Spotlight On…

Rose Hunter’s book, to the river, takes us to parts of the world most of us have rarely seen and it does so by rendering an interior landscape often strange and elegant. We talk with her today about giant banana leaves, the pollution of memory, and where the river is headed.

Tell us a bit about yourself? Where are you from? What fires you up? What’s your deepest regret?

I’m from all over the place. I was born in a country town in Australia (Armidale) — but my parents moved around so as I remember it now anyway, I never felt I was really from there. These days if someone asks I’ll usually say Brisbane, Australia, because that’s where I went to university. I liked university.

Hmm, what fires me up? Good writing of course. Exploring new places. Warm air on my skin. Steamy, drenching humidity. Rare connections with people. Giant banana leaves and horses on the beach. But all that’s more like a slow burn appreciation. I prefer that to getting fired up I think. When I get fired up it’s usually a mistake, even if it’s amusing at the time. This coffee I’m drinking for example is wonderful, just right. I hope I’m growing in my appreciation of those sorts of things.

My deepest regret would be regrets, plural, for sure; I couldn’t really pick between them, and they’re probably not things I could share here. I find though, that these things are constantly shifting. Some days I’m convinced I made a huge mistake doing x,y, or z, and other days I think well, that wasn’t really such a mistake because then I wouldn’t have done this and this. Most people do this I think. It’s probably a form of rationalization on some level — something more reassuring and self-building than saying — well, basically, my life since twenty-five has been a mistake…. Etc.

One regret I can share here is not going any further at university. I always intended to go back and do more there, after my BA. I’ve come close to trying to, a few times. But this is a push-pull thing with me too — when it’s comes to the crunch I realize I probably couldn’t cope with the structure, and the classrooms, and being told what to write and read — or funding it.

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

That’s a really difficult question. There are plenty of books that have changed the way I think about certain things of course. But the way I live my life? Maybe a couple of books by Alan Watts, his one on Zen I read a while back sticks in my mind. The Tao Te Ching. A book of Buddhist scriptures I used to have. I went to the library here* and saw a book by Eckhart Tolle and grabbed it. It’s helping me get through today; it’s changing the way I’m thinking of today. I’m kind of depressed and it’s helping right now even just to glance over at it. Insofar as my life is just a series of nows, it’s changing the way I’m living my life. I don’t have a world view.

* the library here is very, very small, and as such has a limited selection. Nevertheless, I like Eckhart Tolle. I agree with Oprah on this issue.

How has the Internet affected literature?

Other people say way more insightful and organized things than I’m capable of doing, about the general state of affairs with respect to this. I’ll go right to the personal. I know it’s enabled me as a writer, to engage with a community I would otherwise not be in contact with. When I first started out submitting things I was printing out manuscripts and stuffing them in envelopes, and then getting a rejection letter nine months later. Or the occasional acceptance, but still, this felt like a big so what? What’s the point of this? I never got to know any of the other contributors, never exchanged any ideas with them.

Because I’ve never taken a writing class, even at university (I did a BA in English but I didn’t dare write my own “creative writing” back then, and there were no such classes offered) — I was always very alone with my writing. All writing is alone, that’s a given, but that’s why I think it helps so much to be able to come out of the cocoon and have a community of people out there who don’t think you’re crazy for doing what you’re doing – or are similarly afflicted.

Just to have someone say: did you read that? And then look online and find it, read it, and have some little exchange about it. I think that’s brilliant. I remember once when I was pretty new to the whole thing, I had just started my blog I think, in early 2009 – you sent me a note saying you’d liked one of my stories that you’d read in an online journal, I believe it was Storyglossia. This meant a lot to me, and probably helped me write something that day / week. This may be a personal weakness, but I think I need those bits of encouragement, when they’re sincerely meant, as I perceived your comment to be. I spiral into depression pretty quick and easy (especially when it comes to writing) — a few trinkets like this can keep my head above water, and my fingers on the keyboard, to paint an absurd image. So I’ll take them. (The trinkets.) This really would only have happened like that in an online context.

And conversely of course, someone to tell me I’m heading in the wrong direction with something. Like a lot of writers I think, who are not in MFA’s etc., and do not have other book readers, let alone other writers — in their immediate vicinity, I can feel quite starved for feedback, and also have pretty lousy judgment at times, especially when it comes to my own work. A bad combination. So again, any trinket. I can run on that for quite a while.

By exchange of ideas I don’t just mean direct commentary between people of course. I mean the kind of exchange you get from reading online journals and the blogs of other writers. It makes a difference to read the viewpoints of the people who are your contemporaries I think, more or less, rather than picking up a volume of Paris Review interviews, for example. Which I like as well, don’t get me wrong. But they don’t make me feel part of anything, like the online “community” does.

That seems to have run a bit off-topic, but maybe not, as well. I think I was going to say something about inclusivity, and plurality of voices, and the removal of gatekeepers. I do think it’s opened up opportunities for writing that deviates from a certain accepted style. It’s a wonderful smorgasbord out there. It can get overwhelming, but for me it’s not much different from stepping inside a big brick and mortar library and seeing books for miles and realizing there’s just no time in life to read them all. It’s a bummer, but that’s life, and it’s much better than there being too few books at least.

There’s often a sense in your poetry that inauthenticity can’t be escaped. In your poem Memories Do Not, the narrator balks at someone who claims her face is readable and open. She thinks it is readable only insofar as what she plants there is readable. There’s a great deal of truth in that, but the poem also give us this:

Memories do not
fade, they dissolve. That
is, there is always something else
behind them, and you get a bit of both…

This seems to point to larger issues about the nature of truth, relativity, and how does one know if one’s memory is an unpolluted recognition? This poem ends with the line, Can I tell you some of the things I’ve seen? My question is: can you? Can writing communicate something true outside of individual perception? And how much faith do we put into what the writer is telling us? What is necessary for belief when not only memories, but everything else, seems to edge-blur with context?

Oh boy. OK, I’ll try to answer this one. It’s interesting you say that about my poetry — I’m not conscious of that coming across, but I think I do believe there isn’t much true outside of perception. That’s just my perception. Or — there is / might be, but we’re (well, I’m) not capable of perceiving it, not for any length of time anyway. Maybe sometimes, in certain meditative states.

Memory is way polluted, I think. I keep journals, so I can look back at my written memories of a certain event and it will often produce some puzzled reaction in me. Really, that’s what I thought of that once? Or — that’s how that went down? Similar to my friend Eckhart, I think memory is a “now event” which may or may not bear any relation to what happened “then.” This is why two people recalling the “same” event can have such different takes on it. This is how many arguments start, right? It wasn’t like this, it was like that. Who knows? Neither [of us], is what I think.

According to the sections of To the River, you’ve traveled extensively and it appears that the book was written in the course of these travels. Tell us about organizing the book this way and how it came about. How did the travel itself inform the poems?

I’ve travelled quite a bit although not perhaps as much as it would appear. Everything’s relative, as usual. For instance, I haven’t seen much of Asia at all, and have never been to Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe — the list could go on. So there’s plenty of travel left for me. I like living in different places though, not rushing through them or “seeing the sights.” The “sights” are rarely so interesting anyway. And I usually don’t have an excess of money so I tend to travel to places where it’s possible for me to exist cheaply.

The first I guess two thirds of that book collect together various poems I had that had to do with the theme of travel. When I looked at my big messy poetry file I thought, well, here’s the obvious unifying thing — it’s all the ones I wrote when traveling, and about traveling / place — basically when I was living in Toronto, returning there between various trips, and then the first part of the time I was in Mexico. So I gathered those ones up and arranged them chronologically basically, in the order in which they “happened.” Then I thought, well that’s too easy, and I shuffled them around for a while and played with different orders. Then I went back to my original idea, as is so often the case.

The last third of the book – the “Puerto Vallarta” section, are the most recent poems I wrote, while I was living there in 2009. Originally I thought of these as their own, self-contained chapbook, but when Ryan [Bradley, of Artistically Declined Press] suggested they would go nicely with the rest of the travel / place oriented book, I thought well that’s a good idea, so, there they are. I like them there. I think they provide a kind of teleology; a place the river is headed to. That’s my perception anyway.

Having traveled that much, you’ve seen people in many different cultures. How does culture change people? What about people doesn’t change, no matter where they live?

The place I think of as my current “home,” Mexico, I think is a lovely culture. Depending on where in Mexico you are, the differences are smaller, but also big. I’m going to leave that sentence like that because I think it’s true. I don’t like generalizing too much about things like cultures, but I do like how Mexico tends to be a more laid-back, more forgiving place. Really I need extensive footnotes to qualify that statement, but I’ll go on without them nevertheless. In general, there isn’t the same rat race. I say that having come from living in downtown Toronto for ten years (before Mexico) though, so.

Perhaps it’s better to say how Mexico has changed me, which is that it’s made me a bit more forgiving and nicer I hope, to myself and others. I don’t have to do this and that to be “okay.” I’m already okay. Or not. Who knows? It doesn’t really matter. My experience of the world is that it’s just so crazy, so completely absurd, and no one knows what’s going on. My friends in Toronto tended to want to come to some sort of painful narrative conclusion about all this chaos. My friends in Mexico are more inclined to just delight in it, or rage about it — but ultimately reserve judgments and explanation.

They / we also need less stuff. There’s less stuff to buy for starters, at least where I go shopping, and there’s just less of a focus on stuff in general. I got sucked into the whole having stuff thing when I was in Toronto, and I’m very glad to be rid of that, and I think the reason I’m rid of it is due to the culture down there. I didn’t even realize the extent of the change in me until I got back to Australia and stepped into a shopping mall and thought, sweet Lord. WTF is this?? WTF are these people doing? I mean really…. And then I remembered that I used to be one of those people. Kind of. To some degree anyway. (I’m talking about excessive stuff here. I still like my laptop. But I don’t need other gadgets or new shit when the old stuff works fine, I don’t need new, new, new, etc. That kind of thing, which seems to be an obsession here.)

What doesn’t change about people is that we all need a certain amount of stuff of course. Along with food we need clothing and shelter. So this is the common activity of most people I guess, population-wise, across cultures — the struggle to get the stuff we actually do need. The things most people have to do to get their stuff is overwhelmingly appalling, almost everywhere. But certainly, it’s a question of degree. The poverty in parts of Mexico will break your heart.

Do you think there’s a correlation between having material stuff (I’ll not call it wealth) and this desire for narrative conclusion?

I’ll go straight for the personal, as usual. I’ve recently been forced to recognize that I have very little interest in creating narrative, and especially the kind that has a conclusion. It’s always a terrible strain, and usually a failure. What I am happy working with most often are moments of time. I like to sit with them for a while, and look at them a bit like I would look at a photograph. When I read a novel, I don’t think I read like you’re “supposed to.” I don’t get lost, even in “seamless” narratives, and I have a feeling I don’t become stitched in, or identify with protags like I’m supposed to, or like I remember some university theories saying that people did / might. I find the novel as a form, fairly horrific I think. This forward (or backward, or whichever direction) — of things happening, one damn thing after another like Hemingway said. I like the novels of Nicholson Baker, especially one like Mezzanine, where nothing much happens, and we are free to spend three pages contemplating a particular make of paper bag or something. (Caveat: I will read other types of novels of course, but less of them these days, and I read them not as a writer if that makes sense, but more like I watch a movie. And frequently fast forward when they become too plotty.) I’ve read a lot of novels, skipping over the bits where stuff happens, and just paying attention to the “still” bits.

This in no way answers your question. There’s all the theory that I can’t remember much of, about the novel being a bourgeois form, etc. I don’t know about that, but I suppose the sheer accumulation of detail (with logical connections! yea gads!) in a novel (of the realist / conclusive type) – might correspond with a home of some sort, a house, say – a thing which I have no desire ever to own. And maybe poetry (to me) might be more like a motel room. Maybe like the one I stayed at recently in Mazatlan, opposite the bus station, with moldy pink walls and broken windows and no hot water. This would probably be a rich setting for a narrative, for someone who wanted to make that. I don’t really want to do that because I’m not so interested in why I / this character am / is here, or what could happen next. I was very interested in the TV set though — a tiny beat-up thing chained to the far wall not as though the management was afraid someone might steal it, but as though it could sprout legs / wings and break its own way out. I wrote a poem about that TV set….

Do I think my own narrative ineptitude corresponds with an ineptitude with regard to certain stable life things, like a house and stuff? (Not to mention consistent employment, family, and staying in the same general place?) It might, in my case, but this also might be a coincidence. I wouldn’t want to generalize out to anyone else.

This still doesn’t answer your question so much. I like the question though, and hope I’ve accorded it due respect by throwing around some ideas / words in response, rather than answering it, let alone “conclusively.”

Caveat 1: I’ve oversimplified here, with respect to concepts like “narrative,” and “conclusion” – but I hope not too reprehensibly.

Caveat 2: These are my pronouncements of the moment, possibly wrongheaded and always subject to change.

Tell us about your poetry journal, YB. Why did you start it? Does running your own journal impact how you view the literary scene? Is it important for writers to have a sense of what actually happens on the other side of the submissions queue?

There’s a lot I could say about this, but I’ll try to be briefer here because I’ve probably rambled on enough! I don’t think it’s important for writers to understand the other side of the submissions queue, but I do find it interesting. I use “queue” in a minor sense here — I’m a micro operation, so it’s more like a queue-ette. Nevertheless, this queue-ette can be quite overwhelming. It’s given me an appreciation for people who run bigger journals than mine. I don’t know how some people manage to do all the things they do, and still find time to write. It’s a bit of a mystery to me.

The other thing editing YB has done for me is it’s made me take rejection less personally. Slightly less. At least now on an intellectual level, I can see that when I reject a poem, I am usually not meaning to say to that person: I hated that. It sucks. And I’m certainly not saying: Your writing in general sucks. Everything you’ve ever written sucks. Furthermore, you suck, personally. You are a bad person. Why do you exist? Go do the world a favor…. I believe this was my previous response to rejection, approximately. Now it’s only one out of every three rejections maybe, that I go down that road.

What are working on now?

I’ve just finished another book of poems which I’m tinkering with now, on and off. This one’s all “set” in Mexico and has an overall narrative-like thing – to it, sort of but not overly, is the intention anyway. It probably needs to sit more but instead I keep coming back to it and deleting something and then undeleting it and then…. Etc. I’ll see if anyone wants that. If not, I have recourse to the rejection response outlined above.

I’ll be in between places for a bit now (while heading back to Mexico) — so it feels natural that I am also in between projects. I have a list a mile long of things I could do though, so I guess I’ll see which one of those ideas adheres to me in the coming weeks.

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Links to Rose Hunter’s assorted writings can be found at Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home, formerly her blog, now a pagey thing. A book of her poetry, to the river, was published in November by Artistically Declined Press. She is also the editor of a small poetry journal, YB. At the moment she is happily back in Mexico, after a brief stint in Australia.