Colton Huelle
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?
Colton Huelle: I try to never lose sight of the fact that, in writing a short story, I’m essentially asking for twenty or thirty minutes of stranger’s time. So, even in the early stages of teasing out a new idea, I’m looking to find out what might fascinate or delight someone. What will make someone chuckle? What will make someone shake their head disapprovingly at the character? What will catch someone off guard? It’s really that simple for me. Any sort of higher-minded purpose that writing might serve can’t happen if the reader isn’t connecting to what’s happening on the surface of the story. As a high school English teacher, I’m reminded everyday how rare it is for a book to connect with someone who isn’t much of a reader. Trying to facilitate that connection is part of my job as a teacher and it’s really the whole job as a writer. For me, I’m mainly counting on humor to make that connection with my reader, and I hope that there’s more that someone might take away from my work. But at the end of the day, if I’ve made someone laugh then I know for sure that I didn’t waste those twenty or thirty minutes that I asked of 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?
CH: Long before I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be Bob Dylan. On a superficial level, I just thought he was the epitome of cool. Even today, so much of my sense of fashion, my mannerisms, my speech patterns can be traced back to the pale imitation of Bob Dylan that was my personality in high school. I played guitar for a little bit and went through a pretty embarrassing singer-songwriter phase. But ultimately, what really lit a fire in me was his ability to make a phrase that sounded like nonsense on the surface evoke these incredibly vivid emotions that I didn’t have names for. Like: “Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles.” What does that mean, Bob!? I still couldn’t really say, but I know exactly how that line feels every time I hear it. I think that was the start of me realizing that language had this secret, beneath-the-surface power that I wanted to find out about. And then for contemporary fiction writers, there are so many that inspire me, but the two that stand above the rest are George Saunders and Miranda July. They’re both devastatingly funny writers, but the jokes never seem to be at the expense of the characters. There’s a tenderness to their humor that I try to emulate in my own work. Their characters end up in these outrageous, absurd situations, and the punchline is never “what an idiot this person is.” It’s always, “yeah, life’s really like that sometimes.”
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
CH: Vulnerability is a tremendously important, but somewhat misunderstood part of writing. It isn’t just about bearing your soul. You can bear your soul to someone in a cheesy and saccharine way — and that’s not really the same thing as being vulnerable. As a fiction writer, I have the luxury of hiding behind made up characters. So for me, vulnerability isn’t what happens on the page, but what happens behind closed doors. A work of fiction is only going to be deep as its author. Figuring out how to map out the darker or more fragile corners of a character’s psyche requires fiction writers to spend a lot of time in their own dark and fragile head-spaces. And even though my characters are never a one-to-one stand-in for me, I think everything I write has traces of my own fears or fragility — and that still feels like bearing my soul. It’s just a more smoke-and-mirrors way of going about it. But I think any kind of art demands vulnerability from both creators and audiences. On either end of the exchange, you never really know what you’re going to be confronted with.
ORP: How does writing/art influence your worldview, and how does your worldview shape your writing/art?
CH: A core belief of both my politics and spirituality is the idea that all living things are connected and responsible for each other. In fiction writing, I think that belief comes with a lot of implications for how I approach plot. When it comes down to it, literary fiction is really about the relationship between our internal and external realities. Certain things are happening in a character’s mind that cause the character to take certain actions, which have certain consequences, which lead to new things happening in the character’s mind. And that’s basically how I think about plot. And it’s also how I make sense of this notion that we’re all connected.
