I Believe in Imagination: An Interview with Aleksandar Hemon
Jeanie Chung | March/April 2011
Aleksandar Hemon came to the United States from Bosnia in 1992 and ended up staying to build his literary career here. He is the author of two novels, The Lazarus Project (2008), which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a New York Times Notable Book, and Nowhere Man (2002), and a collection of short stories, The Question of Bruno (2000). His most recent book, Love and Obstacles (2009) is also a collection of short stories.
Hemon's short stories have appeared in the New Yorker and Ploughshares among others, and he has received grants from the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations. He lives in Chicago.
Jeanie Chung: You got your start in writing as a journalist?
Aleksandar Hemon: Well, yes, in the sense that it was a way to get published. I was mainly writing book reviews and things like that. I also worked at a radio station in Sarajevo, and one of the things I did was to actually write stories and read them on the radio, in addition to book reviews and film reviews. I always wanted to be a writer of literature rather than journalism, but journalism was an outlet.
Chung: A way to pay the bills.
Hemon: It wasn't even paid. It was a way to get published. The publishing industry in Bosnia—it wasn't even an industry; the publishing people—they operate differently. It was through a state-approved organization. They published slowly, and they published for a narrow audience. Also, this was all happening at a time when things were changing rapidly in what was then Yugoslavia, and in Bosnia too, so to write a book and wait for it to be published a year later was just way too long. The whole world changed in a year. People in my generation had, on the one hand, contempt for the older writers and the instructors and the publishers and all that, and, on the other, the need and the urgency to write about things that were happening at the time and to try to change things through what we were writing. Many of my friends still are in Sarajevo, and a lot of them are journalists—very few literary writers. And if they are actually writers, we became friends while working as journalists.
Chung: But you never had an interest in a long-term journalism career.
Hemon: No, no. I like it—I'm a sympathizer. I like writing for magazines and newspapers. I like deadlines and word limits and all that. That works for me. I like journalism as a way to participate in public space, not to make money. The magazine I write for in Sarajevo would make a public stand against something, even if it would cut their sales. They're interested in playing a part in the public conscience.
Chung: Did you really once say that people who write nonfiction are cowards? Or were you somehow misquoted?
Hemon: I don't know if those were my exact words. But what I meant to say was this: there is an overflow of memoiristic writing, and there are many problems with that. Not many people really deserve to tell their stories, as they don't really have much to say. Also, they're painting themselves into a corner, because how many books of addiction can you write in a lifetime?
But here is the larger issue: I think that literature is a venue for inviting. One starts from the personal space and then transforms it into something that transfers beyond the personal. This transference from private to public, from personal to public—I don't want to say universal—this is what's exciting about literature. I start from my small, personal, anonymous, autonomous space, and then from there I can write, using imagination and language, and create some sort of zone that other people can enter. We can share it because it's not entirely mine. It is subject to interpretation, perhaps empathy. There are many negotiable aspects, as it is not complete before someone else enters that zone. It is inviting. It is also challenging. That is, you open yourself up, however big the personal part is, you open it up to others. They enter into it and they can say you are lying or you are not lying. Or they can say, this is stupid, or this is not stupid. I think all of the books I like, or at least many of the books I like, they always follow this trajectory.
Take Ulysses, the grandest example. It was Joyce's memory of Dublin, his experience of Dublin. He wrote it outside of Dublin, but his life in Dublin was in that book. But it has been merged with something that is so trans-personal that it has nothing to do with Joyce. We can walk the streets of Dublin with Joyce and not think just about Joyce. That is the trajectory that's exciting to me. He asked his brother to go to 7 Eccles Street to see if one could jump over the fence. His brother went to check and said, "Yes, you can jump over the fence," and therefore Leopold Bloom jumped over the fence because he forgot the key. That's exciting to me.
By "nonfiction" I should say that I meant memoiristic writing when I said that originally. Journalistic books—The Dark Side, by Jane Mayer, that was not written by a coward. But this refusal to enter literature, to create fictional work, to ply the imagination, to start from scratch, that to me is cowardly. You have to risk, I think. There is something so safe when someone tells you, "Your story's interesting. Just tell it. Don't make anything up." Then you put it together and there's your memoir. You know, James Frey was so berated for making stuff up. But he had the right instincts, just not the right label.
There are stories that I've written because I've told them to people, and they liked listening to the story I was telling them. So I thought maybe I can write it, but I would change things. I would add whole chunks, and maybe transform it into something that is not about me. The freedom of transforming or changing the world is a liberating experience. In writing literature or writing fiction, what is always exciting to me, both as a writer and a reader, is the ability to enter other people, to become other people. In memoiristic nonfiction, the writer can't become other people, because it's all about his or her situation. The book is so specific to what the writer thinks because it's a confession. As a reader, you can only listen to the confession. You cannot really enter anything. There is no exchange. And that's really kind of playing it safe.
Chung: But is that really cowardly, or just annoying?
Hemon: Ha. Yeah. And I feel a little bad about what I said. It sounds like a judgment on all the people who have tried to do what they think they can do. But what I mean is, if you have a story to tell, then tell it all the way. Explore all of the possibilities. Take it to the logical extremes. I believe in imagination. Then, there is also the problem of veracity, how reliable your memories are. I am perfectly aware that my memories are not reliable, but to me, it's a liberating situation, because it's fine by me if I'm making up my own memories. It's just a different way of making up stories. Many of the memories I've put in my books and given to someone else were made up, I'm sure, although they seem real. But then I also made up memories to give them to the characters, and now I can't tell the difference between the real ones and the made-up ones. I don't know what might have happened to me and what has been made up by me and given to the characters.
I think that's one of the ways the publishing industry has undermined itself, this reliance on the confessional memoir. The genre is practically dead because it's always the same thing: addiction, despair, some kind of abuse. It has become a form unto itself. How many addiction memoirs can you read? But also, these were the big sellers, and they're relying on that to bail them out. But now, the whole genre is kind of in trouble. People are bored with it.
Chung: Your new book, Love and Obstacles, is a collection of short stories: your first true collection since The Question of Bruno. Do you prefer one form over another?
Hemon: I like the short story a lot because it's an outsider form. There's a widespread belief in the publishing industry that short stories don't sell. Somehow it's taken less seriously as an art form. But other than that, there's no difference. I've written more short stories than novels, obviously, but it's just a matter of length, really.
Chung: Why do you think that is, that short stories don't seem to sell as well?
Hemon: One of the things is the demise of the small presses, the journals. And the magazines—all the major American magazines used to give more importance to short stories: Esquire, Playboy, the Atlantic. The New Yorker is the only one left committed to the short story. So it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: they stop publishing it because the short story is not important, and then it stops being important. I also think that there's a kind of prejudice against short stories because that's what writing students write. Writing short stories is presumably warming up for a novel.
Overall, I think it's the decline of public space as defined by the presses and magazines. Way back, somebody would publish a short story, and the short story would be an occasion for conversation. There's a whole range of short works of fiction that have been published-humoresques, whatever James Thurber used to publish, O. Henry in the olden days—which are not exactly short stories of the kind that, I don't know, Richard Ford would publish. There was a wider range, and there was a continuity between straight-up journalism and short stories.
Chung: Over the last few years, of course, you've also had the MacArthur "genius" grant and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Do awards like that change anything about your life as a writer? Or do they just change the way people see you? Like, "Oh, now he's legit."
Hemon: It depends on who the people are. The readers, they have to read the book before they can think anything about you. They might or might not be impressed by the write-ups in newspapers, but those fade away quickly. Even with the decline of publishing, every week there's some new big name being written up for this and that. Those fade, they're like celebrity news. I think the only way to earn the respect of the readers is to be read by the readers. That hasn't changed.
The MacArthur obviously did help in some ways: it helped me to be able to write books. But the MacArthur doesn't sell books. It doesn't help you to reach more readers. I benefited from the MacArthur in the sense that I had more freedom and more energy to write books, but it's not like I got a position at Princeton because of it. Nor did my book become a best seller because of it. Though it's still in print; it might yet become a best seller!
It's kind of an academic award, the MacArthur. It's well-respected in certain circles, but it does little for the readership.
Chung: I'd like to talk a little bit about The Lazarus Project, which is kind of a braided narrative intertwining the 1908 story with the present day. Did you write all of the 1908 section together, and then all of the present-day section together or vice versa? Or did you jump around in time?
Hemon: Well, it differed. Because the contemporary part is built around places the characters visited, I'd write the Lviv part in one chunk. So I'd go by sections in the journey and write it all out. Between those sections, I might write a part about Olga. I would go back and forth, but not systematically. What I liked about writing that book, among many things, was that if I thought I was tired of writing the contemporary part, I could go back to 1908 and still stay, in some ways, in the contemporary part, or the other way around.
I also wrote the book of stories while doing this, because I do have this journalistic instinct: I like to see things published, and I can't do one thing for six, seven years. I could go back and forth between stories and the novel, and the stories would get published pretty quickly. I would take a break, write a story, get it published, usually in the New Yorker, and then I would go back to the novel.
Also, I realized, it turned out that I could take things out of the big book and put them in stories, things that interested me. I didn't have to cram everything into the novel.
Chung: How much input did you have in the design of the book? Obviously, there were the photographs taken by your friend Velibor Bozovic, but even the way the photos are set on the page is significant: they're right in the center, the page is black, there's no clear border, and you have to almost strain, sometimes, to see the picture.
Hemon: That was the designer's idea, which is brilliant, I think. I wanted the pictures, obviously. I did not participate in the design, but they asked me what I thought. Contractually, they are not obligated to do that. They could put any cover on, and I would not have a say. But my editor is a friend of mine, and we respect each other's opinions. And so he always asks me. They had a cover I didn't like, and I said I didn't like it, and they ditched it.
Chung: Could the story have existed without the photographs?
Hemon: No. Well, yes, but not by me. Not this book. The photographs were essential—in the production of the book but also for the book itself.
Chung: Obviously, one of the most striking pictures is the one of the police chief holding Lazarus up after he's killed him. You can't even necessarily tell he's dead. It's such a monstrous, horrible thing.
Hemon: Yes, it's amazing. It was when I saw that picture that I realized I would have to have pictures in the book. I wanted those pictures, but not on the cover or anything. I actually wanted them to be involved with the narrative somehow. I read the story of Lazarus Averbuch by Walter Roth and Joe Kraus, An Accidental Anarchist: How the Killing of a Humble Jewish Immigrant by Chicago's Chief of Police Exposed the Conflict between Law & Order and Civil Rights in Early 20th-Century America. The picture is actually public domain. It can be found on the web, in the old Chicago Daily News photo archives, run by the Chicago Historical Society. There are about thirty pictures related to the Averbuch case. I saw the pictures in the book, and the pictures were amazing, so apart from the story, which is amazing in itself, I thought, I need to get these pictures involved somehow. Then when I found the pictures on the web, I saw the pictures of Olga, and Olga is so amazing in those pictures that I wanted her to figure in the story too. The next step was that I realized I wanted to have a photographer as a character in the contemporary part. It all started from one picture.
Then, my friend and I went on a trip to Eastern Europe, and I had this idea of the photographer and the narrator going on a trip. We went with the idea that he would take photos that I would put in the book. He took 1,200 photos: all film, all black-and-white. He edited them down to 160 photos, and it was from those 160 photos that I worked. I used them in writing just like notes, and it was also from those that I chose the photos that would be in the book. At the beginning I didn't know how many and where they would be; I had to figure it out as I was writing.
Chung: So, in addition to figuring out the narrative and structure of the plot, now you have to go figure out which photos to put where.
Hemon: It was a challenge. There were all kinds of decisions I had to make: for example, whether they would be illustrating something in the text. Probably not. I wanted them to complicate the text. It took me a while to decide to put them at the beginning of the chapters, rather than have them interrupt the text. And if you put them at the beginning of each chapter, that limits the number of photos.
Chung: At least as far as your full-length books go, Olga is the first female character where you've taken on her point of view. Did that present any different kind of challenges?
Hemon: It was in some ways like writing any other character, but any other character is a challenge. You have to make up people's lives and feelings. The greater challenge was the 1908 aspect. You cannot help but project yourself and your own character into the future and the past. But they have to have their own verisimilitude, their own reality. That was a challenge, but that was a challenge for the whole section.
Chung: The New Yorker called it a 9/11 novel that was pretending not to be. Does that seem accurate to you?
Hemon: No. It's an Abu Ghraib novel—if it has anything to do with 9/11 and the war on terror at all. 9/11 novels, I don't know what they are. To my mind, 9/11 novels are about New Yorkers' lives being disrupted by 9/11, about the disruption of the bourgeois lifestyle. I have no interest in 9/11. Xenophobia, the war on the other, the novelization of vulgar patriotism, that was of interest to me. But that was of interest to me well before 9/11. I found myself here because of all that. That's not something that I came to because of 9/11 and the war on terror.
Chung: Politics, in general, is an important part of your work.
Hemon: It is, but I don't think of it as politics. It's just social context. People live with other people, and that means they're involved in conflicts and alliances, and they have beliefs and ideas and utopias. It's not that I want to write about politics—I'm not interested in explaining what it was like politically in 1908—but I don't know how you can operate as a citizen or a person if you're not engaged in some political exchange that identifies you one way or another. It's so ubiquitous that it doesn't have to be talked about.
I do write a column for a magazine in Sarajevo, and a lot of the columns are just blatantly political. Also, I've written things for English-language newspapers and magazines that are political. But politics should be kept out of literature. A work of literature takes longer to take hold. If I'm pissed as a citizen, I'm going to act as a citizen, not as a writer. If it's about politics, I'll submit it to a newspaper: I write about it on Monday, it comes out Tuesday, rather than write about it in a book that takes six years to come out. There's politics in this book, but not because I wanted to change the world by writing about it. The world has changed while it was getting printed.
Chung: You've said you wanted to tell this story to counteract the prevailing narrative of the immigrant who comes to this country, finds the streets paved with gold, and then works his way up and becomes successful, which is interesting to me, because your own story—at least as it gets reported sometimes—has that same mythic quality. I've read things saying you could barely speak English when you came to this country—obviously you were more conversant than that. But now, you've won all these prizes-are you aware of how your narrative is similar to that "Land of Opportunity" story?
Hemon: I am aware of that. But those narratives are always more complicated than that. My narrative is more complicated than that. The path has not been paved with gold. There were things I had to do and had to go through, to get to this point. And this, of course, might change overnight. It's changing for a lot of people as we speak, what with the collapse of the economy. It's kind of an individualistic, selfish discourse, the discourse of the American Dream. I've succeeded, but what about everyone I have ever known in my life? My parents have not succeeded. They're in Canada, but they have different problems. They have a nice house with a backyard, and they're safe and well taken care of. Yet they have this sense of indelible loss that they cannot get over. They came here in '93, and they lost agency in their lives. They did not work toward where they are now, the way you work toward something for thirty years and then achieve it.
I resent that narrative because it takes out all those people who were not successful. It takes out all the nuances of getting to this point for me. But nevermind me. It takes out all the people who have suffered. I climbed up on their backs, as it were—not only the writers, obviously, but all kinds of people, from the Ellis Island immigrants to this day, this neighborhood. There's a large number of Bosnians here, and I see them adjusting or maladjusting, struggling to get a decent life. I cannot see myself outside of them. Then there's a kind of a positional problem related to storytelling. If I can't talk about someone like Lazarus Averbuch because I'm successful, who is going to talk about it? Not that I'm the only one who can: it might be some other successful writer, or it might be someone who is just struggling.
Another way to put it is, some people might think you can talk about the suffering of others only if you're in the same situation. But, if you have the privilege of talking about it, then you're not in the same situation. In other words, those who cannot speak cannot be spoken about. This leads to a kind of solipsistic discourse that memoirs embody: you can only talk about yourself or for yourself.
Chung: The "write what you know" philosophy.
Hemon: Right. But exclusively what you know. You can only write from your point of view if you've suffered. To be legitimate as a writer, you have to suffer. It's not that I have suffered and earned the right to write about Lazarus. It's that human experience is my domain as a writer. I refuse to be barred from it based on my suffering score. Human experience, both the good stuff and the bad, both the confusion and pain and the other stuff, that is my domain. I carry the burden that I'm writing about in various ways. It's not just my burden; there's a sense of solidarity, but there's also imagination.
Chung: I didn't mean to imply that you didn't have the right to write about Averbuch ...
Hemon: No, I didn't take it personally. It's a reasonable question. I'm not insulted by it; I've thought about it. It's an ethical question about writing: why do you write? Who do you write for? Can you claim to represent anyone? To what extent? I don't think I represent anyone, but I reserve the right to get engaged with any aspect of human experience, and so that means that I can—indeed I must—go beyond my experience to engage. That's non-negotiable. If I were a Proust, someone from a wealthy family, I would still reserve the right to engage. Now, that engagement might be justified retroactively; that is, I have to write a good book to justify that engagement. It might be harder to write it if you don't have any related experience, but it's possible.
Chung: Do you consider yourself an American writer?
Hemon: Yes. But also a Bosnian writer.
Chung: Or Bosnian-hyphen-American?
Hemon: I'm not big on hyphens. It's not an identity issue. It's that I write in English and I participate in American literature. But I also write in Bosnian, and I participate in Bosnian public space, both as a writer and as a journalist. I can go with a hyphen, but I can also go without a hyphen. It would be perfectly parallel.
Chung: People have made a lot of comparisons between you and Nabokov. Does that comparison make sense to you?
Hemon: It doesn't make sense, because he wrote forty books in two languages, and many of the Russian books would have qualified him for the title of a genius. To my mind, I would be comparable to Nabokov, in whatever way, only after I've written forty books, which may never happen, especially in two languages. It's sort of a fast or lazy comparison. It takes a lifetime, a literary lifetime, to establish the works of a Nabokov. Whereas I have four books, which is nice, but it's nowhere near that. It's like comparing a shack and a pyramid. To that extent, it doesn't make any sense; we're not even in the same category. But I see why Nabokov springs to mind. He wrote in English as his non-native language, and also, I do love Nabokov. He is indeed my favorite writer. My attitude toward language is closest to Nabokov's.
Chung: That was the other point I was going to mention. As a tool to work with, do you find the English language to be a lot of fun to use?
Hemon: Yes. I love English. It's vast; there's a lot of it, and I like that.
Chung: Do you find that English, as a medium to work in, is more fun than Bosnian?
Hemon: It depends what you write. I've sort of organized a division of labor. I write columns in Bosnian and I enjoy it immensely; I've had as many words published in Bosnian in the past twelve years as I have in English. But it's a different genre, a different model, a different audience, a different medium. The English language has a longer history—there are more books published in the English language. It stretches across the world, and it has the influence of people who use English as their second language. They transform the language all the time, and the feelings of these people are inscribed in it. Bosnian does not have the vastness. It's a small language. All languages are functional, so whatever idea I might have in English, I am capable of expressing in Bosnian. It's small in the sense of the number of published books, the number of writers, the size of the reading audience, the history. There's nothing comparable to Shakespeare in Bosnian: a work by a single person that defined the language and reached its limits five hundred years ago.
Chung: I'd like to talk a bit about point of view. Obviously you alternate in Lazarus between the first person of the contemporary narrator and the third person for the past. The 1908 section eventually moves into Olga's point of view, primarily, but it's a little bit more distant than a close third person.
Then, in a few other places, especially "Blind Jozef Pronek" in Question of Bruno, you technically are using a first-person narrator, but it's much more distanced, as the narrator isn't even really part of the story. At one point you even use the term "dear reader," which you really don't see much nowadays. Is there a point of view you're most comfortable in, and what are the different decisions you make as to which to use when?
Hemon: What interests me, and interested me in all these examples, is to create a space that is not organized around a single point of view, but an overlapping space between different narrators or between different points of view. I have so far not been able to write a book that has a single point of view. I don't do that, although the new book of stories actually seems to have a single point of view in various ways. It's more focused. Even so, both my inclination and my interest is to create a space. The way I think about my writing is creating spaces, not characters. When I teach writing, my students tend to insist on the psychology of characters. The first layer of reading, as it were, as far as they're concerned is trying to understand the psychology of the characters. The space between the characters is something they strive to formulate, and that is, for them, primarily defined by the engagement of psychology. As for me, the space, both the physical space, but also the space defined by the character's presence in the world, is what I'm after.
So in Nowhere Man, you have various narrators, right? Some of them have no substance at all; they're just narrators, they're not characters. But the effect, the desired effect of it, would be to create a space in which Pronek exists. So it's not just Pronek's point of view. It's someone else's point of view, but you have space that's limited, as defined by the narrator, in which Pronek operates. And that would be hard, I imagine, just using the close third person or first person. By definition, the spaces are more limited or more exclusive.
This is a matter of temperament. I don't think that third-person narratives are bad or wrong.
Chung: Is it fair to say that your interest lies more in the relationships between characters, or between a character and society as a whole, or the perspectives characters may have on each other, than on the characters as individuals? This actually ties back to your idea that politics is necessary in literature if only as a means of providing social context.
Hemon: Actually, I mean primarily the physical space between and around the characters. If there is nonphysical space in which they operate, I would call it history. I do not know how anyone can operate as an individual without interactions with other people, without being located in history.
Chung: You're still teaching at Northwestern. I'd guess you don't have to in order to make a living at this point.
Hemon: It does help financially, but the money is not the big issue. I teach because I enjoy it. I do not teach workshops; I teach elective courses. Which is to say that I designed the courses: designed the syllabi and reading lists and all that, and I tended to teach what interested me at the time. The teaching was a learning process for me. Also, the students are pretty good and, temperamentally, I think better in dialogue. If I'm alone, I fall asleep thinking, but if I'm in conversation with people, I understand things better and think better. The teaching, on top of everything else, is kind of a situational dialogue where we can talk about books or other issues that interest me. This is productive because if it's interesting to me, I get excited, and that excitement might spread to the students.
Chung: You don't teach workshops, but you must have participated in one at some point.
Hemon: Only when I taught it.
Chung: It's always interesting to me that people seem to feel very strongly one way or another about workshops.
Hemon: I don't feel strongly, because I have not suffered in a workshop. I've never been critiqued in a workshop. It's not that I don't understand how it works. It just doesn't work for me, because I came from a different tradition. I was actually talking to my students about that. This is not entirely my choice, but this is how it is: I've never been in a workshop as a participant. I've never had a tutor. I've never had a writing teacher. I never had anyone who oversaw my writing progress. I did it all alone.
It's not as noble as it sounds. There was no choice. There were no writing workshops in Bosnia. The professors were not that interested. And temperamentally, I like to work in an autonomous zone; I don't want anyone to get involved until I'm done. I did everything alone, and the way I learned to think about my writing was: I do things in my autonomous zone, and I do whatever I want. But to legitimize that choice, I have to know what I'm doing. And to figure out what I'm doing, as it were, I learned to do that by reading. If I'm doing something in a story, I might have some precedents and think, "Oh, someone else did this before." Falling back to my reading experience, I might step outside of my writing and try to imagine what it would look like to me as a reader-forget that I actually wrote it. I developed a strategy that does not require any workshopping. I never needed a workshop. Not because I'm superior, but because I had to work within specific circumstances.
Chung: Do you have people who read your stuff now besides, obviously, your editor and your agent?
Hemon: Seldom. When I do, I send it to friends. That's happened maybe twice in the past ten years. What I need from them is not so much detailed comments. Rather, if I have a particular problem I need readers. I had a couple of stories where I was not so sure about the ending. Whatever they told me about the rest of the story was good, but it was not necessary. Regarding the ending, what I needed from them was to allow me to imagine how they would see it. Sometimes I would decide what I wanted to do before they even told me what they thought about the story.
Chung: So these are not even necessarily writer friends?
Hemon: They are. They're a couple of Bosnian friends, and I send stuff to them more for philosophical reasons. If they say, "this is bullshit," then I have to think about what I'm doing. Because they are temperamentally similar to me, and we have similar tastes. Then there are Colum McCann and Nathan Englander. I've sent some stories to them.
Chung: You're a big music guy, and you've talked about how Bosnian sevdah is similar to the blues. Do you go to blues clubs here in Chicago?
Hemon: Well, I have a kid now, and that takes me out of all kinds of scenes. I have been to Buddy Guy's and I enjoyed it. I listen to music all the time. I go to hear classical music. I cannot write without music. Sometimes, there are particular pieces of music that I need in order to write.
Chung: I would guess it's not necessarily Bosnian music?
Hemon: No. I've listened to Bosnian music, but it's not necessarily Bosnian music. It varies.
I think more clearly when music is present. "Szmura's Room," which appeared in Love and Obstacles, was one of the stories where I had trouble with the ending. I had written one, and people told me it was no good. I read the sentences over in my head. Then I went to a concert of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mahler's First Symphony. Suddenly, in the middle of it all, the bottom fell out and I saw the ending clearly, what it should be.
Chung: And it was not the ending you had.
Hemon: Right, but it was entirely clear and non-negotiable. It sounds dramatic, but I wasn't thinking about it at all, and suddenly the bottom fell out.
I was telling someone, there was one story, "The Sorge Spy Network," that for some reason all I could listen to when I was writing it was "Mothership Connection" by Parliament, and Mahler's Ninth. I had a tape deck on continuous play, and I kept listening to them over and over. Death and funk. I have no idea why that is, but whatever else I would put on did not work. It was a kind of comfort zone, but also it provided a rhythm. Not for language, necessarily, not for sentences, but to set the tone.
Chung: Hmmm. Death and Funk. Wouldn't that be a great title for a book?
Hemon: It would be a great title for an album.
AWP
Jeanie Chung's author interviews have previously appeared in the Writer's Chronicle, and her fiction has appeared in Timber Creek Review, Madison Review, Hunger Mountain, and upstreet, as well as in the anthology The Way We Knew It: Fiction from the First Twenty-Five Years of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College (1981–2006). She is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Vermont College. She was a journalist for twelve years, most recently a sportswriter at the Chicago Sun-Times.
from "The Conductor" in Love and Obstacles
by Aleksandar HemonI met Muhamed D. for the first time in 1991, at a cafe called Dom pisaca, or Writers' Club, adjacent to the offices of the Bosnian Writers' Association. He was short and stocky, suddenly balding in his mid-forties, his expression frozen in an ugly permanent frown. I shook his hand limply, barely concealing my contempt. He spoke with the clear, provincial inflections of Travnik, his hometown, and was misclad in a dun shirt, brown pants and an inflammable-green tie. I was a cool-dressed city boy, all denim and T-shirts, born and bred in the purest concrete, skipping vowels and slurring my consonants in a way that cannot even be imitated by anyone who did not grow up inhaling Sarajevo smog. He offered me a seat at his table, and I joined him, along with several of the other anthology veterans, who all wore the suffering faces of the sublime, as though they were forever imprisoned in the lofty dominion of poetry.
For some demented reason, Muhamed D. introduced me to them as a philharmonic orchestra conductor. My objections were drowned out as the other poets started howling the "Ode to Joy" while making conducting gestures, and I was instantly nicknamed "Dirigent"-Conductor-thereby becoming safely and permanently marked as a nonpoet. I stopped trying to correct the mistake as soon as I realized that it didn't matter: it was my role to be only an audience for their drunken, anthological greatness.Muhamed D. sat at the head of the Table, governing confidently as they babbled, ranted, sang heartbreaking songs, and went about their bohemian business, guzzling ambrosial beer. I occupied the corner chair, witnessing and building up my arrogance while craving their acceptance. Later that night, Muhamed D. demanded that I explain musical notation. "How do you read those dots and flags?" he asked. "And what do you really do with the stick?" Although I had no idea, I tried to come up with some reasonable explanations, if only to expose his ignorance, but he just shook his head in discouragement. Almost every night I spent at the Table, there was a point where I failed to enlighten the poets as to how music was written, thereby confirming their initial assumption that I was a lousy conductor, but a funny guy. I wondered how Muhamed D. could write a poem about Beethoven while being entirely oblivious of the way the damn notation system worked.
Excerpted from "The Conductor" in Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon. Copyright © 2009 by Aleksandar Hemon. Used with permission from Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group.