Kyle Minor: Sleep is the primary enemy
Sometimes I struggle to read 10 pages in front of an audience – so I was fascinated when I heard that Kyle Minor was going to read all the stories in the latest Barry Hannah book in one sitting.
Kyle Minor
Minor and Nick Bruno read Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories straight through, over nearly 12 hours in December. It was streamed online at HTMLGiant. I didn’t see it and it wasn’t archived, but I’ve remained curious about it, in part because I love Hannah’s stories and I wondered if their wild originality would make for difficult or easy reading. I e-mailed Minor – who writes fiction, essays and really smart online literary stuff – to ask him about Hannah and his own work.
Minor is the author of In the Devil’s Territory, a collection of short stories, and his work has been widely anthologized and honored.
When did you first read Barry Hannah’s work, how did it affect you, and did your relationship to his work evolve as you read more of it?
The first Barry Hannah book I read was his novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan. A magazine had given me a copy to review, right before it was published. I was on the front end of learning how to read, really read, so I didn’t really know how to read it. There was a meandering quality to it – I hadn’t read enough fiction, and what fiction I had read was primarily event-driven. And there was a denseness to the prose that required a reader like I was to slow down in a way I wasn’t used to slowing down. At first, I was repelled by the voice, and the dark humor, and the unrelenting darkness of Man Mortimer and so on. But I knew there was something there that I couldn’t walk away from when, after I finished reading and “reviewing” it, I put it aside and then kept thinking about it.
Airships was ultimately the book that taught me how to read Hannah. It’s a better book. In general, with Hannah the stories are better, and the shorter the novel the better. Those stories in Airships were like rocket ships to Jupiter built by crack-smoking elves from Mississippi who made them to pay off gambling debts. After that, I had to read everything he ever wrote. My favorite of the books is Bats Out of Hell, where the stories get more expansive, and weirder, if that’s possible, and where you get the sense that whatever is beholden to Gordon Lish has finally been trumped entirely by whatever is beholden exclusively to the truest part of Barry Hannah.
He has such a style. What kind of influence has his writing exerted on your writing?
Like almost every other writer I know, I had to write a lot of derivative crap to get to anything true, so I tried what I believe to be a very advisable thing for anyone, which is to try to run some stories in the ruts my betters left behind, so I wrote some bad Barry Hannah stories, and I learned a lot about things that language can do in the hyperbolic register, and also how stories are made first and foremost out of sentences made out of symbols, which means you can do better than say he loves her. You can say: “I want to rip her arm off. I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out. Some nights she lets me lick her ears and knees. I can’t talk about it. It’s driving me into a sorry person.”
How did you come up with the marathon reading? How’d it go?
Blake Butler had already set up a Ustream series for HTMLGiant. Barry Hannah’s work meant so much to me, but I’m living in exile here in Toledo, Ohio, away from all things literary. I wanted a way to yell as loud as I could to as many people as I could (while I grabbed them by the shirt collars): Read this! You must! This is what is worthwhile in the world, and you don’t know it yet! So me and a former student (and kickass art book maker) Nick Bruno stayed up all night (aided by a stash of cold pizza and Coca-Cola and 5 Hour Energy shots) and read the New and Selected A to Z, straight through for a small Internet audience. It was a wonderful experience, if a physically taxing one. I’m not sure we made a dent in the book’s sales. It did more for us than for the book, probably.
What are your favorite Barry Hannah stories? Did reading them out loud change your view of them in any way?
“Love Too Long,” “Water Liars,” “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet” from Airships. Also, some of the one-page stories from Bats Out of Hell, and the stuff that’s just to show off, too, like “Upstairs, Mona Bayed for Dong,” or “Evening of the Yarp,” or just the truly weird things that didn’t make the selection in Long, Last, Happy, like “Ride Westerly for Pusalina,” or “Nicodemus Bluff” (which seems in some ways not like a Barry Hannah story at all.)
Reading them aloud, I realized that they were even funnier, line by line, than I had remembered them being. Hannah wrote for the spoken voice less, I think, than for the written voice. But reading them aloud, I also realized just how much he relied on that voice to carry the weight of everything. I think it’s why he never wrote a great novel. He could do this one thing better than anybody else, but other things – things that served the long form better than the short form – he couldn’t quite bring himself to do. I think that it was a choice, not an inherent limitation. He didn’t want to tamp down the voice long enough to let the long work do what long work can do in terms of structure and accumulation. He just wanted to sing full-throated all day. One consequence is that when you read the stories straight through – I don’t think they were ever meant to be read that way – there is an unintentional structural repetition that grinds, and there is a subtraction by addition. When we were done with the reading, I felt like I had done wrong by the stories by larding them together like that. They’re like chocolate or oysters or high-octane liquor – in small doses better than anything else in the world, and abuse them at your peril.
I just read your essay “Lust” at HTMLGiant, and it’s still rebounding inside of me – the questions of family and art and selfishness and money were like a direct wire from my own anxieties and desires, only expressed more powerfully and artfully. I wanted to pick just a piece of this and ask a follow-up question. You write: “… I am a selfish motherfucker who only cares that I am satisfied by the book I am writing, that I could care less about what anyone with money or goodies to offer thinks about the book I am writing while I am writing it, instead it’s pure selfishness in that I want to love the book I am writing as much as I love the books I love love love …” I wonder how much or how consistently, finally, you are able to love your own work, and how much the ability to love or not love it is a factor in the pressure to keep working?
It’s not a proper essay – none of the stuff I post there is long-considered and revised and spitshined enough to be one. It’s a blog post of a kind I’ve been enjoying making there, often at one in the morning, when I’m full up with longing and desire for which there is no outlet, no confidante or drinking buddy. It’s like a conversation I’d want to have with Matt Bell if he lived closer and we could more often talk the talk that comforts the souls of the dying people we all are, even though we try our best to pretend for long stretches like we’re not. You get that late-night despair that needs emptied out, and if you don’t have a friend, at least you have your typing fingers and a few hundred disembodied someones to whom you can empty your despair, and maybe if you do they’ll feel less alone, and maybe if you can convince yourself that this is true, then you can feel less alone, too, even though, let’s face it, you’re very much alone that early in the morning, and the wiser thing to do would be to go to bed instead of type some more. But who ever said any of this was wise? We’re fools scratching our “profundities” in what used to be dirt, except now it’s an Acer netpad and a million miles of fiber-optic cable. It’s still the same thing, and, geologically speaking, no more lasting.
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The work I care about the most is the longer fiction I write toward the end of making books, and the essays I publish in literary journals. I spent a year writing what some people call “flash fiction” – it was a year when there was a lot of stress about whether or not I was going to have a job, and I didn’t have much energy or stamina to do much else. I enjoyed doing it, it was a fine release of energy, and I honed some ideas about language and learned a few things about concision. But I didn’t consider it to be my real work at the time, and I’m not enthusiastic about the form in general now, especially after I spent a semester reading it with my students. There are a few practitioners — Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Sandra Cisneros, to name three — in whose hands that very short form seems to me to be elevated to the realm of literature, of things built to stand the test of time. The energy I was investing in those very short pieces is probably similar to the energy I now invest in blog posts for HTMLGiant. It’s more about having a conversation with a community than it is making lasting things. Those require more work, more heavy lifting, except for that once or twice a year when you’re seized by the magic. And that magic usually only seizes you after you’ve prepared yourself for it by beating your head against the wall for three or four months.
You’re doing such a variety of things at HTML Giant – it feels like you and others are really creating a way for literature to live online that feels expansive and inventive. Do you think you’re creating some new form or style or even genre, or is this simply a tool of delivery for the ancient forms?
We’re making it up as we go along, right? Half of it is nonsense, another third is silliness, maybe a twelfth-and-a-half is functionally useful, and then, maybe if the stars align, one-twenty-fourth can start crawling in the direction of something like what literature does. The stuff I’ve posted there fits all of these categories. I don’t think any of us have made anything great there yet. If I do, it will be by accident. Who knows the secret recipe for making something great?
Your first-line compilations are very cool. What are your favorites?
The best first line in all of literature is surely Dickens’s opening to A Tale of Two Cities. It’s hard to argue that the other end of the spectrum doesn’t start with “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s . . .” Also, I take back what I said about Dickens. The best first line in all of literature is: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters . . .” Of course, philistine that I am, my favorite is Philip Roth’s, from Sabbath’s Theater: “Either forswear fucking others, or the affair is over.”
You write a ton. Can you describe your work habits a bit – when do you write, how do you juggle it with family and life, how do you traffic-cop all the different things you’re doing?
Ninety percent of my energy for the last year or so has been in revising the novel I’ve almost finished, which will be titled The Sexual Lives of Missionaries. The biggest distraction isn’t HTMLGiant or The Rumpus or the essays or stories I’m still writing here and there. And it’s not my family – they’re the joy at the center of things. It’s teaching. I love teaching, and I’m good at it, but I’ve been doing too much of it for too long – multiple appointments at multiple places, plus online classes, to make ends meet. To do a good job – and you must do a good job – you have to give of yourself as freely as you hope to do with your writing, and it comes out of the same reservoir of energy. Sometimes it comes back and serves your work. You’re teaching yourself, too. But other times, you’re just too tired to do anything but go to bed, and sleep is the primary enemy I can’t conquer. If only I could go without it, I could really get some work done.
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Check out Kyle’s web site; his essay, “The Question of Where We Begin,” from Gulf Coast; his short story, “The Truth and All Its Ugly,” from Fifty-Two Stories; and the essay “You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace,” from Random House’s Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers.
To read past interviews with Roy Kesey, Ben Stroud, Reese Okyong Kwon, Matt Furie, Seth Fried, Dan Chaon and Shann Ray, drop in here.
I love so many things about this interview. Great post, Shawn.
Great interview. I love the power of Minor’s drive here, and how thoughtful and funny and honest and surprising he is. And his posts at HTML Giant are some of my favorites.
Kyle’s “The Question of Where We Begin” is one of my favorite pieces of writing ever.
[...] I talked with Shawn Vestal, at Bark, the blog associated with the literary journal Willow Springs, about Barry Hannah, writing [...]