Adam Haiun is a writer from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In
2021 he was a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for fiction.
His work can be found in filling Station, Carte Blanche, and The
Headlight Anthology.
1 - How did your first book change your
life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel
different?
I feel I’m still midway through the change and lack the ability to fully describe it… I just recently held the book in my hands
for the first time, that was a trip. I’m so happy with it. I’m happy!
I’ve always had my fascinations. Dreams
and the feeling of dreams, architecture, sickness, masculinity, mourning. I’ve
been playing with different levels of abstraction, or obfuscation, depending on
how you want to look at it. This book is more abstract (or obfuscated) as part
of its premise, or thanks to the conceit of the speaker. The things I’ve been
working on most recently feel a bit more forthcoming. I’m also enjoying
introducing some more humour, though I think there’s parts of this book that
are funny, to me anyhow.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as
opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I definitely intended to be a fiction
writer first. Poetry for me was a happy accident. In one of my first fiction
workshops I wrote a bad poem inside of a bad short story (one of the characters
was a poet) and some of my peers pointed out that there was some promise in the
poem, and that got me started. I realized how often I had to contrive of entire
scenes in my stories just to present an image or mood that I liked, and how I
could drop that usually uninteresting scaffolding if I wrote a poem instead. I love
fiction, to be clear, I love the novel, and I’m working on one now, but poems
are always going to be my preferred medium, as a way of skipping to the good
stuff of language as it were.
3 - How long does it take to start any
particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it
a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or
does your work come out of copious notes?
The start comes quickly for me, and then
the trial begins. It needs to prove itself as having legs. If it doesn’t, I
cannibalize whatever I can from it and use that in the next thing, if
applicable. I can handle only about two projects at a time.
Five or so years ago I started writing all
my first drafts by hand. I have trouble permitting myself to be messy or to use
placeholders when typing things up, and I don’t have that trouble in a
notebook. And so when I go about transcribing that piece, the act of
transcription becomes the first round of editing, and the document once typed
up ends up looking surprisingly clean and good. Very useful practice for me
psychologically.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for
you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger
project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I’m often drawn to write book-length
concepts, or section-length concepts, or long poems, more than shorter,
disconnected pieces. I do write shorter pieces, and they’re useful to have, as
an arsenal to bring to readings or to send out to mags. They can demonstrate
range. But for whatever reason they’re never the ones I’m most proud of. I
respond well to the exercise of cultivating a particular voice and maintaining
it or orbiting a particular subject matter and attacking it from various
angles. When you isolate a part of a conceptual project like that, I feel that
you can sense all the weight of the work around it, if that makes sense.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter
to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I wish I had either more reading
commitments, or less. I feel like just enough time goes by between my readings
for me to forget that I do enjoy them, and I get the jitters all over again. I
wouldn’t say they are part of my creative process necessarily, though I often
get lovely feedback, and I really value the social component, seeing and
supporting writers I care about. I like readings, but aspects of them frustrate
me. I always want to approach the readers and ask: “What does your poem look
like? What’s its shape on the page?” Maybe that demonstrates a lack of due
respect for the oral tradition… Nobody’s perfect.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns
behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your
work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I’ve read my fair
share of theory, and if I were an impressive kind of writer I’d cite something
good here. But I have the memory of a goldfish.
I think the question I’m asking is: “Is
everybody seeing this?” I’m trying to translate the state of my mind textually
and see if it resonates, and if it does then I can be a bit more confident in
my experience of reality.
7 – What do you see the current
role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you
think the role of the writer should be?
My partner is an editor, and she describes
writers as existing on a spectrum between people who write because they have
something of value to communicate, a story, a theory, a lifetime’s worth of
knowledge, and people who write because they can make anything they write about
good, and for me the gulf between those two ends of the spectrum is so wide
that I feel loath to assign that immensely varied wedge of humanity any
particular cultural role. On the one end you have sensible people writing under
the intended purpose of language, and on the other you have little goblins who
want to waste your time contorting this ultimate tool of communication into an
object that pleases the brain against its own better judgement. In all
seriousness, writing isn’t a calling. It’s a human practice, a human behaviour.
Some people decide to exacerbate that behaviour, maybe tone it a little, and
disseminate it, if they’re lucky, by way of the industry we have in place for
its dissemination. The people who take that path aren’t ennobled, they haven’t
taken on a sacred mission. Maybe the role of the writer should be to write
well, and as much or as little as is conveniently possible for them, and to be
a good person.
8 - Do you find the process of working
with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
This book was my first time working with
an outside editor, and it was incredible. Ian Williams is a fantastic writer
obviously, and he was the perfect fit to edit this project. We edited together
over video calls, just talking over the poems, reading them aloud, discussing
whether the formal moves were working, whether the voice was consistent,
whether the persona of the speaker was present enough. His suggestions were so
natural, so clearly aligned with the spirit of the piece, that they barely felt
like changes, and often I found myself answering him with: “Oh, of course!”
9 - What is the best piece of advice
you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Salt at every stage of cooking. For
writers I think that means trying to be consistently surprising.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you
tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I’m trying my very best to have one. When
I work on fiction writing, that requires sitting down, in an uninterrupted way,
with goals set and a block of time reserved. When I write poetry I find I can
be looser. My aforementioned notebook is with me at all times when I read, as
so much of my note-taking involves cribbing from or responding to things I’ve
read, and any kind of reading too, from theory to poetry to interviews to the
news. I often transcribe my dreams in the morning.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where
do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I find it’s important to turn to the right
thing for the kind of block I’m experiencing. If I’m feeling like I lack
permission, for instance, I read a scene from Gravity’s Rainbow, not
because I love it necessarily, but to remind myself that, oh, right, there are
very many things that can be gotten away with, in form, content, and style.
But often a block is a symptom, usually
that I haven’t been social enough, or haven’t spent enough time in nature
lately, or haven’t seen a good film in a while. Or tried out a new recipe.
12 - What was your last Hallowe'en
costume?
Gomez Addams. I don’t have a pinstripe
suit so I wore a silk robe and I was very comfortable the whole night.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that
books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work,
whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I grew up in the suburbs, and so I spent a
lot of my childhood and adolescence being driven into and around the city of
Montreal as a passenger. Looking at the city through a car or bus window was my
unspoken favourite pastime, and the feeling and moods it produced in me are
foundational to my desire to make art. I love concrete and overpasses and old
factories. I love the character of the different neighbourhoods. I didn’t
internalize the geography of the city itself until I was a full adult, because
anytime we drove anywhere, I was so absorbed by the act of looking at it.
14 - What other writers or writings are
important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Guy Davenport, Cormac McCarthy. Anne Carson is absolutely undefeated. I love Tolstoy. Tolkien was my first.
15 - What would you like to do that you
haven't yet done?
Either learn to sail or learn to properly
ride a horse. I’ve been in boats and I’ve been on horseback, but in both
circumstances I wasn’t really in control… These feel like skills that will make
me whole.
16 - If you could pick any other
occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you
would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
As a kid I loved to draw and paint and
wasn’t bad at it either. I could certainly imagine a version of myself who
became some kind of visual artist instead. Maybe that’s a copout. Lately I’ve
been thinking of doing a course in tiling, maybe mosaic. I want my someday
dream kitchen to have some kind of unique mosaic backsplash that I’ll have made
myself. My point is I’d likely have done work involving my hands in some way.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to
doing something else?
A lot of people told me to, and I tried to
ignore them, and was sad for that whole time, and when I decided to listen I
became happier. Really, haha. I tried to be an architect, then an engineer,
neither went very far. I struggled to conceive of myself as somebody who could
write something worth reading, and it was people who loved me who showed me
that I did have that in me, that I had a deep curiosity, an observational eye,
a passion and talent for language, et cetera. These are things I’ve only
recently felt able to say about myself.
18 - What was the last great book you
read? What was the last great film?
I read and loved Tove Jansson’s Fair Play,
which is a book of short, slice-of-life vignettes featuring the same pair of
characters. I feel like it taught me a lot about how to make the most of the
episodic, how the characterful microconflicts and sweet microresolutions
between people who love one another can be interesting enough to carry a book.
I recently watched Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession
(1981) as part of the endless journey my partner and I are on to find a
film that will legitimately haunt us, in the way you’re haunted by things when
you’re a child. This one got very close to that for me. The blend of the
realism or groundedness in the domestic scenes with the horror or absurd, the
frightening and traumatic injected with just enough humour, the performances,
my God, Isabelle Adjani, the West Berlin setting. An instant favourite for me.
Two very oppositional pieces of art, both about relationships.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a novel about a youngish
person leaving the city to live with his aunt and uncle in rural Quebec. The
conceit is that this character is endlessly forgetful (you can now probably
guess who I pulled this from) and impossibly obliging, and his aunt and uncle
are very strange and very demanding. And there will be some absurd and surreal
stuff happening, which of course the character will have to be totally fine
with.
I’ve also recently started a new poetry
project, where I’ll be writing a kind of oblique response to each of Montaigne’s
essays. Whether it’ll be a chapbook or a section of a book or a whole book is
up in the air at this point. This idea came out of an exercise in Sarah
Burgoyne’s most recent poetry studio, which I was very fortunate to participate
in. So many of the best things I’ve written have come out of great prompts from
other people.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
