12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adam Haiun

Adam Haiun is a writer from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In2021 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 TheHeadlight Anthology.

1 - How did your first book change yourlife? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feeldifferent?

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 handsfor the first time, that was a trip. I’m so happy with it. I’m happy!

I’ve always had my fascinations. Dreamsand the feeling of dreams, architecture, sickness, masculinity, mourning. I’vebeen playing with different levels of abstraction, or obfuscation, depending onhow you want to look at it. This book is more abstract (or obfuscated) as partof its premise, or thanks to the conceit of the speaker. The things I’ve beenworking on most recently feel a bit more forthcoming. I’m also enjoyingintroducing some more humour, though I think there’s parts of this book thatare funny, to me anyhow.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, asopposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I definitely intended to be a fictionwriter first. Poetry for me was a happy accident. In one of my first fictionworkshops I wrote a bad poem inside of a bad short story (one of the characterswas a poet) and some of my peers pointed out that there was some promise in thepoem, and that got me started. I realized how often I had to contrive of entirescenes in my stories just to present an image or mood that I liked, and how Icould drop that usually uninteresting scaffolding if I wrote a poem instead. I lovefiction, to be clear, I love the novel, and I’m working on one now, but poemsare always going to be my preferred medium, as a way of skipping to the goodstuff of language as it were.

3 - How long does it take to start anyparticular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is ita slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, ordoes your work come out of copious notes?

The start comes quickly for me, and thenthe trial begins. It needs to prove itself as having legs. If it doesn’t, Icannibalize whatever I can from it and use that in the next thing, ifapplicable. I can handle only about two projects at a time.

Five or so years ago I started writing allmy first drafts by hand. I have trouble permitting myself to be messy or to useplaceholders when typing things up, and I don’t have that trouble in anotebook. And so when I go about transcribing that piece, the act oftranscription becomes the first round of editing, and the document once typedup ends up looking surprisingly clean and good. Very useful practice for mepsychologically.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin foryou? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a largerproject, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’m often drawn to write book-lengthconcepts, or section-length concepts, or long poems, more than shorter,disconnected pieces. I do write shorter pieces, and they’re useful to have, asan arsenal to bring to readings or to send out to mags. They can demonstraterange. But for whatever reason they’re never the ones I’m most proud of. Irespond well to the exercise of cultivating a particular voice and maintainingit or orbiting a particular subject matter and attacking it from variousangles. When you isolate a part of a conceptual project like that, I feel thatyou can sense all the weight of the work around it, if that makes sense.

5 - Are public readings part of or counterto your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I wish I had either more readingcommitments, or less. I feel like just enough time goes by between my readingsfor me to forget that I do enjoy them, and I get the jitters all over again. Iwouldn’t say they are part of my creative process necessarily, though I oftenget lovely feedback, and I really value the social component, seeing andsupporting writers I care about. I like readings, but aspects of them frustrateme. I always want to approach the readers and ask: “What does your poem looklike? What’s its shape on the page?” Maybe that demonstrates a lack of duerespect for the oral tradition… Nobody’s perfect.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concernsbehind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with yourwork? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’ve read my fairshare of theory, and if I were an impressive kind of writer I’d cite somethinggood here. But I have the memory of a goldfish.

I think the question I’m asking is: “Iseverybody seeing this?” I’m trying to translate the state of my mind textuallyand see if it resonates, and if it does then I can be a bit more confident inmy experience of reality.

7 – What do you see the currentrole of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do youthink the role of the writer should be?

My partner is an editor, and she describeswriters as existing on a spectrum between people who write because they havesomething of value to communicate, a story, a theory, a lifetime’s worth ofknowledge, and people who write because they can make anything they write aboutgood, and for me the gulf between those two ends of the spectrum is so widethat I feel loath to assign that immensely varied wedge of humanity anyparticular cultural role. On the one end you have sensible people writing underthe intended purpose of language, and on the other you have little goblins whowant to waste your time contorting this ultimate tool of communication into anobject that pleases the brain against its own better judgement. In allseriousness, 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, anddisseminate it, if they’re lucky, by way of the industry we have in place forits dissemination. The people who take that path aren’t ennobled, they haven’ttaken on a sacred mission. Maybe the role of the writer should be to writewell, and as much or as little as is conveniently possible for them, and to bea good person.

8 - Do you find the process of workingwith an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

This book was my first time working withan outside editor, and it was incredible. Ian Williams is a fantastic writerobviously, and he was the perfect fit to edit this project. We edited togetherover video calls, just talking over the poems, reading them aloud, discussingwhether the formal moves were working, whether the voice was consistent,whether the persona of the speaker was present enough. His suggestions were sonatural, so clearly aligned with the spirit of the piece, that they barely feltlike changes, and often I found myself answering him with: “Oh, of course!”

9 - What is the best piece of adviceyou've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Salt at every stage of cooking. Forwriters I think that means trying to be consistently surprising.

10 - What kind of writing routine do youtend 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. WhenI 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 canbe looser. My aforementioned notebook is with me at all times when I read, asso much of my note-taking involves cribbing from or responding to things I’veread, and any kind of reading too, from theory to poetry to interviews to thenews. I often transcribe my dreams in the morning.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, wheredo you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I find it’s important to turn to the rightthing for the kind of block I’m experiencing. If I’m feeling like I lackpermission, for instance, I read a scene from Gravity’s Rainbow, notbecause I love it necessarily, but to remind myself that, oh, right, there arevery many things that can be gotten away with, in form, content, and style.

But often a block is a symptom, usuallythat I haven’t been social enough, or haven’t spent enough time in naturelately, or haven’t seen a good film in a while. Or tried out a new recipe.

12 - What was your last Hallowe'encostume?

Gomez Addams. I don’t have a pinstripesuit so I wore a silk robe and I was very comfortable the whole night.

13 - David W. McFadden once said thatbooks 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 alot of my childhood and adolescence being driven into and around the city ofMontreal as a passenger. Looking at the city through a car or bus window was myunspoken favourite pastime, and the feeling and moods it produced in me arefoundational to my desire to make art. I love concrete and overpasses and oldfactories. I love the character of the different neighbourhoods. I didn’tinternalize the geography of the city itself until I was a full adult, becauseanytime we drove anywhere, I was so absorbed by the act of looking at it.

14 - What other writers or writings areimportant 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 youhaven't yet done?

Either learn to sail or learn to properlyride a horse. I’ve been in boats and I’ve been on horseback, but in bothcircumstances I wasn’t really in control… These feel like skills that will makeme whole.

16 - If you could pick any otheroccupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think youwould have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

As a kid I loved to draw and paint andwasn’t bad at it either. I could certainly imagine a version of myself whobecame some kind of visual artist instead. Maybe that’s a copout. Lately I’vebeen thinking of doing a course in tiling, maybe mosaic. I want my somedaydream kitchen to have some kind of unique mosaic backsplash that I’ll have mademyself. My point is I’d likely have done work involving my hands in some way.

17 - What made you write, as opposed todoing something else?

A lot of people told me to, and I tried toignore them, and was sad for that whole time, and when I decided to listen Ibecame 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 couldwrite something worth reading, and it was people who loved me who showed methat 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 onlyrecently felt able to say about myself.

18 - What was the last great book youread? 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 ofcharacters. I feel like it taught me a lot about how to make the most of theepisodic, how the characterful microconflicts and sweet microresolutionsbetween 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 afilm that will legitimately haunt us, in the way you’re haunted by things whenyou’re a child. This one got very close to that for me. The blend of therealism or groundedness in the domestic scenes with the horror or absurd, thefrightening 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 youngishperson leaving the city to live with his aunt and uncle in rural Quebec. Theconceit is that this character is endlessly forgetful (you can now probablyguess who I pulled this from) and impossibly obliging, and his aunt and uncleare very strange and very demanding. And there will be some absurd and surrealstuff happening, which of course the character will have to be totally finewith.

I’ve also recently started a new poetryproject, where I’ll be writing a kind of oblique response to each of Montaigne’sessays. Whether it’ll be a chapbook or a section of a book or a whole book isup in the air at this point. This idea came out of an exercise in SarahBurgoyne’s most recent poetry studio, which I was very fortunate to participatein. So many of the best things I’ve written have come out of great prompts fromother people.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;