Spotlight On…

Today Kyle Hemmings talks with us about differences between traditional and experimental fiction, as well as all the beauty and ugliness of the New York club scene.

Tell us about the first story you remember writing.

Okay, it was a story that grew into novel and then I tore it up from frustration. It was called “Dreaming with Your Eyes Open.” A very small excerpt from it survived and was pubbed in Rose and Thorn around 2006. It concerned these two brothers, very dissimilar, one artistic and sensitive, the other, a beach boy chick magnet. Over time, the artistic, introverted one discovers his older brother might have killed a girl their father was secretly dating. My first published story was one called Fish Bowl in Verbsap in 2005. It was about a quadriplegic living alone in an apartment. He was in love with a new tenant and jealous of her boyfriend.

How often do you struggle with your writing? Or does it come easily?

I struggle more with longer fiction. I struggle with development where sometimes logic and common sense must take over. I also struggle when it comes to a point of intentionally messing something up to add depth without really “messing everything up.” When it comes to poetry, the muse is more kind to me. I think it’s because I love music.

Describe your typical writing environment.

A desk in my bedroom, a computer, a cup of coffee. More often than not, two or three in the morning. That sense of isolation and silence is important to me. I’m not one of those writers who can compose with pencil. My writing is too slow and the thought leaves me before I have a chance to put it down. I need a keyboard.

What’s your favorite story you’ve written? Why?

It’s funny, nobody ever asked me that except for Randall Brown to a group of us at Zoe. My favorite story, not necessarily my best story or what others deem to be my best, would be “Yucatan,” published by Juked in 2007. It was my attempt to write a traditional story with narrative arc, not so much the experimental or hybrid stuff that followed. I really liked the character of the crippled young man who wanted to escape to an island off Yucatan with his father and uncle and the island might not have existed. It ends with the uncle taking up the nephrew’s cause, trying to cross from Texas to Yucatan in a wheelchair. It was nominated for the best of the web. That experience taught me how important the basics still are — in this case — character. The editor, J.W. Wang, was great and very supportive to work with.

What’s the last book that you loved?

This is hard. I just finished The Jello Horse by Matthew Simmons, and I loved that. Before that I finished Light Boxes by Shane Jones and that was great. And I had this urge to reread this old novel, a psychological thriller from the sixties, called Deadfall by Desmond Cory. They made it into a movie back in ’68 with Michael Caine. I loved it. It was about the world’s greatest jewel thief who becomes entrapped by an ex-Nazi and his wife who turns out to be his daughter. I have this secret love for the old paperbacks of the 60s and earlier.

Does reading online influence your writing style? How would your work change if you lost access to the Internet for a year?

I’d die if I lost access to the internet. It’s like this. Sometimes I’ll browse chapbooks put out by small independent presses, chapbooks of poems or short fictions. And I’ll think my god, I’ll bet nobody’s even heard of this. There’s so much great creative stuff out there, stuff you may not find in the library or the book store, stuff that forces you think of new ways to approach problems or new ways to express the old ideas, or how to create the necessary spaces.

I read in your bio at Smokelong Quarterly that your hero is R Crumb. I can see how his surreal, often edgy work might influence yours. Tell us about your literary influences and more generally what you think it means to be an artist in today’s modern, mash-up world.

I have a lot of influences, but let me repeat something that I said in another interview. One of the biggest influences, besides other writers, was the nine or ten years I spent on the streets of New York, when I became addicted to the club scene. There was a lot of beauty and ugliness I witnessed and I think this comes out in my latter work. I have a short piece up at Noo Weekly which was written from that experience and a reader emailed me that my work for him for the last two or three years was a kind of dystopia with its hub in New Jersey. Interesting way to look at it, I suppose. The other great non-literary influence is music. I could not survive without it. I wish John Lennon was still alive and Jim Morrison. And movies. Old movies. And yes, I can’t get away from surreal. I experience it in real life, in the suffering and the idiocy, in the shit that’s handed down from the heads of corporations and how it affects us, who are often viewed as “little people.”

My literary influences? Cortazar, Borges, Kafka, Woolf, Immanuel Kant. Jorge Santayana, Murakami, Steely Dan, Lorca, Rob Plath, Faulker, Sam Pink, xTx, and on and on. The first piece of literature that turned me on to writing, was, believe it or not, a collection of short stories by the poet, Robert Creeley. It was like reading an American poet’s version of a Beckett-like world in suburbia and the problem, as always, as how do we communicate and get and offer love. It was called The Gold Diggers.

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Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. In his spare time, he talks to pissed off cab drivers and is still looking for the perfect cheeseburger. His work has appeared or will soon appear in Prick of the Spindle, Smokelong Quarterly, Nano Fiction, Staccato Fiction, Camroc Press, Decomp, and Lonesome Fowl. Kyle has a first book of poetry due out soon, called Fuzzy Logic. Kyle does not deal with numbers.