A.E.: In how far, if at all, is your intermeshing of personal narrative with a textual, created reality a kind of an engagement with self, a self-search or a means of therapeutically negotiating reality?
S.H.: I don’t think I understand this question. First, the book is no less or more personal than any narrative I’ve ever written. In terms of ‘therapeutically negotiating reality’ I don’t know what that means. The book is playing with self-help deliberately. I think it would be impossible to create any work of art and not engage your “self” while doing it. Your self is the engine of the work.
A.E.: In 2007 you interviewed Dave Hickey for The Believer. In that conversation you maintained that, “Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just — I can’t do it.” What is the literary-philosophical, ideological or existential rationale behind that statement?
S.H.: There isn’t one. I was just bored. It felt like a toy I didn’t want to play with anymore.
A.E.: You are Interviews Editor at The Believer magazine. How does that preoccupation influence or affect your activity as a creative writer?
S.H.: The interview format is a form I really love. I loved reading The Paris Review interviews when I was a teenager. I didn’t know any writers and never imagined I would and was uncertain of how to proceed. Any time I went into a used bookstore I would look for Writers at Work and I finally collected nearly all of them and I would just read these interviews to learn what it meant to be a writer and how writers worked. I was fascinated by writers and their processes, all so different from each other, yet each writer so assured in the way they, individually, should proceed. I think I learned that confidence is more important than “rightness.” Mainly because there is no “right” way to proceed. But so the interview form really stuck with me as something that can quite beautiful and really valuable. Also, editing interviews can feel a like you’re writing short plays. I always wanted to be a playwright, but that didn’t work out for various reasons, but editing interviews is not so radically different from playwriting. You’re creating a story and a progression through time in dialogue, and it’s about the revelation of the interviewer and the interviewee and about what develops between them, and there’s a beginning and an end. As to how the editing intersects with novel-writing, I don’t know, except that all writing feels the same, whether you’re writing a novel or editing an article or an interview. You’re playing with sentences and mood and creating surprise and all these things.
A.E.: Your earliest work has intimations of that stylistically unsettling air, which is enlarged in your later writing – I refer to The Middle Stories. It is a collection of tightly drawn fables, and elicited ambivalence in some readers. Would you say that the collections’ departure from the norms of storytelling (sudden beginnings, unpredictable or plotless plotting or lack of plot), despite its being in a familiar fable genre, was responsible for a certain amount of initial ambivalence in the general reader to an otherwise well-received work?
S.H.: I can’t say for sure. People who don’t like your stuff or who are ambivalent don’t usually write to tell you why. In the specific case of The Middle Stories, when people wrote to tell me they liked it, they usually told me about how they read it, not why they liked it. A lot of people seemed to read the stories out loud to their boyfriends or girlfriends, on camping trips or in bed, before sleep. Someone sent one story a week to a friend overseas. Those are the kinds of things I hear from people about that book. Don’t ask me why, but a lot of gay men seem to love the story Mermaid in a Jar. It’s just something I’ve noticed.
A.E.: I presume that by now the postmodern trajectory foreshadowed in Middle Stories is very clear in How Should a person Be?, and you won’t be pigeon-holed as a writer?
S.H.: I wouldn’t mind being pigeon-holed if it was the right pigeonhole.
A.E.: The same kind of, well, ‘irreverence’ for traditional forms or modes of thinking seems to be the fillip for your book of “conversational philosophy” – according to The New Yorker. It is written in collaboration with Misha Glouberman. What inspired that essay collection?
S.H.: He did. I loved the way he spoke and thought and I felt the world should have a book by him. But he’s not a writer, so I had to be the writer. It seemed to me that the way he thinks is unique and valuable, and I admire his character, which is comprised of so much kindness and care. I also wanted to work with him again. We created a lecture series together in 2001—Trampoline Hall—but I quit the shows in 2006 and we hadn’t had worked on a project together in a few years, so that was a big motivation, too. I missed making something with him.
A.E.: A work by two authors makes one wonder: who wrote what percentage? What was the workload or arrangement like?
S.H.: I came up with the idea for the book, then we together made a list of “everything Misha knows” and we asked friends for suggestions on what the chapters could be about. Then he would come over in the morning and we’d have coffee at my desk and work for a few hours. Working meant: I would choose a chapter and he would speak about whatever the subject was, and I would type as he talked. That was how we wrote the book. There wasn’t much editing. We didn’t use all the chapters we wrote, but the ones we used weren’t too rewritten. Then I wrote an introduction. So I guess he did 100% of the work and I did 100% of the work.
