries from Summer 2023. The zine was released a year later, Summer 2024.

I came to know Hurley when we joined Chelsea Hodson’s Morning Writing Club in August 2022. Hurley was there every morning on Zoom, and we came to know each other through our internet squares. A year later, in Fall 2023, I took her online writing workshop, where she supported me for five weeks (and beyond). She is the writer of Lonely Victories Substack, and offers a book club for writers. You can find out more about her on her website. Now, enjoy her thoughtful responses to the questions I had about 100 Swims.

Lindsey Wente (LW): I’m curious how many pages you journaled a day. I know if a writer honors The Artist’s Way it is usually three handwritten pages that take place in the morning. What was your typical journaling method in the summer of 2023?

Hurley Winkler (HW): Okay: you caught me. I did, in fact, set out to follow Julia Cameron’s rule of writing at least three pages every morning. And for a while, I did exactly that. But after several weeks, writing three whole pages started to feel superfluous. I ended up making my own rule of writing at least one page every day, all summer long.

LW: I love when writers utilize constraints and adjust them for their routines and needs. When crafting this zine, how did you decide which diary passages made it into the final version?

HW: When putting the zine together, I gave myself another rule: I had to include at least one sentence from each day of journal-writing. At times, this was scary, because many of the entries were very personal, which led to many of the single-sentence entries. These may come across to readers as oblique or concealing, but I love that about them. I pushed myself to share while maintaining a sense of personal boundaries.

LW: As the reader, I felt like I could fill in the blank if I wanted or leave it open. What I love most about 100 Swims, is the very relatable pulse between having complete confidence in a creative project and in life; and then swinging in the other direction of heavy doubts and insecurities. When harvesting your diary entries, how did you shape the work to carry a certain theme or structure?

HW: That was the exact takeaway I had from revisiting my diary entries from last year: for me, creativity is like the tides, and often like clockwork. It was important to me to demonstrate that there are good days and bad days in my writing life, but that the trend of ebbing didn’t keep me from achieving my writing goals.

LW: A core aspect of this zine centers on the writer waiting period—I think I just made that up? The liminal space between projects. The air you must give a manuscript before you go in again. The moment before action, whether the action be querying, submitting, or reading the work again. Do you have any advice for writers who are in a similar space?

HW: It’s close to impossible for me to take space away from a project on my own, even though I know that so many of the project’s problems could be resolved with time and space. It’s helpful to me to send the work to a writer friend and ask them to read it, but also ask them not to send feedback until a certain date. Then, the feedback’s arrival will kick off another round of revisions. 

LW: This project is an independently made zine. Why did you choose the independent approach rather than submitting to lit journals or chapbook presses?

HW: It didn’t even dawn on me to submit it anywhere. It was so obvious to me from the get-go that this would be a self-generated project. I think it’s because the project feels so deeply personal, but really, I think I just wanted to keep it short. I wanted it to capture one moment in time, and I wanted it to be released in the same season it was written, one year later. For those reasons, I needed the control of releasing it independently.

LW: I think that’s what I’m sensing is so special about this project—the combination of it being deeply personal and fully produced from that personal space. And I love how the zine feels in my hand. What was the nitty gritty process of putting this lil baby together? I want to know all about editing, design, printing, etc.

HW: Thank you for asking about this: no one has, and tons of thought went into these aspects! I had one editor: my mentor, the novelist Laura Lee Smith, who’s mentioned throughout the pages of 100 Swims. I trust her so fully that, when she said it was good to go, I knew it was. 

I hired a designer, Rosie Struve, and I’m so glad I did, because she did a beautiful job with the layout. She’d worked on many books before, and I came across her in the Rose Books indie publishing database, which is a great resource.

A few years ago, my friends Emily and Phil worked with a Jacksonville printing company called Creative Printing Place to make a zine as their wedding program (which is the cutest idea ever), and the zine turned out so beautiful, I knew right away that I wanted to use the same printer. 

LW: A zine for a wedding program? Amazing. I also saw you had a release party for this zine in Jacksonville. Book parties are so Literary It Girl, and I love it! How did the gathering go?

HW: Oh my god. It was so fun. I wish you could’ve been there! 

I had the release at Makenu, a chocolate/coffee shop around the corner from my house, which is where I spend approximately 90% of my time. The owners, Jess and Tucker, have been hugely supportive of my writing, and they asked me back in the spring if I’d ever like to do an event there. I was already thinking about putting this zine together, but the offer to have a party was what sealed the deal. We set a date, and having the party on my calendar held me accountable to get the zine together.

Admittedly, it’s a bit strange that I had this party at all, considering how I am very much NOT the kind of person who’d throw a big birthday party for myself outside of karaoke in my living room with a handful of friends. I didn’t even have a wedding: my husband and I eloped, just the two of us, and at the time, he was studying for an actuarial exam and I was finishing my graduate thesis, so we spent the morning of our wedding at the library, studying and writing before heading to city hall. But when it comes to putting a creative project in the world, a party feels exactly right to me.

LW: I’m so glad you got to celebrate this writing victory with your community. Do you think you’ll ever make another zine? 

HW: I’m an avid diarist, so if there’s ever a season of journaling that feels special again, I’d love to make another diary zine. I can see myself returning to the zine format amid a moment of creative burnout with a novel project, and I’m relieved to have found a creative respite that feels this good.

LW: And the last question, of course, what are you reading right now?

HW: I am the least monogamous reader in the world, always reading between 5 and 10 books at a time. So here is every single book I am reading right now:

• Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

• 1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose

• These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson by Martha Ackmann

• Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography by Susan Cheever

• Finding Margaret Fuller by Allison Pataki

• Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter (re-reading this one very slowly, because my, it is dense)

• The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency by Melody Beattie (a book I am never not reading)

• Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir by Ina Garten (my most-awaited book of the year)

• Writing Wild: Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature by Tina Welling (the next book selection for my Book Club for Writers!)

I’ll have to check these out. I enjoyed reading 100 Swims so much. I want to share some of my favorite sentences from the zine that felt so relatable:

“Anyways, why does Little Women make me cry so much?”

“I’m afraid that I’m actually really bad at everything, or worse, just really mediocre at everything, and I’m just stubbornly pursuing my dreams.”

“It’s like I can’t trust myself fully. I want to reach the place where I can.”

“My prayer after swimming in the ocean this morning: help me swim along the shoreline whenever I feel myself getting swept up by the riptide of other people’s approval.”

I’ve been questioning recently, what does it take to be a do-it-yourself writer? I think it takes complete trust and faith in oneself. The ability to say, “I’m just going to do it myself.” And leading with self-validation in any project or offering. Thanks Hurley for sharing your process and creative project with me, and for being my first interviewee.

You can purchase 100 Swims here.