Interviews
Before the live bn.com chat, Daniel Hecht agreed to answer some of our questions.Q:
What was it like performing at Carnegie Hall?
A:
The first time I was playing lute with an ancient music ensemble, and we were all dressed formally -- black tie and tails, false front, studs, the whole nine yards. I was only 19 and nervous as hell about performing well in such a prestigious hall, but to make matters worse I ripped my pants badly just as I was entering the stage. There was a short step up, off in the wings, and as I raised my leg my rented pants ripped practically in half, from waistband to fly! Fortunately, the jacket tails hung down in the back, and by artfully keeping my lute in front of me as I walked and played, I don't think anyone noticed. However, I'm sure my performance seemed a bit stilted.
The second time I was solo, and I wore sturdy blue jeans and played my own composition for steel-string guitar. The audience was enthusiastic, and I played well. It's a charming hall, with splendid acoustics; it's easy to see why performers love playing there.
Q:
Who would you consider your literary influences?
A:
I've got quite a few influences because I've always read voraciously, and my tastes are diverse. When I was a kid, I read books like C. S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles; as a teenager, I absorbed Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and Martian Chronicles; in my 20s I went through a long "great literature" phase that included Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Henry James, Henry Miller, and 20 others. When I first took up writing, I read with particular interest Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Bette Pesetsky. To this day, I can get hit hard by writing as dense as Faulkner's southern Gothic style or as spare as Amy Hemphill's exquisite minimalism.
Nowadays, with all that as foundation, I find I am surprisingly influenced by whatever I just read. I admired the hip, taut style of Peter Hoeg (Smilla's Sense of Snow), or George Dawes Green (The Caveman's Valentine, The Juror); I loved the deep characterization and the lyrical grace and patience of David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars. While writing Skull Session, I freely appropriated stylistic and thematic elements I liked from sources as diverse as Dr. Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars), Richard North Patterson (The Lasko Tangent, Private Screening), and Michael Connelly (The Poet, The Concrete Blonde).
In fact, I consider literary influences a bit dangerous. Depending on my (psychological) writing needs of the moment, I sometimes just don't read anything in order to avoid outside influences.
Q:
Did you have any interesting teachers while receiving your M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop? Did you enjoy that experience?
A:
I was lucky in that during my first year at Iowa I was able to study with Bette Pesetsky, whose collection Stories Up to a Point had "opened the door" for my own stories when I first started writing. She's a wonderful woman, wise and insightful, and she was generous with her time; her support and critical candor were invaluable.
That first year I also studied with James McPherson, the brilliant scholar and writer who had won the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship for his fine, honest, difficult stories. He is able to look through the mishmash of ideas that usually comprise the first draft of a story and can point out to you the story's secret core -- the real theme, the real reason you wrote it in the first place. For two years, in class and at informal breakfasts, he worked closely with me and gave me a great deal of insight.
I benefited also from a semester with Ethan Canin, author of The Emperor of the Air, whose warmth, good humor, lack of pretension, and nuts-and-bolts pragmatic suggestions made writing accessible. Marilyn Robinson, one of America's most brilliant scholars, was a wonderful critic who (unlike most people) enjoyed and supported my tendency for concept-rich writing, for nuance and symbolism.
Did I enjoy the experience? Sometimes. I won a major award from the workshop, I was able to teach writing, I worked with some great writers; best of all, I was allowed to indulge a monomaniacal focus on writing for two years straight.
But graduate programs are divorce mills, and I certainly got milled right around then, which wasn't easy. Also, the workshop is full of very talented people with huge egos and powerful ambitions, so it can be a competitive -- and, for many, discouraging -- environment. The critical culture that prevailed when I was there was sometimes unnecessarily nasty. This not only made the process unpleasant but worse, tended to produce safe, "workshop-proof" writing rather than the riskier work I prefer. (Do you want to live in a concrete bunker or the Taj Mahal? One is safe against attack; the other is -- though fragile -- beautiful and astonishing.) I give the workshop experience one thumb up and one thumb down.
Q:
Do you still play the acoustic and steel guitar?
A:
I quit playing guitar in the late 1980s because of a medical condition that wrecked my hands and ruined a career as a performer and recording artist. Ten years later, the hands are much better, and I've been picking it up again. I literally did not take my guitar out of the case for five or six years, but it's amazing how little technique I've lost. Now I'm even thinking of recording another album, and I have fantasies of touring with a multimedia performance that combines literary reading with guitar playing.
Q:
I see that you have worked in many odd jobs; what would you consider your most unique job?
A:
If I told the "What's My Line" panel about an experience building mechanical musical instrument systems for the House on the Rock, they'd never believe it. Alex Jordan, eccentric millionaire, a cross between Walt Disney, Federico Fellini, and Forrest Gump, hired me to design and build whole orchestras of musical instruments that played by themselves. You can still see many of them at the House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin, the state's largest tourist attraction: rooms full of harps, pianos, cellos, oboes, saxophones, organ, and drums, all apparently playing away in concert. They're not really -- they're just going through the motions, and the music is piped in -- but it was a real challenge to think of ways to make them work and then to make the whole environment look like a Louis XV music chamber or whatever. There's a book to be written about that place, that job, I'm sure of it.
Apple picking was one of the best jobs. Every fall for six years, I picked apples professionally at orchards in New Hampshire. It's hard work -- carrying around a 21-foot pointed ladder, teetering at the top of trees with a metal-and-canvas bucket strapped to your shoulders while groping for fruit just out of reach, picking and carrying and dumping tons of apples every day. But you get very fit, and you gain a rare power and serenity from working outside all day, every day, rain or shine, in the New England autumn. You feel a pride in your skill and your endurance and in your part in putting food on America's tables. Also, living in a coed, commercial bunkhouse with 30 or so other pickers allows you to get to know people in a way that no other job does.
