Hello, writer!

July has come and gone, which means two important things: it's almost my birthday, and it's time for a Meet the Author interview!

I am pleased to introduce you to Emon Hassan, author of I Dream of the Heights, a collection of poetry and photographs taken in Washington Heights, Manhattan. Emon and I had an awesome conversation about creativity, permission, and trying new things.

I'm also excited to share that Emon is giving away a copy of I Dream of the Heights!

​Emon Hassan is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker. A regular contributor to The New York Times since 2011, his photography and multimedia work have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, BBC, PBS, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, Narratively, and many more platforms worldwide.

How did I Dream of the Heights come about?

It started with me taking photos back in 2015 with my iPhone. I was shooting with my iPhone, whatever phone I had in 2015. I wanted to go out and explore a little more of my neighborhood in Washington Heights, where I've been since 1999. I would go out with no particular intention in mind, just take images and see what I captured. Around that same time, all these different iPhone apps became available that let you do textures, layers, filters, all sorts of things.

I said, you know, let me see how far I can take it. If I have the original images, and I layer them and put texture on them, how far can it go? I would give them more painterly effect textures and go with my intuition. I gathered a group of pictures and whittled it down to about 30 or 40. It got to the point where, when I looked at them, I was like, “I don't recognize this as something that I have done. It's become something else.” As I was looking at them, I thought, there are stories there. I wanted to weave a story with all these images together. It's something that I've always done when I look at my pictures: “Oh my god, I wonder what's happening in that scene.”

So, for a long time, I tried to work out stories, and they just didn't come to me. I shared a few photos online on a large Washington Heights Facebook group. The moderator said, “You know, there's a photography exhibit I’m curating for the New York Public Library Inwood Branch, and I really liked two of the photos that you shared.” Those two photos were framed, matted, and hung for the exhibit in 2016. That was unexpected, and I know people responded to it.

Flash forward to many years later, in 2020, I decided to do a photo series. I selected 24 of the original photos. I wanted to do a book, no stories, nothing. As I laid it out on pages, I said, “You know, this feels empty.” I felt like I could do it as a photo book, but something was missing, and I didn't know what it was. I set it aside for another three years. Toward the end of 2023, it randomly dawned on me: I should do a photo book with poetry. I've written poetry since my teens and have published here and there. I decided, okay, I'll do that. That will be my first book.

Then I had to write the poems. This is an example of how deeply those stories were buried inside. One day, one session, all the poems came. As I laid the photos out on an InDesign file, they were on the right side, and the left side was empty. I sat there and started to respond and say, “This is what comes out of this photo.” Everything came in one day. I looked at that and thought, “Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that was all there.”

What was the publishing process like?

I decided to do it as an ebook and reduce the barriers that come between wanting to do a book and actually having a book out. Keep it simple and make it accessible.

From then, it took about two months to edit once I whittled it down. I wanted to keep it simple, so I said ebook only. I finished it and exported it from InDesign into an EPUB. I put it up there and let my people know ahead of time. It was a matter of two or three weeks for that to kind of come together because there were a lot of technical issues. Once that was done then I announced it, and it's out.

How have you gone about publicizing the book?

I basically have my newsletter, and there's a small but dedicated group of people who have been with me for the past ten years, some even more. I've always kept them updated on what I was doing, whether I was shooting a story for The New York Times or doing this or that. Many of them have bought prints from me before, so we have that history.

Once I announced the book, there was an instant response, which was that they didn’t know I wrote poetry. They knew I was a photographer and a filmmaker. The book caught them by surprise just a little bit, but they were very happy. A good number of people bought the ebook, but a good number of people said, “We're buying the print book. We're going to skip the ebook. Sorry, we don't do ebooks.”

So I said, “Ah, I guess I have to do a print version.” It's gone from that to like, when is the print version coming? I'm in the process of sorting out a printer. I think I found a printing service, but it's trickier because it has photography in it. The quality has to be very close. [Bailey's note: I Dream of the Heights is now available in print!]

The response has been overwhelming. It's mostly word of mouth so far. I'm very hopeful that it will encourage me to do more.

You’re a photojournalist moving into poetry and other types of writing. What has that been like?

I got into photojournalism late in my 30s. Every 10 years since my teens, I've had a very big shift in what I did. For a long time, I played music, I taught guitar. In 2009, I decided I was going to do photography seriously, because that was something I always wanted to do. I didn't own professional cameras or have much training. I decided to give it my everything and see where it goes. In 2011, a couple of years later, my first ever publication that I signed a contract for was with the New York Times. It was kind of a pinch myself moment. I said, is that real? That's not how people say things work. I got into photojournalism, and that lasted about the last 13 years, and it’s still going.

In the past few years, especially since the pandemic, I felt like it was time for a change. I needed to do something different. Filmmaking was always something I wanted to do. I also know that for as long as I can remember, since I was a little kid, I was obsessed with books. I would pretend to make books when I was a kid by folding pages and stapling them and then writing. In my teens, I wrote a short story longhand in Bengali. It was like five pages long, I made a cover, stapled it, and I would distribute it to friends. I said, “You read it, and then you forward it to somebody else.” Flash forward to all these years later. I feel like I’m using that same technique if you will, which is word of mouth.

Going from photojournalism into more into fine art and books is almost like going back full circle to what I always wanted to do. I feel like if I hadn't done these past 12, 13 years of photojournalism, which is a lot of deadlines and doing your best and showing up and making the best of that, I'm not sure I would have had the confidence to get back into self-publishing or completing something and going in those directions. The transition has been smoother because I think now technology has given somebody like me, who mostly works alone, a lot of ability to go from an idea to a finished product pretty easily. Easier than at least it was five years ago.

I'm bringing the expertise, but having a deadline has been the biggest motivation in terms of getting things done. Everything is self-motivated, so I have to give myself a deadline. I have to not think so much in photojournalism or journalism terms and be more creative in terms of telling stories, which is a part of my brain that has been in the backseat these past 12 years.

What are some strategies that you find helpful for getting words on the page?

I've always been an intuitive writer. When I sit down if I think one ounce of anything, nothing happens. I have to sit down and let it be and get all the filters down. That is the only way it seems to work for me. Anytime I did outlines or thought about what I wanted, it hasn't worked out.

Trying to get those 24 photos for I Dream of the Heights, which was originally a photo series only, into a book form, I overthought it. I looked at the images and tried to think through how can I connect these and do this and do that? Eventually, I asked, “How would it be different if I let go of that? I'm going to respond and it can be wrong, totally wrong and I'll allow myself that.” I find that when I do that, it comes up.

I attribute it to reading a lot. I've always felt like if I read a lot and I take the filters down it will come out from my lens. That has always been the process. I found that in this case, I was able to do that with the poetry and not think “Is it poetry? This is how you should do it. Do you read the lines here? What does this mean? Why is it this? Why is there only one line here?” So I said I wouldn't think of any of that. I'll let my subconscious dictate and I was able to gain more trust in that process than if I sat down and tried to think my way through the pages.

What's next for you creatively?

The next step is to get the printed version going and that is a process of looking at it and seeing it digitally. In my head, it's a book. It's a process of seeing the images and understanding the expectations of the readers who have requested it and how much they care about the absolute perfect pixel-level accuracy and printing and all that versus how much the poetry meant to them. The photographs are a part of it, and so is my connection to them and what speaks to them. I'm trying to balance that. The readers are responding to the work, so I can't spend too much time worrying about nitpicking over the details, especially if it's photography. A lot of photographers go really deep into the printing quality and all that, and it's about balancing that with what the expectations are. People respond to the whole work, in general. As long as I meet that, then that's my goal.

For the next work, there are a few ideas. I mean, I always have a lot of ideas, but what's next will be something different. I understand that if you do something and it gets a good response, the tendency would be to do something the same but different. I think the only thing that might be common between this and the next would be photography. The content, the written part of it might be very different. It could be anything, really; it doesn't need to be poetry, so I give myself permission for it not to be poetry. It could just be a book of photos with no text in it.

It sounds like giving yourself permission to follow your creativity is a big part of your process. Has that always been the case? How do you give yourself that permission?

I was never good at asking permission. That was the case with music, whether it was teaching guitar and telling myself I don't have a music degree, I didn't go to school for music, and this and that. A friend of mine tells me, “Who cares? You know, do your students care if you have a music degree?” You have to do it and let the world tell you that this is not for you. I was pleasantly surprised that I was teaching a lot of guitar students because I was able to offer something to them that had nothing to do with the actual teaching of the guitar. It was more like being able to do something if you feel like doing it and not having all these other things weigh on you to have permission. I would focus on people who were told that it was too late to pick up the guitar. It's too early, you're too old, or any of that stuff. It was always my MO to convey that it's never too late to do anything you want and you don't need permission from anybody.

Because there will always be people who will say, “Oh, that's not music. That's not poetry. That's not photography. That's not what a book looks like,” and that sort of thing. I said, you know, who decided that?

I've always done that. It's just the way it was built from growing up and being told constantly that that's not something you should do. This is not for you. You shouldn't do this, because people like you should do that other thing. I said you know, I don't believe in that. I believe in people as people, and we should be able to do whatever we want, however we want.

So it's always been that way, including giving myself permission to quit my corporate job and take photography full-time and see where it goes. I found that anytime I did that, I did very well in terms of progressing. But being human, every once in a while I'll tell myself a story of why I shouldn't do certain things and why I'm not the right candidate. I will spend a period trying to unlearn that, undo that, and move forward.

It’s the same going into the industry of making books, which is to debate the terms. What's a book? What’s not a book? The whole that matters is I think something's a book, and I think something is photography, I think something's poetry. I put that together and put it out there because once it's out there, it's for the world. It's for the world. Really.

When doing this book I was pleasantly surprised at how warm the reception has been. It's a great example. I tell myself to do what you feel like doing, what feels good to do, and inspire others at the same time. It doesn't matter what stage you're in, in life, or what you know. You just do it because the world will surprise you and you'll surprise yourself. At the end of it, you don't need anyone's permission to do anything.

What advice would you give to another writer?

I know a lot of people say be yourself and write what you know. I feel like “write what you know” is something I don't believe in. I feel like writing something you don't know is where all the surprises are. It's in doing so that people find either it's a hit or a miss. But no matter what the case is, it sheds a light on something that's surprising.

For writers, I think the number one thing I would say is, beyond giving yourself permission, really put your own voice into the work. If it starts to feel wrong, out of the norm, or against the grain, it probably is something different. Think about how you want to be different because all writers go through that when trying to find their voice.

There are certain things inside of me that come out in writing when I'm writing for myself in secret, and I'm like, “I can't show that to anybody because it's too weird. That is probably the thing that should be out there.

It is scary to put yourself out there. These days, especially, there’s a lot of criticism, but I think when we fear the bad, we also don't allow all the good things that come from weighing in.

What's the best book you've read recently?

One book that I absolutely love is Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (affiliate*). It's one of those big books. When I saw the description in the Times, I knew I had to read that book. It’s one of those books that that you go, “What can you take out and still make it work?” and I couldn't think of anything, because it's just so well written.

A nonfiction book is Susan Cain’s Quiet (affiliate*). I'm an introvert. That book gave voice to me, and I said, “Oh, wow. That's me. I'm okay with that.”

I'm grateful to Emon for taking the time to talk with me about his creative process and for sharing the giveaway! Be sure to enter at the button below.