MINIMALBOOKS

PL: You have had many jobs before deciding to become a writer.  Can you say just one (the most important) skill gained during working in those other fields which facilitates your writing process today?

DHW: Probably my most interesting job was working as a bouncer at a bar in Boston when I was in graduate school.  All kinds of weird shit went down there.  The skill I gained—if you can call it a skill—was one of perception.  Seeing and interacting with so many different types of people really broadened my perspective and provided me with extensive writing material.

PL: There are a lot of flâneurs and dandies in your stories.  Have you considered your writing as a form of mind-flâneurism, i.e., time-consuming and actually aimless activity of strolling through the avenues of your imagination, pursuing whatever draws your attention, making fun of our world, observing ourselves in a circus mirror?

DHW: I like this idea.  In some ways, it’s precisely what I do, although fiction writing itself, as a narrative poseur, is a form of flâneury.  The best example of what you’re talking about is Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (or Passagenwerk in German), which might be described as an aimless act of strolling down the avenues of the imagination in an attempt to capture the unconscious life of nineteenth century urban society and culture through the vehicle of the Parisian arcades.  Your idea also brings to mind the stream-of-consciousness technique (á la Woolf and Joyce).  I use this sometimes.  But generally I try to stay out of my characters’ heads, letting physical descriptions and details tell my stories for me.

PL: Do you have a golden sentence for your students at writing classes which you repeat often to them (e.g., You shall never write under the influence of green tea with your ski goggles on)?

DHW: I have a few.  Most commonly I use this one: “Writing is not writing.  Writing is rewriting.”  It comes from an unlikely source, Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, a memoir about the author’s experience in the Vietnam War.  Students often misperceive writing as something that can’t be learned and cultivated – you either got it or you don’t.  I try to de-romanticize this notion and put constant emphasis on the revision process.

PS: Is there any hidden idea of reforming people’s minds in the strategy of Bizarro?

DHW: Bizarro literature is reformative by nature, if for nothing else than it writes against mainstream protocols, like any avant-garde formation.  Whether or not it is a “strategy” is another story.  Satire distinguishes a lot of my work, but not necessarily for the purpose of evoking social change.  I satirize the human condition because it makes me laugh and allows me to analyze the traumatic kernels that produce subjectivity and selfhood.  This isn’t to say my writing won’t have an entirely different effect on somebody else.  In fact, authorial intent doesn’t matter.  Reader response and interpretation does.  So if my work is strategic it is only by dint of the people that construe it that way.

On a more practical level, Bizarro is intended to provide readers with a fresh, unusual alternative to the monotony and flavorlessness of much contemporary literature.  Above all, Bizarros want people to enjoy the reading experience.

PS: Is there any resemblance between Bizarro and avant-pop?  Do you think that such labels could help people reorganize their emotions and knowledge?

DHW: These are good questions that I’m not sure I have the answers to.  In some senses, Bizarro is a subcategory of avant-pop—and vice versa.  Categorization of any kind is a tricky business.  On the whole, we feel compelled to categorize things, even if they defy categorization, in order to exert control over things.  Especially in consumer-capitalist America.  This goes for books as much as for refrigerators, cars, cereal, grass, etc.  In terms of books, however, categories can be helpful, providing beginning or sporadic readers with a knowledge base and frame of reference.  It’s this demographic, incidentally, who constitute the bulk of readers.  We live in an electronic, comic book, five o’clock world where the image usurps the word more and more everyday.  Reading is a dying practice.  Categories—especially “new” categories—seem to be a way to breath life into that practice, tapping simultaneously into emotional and intellectual reserves.