Dan Holloway on (life:) razorblades included
July 2nd, 2010
Dan Holloway is a contemporary writer who I truly admire. I read and re-read his work and I’m always left hungry for more. He possesses a phenomenal energy, intelligence and generosity of spirit and his commitment to independent publishing is matched by his actions in starting the Year Zero Collective and in publishing his own works through various independent publishing outlets.
We ‘met’ in the over heated world of writers online and are both members of the ethereal Grey Havens, a small, online, raggedy crew of writers with other lives in law, PR, journalism, child rearing, academia, writing and teaching.
Dan has recently released (life:) razorblades included and kindly agreed to talk about the work on my blog.
“My writing has been called bleak, dark, and bereft of joy and hope. The first two of these I will readily concede. The latter two, never. In a world where the default setting is vanilla, acceptance, expectation, normal; in a world where the tragic few who wrestle with life full-on and fail are condemned when it is not they who are too sick for the world, but the world too sick for them; in a world where the grey, suited swamp of the billion walking dead is revered; in this world, anyone or anything that celebrates the full, damaged, despairing, fucked-up and spectacular reality of life is a shriek, a shout, a holler of joy to pierce the eardrum of death.”
From the introduction to (life:) razorblades included.
Dan, you say your work has been called dark and bereft of joy and much of the work here is what you call ‘confessional art’, that is art where the author wears their heart on their sleeve, takes us into the darkest corners of their lives, writes the painful and the personal, and lays it bare and in our faces.’
How is Skin Book ‘confessional art’ if you are writing from a fictional character’s point of view? If it is fiction, then how do you see it as confessional?
For me confessional art is simply taking what is in your head and externalising it in the way that makes the very best sense. I don’t think questions of autobiography or “veracity” need come into it at all (although of course much confessional art IS autobiographical, like Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Every Slept With 1963-1995). As writers we happily accept that the “truest” way to convey something may be a metaphor, or a myth, and that’s how I see confessional art - it’s simply choosing the vehicle that is the very most appropriate one for whatever you are trying to scrape out of your head and onto the page. What’s particularly important for me is that an author never loses fidelity to the absolute relativism of truth (paradox intended). The moment we try to convey to a reader something that is true to them we are lost in the world of the impossible, in generalisation, in things beyond our reach. It’s only the absolute specificity of what’s inside us that we can hope (possibly without real expectation of success) to convey. And, ironically, it’s in that specificity that our only real chance of reaching out to other individuals lies.
To come back to the fictional character’s point of view - I think we need to separate out point of view from circumstance. I’m not a 17 year-old lesbian growing up in Hungary, never have been, and possibly never will be. Nor am I a 30-something woman who killed her abusive twin and flayed him to make a journal from his skin. The details of their lives are not the details of mine. But their point of view is mine. As a writer it’s my job to create the details that can best house and display that point of view, that best give it the grist to play out the questions that form the incessant noise in my head. The fiction is in the detail. The truth is in how characters deal with those details. I think art probably has to have both. Art fails when the truth is in the detail and the fiction is in the point of view (which is why autobiography is no more confessional than a novel); or when there is fiction in both - not because I don’t like escapism - I do - but because there is, I think, something inherently dishonest in pretending that we can create a point of view outside of our own.
What process does your writing undergo from first impulse through to the beautiful crafting?.
It really varies a huge amount from piece to piece. My stories always start with a picture of a character. I tend to follow them around, and watch what happens, and then the story comes out pretty much fully-formed. At that stage I’ll edit and edit to cut it down.
Most of the time I edit for sound if that makes sense - as a reader I sound out what I’m reading in my head (that sounds really daft, but I used to do competitive speed reading, and apparently, we sub vocalise at up to 1500 words a minute, which is about 4 times as fast as the usual reading speed, so it really is something for writers to think about), so as a writer what really bothers me is how the sentences sound. I want the cadence to be exactly right, and the rhythms to work – even if sometimes that means my punctuation’s wonky, or I say “s/he said” too much.
For poetry, it tends to be the other way round. I start with a skeleton and work up, building sentences in. I have a very bad habit of writing lines that are hard to resolve (going back to the sound thing – it’s really old fashioned, I know, but I like my sentences to “resolve” the way a musical phrase will resolve), so I often run on and on and that needs to be edited really toughly otherwise it’s impossible to perform the poems. I do a lot of live readings, and whilst my breathing technique is OK, I don’t want to set myself an impossible task!
Simon Beckett said artist’s need to find ‘a form that accommodates the mess.’ I read on your blog that Skin Book was meant to be a Flash Novel not a poem. You were emphatic that it was not a poem and yet it reads as a verse narrative. Why was the form so important?
I was a teenager in the 80s and a student in the 90s so I grew up with Young British Art and the whole text thing, which has left a lasting mark on me in terms of how I present things
I’ve read a lot of collections of work recently for review purposes, and by and largely I’ve been hugely disappointed in them because they’ve been just that – collections. For me a collection should give you something more than you’d get by reading the pieces separately. The way they’re placed should lead you through, should make you see things in each piece you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. In the case of razorblades, I want to take people on a long dark night of the soul and out the other end.
I was emphatic it wasn’t a poem because I still somehow feel I don’t “get” poetry, and I don’t think of myself as a poet. It’s like cooking – I love cooking anything savoury, especially coming up with sauces and reductions that take weeks because there are so many layers to them. But it’s all by feel. And I get really nervous around puddings, because there’s this aura around them that they’re exact, there are rules. I feel a bit the same with poetry. Poets do all these weird things with indented lines and placing stuff on the page and I feel like I don’t understand it, so I can’t really be a poet. And SKIN BOOK has the full structure of a novel – I’ve spent years railing against classical ideas of structure (I hate rules – like I say I always feel like I don’t “get” them) in novels, and I wanted to show I could actually write one if I tried – albeit one that’s only two and a half thousand words.
I find puddings intimidating as well. I’ve had to stare down quite a few.
Life can be a living hell for some people and I firmly believe there are worse fates than death. It takes an incredible act of will to embrace the life you speak of in the introduction. an you talk about the introduction and its importance in locating the following works?.
In terms of the actual content, I think there’s a lot of glibness about life. Choose life is a phrase that’s wheeled out again and again (especially that awful ending to Trainspotting), and that’s just such a cop out. What do people mean choose life? By and large when someone tells someone to “choose life” they see them walk out the door and give a big sigh of relief that the person’s off their conscience, and that really sucks as an attitude. Life is HARD.
Telling a suicidal person to choose life has consequences, and if you’re not prepared to see them through the consequences, and explain that choosing life is more difficult and more painful than choosing the opposite you should butt the hell out. I think there’s such a simplistic attitude to suicide and death, and life, and I wanted to challenge that. I wanted people to realise what they’re doing when they talk about choosing life. I find the idea that deciding to live means you’ll be happy ever after really offensive. “To live” means a lot of things. It’s fine to tell someone “to live” but that has consequences. Consequences that in some cases may be immoral and utterly unacceptable to the majority. But if you’re not prepared for that you should shut up. That’s why I ended with SKIN BOOK. It’s about two characters who are beyond acceptability. One character is a sex criminal, and the other killed and skinned her brother as a child. Together they’re happy. There’s no comeuppance or karma. They chose to live.
reading (poem)
cinched in the waist of a wholesome window
five streets from soho
ohso proper doorways
and strangers in sunhats with san miguels
and they’ve all got drinks and kisses
and they’ve all got slickety laughs
and they’ve all got smiles and cigarillos
and just enough friends
and just enough coke
and just the right words
and just the right names
and in streamers we tattoo the streetlamp black
and in velvet our tongues streak the glass
and we’re all strung out for the smell of piss
and all the beers are someone else’s
Dan Holloway
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Categories: on writing | Tags: creativity, Dan Holloway, imagination, madness, writing | 9 Comments
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