Jonathan Mendelsohn
Oyster River Pages: How is your art or writing informed by current social and/or political issues?
Jonathan Mendelsohn: Considering that we are now living in “a time of reckoning,” as a a profoundly spiritual friend put it, this question brings to mind the work of J.D. Salinger. Salinger came back to the United States after fighting in World War II, enduring one of its bloodiest battles apparently. And yet the Glass family stories and The Catcher in the Rye never speak directly to almost any of that. To me, there is something so brave and effective about art that knows how to talk around rather than about things.
All that is dark and near hopeless in this time of populist leadership around the globe, how corporate greed at the highest levels is at the root of our most awful sins (namely the rapid destruction of the earth for the blind pursuit of profit) all that must inform any living artists’ work I believe. However, I personally never want to speak to that directly. Not in my fiction. Not the fiction I write nor most of the fiction I choose to read. We have essays, lectures, news for that. I don’t mean that all storytelling have no connection to politics. It’s how they approach the subject … I want my own writing to be informed by these turbulent and virulent times, but I want this reality to serve as the undercurrent to my work rather than become the work itself.
ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?
JM: Solace. If readers can take a modicum of solace from it, and hopefully something amusing too. Above all else I strive to write stories that make others feel less alone. If this story even begins to have that kind of impact, that would be great.
ORP: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your relationship to art and writing, either in the creation of it or the consumption of it?
JM: In terms of consumption, the pandemic has forced me to better balance my reading. I find now that whilst reading a deeper, say Rachel Cusk-like bit of literary fiction it’s critical I also have something rather light and often travel-oriented in the non-fiction department. Married to a Japanese woman (and having lived in the Land of the Rising Sun for the better part of a decade), we go back every other year to Japan to see my wife’s family and friends. I find I’m missing that place something fierce, so reading a lot of Japanese literature or literature about Japan. If I can recommend Pico Iyer’s The Lady and the Monk. Part book about Japan, part love story. All beautifully written.
Not surprisingly I’m also writing a travel memoir piece about a trip to Costa Rica, for if I cannot go there for a while, I would at least like to go back there in my mind.
ORP: If you could choose one writer or artist, living or dead, as a best friend or mentor, who would it be? Why?
JM: I would select as my mentor the Japanese novelist and marathon runner, Haruki Murakami. While I am no longer as obsessed with him as I was through my 20s and 30s, I find I am still keenly inspired by the lightness of touch he brings to writing that still manages to have some real measure of gravitas and meaning. Murakami espouses balance and harmony in his fiction as he detailed in his first talk at the New Yorker Festival almost ten years ago (a talk I flew to attend because I was that big of a fan/nerd). The deft touch he brings to masterworks like Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart or Kafka on the Shore are testament to the humour, whimsy, sexiness, fun but also dark and penetrating insight the great author brings to light on Japan, the Japanese and of course the human condition at large. If I could emulate even a fraction of that in my own work I would be pleased indeed.
ORP: What do you think is the most essential advice that most writers and artists ignore?
JM: Start the story closer to the climax. I’ve been learning this one for over 10,000 hours and counting!
