“Go Off and Figure It Out:” Fran Hoepfner ’13
on Learning, Teaching, and Comedy
By Laryn Kuchta
NYC-based writer and educator Fran Hoepfner isn’t opposed to taking a day off to see a movie and write about it. In fact, she embraces it.
For Hoepfner, K’13, it’s all part of forging her own career. She started her professional life in comedy, working for satirical newspaper The Onion and doing stand-up on the side. From there, she moved to freelance and self-published writing, and now takes pride in being an educator – something she “never anticipated.”
In her weekly Substack newsletter, “Fran Magazine,” Hoepfner describes herself as “a writer with brown hair and glasses – just like all the rest of them!!!” She started her career in comedy while pursuing an English major, a history minor, and an emphasis on Russian classical music at K.
“I was really encouraged at Kalamazoo to pursue [comedy] as a genuine point of interest,” Hoepfner said. “Not as a hobby, as a potential career focus.” She took a distinctive path at an already unconventional school, spending the summer after her sophomore year near her home in Chicago taking classes in improv and sketch comedy at The Second City comedy theater and school.
“I remember she had a great deadpan,” said K English professor Andy Mozina, who was surprised to find Hoepfner enrolled at The Second City at the same time he was taking classes there to research a character for his novel Contrary Motion. “You can try too hard in those situations, and you can be awkward, and she always had really good taste.”
During the fall of her senior year, Hoepfner decided to juggle her Senior Individualized Project – an hour-long play – with more in-person Second City classes.
“I was really unsupervised,” she laughed. “There was just the hope that I would come in January and hit my deadline, but I felt well-prepared just based on the classes I’d taken and the projects I’d already had. You can let me loose for three months and I’ll come back with something.”
After graduating from K, Hoepfner moved back to Chicago. Coincidentally, The Onion had just done the same. “[The Onion] felt like the ideal merging of comedy and writing,” Hoepfner said. She recalled telling herself, “This is nearby, and I bet if I’m annoying and try enough at sort of breaking into this system, eventually I might be able to get close to it.”
Hoepfner initially applied and was rejected for an internship. Later, “truly as happenstance,” she ran into one of the people she’d interviewed with in the middle of the city and asked for another shot.
“She’s just put herself out there in a great way in a really competitive environment and she’s kicking ass, so it’s really thrilling to see her,” Mozina added. Hoepfner scooped ice cream as her day job to save money while “etching away” at her goal, and a year later, she finally got the internship.
Her work was recognized when The Onion’s copy editor took a surprise vacation and she was asked to fill in. “I remember it was like the best week of my life,” Hoepfner said. “I was like, ‘Yes! I’ll do anything.”
Hoepfner found that working full-time at The Onion wasn’t always ideal. Women, people of color, and LGBTQ staff were “virtually nonexistent” when she was first hired.
“That changed a lot over the course of my time there,” Hoepfner said. She’s thankful for The Onion’s editorial team fighting for more diversity and the overall rise in media unions.
The Onion’s lack of diversity wasn’t funny, and neither were writers’ meetings. “No one is really laughing; they’ve heard so many jokes at this point that they aren’t really funny,” Hoepfner said. “It’s almost a red flag if something gets laughed at, because that means it’s too silly to go.”
Hoepfner also had to abandon some of her own style while writing for The Onion. The lack of bylines meant every author “needs to sound like the Onion voice.”
Experimenting with stand-up comedy, however, allowed Hoepfner to write using her own perspective. She loved standup, but realized after two years that she didn’t want it to be her job.
“The relentless churn of coming up with new bits was really not very appealing to me,” she said. “I like coming up with stuff when I have something to say.”
Hoepfner’s experience bombing in Onion writers’ rooms was “kind of harrowing,” but provided her with experience she’d need as a freelance writer.
“It really works the creative muscles to not be too precious about any number of ideas,” she said. “You always have to be continuing to churn and think of stuff. Developing the lack of attachment to ideas was really important for my writing, because so much of what I do now is pitch ideas to editors. I have to be very willing that, if someone is like ‘Not for us at this time,’ to be like ‘Okay, here’s another,’ and keep going.”
Hoepfner covers celebrities, the internet, and “movie-adjacent stuff” for New York magazine, and has published pieces in Gawker, BuzzFeed, and The New York Times.
“She has the knack for speaking into the world in effective ways,” Mozina said. “I envy that. It’s hard to do that well, and she does it really well.”
“Freelance is tricky, because there’s always a bunch of people waiting for jobs that you may have,” Hoepfner said. “If you can make yourself valuable by never turning anything late in ever, that’s a good place to be in, which I think was drummed home at The Onion. There’s not much room for extension.”
In addition to her freelance work, Hoepfner self-publishes “Fran Magazine” on Substack, which she describes as “a weekly blog about culture, some of it popular and some of it very much not.” Readers can access Wednesday issues for free, but Sunday issues require a $6/month (or $50/year) subscription. This way, Hoepfner can make money writing about what she loves, even if it isn’t picked up by a larger publication.
“Doing Substack, I, more than ever, had to become my own boss,” Hoepfner said. She sticks to self-imposed deadlines all while being her own accountant, editorial oversight team, and self-promoter.
Self-publication also requires Hoepfner to juggle artistic freedom with job stability. “It’s always great to know that if something can’t get through an editor or isn’t there yet as a concept, I have a guaranteed place to put it when it is ready,” she said. “If I want to take a whole Wednesday off ‘cause I want to go see a movie and write about it, I can do that. No one’s mad at me, no one knows.” Like with her SIP, “no one’s checking in, which is amazing. But it lacks . . . paid time off, benefits, these other points of job security.”
“Sometimes I have to take a step back and think about where it’s going,” she added. “Have I talked about this in a while? Should I talk about something else? How many times do I wanna talk about “Maestro”?
Hoepfner has referred to Fran Magazine as “the most trusted, up-to-date source on the specific insanity that is Maestro: A Bradley Cooper film.” The newsletter gives her the space to discuss the 2023 film about composer Leonard Bernstein that she had been “breathlessly awaiting” prior to its release, as well as classical music, teaching, and anything else about which she has something to say.
And Hoepfner has many worthwhile things to say. “It’s so hard to be savvy and relevant . . . and have takes that are thoughtful and also sharp and also current,” Mozina said. “In her Substack, she just has it.”
Freelance and self-published writing aren’t the only ways Hoepfner has incorporated her passions into her career. For her, teaching “provides a ton of stability creatively and professionally.” Hoepfner is a part-time writing instructor of the Thesis Seminar in the Design & Technology MFA at The New School in New York City, which she calls “one of the most important things I do now.” She had no desire to teach for a long time, but changed her mind when she found herself jealous of her friends in her graduate MFA in fiction program who were teaching.
“[They were] having all these bonus experiences of discussing material that we were learning about,” Hoepfner recalled. She begged her advisor for a position and was “let loose onto the students of Rutgers University.”
Hoepfner found that teaching at a public university had perks, but unlike K, was “very hand-holdy.”
“They were like ‘Don’t let anyone go off and do their own thing,’ and I was like, ‘Why not?’” Hoepfner said. She recalls conducting research at K feeling like “Okay, go off and figure it out.”
“Having that trust in students to not only do that work themselves but to be curious about it is really huge,” she added.
“I think I had always been told, ‘you don’t get writing done if you’re teaching, so only teach if you don’t wanna do any writing,’” Hoepfner said. “It’s true that I do less writing physically, but I’m thinking about writing all the time when I teach, and that thinking time is so great and truly helpful in the process.”
While teaching, Hoepfner tries “to think about the [K] professors who were really helpful” for her. She fondly recalls K’s education system encouraging “individual pursuit and individual thought.” As she describes in “Fran Magazine,” at K, “there was always a lot of nonsense about the joy of learning and the passion of discovery and an emphasis on curiosity. These were all well and good, and they were informed by the work that we were doing.”
“School is kind of made up and all the rules are arbitrary, and if I want to not care about late work I can not care about late work,” Hoepfner says, “but also…discipline and rules are in place for a reason. I try to be transparent, as I feel like a lot of professors at Kalamazoo were, about the realities of teaching, the realities of being a student. In a perfect world, it’d be a symbiotic relationship.”