Nightmares of broken toys: An interview with Ofelia Hunt.

Ofelia Hunt‘s Today & Tomorrow takes experimental and makes it readable. On page 113, Hunt says:

“I held my backpack tightly to my chest and said to Grandfather, “I’m going to do something sometime because.”
“Like what?”
“I have no idea.”

The book is full of these little beautiful exchanges. The sentences are so perfected, so etched out, so crafted out. As a writer I can see Ofelia Hunt alone typing, deleting, typing one word, deleting another word. As a reader the book was experimental, but not extreme experimental. One can sit with Today & Tomorrow and enjoy the images and feelings that are taking place.

This books seems like a revolution, like a one-woman revolution. Ofelia Hunt can’t start her own revolution because the masses wouldn’t understand her revolution. So she wrote it down.

Noah Cicero: How long did it take to write this? When you write do you have a plan, like is every chapter already planned before you start, or do you think of things as you go?

Ofelia Hunt: The first draft took seven months of writing for 1-2 hours a day (about 500 words a day), generally from 4:30 AM to 6:30 AM, give or take. After the first draft I revised at least five more times all the way through, each time taking around three months, with many breaks and incremental revisions throughout (I continuously revised, even as I wrote the first draft, and so the accumulated revisions are countless, and I’d like to revise it more, but have to stop eventually?). So all told, maybe four years from start to the final-ish revision. I had no plan to speak of. I had a set of rules: the novel was to span only two days, first person/present tense, the narrator was to be untrustworthy, fond of repetition. And to some degree, I thought of all the stories in My Eventual Bloodless Coup as having the same narrator, and so Today & Tomorrow was to learn more about this narrator. Generally strings of words drove chapters forward as opposed to a planned plot, often words I found funny or odd sounding, which may (I think) make Today & Tomorrow a little disjointed (which I like).

NC: What are some of your favorite writers and some writers that influenced this book?

OH: Here is an alphabetical list of some favorite writers, some with books I particularly liked if I can think of one as I type: Ann Beattie (DISTORTIONS), Lydia Davis (THE END OF THE STORY), Stephen Dixon (14 STORIES), Marguerite Duras (DESTROY, SHE SAID), Rachel Glaser, Franz Kafka, Kenneth Koch, Stacey Levine (FRANCES JOHNSON), Tao Lin, Amber Nelson, Fernando Pessoa, Jean Rhys (VOYAGE IN THE DARK), Matthew Simmons, Gertrude Stein, Kurt Vonnegut, Diane Williams, Joy Williams (ESCAPES), Araki Yasusada, Mike Young. There are probably others. I thought about typing Noah Cicero, but you are Noah Cicero so that might seem ‘fawning’ or ‘buddy buddy’ or something.

I think as I wrote Today & Tomorrow I was obsessed with Rhys and Kafka. I love how GOOD MORNING MIDNIGHT starts with, “‘Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’” And later, sentences like, “She is thin, and ugly, and not young.” I consciously imitated Rhys in my first draft. And at the same time I was thinking about how people moved in THE CASTLE (as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir). K. is often unable to move at the same speed as other characters. Roads are often curving away from his destination. He waddles through the snow while villagers zoom past him. I wanted something like that effect, and so more conscious imitation.

NC: What were you doing when you thought, “I need to write a book about a crazy girl who lies a lot.”

OH: Here is a list of likely possibilities

• At work, staring at a spreadsheet with a very small font
• Staring at my computer in my old apartment, near Portland International Airport (PDX)
• Drinking a beer
• Driving in rush hour traffic after staring at spreadsheets for 8-9 hours
• Reading
• Watching SUICIDE CLUB
• Running through the forest near Portland, OR

NC: Do you believe that consumerist culture makes people into non-humans? I get that from the book, everyone is turned into a non-human, they have been turned into something, what, no one can really say, but the primitive instincts are gone from the humans in your book?

OH: Consumerist culture makes me feel robotic and alien. I have trouble existing in large masses of people, at shopping malls, Wal-Mart, Target—I become nervous, awkward, clumsy. Television commercials make me bitter and sarcastic. I feel weird when media outlets discuss professional athletes, actresses, and politicians as ‘commodities.’ I find it strange that the polite language for couples to refer to one another is ‘my partner.’ Our day to day language is overrun by business metaphors. ‘Business’ is the standard for excellence in most of American life. Speed and efficiency or something. Lack of waste or excess (not that ‘business’ generally lives up to these standards). I sometimes feel like people often rely on objects outside of themselves to accomplish goals, and are never deterred when those objects don’t perform as expected. I have nightmares of broken toys from my early childhood, how I felt when the toys disappointed me.

NC: the one thing about the book, that is stunning, is the complete lack of concrete truth, language means nothing in the book, the language is beautiful, but at the same time, the book displays a world, where nothing true can be said.

OH: I don’t believe, I think, in a verifiable ‘concrete’ truth on an individual/personal level, particularly as it relates to memory and immediate experience. For example, I have a very specific memory of visiting a high school friend. He was choking his half-brother when I came in, holding his half-brother down, spitting into his half-brother’s face. They were two huge guys, 5’11″ to 6′, 200-250 pounds. When my friend let his half-brother up, the half-brother tossed a potted fern at my friend’s face and ran out the door. My friend, dressed only in his floppy pale boxers, grabbed a kitchen knife from the countertop knife block and chased his half-brother down Highway 99, while I and another friend chased along with, trying to convince our friend to get back inside before he was arrested. Could this be verifiably true? Each person who was there has a differing account. The police did not arrest anyone, and, as far as I know, were not aware of the incident. And it is possible that it didn’t happen at all, that this is a false memory, or a kind of dream. So, to some degree, I enjoy attempting to write the experiential ‘truth’ of a narrator, to be as close to the thought as I can, which can always only be a kind of lie or myth (I think).

NC: Do you consider yourself an experimental writer? What kind of writer do you consider yourself?

OH: I’ve never thought about ‘experimental writing’ and have trouble understanding ‘experimental’ or ‘innovative’ as categories, except, I suppose, as something different from ‘genre’ writing. I would like to be a Pacific Northwest Writer, maybe, or an Internet Writer, or a Working Class Writer, or something. I don’t know how to write. I don’t know how stories or novels or poems are supposed to work. I’ve never studied craft. I’m not skilled at writing sustainable linear narratives (I’ve tried). So I try my best, imitatively, and focus on what I find engaging/funny/sad, and what I think sounds good aloud. And what makes me feel hopeful.