Spotlight On…

Today we talk with Hunter Choate about how laughter can complicate, how lyricism is an act of creative rebellion, and the influence of James Salter.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? What fires you up? What embarrasses you?

I’m a thirty-something living in Orlando. Like most Floridians, I’m from somewhere else. I was born in Houston, Texas. I’ve lived all over the South and I spent a year in Italy. I’ve worked as a dishwasher, an aircraft mechanic in the Air Force, a financial analyst, and a marketing manager. I love to travel, to broaden my understanding of people and places. Writing fiction is relatively new to me. I find myself worrying I’ve come to it too late, so it’s a bit embarrassing to speak in earnest about my work.

I can certainly understand feeling a bit too late. You wrote poetry before fiction, right? What prompted the move, or do you still write poetry? Which do you ultimately prefer?

Yeah, the first things I recall writing were poems. I was a kid writing about mopey kid things. There were broken-hearted rhyming couplets and free verse poems hailing the apocalypse and other poetic atrocities. These days I don’t write many poems. I’m rarely satisfied with the end product. The move to fiction was gradual. I suppose it started with a love of reading and a distant idea. Back then I never even considered short fiction and the novel seemed so intimidating. It took many years of positive feedback from friends and family in response to these creative nonfiction emails I used to send out before I started to think seriously about trying fiction. Of course, their assessments of my talent were overly generous. I was like the small town girl packing up for Hollywood because someone told her she was pretty. Now I recognize how much talent is out there and how much hard work is involved in even the shortest pieces of fiction.

In “Goodbye, Wynona”, you end the story with an imagined laugh that’s a bit counter-intuitive based on earlier character interactions. It’s an unexpected move, but not one that’s totally out of context since earlier dialog presages the shift. What prompted the laugh? What happens to the story if it’s not there?

Shortly after completing “Goodbye, Wynona,” I realized that I’ve ended several stories with some form of laughter. I’m not sure why that’s the case, and none of them started with the ending in mind. Maybe it has something to do with the range of emotion a laugh can represent. Is it laughter of lightness or weight? The ambiguity allows the reader to bring himself or herself to the story. If I had a therapist, I’d ask what it says about me.

As for Wynona, the laughter serves as counterpoint to the narrator’s quiet response to the breakup. There’s subtext and characterization in the laugh — here’s a woman who is a bit unhinged, someone who leaves a Dear John letter and sticks around to see how he’ll respond, someone who’s upset by his nonchalant demeanor, and someone who the narrator imagines laughing in response to ending their relationship. Of course, it’s important to remember it is an imagined laugh. It’s the narrator seeing himself through Wynona’s eyes, and he allows for the possibility she won’t laugh at all. There’s a chance at redemption. In the absence of the laugh, it becomes a fairly straightforward breakup story.

Your work tends to be lyrical and passionate and functions along emotional curves. Tell us why those things are important, or not. Tell us why you write the way you do and contrast your style with one that’s more precise, calculated, and cerebral. What does a lyrical and passionate style allow?

Ideally there’s an intellectual and emotional resonance in a piece. I write because I’m interested in what it means to be human. Anyone who’s ever suffered an irrational fear or loved the wrong person understands the power of emotion. It’s a large part of the human experience, but certainly not the whole. I try to keep that in mind when writing. I don’t want my work to be so passionate as to become maudlin. I want it to say something about life and I’d be satisfied with quiet epiphanies.

Whatever lyricism exists in my writing stems from an early exposure to poetry. I was influenced by the lyricism of poets like Neruda and writing bad poems long before prose. Also, I’ve worked in quantitative roles that required precision and literal interpretation. In response, lyricism is an act of creative rebellion. It allows me to invoke imagery where it otherwise wouldn’t exist. I like the idea of weaving strong images into my writing to allow a sentence or scene to linger in a reader’s mind.

Whenever I think of literary imagery, it’s in the context of one thing being compared to something else and through that comparison resonance is achieved. Do you think an image itself could resonate without being comparative?

I think imagery works on multiple levels. Comparative parallels are a good way to smuggle in surprising images. But the accumulation of well-rendered description also grounds a story in vivid imagery; with a statement like that I’m thinking of Hemingway’s use of detail or the setting in a book like The Road. Those types of images can be precise and still resonate.

In my own writing I tend to favor visual imagery. That’s something I found myself naturally gravitating toward. Recently, and I’m willing to accept the very real possibility that I’m rationalizing my personal preferences here, I’ve found myself thinking in terms of visual mnemonics. In the same way someone trying to memorize a deck of cards will assign visual cues to each card, I try to look for ways to include striking visual images that will make a scene or ending more memorable.

Has a book ever changed your world-view or how you lived your life? If so, which one? Why?

That’s a tricky question. The simple answer: Yes, all of them. Exposure to new ideas or vicarious experiences in books influences me, nudges me ever so slightly in a different direction. I don’t think I could single out a particular book as being the one that changed my life. It would be more accurate to say the discovery of books in my early twenties had a profound impact on me. That’s when I first read works by Pound and Kafka and Sartre, and I couldn’t get enough. I remember reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” around that time and being blown away. That story was my first required reading that didn’t feel like a chore. I look back on those early discoveries with an almost irrational fondness. They opened up a world of ideas and expression and curiosity.

How has the Internet affected literature?

The Internet has diminished the importance of place. If you have Web access, you can read contemporary and classic works, often for free. You can find and join in discussions about literature. You don’t need to live in New York City or Paris of the 1920s to have access to new ideas or to have your voice heard.

There’s also immediacy on the Web. Many lit blogs and some literary journals are updated daily. New ideas and trends don’t have to wait to find their way into the world. If it isn’t already happening, I suspect this will speed literary change. I’m not sure what the change will look like or if it’s a good or bad thing, but it seems inevitable.

What writers have influenced your own work positively? What writers influenced you negatively?

Lately, my biggest influence is James Salter. His writing is both masculine and heartbreakingly beautiful. He can do more with a single sentence or a turn of phrase than many writers accomplish in pages. It’s a lofty goal, and one I rarely approach in execution, but I strive to emulate some of those qualities in my own writing.

My negative influences have less to do with particular writers than they do a tendency towards humor. Some of my first stories were entirely humor-based. I still enjoy and appreciate well-placed humor. If deftly wielded, it can provide emotional balance or allow a writer to smuggle uncomfortable truths into a story. Other times it’s just plain fun, and that’s okay. The danger is when humor becomes a panacea, the answer to every question. Some parts of life deserve serious treatment, so I’m selective in how I use humor in my writing.

Tell us about your current project.

I’m hard at work on my first novel. It’s difficult and the words are often a painful discovery. Like most writers struggling through a first novel, it inspires both self-loathing and delusions of grandeur. I’m about two-thirds of the way through an extensive rewrite, and I can comfortably say it includes my best writing. The real question is whether it will work as a whole or end up stashed away in a desk drawer. Either way, I expect to be at it again.

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Hunter Choate lives with his wife and a fuzzy black cat, making him third in the household pecking order. His writing has appeared in elimae, decomP, Emprise Review, Word Riot, and others. Find him online at www.hunterchoate.com.