An Interview With Bryan Hurt: Examining the Space of the Page

A flattering photo of Bryan Hurt.

Bryan Hurt, the 2014 winner of the Starcherone Prize for innovative fiction, is an up and coming author who has been published in several journals including Kenyon Review, The American Reader, and Tin House. Bryan has also narrowly avoided winning several other awards—he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was named a finalist for the Calvino Prize.  His first book, Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France, is slated for publication next year. 

Bryan currently teaches at Colorado College, and I had the privilege of taking a class with him.  After the class ended, the two of us sat down and discussed his unique prose, whether or not creative writing can be taught, his relation to his characters, and more.




If you would like to listen to the interview in its entirety, check out the Youtube video below. Otherwise, feel free to read the transcribed highlights.

It's interesting that you won an award for innovative fiction—after reading The Fourth Man and The Sadness of Tycho Brahe's Moose, I noticed some of your stories blur the lines between prose and poetry.  Is this something you're looking to explore?

I am not a poet, nor would I ever claim to be a poet, though I think it's nice you would label me as such.  In those stories, I'm more interested in exploring the verticality of the page.  Prose is typically a very horizontal-looking type of endeavor.  We write sentences all across the page—across, across, across. That affects how we read the piece; it affects the speed with which we read and it affects the emphasis we put on individual lines.

And so, in those pieces, I was just playing around with what if instead of making it horizontal, I changed how it looked and felt and read by making it vertical. 



One thing I like about your prose is that it feels very clean and, at times, almost idiosyncratic.  Have you worked on deliberately developing your prose in this direction?

When I was in graduate school, I had a big crisis because I felt like I was creating stories that were Bryan Hurt attempting to write other people's stories. My crisis was that I felt like I needed to have a voice.  So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Bryan Hurt's voice was.  Listen to me, talking in the third person...but I was just trying to figure out what my voice was by experimenting a lot with voice. 

I'm the kind of writer who needs to hear a voice before I have a story.  So a lot of times I need a first line—or a line that rings true to me in whatever arbitrary way [that is]—or nothing else follows. 

From The Sadness of Tycho Brahe's Moose

But to answer your question, yes.  I thought very deliberately and for a long time about what I might sound like and how I might go about sounding that way. 





My next question is one that gets posed to writers with alarming frequency, really, but I'm nonetheless interested in your response.  What is your relation to your characters?  I'm most interested in your connection to the protagonist of My Other Car Drives Itself—he’s a seemingly apathetic engineer who cheats on his wife.

The question, in a sense, is "am I writing about myself?"  Yes, absolutely.  Every character is me and every parent is my parents—no, no, no.  I think we are always going to enter into the story with our experiences, our obsessions and our concerns. These things always enter the story whether we intend them to or not.

In My Other Car Drives Itself, it's about a Google engineer who is on the chase team that follows around self-driving cars.  He picks up the pieces when these cars eventually crash themselves. What I was deliberately thinking about in that story was the metaphor of a character who is happy to be driven around, who is happy not taking control of his life. He is happy to follow a self-driving car, as it were, which is leading him wherever it might go.  And, inevitably, the car goes in bad directions and crashes itself.  The affair in that story, as I recall, is not initiated by him.  He's not a character with a whole lot of agency—he's a character who feels his life is out of control.

From My Other Car Drives Itself

But is he me?  No.  Do parts of me slip onto the page?  Absolutely, and I like that blurriness.  I like playing with that blurriness, and if you think it's me, well, that's cool.



Like many writers, you supplement your income by teaching creative writing.  Do you believe that writing can be taught?

Yes, absolutely. I have a friend who doesn't like teaching creative writing at all. It's not that she doesn't think it can't be taught, but rather she thinks it's a tremendous responsibility to teach it to people.  She doesn't particularly want to carry the weight of that responsibility.  

I think it's incredibly fun.  What we teach in the creative writing classroom—well, you encounter students of different abilities and different talent levels all the time.  You can't teach talent, obviously, and some students are going to be more talented than other students and that's all fine and good.

But you can teach this thing we call 'craft.'  You can teach students to be better readers, and I think you can teach students to become more diligent workers and to sort of push themselves through their own sloth or laziness in order to continue writing every day.

One last question: what advice would you give to a young writer starting out in today's hyper-competitive world?

That's a good question. I've heard many answers to this and I've gotten plenty of advice about this. I think it's good advice to say that, if you're serious about this, write every day and make this into a habit.  It doesn't particularly matter how much you do it every day,  so much as you sit down and build the time [to write.]  

That's all well and good if you can afford the time and luxury.  What's important, though, when you sit down to write—whether or not you're doing it every day—is that you're only working on what you want to work on.  You have no obligations except to your own pleasure and your own interests.

Write what you want, all the time.  And write only what you want. 

If you are interested in following Bryan, feel free to check out his Twitter.

For more interviews:

Follow @LiteraryGaming