Jamie Collins Kahn
Oyster River Pages: We often think of ourselves as writing or making art, but the process often changes or makes us as well. How do you feel like your writing or art makes you?
Jamie Collins Kahn: I love this question, because I do feel that writing, for me, is a symbiotic relationship. I started writing in a very serious way quite young. I had a high school teacher who taught creative writing workshops in the same style as college classes and I was exposed to the functions of that environment since I was fifteen. It allowed me to feel independent—not just that my thoughts were my own, but that they had value and meaning that others might want to listen to. Writing helped me grow up a little. It was a catalyst in me feeling like I was a real person with something to offer. Now that I'm old and creaky and twenty-two, I still find myself writing about youth and coming of age a lot, and I think now much of my writing is about discovering who I've become through the experiences and feelings of youth. I feel like I'm at the sweet spot where I'm not an angsty kid, but I'm also not forty trying to remember what youth was like. It is the symbiosis, because while being at that place makes my writing more genuine and connected, it also aids me in discovering how I feel about the world more and more every day.
I'm not a big believer in the idea that writing is pure therapy or catharsis, but I think sometimes you can't help but put the puzzle pieces of life together through the practice of it. I know I've had a lot of moments where I write something and I come out the other end having realized something new about myself, mostly by accident.
ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?
JCK: I believe that people should take whatever they want to take from it because everyone brings new eyes to literature. It's how I feel about everything I write. But what I personally see in it is a picture of what it means to be different when you're young, falling in and out of love and all those messy complicated emotions. Love feels so big when you're in high school, you know? I see the way that when you're discovering your identity, everything feels like it needs to fit with it, and that can cause heartache. But there are so many ways to exist as a kid/teen/adult/person.
ORP: Do you believe that hope is a luxury, a responsibility, a danger, or something else? Why?
JCK: I think it's the only way we keep moving forward in life. Sometimes it feels dumb and irrational—like it should be a luxury. But I'd be a pretty sad and boring person without it.
ORP: If you could choose one writer or artist, living or dead, as a best friend or mentor, who would it be? Why?
JCK: Can I pick two? I'm going to.
Sloane Crosley. I know, she's an essayist and I'm a fiction writer. But every single time I read her work I feel so inspired and seen and understood. I read I Was Told There'd Be Cake when I was in high school, and I remember feeling that guttural yearning of "I want to write like this." She makes me laugh and cry and have existential crises. I want to do that to people.
And
Callan Wink. When I first read A Refugee Crisis in The New Yorker, I immediately dashed to consume everything else he'd ever written, and it did not disappoint. He does this magical job of capturing everything exactly how it is and making you fall in love with people and places. It's so easy to fall into his world. His novel, August, is so great at capturing this character and his youth and the places he goes. It all feels so real and perfect. Also I once sent him a lengthy email after reading his short story collection to gush about his talents and he was quite nice to me.
ORP: What do you think is the most essential advice that most writers and artists ignore?
JCK: Finished > Perfect
It's okay. Sometimes I ignore that one too.
