ALU Book Club: Interview with Jeremy Hanson-Finger

If you’ve been following along with our book club, you’ll know what a kick we got out of reading and discussing Jeremy Hanson-Finger’s Death and the Intern (Invisible Publishing) over the last few weeks. But we didn’t just stop there because we’re all about the book club life, so we interviewed Jeremy who gave some very thoughtful responses to our burning questions.* * *

ALU: Death and the Intern features a racially diverse cast of characters. As a white author what challenges, if any, did you run into while writing these characters?JHF: I did have some concerns about appropriation of voice, and I tried to do my due diligence, notably to make sure I didn’t give anyone an inappropriate name or perform any actions inappropriate for their background or faith, but ultimately, I was more interested in living in a world where ethnic diversity was just a given and I hoped my taking on this project in good faith would be evident.ALU: There are quite a lot of music references throughout the book. You even created a playlist of songs that you thought about during the writing process. How did music inform the novel?JHF: I told a lot of people over the last ten or so years that I wanted to write like the band Deerhunter sounds. Bradford Cox, the primary member of Deerhunter, is one of my favourite artists in any medium. There’s just something about the repetitive kraut-y rhythms and atmospheric guitar washes that just does it for me. Something about that woozy feeling it engender—it feels like it taps into what’s below our thin grip on the rational world. This probably lines up with my love for the work of David Lynch, who explores the primal undercurrents that flow below the mundane.I probably reached peak Deerhunter in my writing before I started Death and the Intern, however, with an unpublished story called “Police Radio”, about a man going on a date with a woman who reveals some horrifying details about her grandfather and unpacks the complicated emotions the man experiences as a result. It’s maybe telling that if you look at the music referenced in Death and the Intern, it’s a lot more spare and sloppy—a lot of punk and garage rock, especially, and old country. Music that goes places, even if the going isn’t quite as textured. Appropriate for a move from the short story form to the novel, perhaps?ALU: We know certain works like Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow influenced your writing, neither of which are detective novels. How did those influences shape Death and the Intern?JHF: I definitely got my proliferation of characters with funny names from Pynchon, and from other writers influenced by him that also influenced me, such as David Foster Wallace (favourites include “Candy Mandible” from Broom of the System), and Jonathan Lethem (“Perkus Tooth” from Chronic City) . Fang’s name is a reference to the Golden Fang (a drug smuggling conspiracy of dentists in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice), actually. Pynchon is obviously big on conspiracies, and I think his various groups of conspirators in unlikely places (dentsits in Inherent Vice, a sub rosa postal service in The Crying of Lot 49) were a huge influence on the Pushers and the Mixers. And the song set to “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is pure Pynchon, who so notably sprinkled his work with parodic ditties that Gracvity’s Rainbow actually inspired Devo’s “Whip It.”Likewise, the absurdity of the bureaucracy in Catch 22 lent itself to transposition to a hospital setting. In fact, M*A*S*H, which did exactly that, is also a major influence. People behaving badly in an ordered environment will never not be funny to me.ALU: How did you approach researching the medical parts of this novel? The “pusher versus mixer” plotline seems like something only a medical professional could come up with!JHF: The plotline actually came from my childhood friend Navraj, to whom I dedicated the book. He did a placement as a med school intern at Ottawa General and told me he learned there were two differing viewpoints on anaesthesiology, and adherents to each group staunchly defended their opinions. My original idea for the book was basically “Navraj stars in Fistful of Dollars (or Yojimbo) set in a hospital”, and throughout the writing process Janwar became less and less Navraj and the plot became much more of a mystery than a western. My research process was basically Googling things and then having Navraj tell me how wrong I was. I’m very lucky he was so willing to devote time to helping me understand the mechanics of the hospital experience. When he was staying with me at one point he rigged up a demonstration of how you drape a patient for surgery using my couch, a blanket, and two standing lamps.ALU: You started off writing short fiction and poetry. In what ways did the process of writing your first novel vary from those other forms?

JHF: With the exception of my most Pynchonesque short story, “Climbing into the Sun,” which despite its sprawling and digressive influence, really chugs along, basically every short story I’ve written is just setup leading to one atmospheric moment—chasing that Deerhunter vibe I mentioned earlier. And my poetry is generally pretty atmospheric as well.With the novel, I actually had to take on character development and plot. It was my third try at a novel, but I had never made it past 20,000 words before. The first one was an untitled black comedy set at CFB Esquimalt, the Navy base where I worked one summer (which dipped back sixty years and jumped into the middle of Pacific to turn into “Climbing into the Sun”), and the other, tentatively titled Slumlord of Blood Planet was a polyphonic crime story told from the point of view of everyone but the accidental detective, a university student whose father had made her the landlord of a crime-ridden building in a rough neighbourhood rather than lending her money, was the genesis of the character of Susan, and also featured the first appearance of Gizzard and the Creepshots, who lived in the building.I spent a lot of time walking around Koreatown (I lived with Andrew Battershill in Toronto at the time, while he was also working on his first novel, Pillow) trying to solve plot problems I’d never had to consider before, instead of just getting jacked up on coffee and vomiting uncomfortable moments from my past through a filter to try to make it more universal, which was basically my writing process in the past.I also had the luxury of working on the novel while working as a freelance editor, so I was able to work on copyediting business books for two weeks straight, then work on my novel for a week straight, then work on another business book, and so on. That way I was really able to get into a routine. I found I had to leave the house to get started, and then I could come back and keep working if I hadn’t met my word count for the day yet (I aimed for 2000 a day). I wrote most of it at the Gladstone branch of the Toronto Public Library, Northwood, and Toronto Coffee and Tea House. In the past I’d mostly worked in my room, but on such a long project I had to get out of the house.So writing the novel was a lot more sober and less animal, although I really depended on a lot of sudden inspirations to turn the action in different directions. I was very much inspired by how David Lynch completely changed the course of Twin Peaks after a shot of an electrician named Frank Silva peering up from behind a piece of furniture showed up in the dailies, leading to the birth of the entire plotline with the evil spirit BOB.ALU: “Intern” is a pretty loaded word in the writing and publishing space. Were you ever an intern?JHF: I was an editorial intern at the publishing company John Wiley and Sons Canada, but I was hired full-time after couple of months, however, and the same thing happened when I interned in publisher operations at the e-book and e-reader retailer Kobo. I know not everyone had that experience. Publishing is a hard way to make a buck, and even a hard way to feel good about what you’re doing, but I have so much respect for indies and their contribution. I couldn’t be prouder to represent Invisible.* * *Thank you to Jeremy, and to Leigh at Invisible Publishing for connecting us. Catch up on our entire summer of Book Club here.