JC Live Wire Currents

07/28/25

    Jersey City author, journalist, and poet Timothy Herrick is full of surprises. Just when we were about to ask about his recently acquired pulp fiction western series, the writer has released a novella and collection of stories set right here in his hometown and taking place immediately before the extended surreal waking nightmare of Covid-19 arrived.

    Last year, as detailed by the Jersey Journal’s David Mosca, Mr. Herrick’s ‘Knolland Parables’, an experimental take on the classic Western genre, was picked up by Dusty Saddle Publishing. Since then, Dusty Saddle has expanded into literary fiction with the imprint Illuminari Press and the release of Mr. Herrick’s new title.

    The author explains: “From 2017-2021, I was inspired to write stories about artists. I set them in the same universe – a fictionalized Jersey City – taking place about mid-decade. They were current at the time, but the pandemic has changed the city and world so drastically, they’re now a literary snapshot, a time and place preserved. I focus on art, artists, creativity – why do we love paintings and why are artists compelled to create – and what impact that has on their families, friends and community. Why does city living encourage creativity? Our most recent past is both distant and familiar, perfectly framing this collection and enhancing its themes and plots. Subconscious City depicts the lives of artists and their familiars – families, lovers, friends, gallery owners, etc. – in a gentrifying American City. Clearly that city is Jersey City, and while fictional, the depiction of our most recent past – the pre-pandemic era – is true (but not factual).”

    As an admitted lifelong art lover, Mr. Herrick has been a publicist for Jersey City artists and arts organizations and covered the local scene in his blog Dislocations (2009–2014). At Stockton University he studied under Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn and was also an MFA Fellowship Student at New School University.

    Live Wire reached out to Mr. Herrick to discuss the new work and Jersey City in general. The e-mail exchange appears below unexpurgated and (mostly) unedited.

    The author’s website: Tim Hrk Lit - A portfolio of other writing by Timothy Herrick timhrk About

(LW): Your bio says simply that you live in Jersey City and were raised in New Jersey, and that’s cool, high school is a touchy subject for everyone. What did Jersey City look like when your escape pod landed and you stepped out?

(TH): I’m not sure what you mean by high school. My teenage years were very difficult. I grew up in Paramus, the quintessential NJ suburb in the wasteland that is America. I went to college in South Jersey, which instilled in me an appreciation for the different regional demographics within the Garden State. Then for a while lived in Elizabeth where I also worked at a magazine. My dream was moving to the East Village in New York.

    As I gained experience and an impressive clip file, a New York magazine publisher gave me a Senior Editor position and a good salary and I moved to the Lower East Side and it was great. Bookstores everywhere, affordable bars, grungy art galleries, revival movie theaters, unfortunately my apartment kept getting burglarized and was in a relationship and she lived in New Jersey so Jersey City was the compromise. She went back to the suburbs and I stayed. NYC was too distracting for me as a writer, Jersey City leaves me alone.

    Jersey City looked more Ghetto I guess, but so did the lower east side and Brooklyn back then, which I love. Ghetto-Fabulous was a common expression. I hate cars and driving and hated the suburbs where everyone was white. Diversity is so liberating. I was just glad to be out.

Jersey City was dingier and working class. The stores here hadn’t changed their fixtures since the Ford Administration. Woolworths. CH Martin Customer. Neighborhood Hardware Stores and butchers. Spanish Bodegas, which sold sandwiches, snacks and household items and Korean bodegas, which sold produce, natural foods and Asian imports. I had my fill of shopping malls growing up in Paramus.

    The only bars in Jersey City were sports bars and not very many, and they too seemed untouched by time. I did most of drinking and such in NYC, where I worked and did poetry readings and most of my partying. Jersey City was a respite from all that.

    Life was more bifurcated. Very few friends wanted to visit Jersey City. For work, socializing and culture, go across the river. Otherwise stay home in the old factory town, go to the gym, be healthy, read and write. Go to Video-Rental and rent a movie or two, as opposed to now where you can stream everything all at once. The PATH used to be grimy orange, now it’s shiny chrome blue. 

    The Chinese Food and Pizza were as good as NYC but that was about it for takeout. A couple of old school Italian red sauce places were still around too, but they too looked straight out of the Ellis Island era. That was their charm, like the restaurant in The Pope of Greenwich Village where Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke worked. There seemed a collective nostalgia for the Greatest Generation style in the latter 20th century – like an offshoot of the camp movement – which seemed to vanish in more recent decades. Fiore’s Deli was this Italian deli that was still here, had been since like the Depression. Every Friday they served Fish Filet sandwiches, very old school. 

    Factories and warehouse were just being renovated, many were still fallow. You’d meet people who either worked or had family members who worked at the Colgate Factory or the Pencil factory. The Reagan era decimated American industries and factory towns like J.C. suffered the most. You’d walk around Jersey City and see the entire history of the 20th century, the industrial revolution rise and fall, boom and bust. I love that look, cobblestone streets with embedded railroad tracks or the old trestles of the Embankment. We’re haunted by America’s broken promises. 

    But it wasn’t just remnants of the past. Some of the Catholic churches are the same now and then as they were since before the 20th century. The main branch of the Public Library had an old style elevator – it required an elevator operator until like 10 years ago – the new lift is far superior but the library is still a wonderful old building, 

    So, that old Jersey City – historic remnants – was still very fresh when I hit town. Bergen County was filled with Jersey City folks, the white flight folks. My family didn’t have that background at all, but we were in the minority. Discovering that everybody in Jersey City from that generation hadn’t moved to the suburbs and the many families and their offspring that stayed had a very different outlook towards life than suburbanites was revelatory.

    But the present is always just a fading past. Now the remaining industrial buildings are alongside the new condo and office towers, which seem very bland, somewhat oppressive and identical to new buildings you see in skylines of other cities. They’re not as unique as the repurposed industrial buildings. The contrast though is not without aesthetic value. It’s such a chaotic blend, a constant clash of eras.

(LW): When and how did you come to terms with and fully accept that you were eternally cursed and blessed to be a writer and poet?

(TH): The phrasing of this question makes me wince. However, when I was about 10 years old I woke up one morning and wrote a poem. I don’t know why, I just did. It was poem about waking up and morning sounds. My older Brother and younger sister were eating breakfast and I came downstairs and said I wrote a poem. My brother make fun of me and my sister said she liked it. I honestly just think of writing as a vocation and a calling. About two years later – 8th Grade – I was the only person who recited their own poem in a poetry contest and won second place, losing to the Charge of The Light Brigade. I’ve never thought about doing anything else as work or pursuit. My constant challenge is balancing paid writing gigs with literary art. Just about the only time I’m not thinking about writing is when I’m writing.

(LW): The novella and stories in Subconscious City take place in the city just before we all had to seriously modify our party schedules and the bodies started piling up. Does it seem at all like the social scene is returning to some level of normalcy, or how are we forever changed?

(TH): Nobody knew Covid-19 was coming until it was here. The pandemic coincided with the rise of Trump and these stories take place in the America before Trump. Previously, writing contemporary fiction the precise era mattered little but the constant upheavals since 2016 changed the game.

    Being a quarantined writer was almost identical to being a non-quarantined writer. It was not until the pandemic however that I saw the book as a cohesive whole. I’m exploring ideas about art that I’ve been pondering for decades and I usually write contemporary fiction, so the setting is now but since the rise of Trump that now is naturally on everybody’s mind so what was now is long past. Seemingly overnight writers of contemporary fiction were now writing historic fiction. It’s not just Trump or the Pandemic, technology, social media, architecture, change has always been relentless but never occurring so quickly.

    Actually when the pandemic hit, I needed a break from Jersey City and I wrote my first Western, The Gundersons, which led to The Knolland Parables series. That work came very quickly but I put aside the Subconscious City work for a while. In building the universe of my so called surrealist westerns set in the town of Knolland I began to think about the novella and short stories as an episodic anthology all set in the same place and time.

    The scene like everything else in the world was disrupted. Some places closed, people passed away. The setting of Subconscious City had vanished.

    In some ways the Jersey City of Subconscious City is more fictionalized than the town of Knolland. There’s plenty of documentation of the evolving Jersey City Arts scene, if poorly archived, barely organized nor well presented. Subconscious City is literature, not a year book of the good old days. Artists and their associates, that’s where my interests are. The human brain is wired to think both verbally and visually, but they’re not evenly proportioned in each individual mind. Artists think visually more than the rest of us, at the same time our culture is more visual than any previous civilization. They’re first responders to the changes transforming our collective consciousness. 

    My subject is always the human condition. Artists — visual artists – painters, photographers, mixed media, illustrators, sculptors – the whole lot – they have more to show us than just their pictures. The setting is a long moment in the history of city and the country. Now our most recent past, but it’s the art and the folks who create art and their lovers and friends informing readers about the human condition is what these stories are about, they just happen to occur in a unique American city.

    I suspect the social scene has changed because places closed down, new places opened, people moved away and waves of young people keep coming. Cities are always changing. 9-11. Sandy, the pandemic. There’s before and after and how much the instigating event formed that after can be discussed but everyone’s life is going through ups and downs regardless. Bodies age. Generations change. Baby Boomers are being shunted off, X is middle aged and Z and Gen-Alpha are incredibly smart, creative and intuitive. Your parties over and you’re not invited to the new one. Such is the relentless passage of time.

    Art scenes are very social but also very cliquey and amazingly prone to gossip. But artists still create good work and like everyone else they’re enduring the overwhelming apprehension of our times.

(LW): Clearly, you’re a long-time and sharp-eyed observer of the art scene in Jersey City. What does Jersey City’s literary scene look like as of today’s date?

(TH): Are you using the art scene and literary scene synonymously? 

    As far as I can tell, the Jersey City literary scene is all spoken word and performance poetry. There’s some good writing out there. For me the risk is when a good performance camouflages weak writing but the open mikes and readings around town are usually engaging and entertaining.

    The art scene – I guess visual art – and theatre, but there’s not an abundance of theater spaces in town and you don’t see acting companies in raw spaces like church basements – anyway, visual art … well the era of Art Bars and raw space galleries or art-centric outdoor events like Creative Grove or the 4th Street Festival seems pretty much over, which is more or less the Subconscious City era. Now the galleries are classier, the presentation more professional. I miss the make-shift galleries in bars and cafés, but at least the lighting has improved. It’s less approachable in some ways, but there’s still authenticity and great art to be experienced. 

    The thing about the Jersey City art scene is that there’s no one Jersey City art scene. We’re an asteroid belt, not a solar system with a central sun for planets to orbit around. We’re disparate. 

Because of the art fund and some city initiatives, there’s more awareness of art. Social media encourages, which is needed because with the demise of local news outlets there’s an absence of arts coverage of any kind. 

    Community out-reach has long been an Achilles heel for Jersey City artists, organizations and galleries. The cultural affairs department has the same challenge, It’s not for lack of trying however. 

    There’s an economic incentive for a municipality to support the arts: tourism dollars. Generating revenue is an important consideration when taxpayer dollars are used to fund art programing. But art also improves the quality of life of residents. Art has a higher purpose than just a positive economic impact, but defining that purpose has always been elusive. Obviously community outreach and relevant programming are key components, but that’s way easier said than done. It’s a constant challenge for organizations and some do it better than others, 

The arts play what seems an inevitable role in gentrification, which is one of the themes in Subconscious City, I’m not sure how that can be avoided or how the negative ramifications tempered, but those issues need a drastic update. Gentrification as it was known is history. Jersey City is now in the hyper-gentrification stage. It’s a new chapter. With gentrification, art scenes seem to be both precursor and accelerant, With Hyper-Gentrification, the role of the arts and arts organization in this new paradigm is murky at best.

    I guess we’re all waiting and seeing. Perhaps solace can be found that this conundrum of art, artists and urban renewal is a scenario being played out in cities throughout North America, Europe and parts of Asia.

(LW): As an indie author, you are doubly lucky and a rare success story having been signed by your publisher Dusty Saddle, which has recently expanded into literary fiction with Illuminari Press (a dream come true for any multi-faceted writer). What counsel and encouragement can you give the new ranks of wide-eyed scribes to save them a little bit of time and turmoil?

(TH): Get out while you can. Seriously, writing is hard and if you’re looking for shortcuts or less suffering do something else. Read and write, then rewrite and revise. Reading is the most important. Literature and genre-fiction, both never either or. Devour oeuvres. Deep and close reading is essential to the craft of writing. I’ve also found that writing in the morning is beneficial because that’s when the veil is thinnest.

    Natural born and Berklee-trained jazz and blues master Jim Joustra does some serious adulting on his debut solo recording, taking time away from his numerous group projects and stepping into his own with a long-awaited collection of songs that explore an early fascination with America’s original music genres and ponderous, celebratory musings of myriad guitar stylings.

    The 5-song EP jumps right in with ‘(Here Comes) the Soho Momo!’, a funky, greasy, gritty, and jubilant walk through the arts district with a little change in your pocket, a chance for adventure, and the whole night ahead of you.

    ‘A Jersey City Nocturne’, a swift, lusty affair complete with post-coitus cigarette, evinces an adventurous (but of course doomed) summer dalliance in the sixth borough, with flirting glances at flamenco, tango, and salsa, and the distinct taste of bittersweet lament.

    The solid, pensive guitar work on ‘Aimer, c’est s’aimer, Soi-Méme’ suggests a self-reckoning and a quiet resolve, with an ending that also sounds like a beginning. For, after all, To Love, is to Love Oneself.

    The laid back and brief ‘An Early Rain>’, an ambient, ponderous piece coincidentally heard with a Saturday’s morning drizzle, sparked memories of an afternoon spent with old vinyl records in an attic in Portland, Oregon, and of teenage tragedies with soundtracks by Cocteau Twins and Ulrich Schnauss. The song then happily eases into ‘Petrichor’, a lush, intricate, and intimate work that marches triumphantly, if bloody-lipped, to a hard won peace, like the scent of dry earth revived by a long absent rain, the mythological blood of the gods.

    The artist’s website: Jim Joustra Guitar

    The full EP on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1PQ3p8odhKNgrjQOi7MtZV

04/19/25

    Just over a year ago, on April 10th, the Jersey City Municipal Council nearly unanimously voted 7-0-1 to approve a Ranked Choice Voting “trigger” ordinance that would enact the ranked choice method of ballots in municipal and school board elections, contingent upon passage of authorizing state legislation in Trenton.

    There was a fair amount of public support for the initiative and advocates nationwide chalked it up as a small victory for a concept still remarkably unfamiliar to the average voter. Hoboken had recently in December 2021 become the first city in New Jersey to approve RCV.

    Proponents of ranked choice voting defend it as the most logical form of electoral representation, a “win-win” scenario for everyone, and democracy in its purest form. Theoretically, Republicans stand to benefit with second and third choice votes from Libertarians, disaffected Democrats, other third parties, and undecided voters. In turn, Democrats would receive votes from pragmatic Greens, less obedient Republicans, third parties, and those same undecideds. Critics have called the ranked choice system confusing and anathema to the “one citizen, one vote” doctrine.

    So how will RCV work in Jersey City? The immediate answer is that it won’t. Not without you, it won’t. Without increased public support and demand, the ranked choice voting bills currently before the state legislature, A4042 in the Assembly and S1622 in the Senate, face an uncertain future, most especially in the in the current stormy political climate.

    As for how RCV functions in practice, the idea is so simple one can perhaps understand how folks conditioned to only two options might get confused. In the most basic of terms, a voter is able to rank their choice of candidates as first, second, third, and so on to however many candidates are listed on a ballot. At the final tally, the votes from the least vote-getters are distributed upward to the voter’s next choice(s) in mathematical succession, an “instant run-off”, until an undisputable winner of the contest is clearly confirmed. Costly and time-consuming run-off elections are eliminated.

    National organizations such as Rank the Voteand Fair Vote exist to help educate the public about RCV and provide updates on advances throughout the country. Fair Vote includes a New Jersey page. Voter Choice NJ is an organization focused on the garden state and has posted an online petition in support of the Municipal and School Board Voting Options Act, the RCV legislation primarily sponsored by state Senators Linda R. Greenstein and Andrew Zwicker, the latter a perennial champion and sponsor of RCV bills who has received bipartisan support for ranked choice voting from leading New Jersey Republicans such as Vince Polistina.

    At the time Jersey City approved its ordinance, there was national attention on the proposed bill and its subsequent passing. Mayor Steve Fulop expressed support for the initiative, as did Senator Raj Mukherji, Assemblyman John Allen, and County Commissioner Bill O’Dea. Ward E Councilman and now mayoral candidate James Solomon co-sponsored the Jersey City bill and could be seen everywhere on local media espousing the merits of RCV. There were favorable op-eds in the Jersey Journal and other regional publications. At the hearing itself, there was a who’s who line-up of Hudson County notables on the speaker list in support of the legislation.

    And then the waiting began. The following month, Red Bank became the third New Jersey municipality to officially endorse ranked choice voting with a borough resolution. In late August the town of Princeton also passed a reform resolution expressing support for state-level ranked choice voting legislation. On September 11th, US Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08), US Congressman Don Beyer (VA-08), and US Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) reintroduced the bicameral Ranked Choice Voting Act to require RCV for all congressional primary and general elections.

    A full year has passed since the Jersey City resolution. The main bill before the New Jersey Legislature floats aimlessly in legislative limbo, as did similar bills before it, all of which ultimately dissipated into the ether. For the ranked choice voting initiative to succeed in New Jersey, a monumental effort by the electorate has to take place. Only widespread support will make it happen.

    At the very least, and not at all the least of it, RCV in local elections would certainly generate civic interest and activity, level the political playing field, and offer a voice to the voiceless. At the federal level, ranked choice voting disperses with election “spoiler” disputes at the dinner table and, had it been implemented in the 2024 elections, would have undoubtedly afforded the country an opportunity to avert the national catastrophe of the dumpster fire currently raging unabated at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.

Downtown, 01/26/25 - This past Sunday Jersey City showed its support and concern for Gazans in the aftermath of the war with Israel, which was declared a permanent ceasefire two weeks ago.

   The Palestinian Cultural Fair held at Grace Church Van Vorst was hosted by a coalition of relief organizations and student groups including New Jersey Peace Action, Ceasefire Now NJ, HCCC for Palestine, and others, with all proceeds going to Heal Palestine and PCRF.

   There were cultural talks, musical performances, embroidery demonstrations, art pop-ups, and an assortment of vendors. The line for a taste of Palestinian food was so serious a second entrance had to be opened.