Spotlight On …

Ethel Rohan suspects it’s the last place Steve Himmer wants to be, but he deserves his place center-stage. In addition to being a tireless, dedicated, and generous editor at the helm of Necessary Fiction, Himmer is also an excellent and courageous writer determined to tell his stories his way. Welcome to Dark Sky, Steve, and thank you.

Writing wise, where are you now? Where are you going?

I’m trying to get on with a new novel, now that I’ve “finished” sending out the last one without generating any interest. Here’s hoping the bureaucratic tedium of Arctic exploration will be more appealing to publishers than decorative hermits! I’m also trying to finish a collection of stories based on tall tales. A few have been published individually, and I’d like to pull them together as a chapbook for a couple of upcoming contests. And recently I found deep in my hard drive a semi-fictional account of my summer working graveyard shift in a convenience store, which may be worth another look. If only because James Tate and Sonic Youth appear as characters.

What informs your creative process? How do you keep inspired?

I can’t read or watch TV or take a walk without getting an idea for a story. Too many, perhaps, because I get stuck vacillating between starting one project or another. I read a book about stone walls recently and could probably spend the rest of my life writing about only the questions raised by that one book (I’m not saying I will, but I could).

Usually I’ll come across some interesting bit of science or history or folklore, then wonder what kind of person living what kind of life that information would matter to and then write that person’s story. It’s like the scientific method: notice something unexpected but compelling, and devise a means of exploring it toward understanding. Hopefully not in a way that’s didactic or dull, but also hopefully not in a way that just confirms what a reader already knows. I can’t stand fiction that merely shows me life as I already know it – I read to find something new, not …

The biggest obstacle to inspiration, for me, is a creeping sense of futility. Rejections from submitting stories don’t bother me much at this point, but after writing a couple of novels that went nowhere it’s harder to sit down and get on with it without wondering if the ideas I’m so excited about — or the execution of them — will be interesting to anyone else. That’s very glum, isn’t it? I was going to leave it out of my answer, but it’s the truth of where I am right now.

In addition to writing, you wear many hats. Do you worry about spreading yourself too thin and diluting the quality of your writing, editing, teaching, and living?

It concerns me in terms of time, but not quality. Teaching, especially, informs my writing. Most of all, I hope most to get students engaged with the world and writing or thinking about more than themselves, whether in composition or fiction or cultural studies. The harder I work to broaden their perspectives, the more I broaden my own, and hopefully the more I have to say as a writer. I’d say the same about editing — it makes me a better writer, more critical but also more generous. And certainly a better reader and human being.

But between teaching, editing, and parenting, there are lots of demands on my time (as there are on everyone’s) and writing often takes a backseat. At the moment, my life doesn’t allow for a consistent writing schedule, for better or worse. I hope to get back to one soon, but right now it doesn’t happen and I try not to beat myself up about it too much. If I play with my daughter instead of writing some days, I can live with that. She tells great stories.

How has the Internet impacted your reading and writing? What is the future of print publication?

Apart from the practical impacts of submissions and publications moving online, I’m really interested in exploring what it means to live in an online, networked world (as least, the part of the world I live in). Especially how that changes our relationship to nature, how these two apparently disparate spheres intersect or collide, metaphorically if not literally. How does our ability to be online and in touch while on top of a mountain change our familiar notions of urban and rural, society and solitude, natural and artificial, culture and nature — distinctions crucial to our narrative traditions? How do we redefine ourselves as individuals and cultures and as a species when those binaries break down, and how do we tell new stories about ourselves in that newly organized world? I don’t know that I’m saying anything useful in response to these questions, but I come back to them again and again. It’s probably the literary equivalent of roadside sculptures built by obsessive artists who assume everyone else will be as excited about a giant cement Smokey Bear as they are, or a collection of concrete figures with glass eyes and real human teeth. I have a lot of admiration for folks who commit themselves to projects like that, especially those far off the main road where few people are likely to see it.

As much as I believe in the web, I do worry about its rapid feedback loop, and the loss of an isolation and solitude that seems important to finding ourselves as writers and artists. I think of Flann O’Brien, who was best known in his lifetime not for his fiction but for his newspaper columns. Poet Patrick Kavanagh said those columns were dangerous because they brought O’Brien enough quick satisfaction and praise to feel like his work was done prematurely, and to keep him from writing more fiction.

Online you can always, immediately see which stories are getting the comments, the links, the Facebook likes, so you’re not only aware of where the margins are but where they are in relation to you. Sure, that happens in print culture, too, but there’s more time and more space to sort out the world for one’s self — to draw your own margins — between the arrivals of journal issues and books than between emails and Tweets; they’re always waiting right there on the same screen where you need to write. It seems like it to me, anyway. I don’t subscribe to ubiquitous, overblown claims that the web will kill reading and literature; one of the first things I published was an essay arguing for taking weblogs seriously as a literary form (an adorably optimistic argument, in retrospect, maybe), and I’m still really excited about the web as a literary medium, not just a delivery service. But the “social” side of things makes me a bit nervous, and I wonder about its impact on the more solitary corners of art.

Tell us something that most people don’t know about you?

I got shot at once. I was camping with friends by a riverbed in South Australia, and a truckload of hunters pulled up to the ridge overlooking our camp. They threw the spotlights on us and began shooting, and we all woke up and jumped out of our sleeping bags shouting and waving our arms. Turns out they were drunk and thought we were possums.

Even as it happened, even as I was jumping up and down and bullets were hitting the ground beside me, I knew it was a story I’d end up telling people and would make part of my own self-mythology. Even as it occurred, it was already becoming symbolic — but not ONLY symbolic, as the bullets would have been glad to remind me. That double-awareness is something I think about often when I’m writing and reading. I’m impressed by writers who can approach life directly, stripping away layers of artifice and metaphor to go after the “reality” of an experience (or at least having the confidence to think such a thing is possible), but that’s not what I want to do and it’s not usually what I want to read.

I like characters to live in a world where symbols and surfaces can’t ever be separated — as much as I enjoy Robbe-Grillet — and as a reader I don’t want to forget that I’m always navigating that intersection. I want fiction to remind me that stories are told, no matter what, and don’t come out of the ether. And that fiction is really just ink on a page or pixels onscreen, symbolic of but never the thing itself, like those bullets were actually bullets in the moment they missed me but now exist only as references freighted with all sorts of ambiguous and awkward meaning. Ambiguous and awkward like this rambling account of them, for example.

If you didn’t write, what would your life look like?

I would probably cook more, which is what I like to do when writing feels too intangible and too slow to produce results. And I might be an anthropologist, which is what I was trying to become when I realized I was more interested in making up stories than collecting them. I know a lot of people talk about writing as a vocation, something they need to do or they’d wither and die, but I don’t feel that way. If I didn’t write, I’m sure I would have developed some other medium in which to engage the world — I might have become a biologist after all, which I often regret not pursuing. Or I might busy myself with a giant concrete sculpture of Smokey Bear for my front yard, in which case another difference would probably be living alone. I need to tell stories, but writing them down may be as much a result of being too shy for performance and not so hot on guitar as it is of anything else.

Please tell us your favorite, and why:

a. Musical

I’m not so big on musicals. But I do love Singing In The Rain, and some others with Gene Kelly. Dancer In The Dark is also terrific, though “favorite” seems the wrong word for something so bleak.

b. Fable/Fairy Tale

I can’t say I have a favorite fable or fairy tale, because there are other genres of folklore I like much better — especially the tall tale, because of how active a role both storyteller and listener play in constructing the story. As Homer Simpson said, it takes two to lie: one to lie and one to listen. That’s as true of tall tales as it is of fiction, but tall tales are perhaps more honest about it. Fables and fairy tales seem more passive to me, more conservative means of preserving social mores, while tall tales offer such radical, disruptive possibilities.

c. Movie

Can I have different favorites for different reasons? I love The Thin Man, and Until The End Of The World. Also Fargo, and almost anything with a lot of snow in it. And the Bourne trilogy, too, when I’m in an action mood. I may not see enough movies to have a very useful opinion here.

d. Painting

I can’t name an individual painting as my favorite, but I think Donald Evans and his watercolor postage stamps — and the countries he invented for them — are my favorites as a body of work. I do have a favorite sculpture: Lawrence Argent’s “I See What You Mean,” in Denver. I wish I’d gone to AWP just to see that.

e. Place

That’s a hard one. I’m not doing so well at having favorites, am I? There have been a few moments in my life, and only a few, when I felt like I was exactly where I was meant to be. It’s always fleeting; one was waiting at a bus stop in Aberdeen, Scotland. Another was stuck on a tiny mangrove island in Puerto Rico, as a hurricane passed. I love the Outer Hebrides, and Orkney. I love islands in general. Tasmania. The Boston Harbor Islands, which are only a kayak paddle away from my house now. I just moved in recently, and it’s the first home I’ve owned, so I guess that’s my favorite place at the moment.

Please do a five minute free-write with the word “beach” and share.

Yesterday a waterlogged computer tower, this morning a bird’s nest somehow still intact on the shore. I drag them both up the beach toward the tennis shoes and driftwood and frying pans, cellphones and CBs and blown speakers. Some of them already sun-bleached, some already serving as homes for hermit crabs, turtles, and fleas. I’m still waiting for a tent to wash up or a tarp of some kind. My palm leaf lean-to has blown off again; however many plastic forks and spoons I spike it down with they don’t hold in the sand, and the box of them is empty now. I have a TV but I don’t have a plug, or I do have a plug but it isn’t wired to anything — just a metal box and few inches of barnacled conduit hanging below. It’s going to be the head for my robot, now that the tower can be the torso and the hard drive the heart. It’s not going to do anything, the robot I’m building — I’m not crazy enough to believe otherwise, at least until solar panels wash up, but I’ve got all those parts, all those wires and cords, and it seems right to build something with them. Something optimistic, I thought, something to remind me I’ll get off this island one way or another, and what is more hopeful than robots?

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Steve Himmer’s stories have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, most recently Hobart, Los Angeles Review, and Emprise Review. He edits the web journal Necessary Fiction, and teaches at Emerson College in Boston. He has a website at http://www.tawnygrammar.org.