I got the news today that the website LitReactor will be shutting down at the end of this year. Itâs a great loss for a certain kind of literary activity in journalism, the âindependent spaceâ that Iâve been viewing for the past three years or so. The biggest loss from my perspective will be the frequent occurrence of interviews with writers conducted by Gabriel Hart. He also wrote columns and other pieces at LitReactor about writers and their output. This is where I got the best information on the literary sphere as I navigated forward and tried to understand my surroundings. It served as a kind of âNew Yorkerâ or âNY Review of Booksâ for the indie lit set. I learned about so many new writers from Gabrielâs interviews. When it came time for my poetry chapbook Handcuffing the Venus De Milo to be published in Nov 2022, and Gabriel asked me if Iâd like to be interviewed for LitReactor, naturally I said yes.
With the closure of LitReactor today, Gabriel sent out a message that his interview subjects should immediately take steps to preserve their interviews before the site shut down. I talked to him about the prospect of republishing my interview here at my substack for posterityâs sake. Itâs a mite egotistical as so much of social media is â tending to oneâs profiles, pruning and watering oneâs own digital manifestations â but I feel like this would be the best place available to me currently for reproducing the interview. He said it was alright and that Josh Chaplinsky of LitReactor relayed that I should make sure to credit LitReactor as the original venue for the interview. Itâs too bad that all those interviews might disappear because they must represent hours and hours of work and illumination into dark crevasses of social life for writers in the era of COVID when so much ferment took place online. These interviews should be preserved somewhere. But Iâll just show you the one I directly played a part in. It came out in November 2022. I tried to give thoughtful answers to Gabrielâs questions; in some ways this felt like my one shot to get across my views and let people get to know me. I hope I didnât come off as too grave or too florid.
I want to add here that for me, Gabriel was a leader in âshowing how journalism was to be conductedâ and I have since done a few interviews of my own of writers and publishers in the scene, with his model in mind. Thatâs not empty flattery, itâs just the truth. He was an exemplar and a guide. I seriously hope that, even with LitReactor disappearing as a platform, he and other journalists affiliated with the site will find some way to continue this important work.
The initial paragraphs are Gabrielâs intro and then the bold sections are his questions.
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Writers often see how little they can get away with, condensing all their reductive intention into a âbrand.â While this may take root in our attention deficits, we may never know who the real writer is. For instance, it boggles me that more fiction writers donât write poetry â itâs the easiest way to show the world who you really are. And if you can pull it off, itâs the best way to show your economy of language, not just your command. On the other hand, I maintain poetry is the most difficult form to navigate; to write it well enough to float above the masses' attempted dredges often takes years to perfect, contrary to many who think it just requires breaking meter-less prose into verse (if you donât know who you are, I sure do).
Since we first began hearing of him around 2020, Jesse Hilson has never been anything less than exactly who he isânot just a novelist, short story writer, confessional non-fiction/cultural essayist, poet and cartoonist, but with this wide range comes a humility thatâs difficult to replicate; a non-performative sincerity you just canât make up. From his debut noir novel Blood Trip (Close to the Bone, 2022) to his near daily Substack insights into modern literature and his struggles with mental illness, Hilsonâs writing is both intense and introspective across the board.
With his debut poetry collection Handcuffing the Venus DeMilo (Bullshit Lit) released this month, the hard-to-pin author compiles a large slice of the cyber-poetry heâs been sneaking into our subconscious online into a cohesive physical statement that reads like haunted psychological scripture or late-stage-capitalism John Berryman.
Jesse, you and I have often discussed a common trajectory, a condition weâve called âgenre refugeeâ where weâve cut our teeth in genre and enjoy the freedom to return there at times, but also turned off by its restrictions of form and cliques constructed from its rigidity to define itself. Can you tell us how you started in this lit landscape and where you are now?
After some initial contortions writing and submitting poetry online, I had this feeling in 2019 that with dollar signs in my eyes I could try to be a crime novelist. Iâd written a few crime/mystery novels and I felt like that was something I could continue to pull off in the future and maybe get paid. As I reentered Twitter after years away, I started exploring the outline of the map of the indie crime lit community and quickly began apprehending a certain kind of tacitly corporate industrial superstructure to the genre writing community in toto: internal politics, cop mentalities, clique-like formations, and the pervasive negative effects of constant salesmanship.
In the closing days of 2020 I got a crime novel accepted by Close to the Bone in the UK and there I met you and other label-mates like Max Thrax, and right about this time certain scandals or divisions which can only be described as political struck the indie crime lit world and specifically our publisher. I, being new, didnât know who anybody was or which side to take as people claimed allegiances, or whether it mattered as no one with a major profile in indie crime knew I existed. I stayed with my publisher but the drama left a bad taste in my mouth. Also around this time I became aware of some less overt, genre-evading publications in hidden-away underground cubbyholes of Twitter lit, like Misery Tourism. I started migrating to attending their weekly online reading series, Misery Loves Company, and I saw there was this other literary culture happening that was looser, more apolitical, more adventurous, funnier, and honestly just friendlier. The stakes were different; it was more about art than about chasing money. I still consider myself to be capable of genre writing, but this other parallel track of âcyberwriting,â as itâs somewhat tongue-in-cheek been called, is appealing to me as a place where, if I am indeed doing it, I feel like my punches and karate kicks have connected more.
I know youâre working on a non-fiction project chronicling this sort of vaporous scene we participate in. Would you describe this fringe scene to be more a movement that can be defined, or more of an era that has all to do with outside social/political developments; maybe a reaction to such?
Youâre right, it is vaporous, and defies definition. To my way of thinking, whatever it is, it is âpost-genre,â or maybe âextra-genre,â and yet not quite literary per se. The fringe quality of this scene has antecedents in the alt-lit of yesteryear that I wasnât present for, so its pedigree contains genetics mysterious to me which might be chronicled one day by literary historians with broader reading habits than mine.
As far as sociology or politics, it seems to pull something from being largely an offspring of the Internet, and whatever bespoke âhome-brewâ quality it has seems to have only been fermented stronger by the internal exile of writers driven into isolated lockdown by the coronavirus, and possibly driven onto each otherâs radars in a way that wouldnât have happened if we had just participated in our local scenes IRL. I think this is its major characteristic as far as I can tell. Iâm more focused on writing book reviews at the momentâbooks as objects perhaps being a more metaphysically privileged literary culture than the âvaporâ of online lit mag ephemeraâbut if I were going to do a non-fiction chronicle of this movement, I would maybe like to write something like Malcolm Cowleyâs Exileâs Return, which was about literary figures in the 1920s like Hemingway and Dos Passos spending much of their time in self-imposed exile in France. But in the 2020s the mass exile is not in Europe, not geographic, but onto our laptops or phones.
How early in your life were you struck by literature? Was the first work that stunned you the same one that compelled you to become a writer?
Iâve always dreamed of being a writer since being a little kid. When I was a teenager I found myself pouring my heart into poetic love letters to girlfriends and finding I could express emotion and move women into giving me love in return, but in a more permanent, less crassly transactional sense I was probably just showing off for myself. Inevitably as a Gen X young person you encounter the Beats and I discovered the wild, febrile imagination of Burroughsâ Naked Lunch, and I saw that book as an artifact with a forbidden, perennially underground aura that was badass. Then like a lot of people my age I fell under the shadow of David Foster Wallaceâs Infinite Jest in 1996, which left a massive novelistic dent in my brain, a fatal head injury, and itâs been a definite effort since then to try to get out from under that writerâs shadow and influence. Itâs taken decades, and Iâm not sure the extrication is fully complete yet, or ever will be.
Iâd have a difficult time deciding on a favorite Hilson piece since youâre so prolific, but one piece that burrowed so deep into me was your CNF essay âFrench-Kissing the Light Socket.â As hallucinatory as it is, you somehow made this origin story of âmental illnessâ completely relatable; how it can be such a fine line between illness and well-being once that veil is pierced. When I read it, I felt you were describing a legitimate religious momentâisnât that what we are all searching for? What is your view of this âveilâ and what is it keeping from us? What are the dangers of going beyond it?
The clichĂ© about the connection between mental illness and creativity I think has become a kind of shorthand by which people (who may not have been touched by either, really) can evade a true understanding of the value of the human mindâs output. This might be gibberish, but I think one of the roles of the artist, in this case the writer, is to go on reconnaissance missions to far-off places where other people arenât able to go, and to bring back reports to the tribe that could conceivably reveal things of spiritual significance or inner utility that science and rationality canât provideâotherwise hidden blueprints for how the cosmos, mind, soul, or an absconding godhead operates. Sometimes such information is disturbing, with an unhinged prophetic quality or an alien beauty that the tribe might want to reject, or canât understand. And the writerâs job is to try to authoritatively describe it and often he fails. Maybe it actually is useless personal mythography, something delusional: the writer has gone too deep into the ghost territory and canât resurface into the realm of mundane things to make the report. He is mumbling in a solitary, foreign language now. All that Iâve been saying sort of presupposes that the writer is supposed to âmake themselves usefulâ to society and serve the readership as a scout. To do their duty. Which might not always be true. Maybe to the writer the ghost territory becomes more hospitable than the home village of sanity and health.
Do you think a prose writer will always be improved by writing poetry? Why do you think more fiction writers donât practice poetics? Is it just as important to edit/revise poetry as it is prose? Whatâs the typical amount of time youâll spend on a piece of poetry?
My conception of a man or woman of letters is someone who can operate on multiple levels and can create writing that travels at different speeds for different needs. The flexibility of switching between modes of language like poetry and prose is helpful to the writer in every mode, I think. Sometimes the transmission just comes through as a poem and it canât be helped, and to try to thicken it into a short story or a novel or essay would dilute it or wreck it, and vice versa. Knowing when to compress and when to stretch out, when to dramatize and when to be pithy, is part of this flexibility. Sometimes itâs just showing off, I admit. Poems take days to weeks to compose but sometimes (maddeningly) years sitting in folders to gather the magical properties necessary to project them outwards into someone elseâs field of vision. If thatâs your thing.
Youâre also a committed cartoonist. Did you start by doodling or were there specific artists who inspired you? What can this format do that literature cannot, beyond the obvious visual element?
I was a terrible doodler in school when I should have been taking notes. I liked making comics to make my friends laugh, drawing naked ladies. Also, drawing while stoned is easier than writing. I spent countless hours as a youngster getting âlifted in the name of hieroglyphics,â listening to ambient/dub/hip hop, and drawing trippy cartoons. Later when I focused more, I found a strong appeal in the monochrome psychedelia of underground cartoonists like Robert Williams, Paul Mavrides, and Skip Williamson, or just more mainstream comics like Sergio Aragonesâ Groo the Wanderer, with his breathtaking panoramas full of elaborate by-play of detail and extra characters. Again, like the flipping between poetry and prose, this fits into my notion of being well-rounded and, just as different muscle groups are exercised at a gym, you should be able to do multiple types of art. Because when drawing dries up, letâs say, you can cycle to another medium like poetry or fiction, while you hope for the drawing pencil to come back. The point is to try to maximize creative flow. Because itâs when it isnât flowing that you feel like stepping in front of a train. Therefore I think in some ways switching formats could be more for the artistâs survival than for the viewerâs or readerâs benefit.
What would you tell a young writer just starting out in this often intimidating landscape? What would you have told yourself in your twenties?
I might have told myself to be patient. That success is something that might potentially come later. In my twenties, I always hated it when I heard people say âyou as a writer will likely have nothing important or original to say when youâre twenty-two, you havenât yet learned a fucking thing about life, you have no substantial story to tell.â Iâm an older man now and in spite of the average age of my online peers skewing younger, I feel like itâs more like my time to speak now than it was when I was younger. Also, I would advise somebody younger to, sure, aim for success but also to develop a healthy sense of scope for defining that success. I can already tell that the people who will dig my writing or artwork will be a smaller circle of perhaps a more âhip underground intelligentsia who would really get itâ (Robert Williamsâ words) and it probably wonât really pay the rent. And thatâs alright.
Another thing Iâd advise, and this is more of a life thing than an art thing necessarily, is to gain a good sense of how to organize time and energy so you can do art and yet do normal life things like pay attention to a career or a family. Iâve lost both those signifiers of âthe good life,â and I think being smart about prioritizing multiple aspects of life could have made me a happier individual. Finally, Iâd say: Your imagination as an artist can produce wonderful beauty but it can also produce horrors and fears that will utterly conspire to waterboard you and destroy your life. So make peace with your imagination.
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Cool interview, Jesse! Thanks for posting.