Office at Night by Laird Hunt, KATE BERNHEIMER Read Free Book Online Page A

Laird would take it from there.
    CF : Did you ever disagree about the direction of the story?
    LH : The quick answer is no. The possibly more interesting answer is that we disagreed all the way through, but that disagreement took the happy form of writing into the collaborative, respectful freedom we had granted each other. Conversation is, after all, in its component parts, a kind of disagreement—a most interesting kind! And this was a conversation, to be sure.
    CF : Were there any surprises along the way?
    LH : There were so many surprises. Every time Kate sent a new section I was surprised in that best of all possible ways: seeing a first-rate writer galloping after her imaginings. And, of course, when you write the way I think we both do when we’re doing it solo, tending not to plan out the whole thing ahead of time, just the daily fact of writing is a constantsurprise. Years ago, when I was a student at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), attending the Summer Writing Program, I went to a lecture by Michael Ondaatje, who was asked if he made a detailed outline before he wrote his novels. He said that although he knew that worked for some people, it absolutely killed the thing for him. Writing, to his way of thinking—and I’m grossly paraphrasing—was all about discovery, about surprise. A novel was a kind of great journey. Clearly you thought ahead, but you didn’t think all the way to the end. I had been banging my head against the whole you-must-plan-it-out thing and was sold on this approach.
    In the context of Office at Night, I had no idea that the narrator of the first section I wrote would turn out to be the phone, or that the chair by the door would be paranoid and lascivious, or that there would be an abandoned, loquacious paintbrush in the back of the desk drawer or, as Kate dreamed up for us, the story would end with a dance. It was only in the editing stage, when Chris put a series of great questions to us, that the idea of a chorus of frame, canvas, and pigment came to me. New ideas bloomed up for Kate at that stage too. So it was surprise, surprise, surprise all the way through.
    CF : How has your relationship to this painting changed over the course of your “residency” within it?
    LH : No doubt I have been reading the wrong ekphrastic poetry and fiction, but I have almost always encountered a kind of distance in the result, often distance of a rather pious variety. Here I am standing mournfully—or at least soberly but intelligently—before the great work, and now here are my thoughts . . . As I say, I have not read broadly enough! At any rate, the idea of inhabiting the painting with and through fiction was terribly attractive, and the playfulness with which we approached it made it possible, and even necessary, to spend a lot of time staring at odd details. At certain junctures, I actually found myself looking out into the room from different angles, as if I were sitting on the chair by the door, or leaning against the file cabinet, or leaning out the window. You come away from that kind of immersion colored—stained. I have always loved Hopper’s colors, so this is a happy state of affairs.

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