Tiny Interview #3 - David Hayden
Here we ask authors we admire to share their musings on art and writing, spill their current reading obsessions, and give us a tiny wedge into their creative life. In this Tiny Interview, meet David Hayden, whose debut story collection, Darker With The Lights On, was reviewed by The Guardian as "brilliantly disturbing and unclassifiable."
(Interviewed by Cameron Finch)
Q: What book(s) are you reading right now?
A: I Just read and reread Manuel Muñoz’s new collection of short stories, The Consequences, for a review I wrote. Subtle, beautiful and memorable writing. Tracking back and forth across Georges Didi-Huberman’s Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of A Certain History of Art, as a way of trying to recover the pleasure of looking at art. I read poetry every day. This year I keep returning to the work of Lorine Niedecker, Ingeborg Bachmann, George Seferis and Nâzım Hikmet.
Q: What are your current writing projects?
A: I have written three books since my first was published, two books of short stories and a novel, none of which work. I have been slowly working on another, which is more like an art project—telling the story of one person’s life through one sentence from each of the books they have left behind (all fictional). It might serve as the basis of someone’s site-specific work. Or not.
I have two other novels taking shape, probably. Whenever something appears to me out of the world of one of them, I write it down. The epigraph for one of them are the words of Jean Eustache: Knock hard, as though to wake the dead.
Q: Do any other art forms influence your writing? If so, how?
A: Painting, sculpture, cinema, music, mainly. Plastic arts have an object life—a quiddity or thereness—that the best writing has, although they are always experienced in time, as everything is. With music and cinema, time is a major element (Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time comes to mind). The many ways of thinking about or working in time are essential to good writing, but it’s the ways that a great film, such as Marguerite Duras’s India Song, or a piece of music, it could be Schubert Impromptus or Bad Brains’s Big Take Over, inhabit that time that is what I’m looking for in what I read or write: density, intensity, motion, and so on.
Q: Where is your favorite place to write, and do you have any writing rituals?
A: I didn’t have a writing desk until recently, and I still don’t use it. If I can’t get complete silence, which is rare, I wear noise-cancelling headphones and listen to very familiar music which almost serves the same function. I’ve thought of going away to write (retreat is an odd expression for that, I think) but have never managed it.
Q: Who is a writer you wish more people were reading?
A: Henry Dumas. Toni Morrison described him as “an absolute genius’. Poet, short story writer and novelist, part of the Black Arts Movement. His magnetic and haunted work displays a deep musical sense (Dumas was a friend of Sun Ra and admirer of John Coltrane) and a commitment to reweaving black experience into myth, and myth into experience. Coffee House Press in the US have reissued his collected short fiction in Echo Tree, with an introduction by the excellent John Keene, and Flood Editions his poetry as Knees of A Natural Man. They’ve not been published outside the US and haven’t garnered nearly enough readers within America.
