Sheila Liming: On Nurturing Human Relationships

Sheila Liming is an associate professor at Champlain College (Burlington, VT), where she teaches classes on literature, media, and writing. She is the author of two books, What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020) and Office (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the editor of one, a new edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2022). Her essays have appeared in venues like The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and The Point. Find her on Twitter and Mastodon.

In this post, Sheila discusses her call-to-arms for social interaction in her new book, Hanging Out, what her students taught her about person-to-person interaction vs. digital interaction, and more!

Name: Sheila Liming
Book title: Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time
Publisher: Melville House
Release date: January 23, 2023
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Previous titles: What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020); Office (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Elevator pitch for the book: A smart and empowering book about the simple art of hanging out.

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The decline, as I saw it, of hanging out, by which I mean unstructured social time. I wanted to write a call-to-arms in defense of a very old pastime that has started to feel foreign, strange, and increasingly rare.

About 18 months. I’d been musing on the subject for about six months before I pitched it to an editor at Melville House, along with a provisional chapter outline; after it was under contract, the book came together very quickly along the lines of the outline I had suggested, albeit with some modifications.

For instance, a chapter on “parties” that was supposed to include a discussion of dinner parties as well turned into two separate chapters—one on parties, one on dinner parties—after I realized that the two things were actually quite different.

I was surprised to see the book labeled, in some arenas, as “self-help.” I didn’t see it that way, originally; rather, I saw myself as writing a manifesto intermixed with memoir. I had no plans to be prescriptive or to offer advice until conversations about the book, which took place while I was writing it, started to drift into that kind of territory. The final chapter, “How to Hang Out,” grew out of what I perceived as a new need for reminders and encouragement on the subject.

I wanted to write this book because I was worried, initially, about the decay of hanging out and about a perceived lethargy regarding social activity in general. I wanted to fight for the right to hang out.

What came as a surprise were certain conversations with my students (I teach college students who are mostly aged 18-24), many of whom stated that they had little interest in hanging out in person and were happy confining their social activities to the internet. I became interested in that response and in investigating its viability in a variety of different arenas.

I want readers to reclaim the work of hanging out as work, and I hope the book will encourage and inspire them to do that. The 24/7 nature of contemporary work teaches us that all activity must be productive and, seen through that lens, hanging out is often viewed as an impediment to productivity.

But what I argue for is the opposite—for seeing hanging out as indispensable to the work of building and maintaining human relationships, which is some of the most important work we can do.

Many writers, I think, are shy when it comes to marketing new ideas or projects. If you have a solid idea for a book, don’t stress about whether or not it’s “ripe” or “ready” or fully developed. Start talking it up, pitching it, and spreading it around and you’ll find that much of what’s missing will start to naturally fall into place.

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