Trillium Book Award Author Readings June 16

rob mclennan's 12 or 20 Questions, with Jeremy Hanson-Finger

 
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Jeremy Hanson-Finger. Photo courtesy of Jenn Huzera.

By rob mclennan

Jeremy Hanson-Finger attended Carleton University, where he co-founded the literary erotica journal, The Moose & Pussy. He now lives in Toronto, where he co-edits the online literary mag Dragnet, and where he is working on a collection of short stories, entitled Airplanes and Bad Things Happening to Women. Let it be known, however, that he likes women and doesn’t want bad things to happen to them. Recently, Apt. 9 Press in Ottawa published his fiction chapbook, The Delicious Fields. You can visit his website at http://hansonfinger.tumblr.com.

rob mclennan:

How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Jeremy Hanson-Finger:

My first book was Saintliness/Slowdive, a two-story chapbook published by In/Words Press. After it was published, I realized just how many people believed in my writing — the launch party was, to my knowledge, the largest turnout In/Words has ever had for an event, and Broken Pencil reviewed the chapbook favourably. My most recent work is much more heavily character-based than my older work, which was more about fun with language (which is still important, but made it less accessible).

rm:

How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

JHF:

I took a creative writing class in Grade 11 with Terence Young, a GG-nominated poet, in Victoria. He is my single greatest inspiration and wholly responsible for my realizing I had talent and that I should pursue creative writing. The way he structured the course involved a unit on poetry first, then a unit on short fiction. Previous to that point I'd been fairly uninterested in poetry, because all I'd read was the stuff you read in elementary and early high school, like Robert Frost, whose work I was not at all enthused about. But then Terence introduced me to poets like David McFadden and Sheri D Wilson, and around the same time, my dad introduced me to Richard Brautigan, and I realized that contemporary poetry was a hell of a lot more exciting. I considered myself solely a poet until a few years ago, when I really got into writing fiction that treaded the line between poetry and prose.

rm:

How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

JHF:

In the past, my writing used to come very slowly. I'd go over each line until I was happy with it, especially when writing fiction, which didn't really work that well for me. When I took a writing workshop with Ivan Coyote a couple of years ago, she talked about "writing till it runs clear," meaning, just sit down and bang shit out until you get to the actual story. That was incredibly helpful for me. Once I was able to sit on my editing hand and edit later, my output increased enormously. I think as of today, actually, every single story I wrote during that class has been published somewhere. So, yeah, now my first drafts end up looking pretty close to the final ones, though I often end up cutting out the first few hundred words of any given session.

rm:

Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

JHF:

A poem usually begins with a phrase. My notebook is full of sentence fragments, some of which are interesting enough that they turn into longer poems or stories. I rarely start with plot, which means that my biggest problem is plot.

rm:

Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

JHF:

I very much enjoy doing readings. I don't like public speaking off-the-cuff, but I love reading from the page. I think I read at every In/Words reading for three or four years.

Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

JHF:

My latest chapbook, The Delicious Fields, which Apt 9 Press published just this month, is in some ways a meditation on various literary theories of transgression — mainly Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. God, that's a good advertisement, isn't it? Basically, what Kristeva says in Powers of Horror is (bear with me) that the abject is that which is neither subject nor object. That which threatens our concept of subjectivity, our idea of ourselves as individual consciousness. Bodily fluids are horrific to us because they remind us that our bodies are not sealed and eternal; they remind us that we leak and break down; that we are mortal; that one day our consciousness will end. I don't know if that's a particularly contemporary question. It's more of a universal statement. But yeah, I would say exploring that which makes us uncomfortable, especially the human fear of death and its connection with relationships and sexuality, is a big theoretical concern of mine.
Another one is the necessary intermarriage of comedy and tragedy, which I would say is best theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His World. In essence, he says, in ancient Roman festivals, comedy was held to be at parity with the more serious aspects. If someone was lauded, they were also degraded and laughed at. So that's something else — I strongly believe that writing shouldn't take itself too seriously even if it covers serious topics (something I've struggled with myself on occasion). No matter how tragic a situation is, if there's no humour in it, it's not an accurate depiction.

rm:

What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

JHF:

The writer, just like the musician and the artist and the filmmaker, reflect the human experience. Like David Foster Wallace said, a great novel makes us feel less alone because we can identify with the emotions and thoughts experienced by the characters.

rm:

Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

JHF:

I haven't had any major problems working with outside editors. Both Peter Gibbon from In/Words and Cameron Anstee from Apt 9 Press have been very good at picking out areas I need to work on and letting me address them myself.

What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

rm:

JHF:

As I mentioned earlier, Ivan Coyote saying, "write till it runs clear."

How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

JHF:

I don't really have much of a division between the two. My poetry almost always forms complete, grammatically correct sentences, and my fiction rarely sticks to traditional narrative. Regardless, I do need to work on not getting bogged down in poetic language and keeping some sort of drive to keep fiction readers interested.

rm:

What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

JHF:

I'm just settling into a routine, as I now have a 9–5 job, but when I'm not doing something in the evening already, I come home from work, make dinner, eat dinner and then try to write for an hour.

rm:

When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

JHF:

Often I will go through old notebooks, or I'll pull a book off the shelf and read until I get excited again. Or sometimes I'll try switching to pen and paper instead of the computer.

rm:

What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

JHF:

I was Jack Nicholson's character from Roman Polanski's Chinatown.

rm:

David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

JHF:

Ha! Funny I mentioned McFadden earlier then. Music, definitely. Especially the band Deerhunter. The reason being that I want my writing to read like Deerhunter sounds like — they combine beautiful, Brit-pop-esque melodies with noise and feedback. I've seen them live twice and I nearly cried the first time I saw them. The sound just made me feel more than a lot of other art forms.

rm:

What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

JHF:

David Foster Wallace for sure. His preoccupation with affect and sincerity in an era in which irony and sarcasm have lost their political edge really resounds with me. Richard Brautigan is also still my major poetic influence.

rm:

What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

JHF:

I'd like to visit Eastern Europe. Kinda cliché, the whole finding your roots thing (My ancestors were Ukrainian/Lithuanian/Austrian Jews), but I've never left North America, and I think that'd be fairly rewarding, especially because one of my favourite poems I've written was about my great-grandmother hiding in a swamp during the pogroms, and although I'm not religious, I'm very interested in Judaism, especially Jewish conceptions of the afterlife.

rm:

If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

JHF:

I've tried being a filmmaker too, but I'm too much of a control freak to deal with how much you have to depend on other people and unpredictable situations to produce your artistic vision. It's also very expensive. But maybe I'd try that again at some point. I also wanted to be an arts journalist at one point, but creative writing is way more fulfilling than writing about other people's creative writing (and music and film, etc.). Right now, in my day job, I'm an editorial assistant at a publishing company, which is about as good a day job as I can hope for, so I hope they keep me for a long time!

rm:

What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

JHF:

I've always read voraciously. There's a picture of me in the Oak Bay Star community newspaper as a 7-year-old, sitting on stack of encyclopedias outside the library, because I read the most number of books in their summer reading program. Possibly by a fairly large multiplier. Every Saturday my dad and I would drive to a different library in the city and I'd bring home 40 books, dump them all out on my bed and read all day.

rm:

What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

JHF:

The last great book was Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? That's the one I've been recommending to everyone I know. The last great film was Incendies, or maybe Biutiful. Both very sad films, but they manage to plumb the depths of human tragedy without making you want to just give up and leave.

rm:

What are you currently working on?

JHF:

I'm working on fleshing out my short fiction manuscript, Airplanes and Bad Things Happening to Women, and I've also started an online lit mag called Dragnet with a friend from Terence Young's high school creative writing class. You can check it out at http://dragnetmag.net — our second issue is coming out July 2, but our first issue can be read on our website, as a flipbook on Issuu, or as an ebook.

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