Dylan Hicks - The Interview
Published in 2012 by Coffee House Press, Hicks’ first novel follows a man piecing together his childhood using his own memories, but also the recollections of a “con-man father figure” who doesn’t exactly make things easy.
Whether it’s a novel or album, article or essay, humans can’t really consume art without internalizing aspects of the form, even if it’s just the process of consumption they’re holding onto. Dylan Hicks, who was born in Austin, Texas but whisked away before it could define him (too much), has art pouring out of him, blasting into characters who in turn pour even more art forth, like one of those fountains lobbing arcs of water around.
His novel Boarded Windows was published in 2012 by Coffee House Press and was heralded by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “a stellar work of fiction.” A kind of bildungsroman by way of Nick Hornby crossed with Garrison Keillor, it’s a novel about children and fathers, art and artists, plus what the hell are you supposed to do when you aren’t sure who a person is, especially when that person is you?
Notably, the novel has a companion album titled Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greene, 10 tracks of “fake country,” according to Hicks, all written and recorded to deliver art straight from the “outlaw-country also-ran” strolling through the background of the characters’ lives in Boarded Windows. The album begins with “West Texas Winds,” the tale of a bus trip detailed right down to the snuff juice falling on a pair of jeans. It’s a pleasurably melancholy tale, relaxing and all relayed from a “bus stop raconteur.” It’s the perfect opening song.
Hicks followed it up with another novel and another album — this time the two pieces weren’t related, other than by his memorable characters, control of language, and stories that all have the patina of truth. Amateurs is a novel about family, success and failure, and a whole lot more. His album Ad Out delivers yet even more wordy tunes, fat with narrative and characters you’ll recognize from life. You should definitely check out the song “Asking for a Friend,” which has a kind of Wes-Andersony-sadness hanging around.
Currently Hicks is writing non-fiction music reviews/essays on his website NR MINT, most recently an in-depth discussion of just under 7,000 words about Joe Henry.
He took the time out of his writing and life-living to chat with Ledger via email, where we went over his utilizing art as an entry point into his characters, “modular” stories, and how he just can’t abide a mess.
Ledger: Some of the characters in your novels Boarded Windows and Amateurs, as well as on the Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greene and Ad Out records, have very specific and important relationships with art. When you're writing, is that always one of the entry points into who they are or will be?
Dylan Hicks: In some ways it’s a failure of imagination. With the novels, the more or less artistic-intellectual milieus felt companionable to me and gave me some confidence. I do try to challenge myself, but maybe comfort zones get a bad rap. When I started Boarded Windows, I was interested in depicting post-hippie provincial bohemia, drawing a bit on these odd little geographically isolated countercultural scenes I observed without much understanding as a boy in North Dakota. The book expanded, but the focus stayed on characters who were trying to live their lives through or as art, though by and large not by making publicly applauded contributions as artists. For Amateurs I wanted to write a multiperspective third-person novel that used devices from romantic comedy—Jane Austen, Hollywood, whatever—and though I originally tried to avoid writers, readers, aesthetes, and other types overrepresented in literary fiction, in the end I thought the wit and interiority and essayistic passages would be sharper and more convincing if I let myself stay closer to home. You’re right to note that artsy characters crop up in my songs as well, especially on Sings Bolling Greene, though I probably feel rangier there in general.
L: I think comfort zones do get a bad rap, and the rom-com genre is one such comfort zone I happen to be a huge fan of. I think generally the idea that true art comes from misery during creation, or that pushing yourself means constant discomfort and/or doubt, these are some of the more insidious ways gatekeepers try to keep out the "untrained" or "unoriginal," which are bullshit terms, usually.
DH: You’re probably right. I mean, a certain degree of self-doubt is necessary in that it helps drive revision and reflection, and it’s good for a novel to be drawn from inexhaustible material, stuff you won’t get bored of, questions you can’t definitively answer. Material of that sort is often painful. But I want the process to be generally fun. Maybe because it is often fun, and leisurely, novelists sometimes talk about their work in defensively heroic terms.
L: How much do you think our search for and consumption of art is undertaken with the purpose of internally defining ourselves?
DH: Probably most of us expend too little effort using art to help define ourselves internally and too much using it to distinguish and define ourselves socially. Although I don’t see art as my surrogate religion, I think my deeper aesthetic experiences, because of their depth and because of their similarity to love, have informed my personal ethics and helped me try to be kinder to others.
L: What do you mean by "deeper aesthetic experiences," and which ones have had that effect on you?
DH: Thanks for prodding me. In truth, a phrase like that no longer quite reflects how I experience art. I was thinking, habitually, of transformative, overwhelming aesthetic experiences of the “disinterested” type described by Kant, where a work of art helps us transcend ourselves and social considerations, but I tend not to think in those romantic terms anymore. I think there are constant, earth-bound opportunities to take great pleasure in art, including pleasure taken in work with which you have complaint, and I’m happy that I can access those pretty much daily. This weekend I listened repeatedly to Barbra Streisand’s Guilty, the album she made with Barry Gibb, who wrote beautifully for her. A few times I laughed out loud over the inspired virtuosity of her singing. That’s probably closer to what I mean by a deep aesthetic experience—not life-changing but life-enriching. Over the same weekend I read some of Jia Tolentino’s witty and perceptive essays on culture and technology, provided editorial notes on a strong first novel, and saw three very good movies: the wrenching and elegant Marriage Story, the clever and entertaining Knives Out, and the epic and somehow not overlong Irishman. Maybe all those experiences were deep aesthetic ones.
L: How much of a story has to be in your head before you can start writing?
DH: I’ve tried preliminary outlines, but the stories springing from those efforts quickly start to feel boring and artificial. I never really follow their direction. I do like to use index cards to arrange chapters and scenes after the manuscript has been growing for a while. In other words, I’ll summarize the chapters—“Bob accidentally ignites tool shed”—on index cards, lay them out on a table, and move them around. My stories so far have been modular like that, which might be a way of admitting they’re not story-driven, though I maintain they kind of are. To start the novels (I mean, the ones I actually finished), I just needed a few images and scenes in mind, some broad thematic terrain, and a sense of how I’d like the book to feel, to put it vaguely, which for me has much to do with the influences and referents I’m hoping to combine.
L: What about your stories being modular would mean they aren’t story-driven? Also, because I think it’s important for upcoming writers, can you talk more about the experience of not finishing a novel? How often has that happened, what’s it feel like, what have those experiences lead to?
DH: On the first question: I like to read old suspense novels by writers such as Ross Macdonald, Patricia Highsmith, and Donald Westlake. Those plots are so tightly constructed, it’s hard for me to imagine the writers laying out their draft’s chapters, then transposing Chapter Twelve and Chapter Eight—everything would fall apart. I do have stories to tell, but they haven’t driven my novels so far; it’s more that I think a story will facilitate a form and style, help me convey a feeling I’d have trouble summarizing. I’ve abandoned a number of novels and nonfiction manuscripts at early stages of their development, and one that I’d worked on for quite a while. Some of those projects probably were viable, but I just couldn’t stay inspired. I figure if you’re not compelled to carry on with something—eager to return to it, somewhat preoccupied by it—and you’re not in the middle of a depression that keeps you from getting absorbed by much of anything, and you’re not under contractual or financial pressure to finish, it’s probably better to move on to something more exciting. Maybe you’ll come back to it later and figure out how to proceed.
L: You write prose fiction, lyrics and music, and journalism. Do you feel a higher degree of control when writing in one form compared to another? If so, which one and why?
DH: I suppose as a journalist I’ve had less autonomy than in the other areas, in that I’m trying to fulfill an assignment with a word count, hoping to write independently but also hoping to come up with something attractive to the editor and the publication’s readers. But I haven’t done much reporting where I’ve had to talk to sources and put together a story; it’s mostly been criticism where I’ve had a fair amount of leeway within the established forms. As a writer I tend to be fussy and sometimes controlling about little things—I’ll gently argue to let a semicolon [or] unconventional word stand—but I love working with careful editors, and I’m grateful for the improvements they’ve made or prompted. Bringing in songs to musicians is a kind of editorial process: I come in with finished material, but the arrangements are collaborative and always introduce things I hadn’t foreseen, and sometimes the other players will suggest revisions. I know artists talk about stories writing themselves, characters taking on agency, songs emerging so quickly and naturally, they seem received more than written. I understand what’s meant by all that, but I never feel like a conduit. To me, thought is just strange and unpredictable, so when writing I feel like I’m making a bunch of little decisions, some of them self-conscious and deliberate, some of them intuitive and slippery, some of them technical, many of them borrowed or in dialogue with stuff I love.
L: When did you know you'd be making a companion record for Boarded Windows? Do you have a larger history/life of Bolling Greene in your head?
DH: It was after I finished the draft I submitted for publication, though that draft underwent significant revisions. The manuscript contained passages of lyrics and song titles, but the songs hadn’t been written beyond these fragments. While I was waiting to hear from editors, I wrote some of those songs, then hatched the idea for a companion album in which I would loosely cover, in some fanciful sense, songs by this outlaw-country also-ran. Most of what I know about Greene is in the book.
L: I laughed when I saw "fake country" was one of the tags listed on Bandcamp for Sings Bolling Greene. While it's most likely a comment on Bolling Green being a fictitious singer, it did make me wonder about the state of country music and the pugnacious nature of "real country" versus "fake country.” Or maybe just my perception of that ever-raging fist fight. What's "real country" to you? (Also, it's not the only album tagged with "fake country,” though it is the only one tagged "literary tie-in.")
DH: Yeah, that record uses country motifs and has country touches, but I’m not really equipped to play country straight. Desperate to pad my credentials, I’ll sometimes note that I was born in Austin, Texas, which is true, though it’s also true that we left before I started forming memories. As for the bigger issue, I’m put off by dogmatic preservationism and other efforts to police genre borders, but that’s an easy liberality because I’m not really invested—culturally, economically, or otherwise—in any one tradition. Of course country was always hybridic: Jimmie Rodgers, who was so often a blues singer, recording with Louis Armstrong; the Carter Family performing their far-flung songbook made up of folk songs as well as reworked versions of tunes written and published by pro songwriters from the Civil War era up to the Tin Pan Alley period. Some of the figures I’ve seen held up as emblems of country traditionalism—Patsy Cline is an example—were criticized at the time for diluting the tradition with pop gloss. I’ve had periods where I followed mainstream country and during those periods always found great songs well sung and played, along with the junk every genre produces, but over the past few years I haven’t paid much attention.
L: What's a typical day of writing like for you? Do you have word goals? Rituals?
DH: Lately it’s been inconsistent. When I was writing the novels, I aimed for 300 to 500 polished words, sometimes producing a greater number of less polished ones, sometimes doing more revision than drafting. Right now I’m not exactly working on a book-length manuscript, so I go back and forth between working on music, doing paid jobs, and, over the past months, writing music criticism that I’m just posting to a blog, or a blog that might have very modest journal aspirations. The readership is small but, I imagine, devoted. Certainly small. I can’t think of any writing rituals, but I have preferences. I’m not someone who likes to get it all on paper, then revise. I wish I could do that, but I have to revise as I go. I can’t abide a mess, except in my car, on my desk, around my piano, and in the kitchen, living room, yard, bedroom, and bathroom.
L: Tell me about the best day of writing you can remember.
DH: The challenge there is that when I think of a great day, it’s a balanced one in which I did some writing, spent time with my family, played music, exercised, cooked a nice meal, did volunteer work, brushed up on my Spanish. But if I’m absorbed in a project, particularly a writing one, I’m preoccupied by that work and have trouble focusing on everything else. It’s exciting, racing up the stairs because I’ve figured out how to construct a sentence, or waking up at six-thirty already writing in my head. But also crazy making. A great day, I suppose, would be one in which I maintained a high level of concentration and took pleasure in the work, but not to be the point of single-mindedly neglecting everything else and feeling out of balance.
L: One thing I ask everyone: What're you enjoying right now? Books, movies, music, anything really.
DH: In addition to the stuff I enjoyed this past weekend and mentioned above, I was recently impressed and challenged by Anne Boyer’s The Undying, a hybrid of essay, iconoclastic cultural and political argument, and memoir drawn from her survival from breast cancer. I recently wrote a long essay on the singer-songwriter Joe Henry — https://www.nrmint.org/newarrivals/on-joe-henry — so I spent a week or two listening almost exclusively to his music. I’ve also been listening a fair amount to the jazz trombonist J. J. Johnson, particularly his recording of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s “Time After Time.” Wonderful tone, and his descending entrance on the first improvised chorus kills me every time.
Thank you to Dylan Hicks for chatting via email and answering questions for Ledger. Please check out his work and spread the word if it’s something you dig. Never be afraid to let me know what you thought of the interview at @LedgerBooks or @austinRwilson on Twitter, or the About page up there at the top of this site.