You’ve published three novels, as well as a collection of short stories, and you have another novel forthcoming in 2009. What have you learned about book publishing and being a novelist throughout this time and process?
I just read an article called “The End,” in New York Magazine, which is the latest installment in the semi-regular declarations about the end of publishing as we know it. I’ve read several of these over the years, but this one paints a particularly dire picture about the fate of literary endeavor in this country. I was sorry, in reading it, that there wasn’t a bit more attention paid to the vibrant and ever more indispensable small, independent publishing houses we have. Instead the focus was placed on a small shop operating with some independence within one of the enormous conglomerates and what they were doing seemed dreary as ever (get celebrities on the list, then get more!!). So, thank God for outfits like Coffee House Press, where I’ve done most of my publishing. Not only do I get to be in excellent, unpredictable company, I have the undeniable luxury of knowing where I’m going to send my next manuscript and that it will get a very careful reading. I’m currently agent-less, and that works just fine with the sort of established relationship I’ve developed. So things don’t feel quite so dire from where I’m sitting. But of course it all can change in a heartbeat. I should definitely find some wood to knock on.
How would you describe the type of readers your work attracts?
This is a strangely tantalizing question because the number of readers a typical book of mine attracts could fit very nicely in a not even moderately robust high-school gymnasium and I find myself picturing a convocation in which all several of them have been teleported in for me to get a good look at them. The truth is this is a very difficult question to respond to without having recourse to the hypothetical. People who don’t mind a certain measure of text-based trickery? People who like Harry Matthews? People who don’t cry when they peel onions? Whoever they are, bless them.
Your first novel, The Impossibly, is often categorized as noir. Does this style carry on into your later novels?
My aesthetic preoccupations have tended to be project specific – so that if The Impossibly investigated certain aspects of genre that might fall in some general sense under the rubric of spy fiction, and The Exquisite under some cross between noir and pulp fiction, Ray of the Star takes advantage of elements of ghost stories. On the other hand, Indiana, Indiana wouldn’t easily fit into any genre category. So I’m pretty far from being preoccupied with noir – though I almost always love to read it.
Can you give us a teaser for your new novel, Ray of the Star?
Each chapter of this slender novel — which is about some demons, ghosts and a man who tries to woo a living statue — is composed of a single sentence.
You’ve almost completed another novel, which you describe as “a longish history-based novel set in New York and Colorado,” as well. What more can you tell us about that project?
Apart from the fact that, for all the usual reasons, it is frustrating the hell out of me, the novel involves early aviation, a graveyard for crashed flying machines, the marvels of osteopathy, numerous quotations from the modernists, a Pinkerton detective, fist fights, Cole Porter songs, the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, Mesa Verde, petroglyphs, palm and knucklebone readers and hoax. Just today I realized I needed to pretty much gut an entire section. This was depressing. I hope I was right.
When did you write The Paris Stories? Have you thought about putting together another collection of short fiction?
I wrote The Paris Stories, their first solid draft at any rate, in 1994-5, when I was living in Paris, smoking piles of Chesterfields and trying to be a student of sorts in Lettres Modernes at the Sorbonne. I am, much less emphatically and without the benefits of nicotine, slowly piling up a number of short pieces that might one day be fleshy enough to make up a book. I love very short things, both reading and trying to write them, but they are so omnipresent (and so often so similar in tone and intent) these days that I have grown afraid it would be too easy to get excited, knock off a couple of dozen over Christmas break or something and then fire them off at my editor.
Tell us about studying at Lettres Modernes at the Sorbonne, and living in Paris, France.
I went marching over to France a couple credits and a thesis short of an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and proceeded to treat the available rigors of the Sorbonne and the possible glories of Paris as a bag full of bright goodies to pluck up and try to mash into words. I had classes on Montaigne (huge discovery for me), Zola, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes, Jean Giono, old French, old Provençal and Latin. I took a class with the great Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadié, who was wonderful, even though the course was not on Proust. I smoked endless cigarettes in the courtyard of The Sorbonne and drank endless cups of espresso out of plastic cups, then sauntered out into Paris to be a flaneur and notice things and stand at café counters and order beers. In short, I was not the student I had once been, but something important was happening in my head. Important to me at least.
Did you study the writing of Jack Kerouac at Naropa? How do you feel about the man and his work?
I never took a course on Kerouac at Naropa but had read a good deal of his writing before I went there and consider him a marvelous prose stylist and major 20th century literary figure. There is a good deal of confusion, I think, generated by the title of the creative writing program at Naropa: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In fact, the lineage at Naropa has a good deal more to do with the poets of the Beat generation (Ginsberg was a co-founder with Anne Waldman of the program), Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance and the New York School than with Kerouac. I learned a tremendous amount, as a fiction writer, from the poetry heavy curriculum at Naropa.
Where else have you lived? What have you done there?
I was born in Singapore and am told spoke as much of the local dialect of Chinese as I did English for my first three years. I moved to London and watched many episodes of Blue Peter and learned to read and tried to call my American mother Mummy (she said no). I moved to the Netherlands and proved to be a speedy runner until I met up with the joy of over-snacking, especially on pommes frites (with mayonnaise). I moved to Greenwich, CT and attended North Street Elementary School and set a record for the standing broad jump that lasted a decade. I moved back to London and had my first girlfriend and listened to a first generation Walkman and looked out my window at the rooftops of South Kensington and decided I believed in ghosts. I moved to a farm to live with my Grandmother in rural Indiana and that went on for a long time.
Since then I’ve lived in Strasbourg, France (studying), taught English in Japan, moved to Boulder, CO, spent the aforementioned couple of years in Paris, lived in New York where I worked at the UN for five years, now live again in Boulder.
I love your story “How 9) Strange,” which appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Issue 19. Do you write much flash fiction? What are your thoughts on the form?
Barthes, perhaps channeling Bergson, remarks in Writing Degree Zero, that form is the residue of duration. I kind of love that flash fiction is sometimes, when it’s really hitting, able to conjure form almost without duration. It’s like a magic trick, but neither the magician nor the audience are there to say ooh and ahh and to then go off and have syrupy cocktails. Maybe what I mean is that it can be like a spell. Something strange and real has occurred, and your eyes (those poor overworked orbs) have been asked to do very little.
You were a member of the non-realistic fiction panel at AWP’s 2006 conference. (Read more about it in the links below.) Did you enjoy the experience? What is the most important thing you hope people took away from your talk?
I did enjoy the experience and will be speaking on a follow-up panel of sorts at AWP this year in Chicago. My hope is that a few people left with the idea that reading, like writing, is a highly active endeavor, and that active engagement with challenging work pays significant rewards.
If you could sit down to coffee with any writer in the world, who would it be? Would your answer change if you were meeting this someone for drinks?
The first three writers that popped into my mind when I read that question are dead. Still, I think I’ll list them and let the list stand as my answer and say that while the people on the list would not change if the beverage was different, the order might: W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortazar.
Contact Laird: lairdhunt AT earthlink DOT net
Read:
Laird Hunt on Nonrealist Fiction
at the Mumpsimus
“A Man Has a Job”
published by Tarpaulin Sky
“New Marvell Goose”
published by onedit
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