Photo by Adrienne J. Romero / SOC Images.
It started with a phone call at midnight: a friend swore they heard a humpback whale in the Hudson. That’s what I thought I’d start this article with, but really that was just one spark: one idea along the road in Timothy Herrick’s story.
Timothy Herrick, a New Jersey–born poet/writer and journalist, has published multiple books. Herrick has lived in Jersey City “for a long time” and will be one of the honorees at the upcoming Jersey City Theater Center’s 20th Anniversary Global Gala on Tuesday, March 10. Slice of Culture recently sat down with him to discuss two of his works: “Subconscious City: Love, Art & Artists” and “The Gundersons.”
Talking to Herrick, I learned much more about him than I anticipated. Before becoming a fiction writer, he was a poet.
Herrick recalled being 10 when he began writing, saying, “I woke up one day and wrote a poem, my older brother made fun of it and my younger sister said it was good.”
And sometimes it really is that simple.
Many writers will tell you there isn’t always this big flashy moment when they decide to write or even become interested in writing; many times, it simply begins with action, with an idea that makes them want to put pen to paper—or in this day and age, hand to keyboard.
Preface: Herrick’s Writing Journey
During the course of our conversation, Herrick mentioned a memory that seems to have stuck with him: he recalls winning a second-place award in the eighth grade for poetry recitation. Saying that he was the only person who had written their own poem; however, he lost out to a reading of “Charge of the Light Brigade,” and humorously added that he was “still mad about it.”
Herrick has spent over a decade on poetry before he began writing fiction and was a fellowship student in the MFA Creative Writing Program at New School University as part of the inaugural class, then concentrated on his fiction writing until 2010 when he began writing poetry again and did both.
Though he did mention that with poetry, he felt inspired to the point where at times he couldn’t do anything except write his poetry, noting that fiction is a “longer labor” and often takes a while to complete. Which is true for the most part: a story or a book can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to complete, and that isn’t even factoring in the time it takes to get the book published, even when you are self-publishing.
A City In Motion
Knowing this, we asked Herrick about his experience, and when he began writing “Subconscious City.” He told us he had begun writing it in 2017. The idea, according to Herrick, began when his friend called him, insisting they’d heard a whale in the Hudson River.
He remembered his initial reaction being “That sounds crazy,” then catching himself.
Herrick told us he thought, “Why am I resistant to that?” The question then became an idea, and the idea then became “Subconscious City,” Herrick’s interconnected collection of stories rooted in Jersey City’s art scene.
In the book, the artists orbit an art-bar ecosystem, their lives threaded together more by shared atmosphere than plot.
For Herrick, that choice is the point: the collection is an imaginative record of a city in motion—and an argument that Jersey City’s artists have shaped its identity far more than the old clichés ever did.
We asked Herrick if he intended to write any similar projects; after all, Jersey City isn’t the preferred setting for many works considering the assumptions many people make about what goes on. Some people consider it a place filled with crime when, in truth, the city is rich with cultural diversity, housing artists of all walks of life—something Herrick portrays well across the multiple stories created in his book.
Herrick then told us about his soon-to-be released book, which is the third in his series “The Gundersons: The Knolland Parables.”
While “Subconscious City” is rooted in Jersey City’s creative scene, Herrick’s second book, “The Gundersons,” moves into a different kind of territory entirely: a Western.
At first glance, it may seem like a sharp turn. Jersey City and Westerns are not exactly the pairing most people expect. But for Herrick, the shift was less of a leap and more of a natural extension of what has always drawn him to storytelling in the first place.
During our conversation, Herrick spoke candidly about his love for the genre, explaining that although he had always loved film, his relationship with Westerns became more serious in the early 2000s, when he began revisiting classic Western films and reading major works within the genre.
Over time, admiration became inspiration.
Herrick explained that “The Gundersons” first began with a short story written for a local western contest. Though the story was rejected, he did not let that stop him. Instead, he sent it elsewhere, where it was later anthologized twice. From there, the project opened the door to what would become a larger world of stories and eventually the Knolland Parables series.
For Herrick, he’s not especially interested in chasing what is expected or “popular.” When asked how a Western might resonate with audiences in an eastern city like Jersey City, Herrick pushed back against the idea that the genre belongs only to one kind of reader. The Western is not merely regional—it is foundational.
Still, Herrick is not writing Westerns in the traditional sense. He described his own work as “surrealist westerns,” shaped as much by literary influence as by frontier myth.
Taken together, “Subconscious City” and “The Gundersons” show just how wide Herrick’s creative range really is.
Even though the two books live in very different worlds, both reflect the same instinctive approach to writing: following inspiration, trusting the process and letting the work become what it needs to be—and it is that same mindset Herrick returned to when we asked him what advice he would offer aspiring writers trying to break into an industry that is rarely easy.
You can find Herrick’s books on Amazon and WORD Bookstore in Jersey City and he’s working on getting his work into other local bookstores.
“What’s fascinating about cities is the revolution. You know, the way the city changes and to see those changes and to see how those changes coincide with generational changes and changes in the nation and the world, it’s really quite interesting and just fascinating to me and really rich territory…
– Timothy Herrick to Slice of Culture
Plus I love to walk around and contemplate, you know, the world or my mind. I love to walk around Jersey City, and Jersey City feeds that to me.”
