Laird Hunt Interview

2 nonfiction JORGE ARMENTEROS

Pushing Outside the Received: An Interview with Laird Hunt ARMENTEROS: When I say the word “Indiana,” what is the first image that comes to your mind?

HUNT: It’s my grandmother standing in her pantry with her fingers in a bowl, kneading dough to make a piecrust.

ARMENTEROS: How old were you?

HUNT: When I went to live with her, I was thirteen, and that’s when I really started to register the things that she would do in a daily way. I had visited many times before going to live with her. When I was thirteen, my parents had split and both had said, “We’re going to have to find some other solution for raising you.” I went to Indiana at that point. It was supposed to be a one-year engagement but it lasted five years and then I went to college in Indiana as well.

ARMENTEROS: At what point in your life did you realize you wanted to be a writer?

HUNT: It started to creep in late in high school, I think. This idea that writing could be something that was at least part of my life. I was under considerable family, mainly paternal, pressure in a gentle way but a consistent way—that I think came out of the best intentions—to go into something like business, something like law, something that was recognizable and that would help me make my way through the world.

Nonetheless, I was living with my grandmother in this farmhouse in Indiana. She had a significant personal library that had been started by her father and that she had maintained and built up, and on its shelves were amazing books. It wasn’t that I was reading Virginia Woolf or Faulkner or Hemingway or Homer, but they were there. While I would sit reading my fantasy novels in the library, I would look at them and wonder and I have often thought that maybe that’s where this idea that I could be something else, a writer, came from. My grandmother was certainly passionate. She was an English teacher. There was a sense of a worth to the endeavor.

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Laird Hunt by Laird Hunt

Still, I went all the way through high school and college without doing any creative writing of any kind. In college I studied history and French literature, including a year abroad in Strasbourg, France, where I was exposed to nineteenth and twentieth century novelists and story writers.

It was during the year I spent immediately after graduating from college in Japan that I really started to write and to think I could be a writer. It was in Kumagaya, Japan, in my apartment, sitting cross-legged at a low, kotatsu table that I wrote my first stories.

ARMENTEROS: How did studying French literature as an undergraduate, and living in Paris for a while, influence your life as a writer?

HUNT: Hugely. So much of my sense of identity as a writer comes from that experience—much more than any early awareness of American literature, for example, although of course I had been exposed to any number of standard classics in high school—first in Strasbourg and then later, as you mentioned, in Paris where I was a student at Paris IV, the Sorbonne.

I didn’t do very well in my classes at the Sorbonne, but I did complete the first draft of my early collection, The Paris Stories.

ARMENTEROS: Do you think the expectations of a fiction writer in France differ from his or her counterpart here in the United States?

4 nonfiction HUNT: My wife Eleni and I frequently talked about the differences between the life of a writer in France and the life of a writer in the United States. In France, if someone asks you what you do, and you answer, “I’m a writer,” the immediate rejoinder is not, “Oh, but what else do you do?” or “Great, but how do you make your living?” Unlike all too often here in the States.

Off and on over the years, I’ve dreamed about reinventing myself in some way, and going back to Paris and living as a writer there. There is a sense of validation there that’s useful. It’s empowering for a writer to have the idea that what one does matters in some fundamental rather than trivial or supplementary way.

ARMENTEROS: Do you think those differences are cultural or market driven?

HUNT: I wonder if the market is following culture or vice versa. It’s a question worth thinking about. The life of the mind certainly does feel like it is under serious assault in this country. I don’t want to romanticize the situation in France though. France is full of all kinds of worldviews and experiences, and the twenty-first century and its technologies is hitting it as hard as anywhere else, but there is something that remains, some strand of belief in the power of books and art to change the world for the better. All you have to do is go on the Métro in Paris and you still see people reading novels—and novels by Zola, novels by Proust. Again, I don’t want to posit some fantasy of France that doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Certainly, there are more and more people looking at their phones, playing games on them rather than thinking, or spacing out, but there is still, I think, a firm belief in books. And I think it does come out of a deep cultural given that literature matters.

ARMENTEROS: There’s a stimulating book by Susan Jacoby entitled The Age of American Unreason that echoes some of the sentiments that you are talking about. She proposes that anti-intellectualism is not only tolerated but also celebrated by those in politics and the media. I wonder if there will be a time when that pendulum will shift.

HUNT: There was reason to be so hopeful, in so many ways, when Obama was elected. Here is an intellectual guy, a former law professor, who writes memoirs, reads novels, and clearly believes, as his wife does, in the life of the mind and the imagination, and yet we have seen an acceleration in the rise of these very well-educated anti-intellectuals during his tenure.

Still, I remain hopeful. I hope the pendulum will shift, but it’s a tough time. Which is not a bad space to be in as a serious writer. Too much endorsement can undercut serious endeavor. Though a little of it is nice once in a while.

nonfiction 5 ARMENTEROS: If you belong to a tradition, what would you call it? Where are the roots of your genealogical tree, and in which directions do its branches grow?

HUNT: There was a review of my fourth novel, Ray of the Star, in Bookforum, which referred to what I was doing as “continental.” And it certainly is the case that that work is informed by my sustained engagement with European literature; was European in its sensibilities. Ray of the Star doesn’t dodge plot or narrative, but it is also governed by the kind of constraint that Oulipians and other experimentalists work with.

I have another heritage, though, one that I think comes out of Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, William Carlos Williams, and many others interested in the American experience and what America might mean. All along, I have written what I think of as my urban “continental” novels, and then my rural novels. In some ways, lately, especially with Kind One and Neverhome, the rural has the upper hand, but I don’t believe for a moment that it will continue to have it.

I have been influenced by many, many writers, and have many heroes, but I’ve always felt myself to be positioned a little bit outside of prevailing paradigms, both past and present. At Naropa University, where I did my MFA, I studied with Anselm Hollo, a Finnish poet who wrote in English. He seemed to be both of the world of writing and apart from it, as did so many of the writers I worked with at Naropa and who came through its legendary Summer Writing Program. So maybe it’s no coincidence that Naropa’s writing department believed in the importance of attending to an “outrider” tradition of literature. Writers of great power, of lasting significance, who wrote, like the predecessors who had inspired them, non-normatively. So there is both exploration and a growing (because you are always reading) awareness of where one is coming from. That’s worked for me very well.

ARMENTEROS: I would like to begin talking about your novels with a quote from The Exquisite, where Henry, a perfectly unreliable narrator, attempts to describe the mysterious Mr. Kindt: …while many had sung of the great variety of life, of its rich and fulsome plenitude, if asked to stand and take his turn at the great song of being, he would sing of death and its agents, bright and dark, alone or in company, mock or real, on the earth or in the air or below the seas.

Is The Exquisite a book about the transcendence of death?

HUNT: The Exquisite had an interesting evolution. It started when I encountered the book The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. I couldn’t help but notice

6 nonfiction the double-page reproduction it contained of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson. And it was looking at this striking image, and reading Sebald’s thoughts on it, that I started to wonder what would happen if I made the shadowy corpse at the center of The Anatomy Lesson the protagonist, or at least the central figure, of a novel.

Sebald talks about the double identity of this corpse, Aris Kindt, who also went by the name Adriaan Adriaanszoon, awakening the possibility of this relatively ignored figure in the center of the painting having had a life, having had a history. It was pretty easy to go and find out more about Aris Kindt and to start to put together in my mind some idea about this story.

For a long time, The Exquisite was a fifty-page meditation on this figure set in New York, which is where I was living at the time. I didn’t really know what to do with it. And while it contained some pretty good stuff, it wasn’t a story. It wasn’t finished.

Then September 11th happened. This enormous event sort of exploded into the process of the book, and shifted it, as it shifted so much, and I saw it differently. All of the latent elements about death and about the empire of death became even more foregrounded. Much of the plot structure, of what gives the book its motor, happened in the wake of that horrible day.

The notion of mock murders that is so important to the plot came out of stories that I read and heard about traumatized people trying to recreate the circumstances of that day.

For example, the person who lived near Ground Zero who was finally able to move back into his apartment, only to spend hours scraping away at the peeling paint on his ceiling, realizing at a certain point that what he was trying to do was recreate dust. You’d hear these stories and sometimes they were anecdotal, they weren’t reported, they couldn’t be verified, but there were many of them, and they became a kind of currency of exchange among those of us who were in the city that day. The woman who spent more and more time living on her fire escape was another one. She eventually, effectively, moved out onto the fire escape, again, out of trauma.

These kinds of stories, transformed and transmuted to varying degrees, worked their way into the draft and turned it into a book, one that drew a kind of horrified breath from the tragedy without wanting to be too particular about it. So I tried to generalize that experience, meaning that “September 11th” or “9-11” is never mentioned, it’s only referred to obliquely as, say, “the events downtown.” And after all, The Rings of Saturn isn’t localized around a single event, the Holocaust, as The Emigrants is, it’s about catastrophe of many varieties, natural catastrophe, human-inspired catastrophe. Going back to Sebald after I had a better sense of the book’s trajectory, I teased out more elements and wove them through the novel

nonfiction 7 very deliberately and created the work’s texture, which is an unreliable texture, as is Sebald’s.

ARMENTEROS: Considering that Surrealism aims to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality by means of revolutionary works of art, would André Breton consider The Exquisite a legitimate child?

HUNT: I’d like to think so. Though I’m not sure that if he had done me the honor of putting his hand favorably down on The Exquisite he wouldn’t have then taken it away when he saw some of my other books that go elsewhere, do other things. Without ever wanting to try and duplicate the devices and effects of the Surrealists, I’ve always been drawn to them and found them to be a powerful force, even when I became very interested in the works of the Oulipo, the mainly French (with a few notable exceptions) writers who in many ways created their movement as a rejection of Surrealism. Constraint for the Oulipians was much more liberating than the kind of radical lack thereof prescribed by Breton and his colleagues. Regardless, all of my books have aspects of the Surrealist project within them and even the most seemingly straightforward ones are riddled with visions and fever dreams.

ARMENTEROS: Is Henry an unreliable narrator because he’s mentally ill, or would he tell the story in the same way if he were of sound mind?

HUNT: With its twinned narratives, both narrated by slightly different versions of Henry, the novel offers both opportunities. In one narrative Henry is out and abroad on the traumatized streets of New York and in the other he is in a hospital. Let’s not forget that this is a character born of Aris Kindt, a character born out of a need on my part to narrate Kindt. So he’s a sort of reflection of this central figure, who in turn is an embodiment of death, an embodiment of mortality come to full, though uncertain (my Aris Kindt is alive, after all), fruition. It’s hard to speak from that place. Henry has a kind of deep, internal stutter.

ARMENTEROS: The long sentences in Ray of the Star create a fast-paced narrative. They propel the reader toward the end of the various two- to four-page sections. Did you write those sections in discrete bursts of creative energy?

HUNT: Yes. It was a joy to do it. I have very fond memories of setting out to sea on these long sentence chapters. I’ll tell you the way I did it. After the very first sentence was written, I would always write a little bit of the next sentence and then leave it for the next session so I would have something to move forward with. I would be mentally panting almost, really huffing at the end as I neared the finish line of the day’s sentence, but I would run a

8 nonfiction few steps past that line as my track coach in the long ago told me I always must. Always run through the finish line, don’t run to the finish line!

So I would give myself just a little bit to go on, just to start the next section, and this method worked, boom, boom, boom, all the way through the book. It was written very quickly: I think the first draft was set down over a period of a few weeks with a sentence, two at the most, a day, and it was really a wonderful experience. I’m hard pressed to remember where I was when I was writing certain ones, but the general feeling of it remains, and I’ve always wished I could go back and do it again, but as is so often the case the gesture used itself up.

ARMENTEROS: Roberto Bolaño once said: “Let’s say the story and plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is chaos, disorder, or the realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it epileptic).

Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death.”

Does this resonate with your own creative process?

HUNT: It really depends on the project. In the case of Ray of the Star, form was something that was given to me, was a kind of gift. It came through a chance encounter with Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s short novel, The Assignment, which is written in single-sentence chapters. I came across this singular book at the Boulder Public Library and I started to read it and I realized that I had to shut the book because I wanted to do something with that form. And although I’m a fan of Dürrenmatt, who is a little overlooked these days, I’ve never read it, never finished the book.

What was interesting about his sentences was they were, as you say, fast moving, propulsive. They moved forward and didn’t seem to want to stop until the sentence was over, the chapter was over, and this was a mystery novel. I’d never encountered this before. I’d certainly encountered the Jamesian long sentence or the Proustian long sentence or the Faulknerian long sentence, but compared to the ones I found in The Assignment, those seemed to meander. This was something completely different.

So in the case of Ray of the Star, this structuring element, the formal element, really fell into my lap and it was the story that I was much more deliberate about: I had the form, those sentences, and then what was I going to do with it? The form (the cage) went in search of its bird. In the case of other books, The Exquisite, for example, there was a completely inverse experience.

Part of the joy for me of writing is that each project comes out of its own organic circumstances, and I’ve never been able to come up with a recipe for it. I’ve always envied writers like Bolaño and others who can make

nonfiction 9 proclamations like the one you just read. I think they’re wonderful, and often write them down, as one does, but doing so myself rarely works for me.

ARMENTEROS: Do you consider form and rhythm as veritable storytellers?

HUNT: It certainly feels that way to me. I’ve always been very attentive to the surfaces, to the materials of writing. One of my great early artistic heroes was Paul Cézanne, and I admired this notion he seemed to espouse of the materiality of paint, the importance of the surface. It was the first time I had encountered that. This makes me think of an early teacher, Bobbie Louise Hawkins. One of her greatest lessons was the importance of punctuation. And the shape of the sentences on a page. She would punctuate our pages when she made her critiques, more than anything else—she didn’t particularly care what point we were or were not making through our characters, plots, etc. She was very interested in the way things sounded and the way we read things, and punctuation was the way to unlock that.

I’ve never thought of my books as sort of vehicles for stories, flashlights to shine onto content, delivery systems for lessons and/or stories.

The stories are very much the rhythms of the language employed; the stories are very much the constraints I’ve employed. For example, this character Harry in Ray of the Star is sentenced by what has happened to him, sentenced by the terrible event in his life, and the reader then becomes sentenced as well. You enter one of those sentences and it’s very hard to leave them until they stop. You’re trapped.

ARMENTEROS: Ray of the Star is your only novel that takes place in a foreign country, in the city of Barcelona, to be exact. Was it difficult to suppress early images of Indiana while writing that book?

HUNT: Indiana, the flat, central part of the state, is my deep heart’s core. Or my “deep zoo” to borrow from Rikki Ducornet. I think here of Italo Calvino’s great novel, Invisible Cities, about the explorations of Marco Polo. Ostensibly the book comprises Polo’s descriptions to Kublai Khan of all the cities of the great Khan’s realm, but as we start to understand, it starts to seep into our consciousness as we read, that all of these cities are simply versions of Polo’s own deep core, Venice. It’s very beautiful and very powerful, and rings quite true to me.

Certainly, if I’m going to write a fictionalized version of Barcelona or Paris or Athens, it’s always going to be haunted by myself. I can’t step out of the way. That’s what gives it the particularity to the extent that there is any. Indiana is in everything I write.

10 nonfiction ARMENTEROS: In The Impossibly, the reader follows the main character into an abstract world where the real and the unreal intertwine, and many questions remain unanswered. Was that a deliberate approach?

HUNT: Not in the sense that I said to myself beforehand, “This is the world I want to create, this is the gambit I’d like to play out.” I was working at the time at the United Nations as a press officer in the Department of Public Information, and spent my days reading and listening to people describe experiences in curiously abstracted, often quite dark language.

Euphemisms abounded for very difficult situations. The language of the diplomat is full of ways to circumlocute around horror. Sometimes, it’s about things that are positive. Sometimes, it’s about breakthroughs. But the breakthroughs that the UN diplomats and staffers talked about came in the context of natural disaster, of war, of outbreaks, of disease, etc.

So, much of my daily life was spent in an enormous organization with many tentacles that dealt with situations all around the world, and sometimes even into outer space! I covered a subcommittee of the General Assembly, part of whose multifaceted charge was decolonization, and another was taking up the peaceful uses of outer space. Things like the growing dangers of space debris would come up. We’d go from the cosmos to the situation in Yemen or what was happening in Taiwan or on Vieques Island. Absolutely covered the spectrum.

When I started to write The Impossibly, it was with all of this in the back of my mind. But I wasn’t consciously thinking I really wanted to do something with this. I had a break from work, so I had a few weeks ahead of me. I had this notion of wanting to start something longer. I had already written the first draft of Indiana, Indiana but that was at a stopping point.

I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what it was.

I thought, “How can I get this started? I’ve got a little bit of a notion of a love story, but I have no idea beyond that…” I was doing some shopping on Avenue A in the East Village in New York, and went into the local Key Foods, and decided, “OK, I’m going to shut my eyes, spin around, and the first thing I register when I open my eyes will start the novel for me. And I’ll go from there.”

So that’s what I did. It was back-to-school time. There was a backto-school display for kids, and there was a kid’s stapler. That’s what I saw. Right away, the idea of something that puts a strong bind on weak materials sounded like a love story to me. I started writing, “The first time we met, it was about a stapler, I think.”

Then, as I started writing this story, and this chance encounter in a paper store, all of these things in the back of my mind from my experience

nonfiction 11 at the UN started to rush in very quickly. And the story very quickly went dark. Also, it started abstractly. There are no names, or the names are euphemisms, and the place is not identified, and that continued. During the weeks that followed, I wrote the draft of the first part of The Impossibly.

For a long time, I thought that the project was going to be a trilogy in the spirit, say, of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy or Samuel Beckett’s trilogy.

But over the course of the next four or five years, during which I continued to work on Indiana, Indiana and started The Exquisite, I was realizing that I was probably writing a novel and not relatively stand-alone novellas.

ARMENTEROS: Most books today land on the reader’s lap, defanged, tamed by the weight of tradition, ready for easy consumption. Should a book resist offering itself to the reader like a shelled pistachio? Should the reader do the work of shelling through words, rhythms in prose, and the unconscious in order to savor the book?

HUNT: My answer is yes. But it’s a personalized, localized yes. My experience of the books that have most moved me, that have changed my life, that have changed the way I think about things, the way I feel about things, that have been that ax to break up the frozen sea inside me, Kafka’s ax, have been the ones that have required some shelling, some work. Again, that’s been my experience. Take La Disparition by Georges Perec, A Void, his famous novel that doesn’t allow itself use of the letter “e.”

ARMENTEROS: It’s the most common letter.

HUNT: Yeah. It’s the most common letter in French as well as English. There is that initial encounter with the text, and you say, “Wow, these pages look very odd. Something’s missing.”

The indispensable element is missing, has vanished from Perec’s equation early on. You think about this, and you think about what the book is doing, and it adds a different color to it. That notion of multiple things to discover within a reading experience—both on the page and off it—has enriched endless books for me.

ARMENTEROS: If we are to have a high esteem for the reader, we have to invite her to the creative party. Should the reader, then, create alongside the text?

HUNT: Absolutely, and let’s face it, even when someone’s reading a book that gives itself the most readily, the most quickly, is the most immediately available, there’s still a tremendous amount of work going on in the reader’s mind. We’ve become accustomed to decoding realist texts, with their alternating passages of description, dialogue, action. We’ve become

12 nonfiction incredibly accustomed to that model. But, nonetheless, even with the models we’re most used to, there is still all of this work going on that creates a world out of the words on the page. It’s just that we can do it as we’re lying back in bed with our eyes half closed, in the way that we watch so many television programs.

It’s that experience of participating in the creation of a world that’s most distinctive about the reading experience. I’ve always found it rewarding to find ways, as a writer, to heighten that experience, to open more creative space for the reader. When I’m off on my own reading adventures, I’m drawn to books that have a lot of space for me to run around in: to explore, to discover, and to create.

ARMENTEROS: When discussing his cut-up technique, William Burroughs said, “Take a walk down a city street… You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows—a montage of fragments… Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up.” Do you think that the modern avant-garde often paints a far more “realistic” picture of experience than the nineteenth century realist ever did?

HUNT: Over time we have found better ways to apprehend the real, more interesting ways, more engaging ways. Maybe more difficult ways. When I return to Burroughs, it’s always a shock to the system and he remains as daring and as troubling and, in many ways, as wonderfully hard to read as he ever did. I think that that’s part of the great power of what he was doing. It’s bracing, difficult stuff, and it does seem to reflect the world as we experience it.

Maybe it’s not the way we want to experience the world. After all, a big part of what our brains do is provide some sort of interface that makes it comprehensible. But art isn’t about making people comfortable, putting them to sleep. There are pills for that. Productive discomfort is always worth investigating. Burroughs was more or less slapping people in the face, and a good slap wakes you up.

ARMENTEROS: In her debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride uses a unique form of sentence construction where parts and pieces of the sentence are missing. You can still read through the pages and elicit the meaning.

The feat is sustained throughout the entire book. It’s a very interesting accomplishment. McBride had a very hard time getting it published for several years, but now it is available everywhere. But I wonder, how many people really go through the entire book and finish it?

nonfiction 13 HUNT: It’s one of those classic stories of the writer who has done something singular. Who has done something that’s very much her own, and then, of course, because no one has ever quite seen it done that way before, it’s impossible to get the thing published.

Then, by some miracle—and one wonders how many never have the miracle happen—it’s published, and it touches a nerve. There, again, there’s a certain amount of magic and improbability, because there are numerous experimental books that do find a home, that are interesting, that are challenging, but that don’t touch that nerve and so fly under the radar.

I think of it in a way as the John Ashbery proposition, or the Donald Barthelme proposition. Writers who are able to create work that is distinctive, singular, experimental, and yet have it appeal to this large audience and have regular iterations of it appear in, say, the New Yorker magazine and be taken up and widely reviewed in the mainstream media. McBride, I think, falls into this category. For whatever reason her strangeness is OK with a broader audience. Which is a great thing. It remains to be seen if her follow-up books will be treated in the same way.

ARMENTEROS: Considering that classic realism is nothing other than “illusionism,” should the novel execute a calculated demolition of the conventions of reality and simply take flight?

HUNT: That notion makes me think of Edmond Jabès and books having wings. I certainly have had that feeling, have had that thought, and have in some ways, in certain aspects of my writing, been trying to find something that does that, that goes elsewhere, that explodes the convention. The novel could have gone in so many directions. It could have gone in what we would now think of as an irrealist direction, if it had more warmly embraced, say, the conventions of genre: of fairy tales, ghost stories, etc. It could have gone in that direction. In which case we would think of those types of work as mainstream, and perhaps the box of illusionist tricks that is the realist novel as something revolutionary.

Regardless, my notion has always been to try and take advantage of all possibilities. Part of what my work has been—my homework maybe—as a writer has been to try and expand my sense of what’s worthy, what’s interesting in fiction. Say, to look at what’s going on in Japan or China in fiction. Or what’s happening in Kenya, in Nigeria, in Zimbabwe. Or in native communities right here in the States.

ARMENTEROS: What do you think is at stake when authors write something out of the norm, whether it is experimental fiction, fiction that crosses boundaries, or fiction that uses uncommon elements?

14 nonfiction HUNT: It has always felt like almost everything is at stake within that space of distinctiveness, that space that opens up where something new is occurring. That’s where life is, or that less sleepy sense of life, that sense of life that is articulated in the now-overused notion of the epiphany. It seems to me that when a novel is really able to do something, or a story or a collection of stories is able to do something, that pushes outside of the received, the received notions of what novels should do, how they should behave, how they should perform—it’s in that space where everything is crackling, everything is firing and we recognize ourselves in some deeper way, recognize the fissuring of the universe, the pressures and energies, the cooking and the heat.

ARMENTEROS: In a previous interview with Roxane Gay [Bookforum 2013], you mentioned that you started writing Kind One “without knowing much about the particulars of Ginny’s story. I didn’t have it mapped, didn’t know where her voice was going to lead me, lead her.” Do you enjoy writing from the unconscious, from that white center inside?

HUNT: I’ve often tried to determine whether or not I enjoy writing at all. I don’t know whether it’s pleasurable or it’s painful. Something in the center, maybe a little bit like addiction. It’s pleasurable and painful. Anyway, maybe I can trace it back to hearing Michael Ondaatje talk about his writing process. Someone asked him whether or not he does outlines for his books.

He said that he didn’t, because to know what was going to come next, to have it all mapped, would be to kill it for him. He wasn’t saying we shouldn’t do it, don’t outline, but for him it didn’t work.

I realized early on that for me it didn’t work either. And I don’t know which comes first: Michael Ondaatje saying it, or my being averse to it.

It’s certainly the case that from around that time, around 1992 or 1993, I’ve never been able to think terribly far ahead of myself in my writing process. With the exception, that is, of these recent, very much voice-driven, American historical novels.

There’s Kind One. There’s Neverhome. There’s the next book, which is called “Dog Day,” and then there is another one, a kind of throwback to early more colonial America that deals with witches of all things, which I’m calling “Red Boy.” They’re all written in the first person. The narrators are mainly women in all of them. My role would seem to be serving as a kind of vehicle for the expression of these voices. I love the poet Jack Spicer, who believed he was channeling voices from afar. I certainly did have some of that experience when I was writing these books. First in Kind One and then in Neverhome, that I was in some ways just standing out of the way, so that these voices could speak and tell their stories. I didn’t know what

nonfiction 15 they were going to say at any given moment. Still, even if I never drafted anything like an outline, I had a larger sense of where the tale was going than perhaps I have had with other books. A big part of the process of discovery with them for me, and the excitement of discovery, was seeing where the voice went next. What aspect of its story it revealed next. That made them refreshingly known and unknown at the same time.

ARMENTEROS: When you mention that your recent books focus on a particular voice, it reminds me of The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz. There he wrote: “Each people carries on a dialogue with an invisible colloquist who is, at one and the same time, itself and the other, Its double.

Which is the original and which the phantasm? As with the Moebius strip, there is neither inside nor outside, and otherness is not there, beyond, but here, within: otherness is ourselves.” Are the voices of your characters somehow your own voice?

HUNT: If only I were that brave, that crazed, that mad. There are aspects of these voices that are terrifying to me. But then that’s what writers sign up for. A hopefully clear-sighted investigation into places that are sometimes dark. As deep and as piercing as possible. Your question reminds me of an interview I did in France last year, when Kind One came out in French translation. I was jet lagged and I had an interview the very first day with a French news organization called Mediapart.fr. A nice long interview with very nice interviewers. But one of the things I managed to say along the way is that I am a black man. Just by complete mistake in language and jet lag.

They found this a really wonderful, revealing slip. Then in an interview I did with another journalist from another place, I called myself a black woman. Again not at all what I meant to say, but simple mistakes. There it is on the record. Instead of thinking, “Oh what a terrible gaffe, what a ridiculous gaffe…” they found it very interesting.

While I would obviously never consciously assert that I’m a black man, or woman for that matter, I’m fascinated by this notion: that we can contain the multitudes that Whitman spoke of. Whether or not my waking self is any of these things, maybe my dreaming self can be. It seems to me that when we shut our eyes and go to sleep, all bets are off on who we are and what we are and how we do things.

ARMENTEROS: Well, Borges once said, “Writing is nothing other than a guided dream.” Does that resonate with you?

HUNT: Oh absolutely, yeah. Well so much of what Borges said resonated with me. When I went to Japan, those years ago, right out of college, I started to have the idea that I was going to be a writer. I took a stack of

16 nonfiction books. My becoming a writer stack. There was Moby-Dick. There was The Sound and the Fury. There was some Gertrude Stein. There was some Virginia Woolf. Certainly some Hemingway. One of the central books, though, and maybe the most important book for me at the time was Ficciones, by Borges. For me this was a great revelation. And it had a huge impact on my writing for the next several years. I had to read everything I could. And if I was the type to actually get tattoos, I would have had Borges or a labyrinth to stand in for him tattooed on me.

ARMENTEROS: Gendron Jensen, an artist who lives in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, creates graphite drawings of bones. Conjuring art from nature, Jensen juxtaposes the relics of predators and their prey, the moose and the wolf, for example, revealing the primal connection of their spirits. Ginny seems to be both; prey and predator, oppressor and victim. How would you define her true spirit?

HUNT: Ginny aligns herself with demons at the start of her story, and demons, or at least people inhabited by the demonic spirit of slavery, were living and breathing and walking and holding the upper hand in vast parts of the United States at that time. What intrigued me about this was that from the very beginning Ginny, who has spent time as a victim of the institution of slavery, is more aware of and more aligned with her role in perpetuating the institution, even when she knew better. When she looks back on her life she sees both the oppressor and the victim, and the oppressor has the upper hand. This is important: even if she is in some ways defiant, she never sets up a false equivalency between what happens to her as a kind of ad hoc event and the mass, lifelong enslavement of others.

She’s a complicated individual as any character worth writing a novel around is. I feel like she’s very much an omnivore of experience. She embodies good and evil, light and dark, repentance and lack thereof. Those qualities make her human.

ARMENTEROS: The Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta created the female silhouette using nature as both her canvas and her medium. She used her body to create silhouettes in grass, sand, and dirt. Those images rushed into my mind when reading the section where Ginny makes a hole in the ground to make her bed. It seems to me that Ginny was throwing herself into the very elements that produced her. What kind of emotional ties was she trying to assert?

HUNT: I love that you mentioned Mendieta, I think she’s wonderful, which also makes me think of, another artist who’s been important to me: Robert Rauschenberg, especially, in this context, his dirt paintings. He actually

nonfiction 17 took a little square of New York dirt and painted it, inhabited it, made it beautiful. And I can’t take up this subject without also evoking the fields in Indiana, which I spent so much time in. One of my great pleasures as a younger boy was to walk the fields. Whether it was the soybeans that came up at their peak to my waist, or the cornfields, that of course went much higher than I was, nearly blocking out sky and sun. Always there was the dirt. Always there was that awareness of dirt. The warm soil, the goopy soil, the dry surfaces and the wet within. During games, especially in the soybean fields, you would hit the dirt, you would drop and hide. It’s very tactile, the memory I have. I like this notion of Ginny returning in a way. Returning herself, rendering herself unto this element. Digging herself homeward. She says early on in the book, “The land is the land and the land washes itself clean.” She is not holding what happened there against it. So she is both giving herself to the earth and also in a way looking to conceal herself within it, to conceal herself within an element that is untainted. This child who grew up surrounded by geese on a farm now finds herself in a very different, much darker place, but she still wants to be within the earth.

ARMENTEROS: When I read Neverhome, I did not read it as a Civil War story, but as a story of a woman who went to war. Was that your original intention?

HUNT: Absolutely, it was never for me—at least not in the first instance—a novel of the Civil War. In its deeper underpinnings, it really was a story about this person, her mind, her heart. I have been in other public conversations about Neverhome and there has often been this notion of “Should we talk about the spoiler?” I always think at first that I am being asked about the revelations made by Ash Thompson at the very end of the novel. But invariably what they are referring to is the fact that Ash is a woman, rather than a man, who disguised herself and went to fight in the Civil War. For me that’s the given of the book, the context, as the war is.

In its deeper implications, the novel is about the desire Ash has, the compulsion, to tell the story of her life. And in so doing find a way to confess something that she has done. Something terrible.

I don’t want to say it is merely incidental that the central events of Neverhome take place during the Civil War. I’m very interested in American history, and have been particularly drawn to the nineteenth century, let there be no mistake about that. But I never had the idea at the beginning of the project, or even as it was in progress, that I wanted to do a Civil War novel.

18 nonfiction ARMENTEROS: In your last two novels, Kind One and Neverhome, you employ the first-person narrative. The main characters in these novels are deliciously faceted and terribly conflicted. Do you consider the interior monologue technique as the most direct approach to a character’s mind?

HUNT: I think here of Brian Evenson who once remarked that he didn’t believe we all have all these thoughts running through our minds all the time, as the stream of consciousness or interior monologue might suggest. And I find myself agreeing more and more with him. So while the device, with its nuances and variations, is beautiful and often powerful, it is something that occurs on the page rather than in the world. So in general my interior monologues are not as full throated as they used to be. My characters these days don’t bubble with as much thought as my early narrators, like the one in The Impossibly, did.

ARMENTEROS: Well, perhaps what happens inside the mind is not a stream of words and sentences, or phrases. It may be more a stream of images. We need to use language to mold this onto the page because there’s no other way to convey the process. Who knows what goes on inside one’s mind?

We only have an approximation.

HUNT: Yes, who knows. Think of dreams. We don’t know what they’re translating, what’s lurking underneath them. Underneath our thoughts. In the flow of blood through our veins. That’s wonderful and terrifying to me.

ARMENTEROS: I understand there’s some interest in adapting Neverhome for the big screen. How does that make you feel?

HUNT: I’ve always been really interested in the life that my books lead after I’ve written them, whether that is being held in the hands of a hundred or a thousand readers, dreamed about afterwards, thought about in bits and pieces, turned into the shards that remain of our reading experiences. As a basic principle, I’ve loved this notion that the books have this other life when I’m done with them, and I understand that they do.

With Element Films (backed by Film4), it’s not yet clear to me whether or not I will have an active hand in the adaptation. But the conversations I’ve had with them have been really positive, really productive, really interesting. I love the work that the director, Lenny Abrahamson, has already done.

He’s a brilliant filmmaker on the rise. And I am more than happy to let the professionals do what they are best at. All of it feels like the appropriate place for Neverhome to be. It feels like it’s in good hands, the best hands.

ARMENTEROS: Well, we look forward to the product in whatever form and fashion it will be rendered. We’ll have to see.

nonfiction 19 HUNT: We will have to see.

ARMENTEROS: The theme of loss accompanied by a sense of melancholy appears frequently in your novels. At other times, we come across moments of hilarious absurdity. Are these themes equally satisfying to write? Does any of them touch you deeper?

HUNT: It seems to me that both impulses as they manifest in the text come from the same place. It feels like the moments of absurdity are feeding into this notion of melancholy, and the melancholy feeds into these instances, notions, of absurdity. It’s a similar impulse.

And I don’t know where it comes from. I didn’t grow up surrounded by people who laughed in the face of great hardship or difficulty. There was mental illness in my family, but it wasn’t something that was an occasion for joking or silliness or absurdity in any way. So I suppose it’s something that came later, that came to me as a way perhaps of dealing with some of these memories, some of these feelings, maybe this baseline of a kind of sadness, a kind of melancholy produced in me and dripped into my characters. It’s certainly something that I inherited from some of my great literary heroes, like Kafka and Sebald and Ishiguro, for example, and there are others, as well.

ARMENTEROS: This reminds me of a poem by Borges: “I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart. I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.” Do you relate to those sentiments?

HUNT: That’s beautiful. I well imagine that I have encountered them before and then forgotten encountering them, but clearly metabolized them, and swallowed them whole maybe even more than metabolized them. But absolutely, I think that that’s a very apt way to put it.

ARMENTEROS: In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is a tree that stands at the center of the cosmos. It grows from the Well of Urd, which could just as aptly be called the “Well of Destiny.” The water cycle in this image expresses a circular passage of time. The well, which corresponds to the past, influences the growth of the tree, which corresponds to the present. But then, unlike in our modern, linear conception of time, the present then returns to the past—even retroactively changing it. In other words, destiny is the often inscrutable force that causes the past to exert its particular influences upon the present, which, in this image, necessarily also includes the influence of the present upon the past.

20 nonfiction Does the recurring image of the well in your novels represent the potential for a new and different present?

HUNT: How interesting. It’s only recently that I realized that wells keep coming back in my work.

ARMENTEROS: They do. (Laughs.)

HUNT: Yeah, they really do. And I’m known for liking to stare down a well when I find one, any well, anywhere. Though, of course, you don’t find them quite as frequently in the States as you used to. So many wells were capped. As a matter of fact, maybe the most important well for me is a well that was long since capped. It sits towards the center of what is still the family farm in rural Indiana.

The farm that I lived on had an original farmhouse where my grandmother was born. As a matter of fact, she was stillborn. She was born breech and not breathing, and the main doctor had to attend to her mother.

Fortunately, there was a second, apprentice doctor, present that day. He took my nonbreathing grandmother and went to the sink in the kitchen that had a pump and pumped cold well water on her and woke her up. That well was dug probably by my forebears, had been there a long time, but when a year after my grandmother’s birth my great-grandparents decided that they needed to be closer to the big road and knocked down the old house and moved to the front of the farm and built a new house, the well was capped.

During my childhood when I would play in the fields with my cousins, we would try to find the well. It was described to us as a place we should avoid, because it might be dangerous. Wells of course have always been things you might fall down into. But hearing that of course made us want to find it even more.

We never found it, though. The dirt from the field had covered it up. It was just something that haunted us and me. It’s a buried well, a covered well, and all the more attractive and interesting for this to me. Well of sorrows we talk about, that all-too-familiar welling within the heart. Wells are quite potent, quite powerful as symbols, but are also just these actual things that gave life. In the case of my grandmother, it was crucial and timely life-giving. My characters hide in wells, they look down wells, they worry about falling into them. And you are right, they are almost always there.

ARMENTEROS: The scope of your literary production is genuinely diverse.

You have played in the noir, explored the surreal, voyaged back in history, spoken in a woman’s voice, inhabited European and American cities, and exposed the rural Midwest. Which of these elements feels the closest to you as a person? What makes your neural chords vibrate?

nonfiction 21 HUNT: I feel like it’s shifting at the moment, or maybe it’s coming back around. I mentioned earlier that although my first published novel was The Impossibly, my first written novel was Indiana, Indiana.

That has a strong resonance for me: that when I decided to start seriously writing longer narratives, it was to Indiana that I turned, even if I was feeling this call in New York and had just come from Paris and before that Japan. My first notion of myself as a serious writer of fiction on the larger canvas of the novel was this rural past.

It was in Japan, sitting cross-legged on the floor at my kotatsu table that I wrote my first real story. A story set in Indiana called “Old Woman.”

As a matter of fact, it was my first published story. The Tokyo Writers Workshop had a magazine affiliated with it called Printed Matter and they published it. I wish I still had a copy somewhere.

Having said that, for a number of years, I seemed to be more in tune with my urban concerns, which brought me into conversations and arguments with various notions of genre, as you say—with noir, with ghost stories, with thrillers, with the supernatural and other vectors of intensity that were swirling within the cauldron of the city.

I went through that period, and it stretched for a decade at least, but now I seem to be back to my earlier concerns. No doubt I’ll have to wait a little longer to say definitively which area of interest makes me more excited, because after all I was born in Singapore and I lived in London as a kid and I lived in The Hague as a kid before I ever lived in Indiana. It’s really hard to know. Even if, as something I said at the beginning, my deep heart’s core feels like it’s Indiana, I don’t know if I know myself well enough to fully endorse that, even as I assert it.

ARMENTEROS: In your travels, you have crisscrossed the earth. How has that experience influenced your work?

HUNT: I was remarking the other day when I was discussing Ray of the Star with a book club that almost all of my narrators are in constant motion.

They are traveling, wondering, wandering in world and in thought. Whether they’re moving with purpose or not, they’re in motion. And this certainly feels connected to all of the travel that I have done. Earlier because I was in the tow of my father, who at twenty-six years old left New York to run the Singapore branch of Bank of America. Or traveling under my own steam, going to teach English in Japan. Going to study in France. Moving to New York or traveling to Borneo or most recently, and maybe most interestingly, going with the International Writing Program of Iowa to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo, both Kinshasa and Brazzaville.

22 nonfiction I returned from the trip to Kinshasa and Brazzaville with a renewed sense of urgency of the literary endeavor and its meaningfulness in a way that nourished my work and maybe in someway made possible completing a novel like Neverhome, which deals with an individual after all in extreme circumstances. So much extreme circumstance was evident in both Congos, even in a brief trip.

ARMENTEROS: According to Thomas Mann, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Do you agree with that statement?

HUNT: I have found it harder and harder the more I’ve gone on, which isn’t what I really signed up for! I had the sense that this was something you could, over the years and with hard work, gain some mastery of and carry off with brio and joy and pleasure, etc.

But I’ve found, even as it entices me more profoundly, even as my engagement has grown, it has become more difficult. So the farther I go into the swamp, the farther into the mud below the water I sink. It’s up to my knees now. It’s hard to move. But it is essential to move. The dilemma feels Beckettian.

ARMENTEROS: Do you think, then, that your writing has improved over the years?

HUNT: I’d like to think I’m a better writer than I was when I started. But then, that comes maybe more out of a belief, which I have had practically since the beginning, in whatever project I happen to be working on, that “this is my best thing.” I certainly experienced that when I was working simultaneously on the first three novels. When I was working on The Exquisite it was where I was being the best writer. But then I would turn back to The Impossibly and say, “No. In fact, here it is. This is it.” Then I would go to Indiana, Indiana, and say, “No. In fact, this book is the best one.”

I suppose there is always the belief, when we’re involved in any sort of serious endeavor, that we are, if not writing better work from project to project, exploring questions in ways each time that are more fascinating, to us at least.

ARMENTEROS: Both you and your wife, Eleni Sikelianos, are writers and university professors. You truly embody the confluence of fiction and poetry. To what degree do you influence each other’s work?

HUNT: To an enormous degree. Our relationship really came out of an interest in each other’s work. That’s how it started. Our first days spent in each other’s company were reading poems and stories to each other, and not

nonfiction 23 just with lutes and flutes and all of that. I’m sure that there was some of that in the mix, but it really was this shared love of writing, literature, and this idea of becoming writers, becoming poets, and having a life built out of writing that got us going and that sustains us to this day.

So since the beginning we’ve read each other’s manuscripts, been each other’s first readers, and called on each other to look at something with the simple but essential question, “Is this any good?”

As a matter of fact, just yesterday I was looking at some of Eleni’s work, her new project, and answering some questions. “What did I think of this?” “Can you help with this?” I feel the same way. I’m waiting to complete the draft of the new short novel, “Red Boy,” to give to her and to see what she thinks. She’s a very good and very fierce reader. It’s a little daunting to hand things over to her, but it needs to be done.

ARMENTEROS: Could you comment on what the ultimate purpose of writing fiction is? Does it matter to the universe whether we write a novel or take a piss in the river?

HUNT: A pretty large part of who I am is wrapped up in the belief that it is meaningful, that it does matter. And I was just thinking of this a couple of days ago, as a matter of fact. The earth is going to explode. Long before that we’re going to evolve out of the capacity to understand even the great works, etc. What does it matter? What does it mean? Does it mean anything at all?

Surely, since I am still at it, the answer for me must be yes. Being deeply engaged in the substance of what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, what it means to be made of atoms that are made of electrons and protons and neutrons, this is meaningful.