Aren LeBrun
ORP: Do you write or create with an audience in mind? If so, how do you consider the relationship between that audience and your work throughout your creative process?
Aren LeBrun: Steinbeck once issued something on this theme that I agree with heartily and still return to as a general guide. It was in a letter he wrote to somebody or another that I found in a truly excellent book called "Steinbeck: A Life in Letters," in a used book store in Arizona about six years ago and consumed biblically. He advised a writer friend to fixate on one single reader only, purging the whole "audience" concept from his imagination permanently. Audiences don't read, individuals do. Writing for an "audience," he said, is a dangerous approach that'll serve mainly to hamstring you and diminish the impact of your work on the individual.
For me, when fiction works it works because I'm experiencing a transmission through time and space from another individual consciousness at a fidelity so high it's literally unimaginable to me in ordinary life. Once you've experienced that, you never forget it, and a real part of you is never the same. I know the world is full of people who read for this exact reason, not to escape their reality but more to climb out and over the edges of their loneliness in hopes of confronting reality. I try to keep that person in my mind and write for them.
ORP: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs?
AL: I've always been most floored by writers whose work operates fundamentally at the level of the individual sentence and puts less stock in the somewhat contrived formalities of plot. It would be insane to think this group was short enough to list every member, though there are some obvious ones I'll admit to right away: Hemingway, Faulkner, Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Henry Miller, Steinbeck, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Barth, Gaddis, Celine, Beckett, Chekov, Barthelme. I suppose it's a fairly garden-variety crowd as I list it out here. But every single of one those people remains a big deal to me. I'm also a vacuum for fiction that pulls off that high-wire act between irony and sincerity without giving over to the established clichés of either side (i.e. cynicism on the one hand, sentimentality on the other). Writers like Charles Portis, Denis Johnson, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey, Anne Beattie, Richard Brautigan, and Walker Percy come to mind. When it comes to short fiction, my favorite stuff tends to be melancholic tales of messed-up working-class people neither mocked nor deified by the writer, stories about people and situations I suppose I recognize from my upbringing in a region of devastated post-industrial mill towns in Central Maine. Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Joy Williams, Thom Jones, Larry Brown, Annie Prioux (people rightfully discuss Brokeback Mountain, but fewer talk about Job History, an absolute diamond of a story), Alice Munro, Andres Dubus half the time, Bukowski. I also discover many ideas while reading nonfiction stuff I happen across randomly. Wilhelm Reich's "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" and "Listen, Little Man!" were incredibly strange and intriguing to me. There's this fantastic Scottish psychiatrist named R. D. Laing whose books on psychosis and schizophrenia, mainly The Divided Self and Politics of Experience, rang my bell a few Novembers ago when I was in Spain. Laing's one of those you put the book down twenty times an hour and go oomph sorts of guys. He spent his career arguing that symptoms of mental disorder were typically rational responses to a dysfunctional, restrictive, and close-minded environment, rather than irrational responses to a free and functioning society. You can probably imagine how that went over. I've also become a big fan of this late professor named Jules Henry, an American anthropologist from the mid-20th century, whose books (Culture Against Man, Pathways to Madness, On Sham, Vulnerability, and Other Forms of Self-Destruction) snuck in through the backdoor of an older story of mine called “Gigadyne OmniServices Corporation.” I could continue but won't.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
AL: My wife is a fluent Spanish speaker who lived for six years in Seville teaching both Spanish and English. Traveling with her throughout Spain and Mexico has grafted some flesh to the skeleton of my now decade-old high school Spanish background, perhaps enough for me to entertain an intelligent two-year-old in a discussion of colors or quantity.
ORP: What would you say is your most interesting writing and/or artistic quirk? Do you have any habits that you believe help or hinder your creativity?
AL: I tend to commit my first couple paragraphs to memory, word for word, and recite them to myself when I'm doing other stuff. I don't necessarily do this on purpose. It works as a sort of talismanic mantra to remind myself that the story is real whenever I walk away from it, that it's a real thing whose mysterious rhythms I can return to easily. What we call "voice" as readers/writers, that distinct idiosyncratic logic that holds a story together, is basically a matter of sentence rhythm. Virginia Woolf said something like that. Memorizing the opening of a story-in-progress, for me, does something to the mind akin to when you play the opening bars of a guitar arrangement you forgot you ever knew, and the whole thing just pours back into your head at once.
ORP: How does writing/art influence your worldview, and how does your worldview shape your writing/art?
AL: Perhaps it's difficult to describe in clear terms why we do anything that we do. I could ascribe my impulse to write and read fiction to a whole host of noble principles I'd feel proud for admitting to, principles I hold on on a political-moral-economic level, but I don't think it would be all the way true to say that. The inescapable fact is that the motivation to write fiction stems from a peculiar combination of self-denial and tremendous self-involvement. To write a story, you need something more definite than your worldview, you actually need to close a real and tangible door on the world and shut it out for whatever period of time is required. That means your job, your family, your spouse, your friends, people you love, you need to put them all on the other side of a closed door as you improvise these sentences on a blank piece of paper alone.
This is to say that, for me, the calling to write comes not from a worldview or some moral-ethical system I've developed over time, but from a sort of sub-rational force inside my head that's been there from childhood and signals to me in small bursts of language and image while I'm doing something else. I either write these things down or become irritable with myself and probably difficult to be around. I wish I could describe it in a way that sounded more glorious than that. Luckily there is glory in other things.
