An excerpt from Laird Hunt’s Ray of the Star (Coffeehouse Press) appears in the first issue of The Collagist, published August 15, 2009. He the author of a book of short stories, mock parables and histories, The Paris Stories (2000), from Smokeproof Press, and three novels, The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003), and The Exquisite (2006), all from Coffee House Press.

Here, he speaks to The Collagist about the inspiration for Ray of the Star, as well as the construction of “memory palaces,” the possibilities of constraint-based writing, and how to fight the “endless, miasmic affair” of novel writing.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for Ray of the Star? What was on your mind while you were writing this novel?

In her recent novella, TOAF, Renee Gladman tracks her thoughts, albeit imperfectly, perhaps unfaithfully, over the weeks and months she spent in writing a previous work. I’d love to be able to do something like that: really try to sort out, a couple of years later, what was on my mind and what my mind was like, when I was writing Ray, and find some way to spin fictional gold from it, but that will have to wait for another occasion. So, in short: the Catalan city of Barcelona generally and the woozy-making buildings of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi particularly; living statues; chapter-length sentences à la Durrenmatt’s The Assignment; and the gut-wrenching fears that can sneak up on you when you are a new parent, esp. one with a tendency to dream up bad dreams.

2. At the past AWP conference, you gave a paper as part of a panel on “Truth and Consequences in Non-Fiction,” that, frankly, was one of the best things I’ve heard or read all year. In that same paper, you also said that the characters you write “tend to be engaged, often obsessively, with in the construction of memory palaces. These palaces are not palaces at all. They are crumbly things. They contain great quantities of bric a brac… My protagonists tend to be very bad at system but very good at accumulation… they are tasked with dealing with aftermath: the rubble fields of time and memory.” What is it about these “memory palaces” that makes them so well suited to depicting the contemporary mind?

I can’t remember just this moment what war-ravaged African country was in question, but when I worked at the UN I read a report about that country’s formerly excellent now almost completely useless network of roadways. The roads had been bombed to bits, swallowed by jungle, obstructed by semi-permanent road blocks or let go to ruin. Another report that affected me greatly was on the presence, in what seemed innumerable former war zones, of innumerable land mines, which regularly killed or maimed humans, often children, and animals. These two reports (out of so many that dealt with human made disaster and consequence), in conjunction with a third about global lack of access to the so-called world wide web, impacted greatly on the way I thought about how minds go about their mysterious bricolage of consciousness.  We can privilege the gaps, the no-go zones, the areas where death and its metonyms lurk, but there is also the gleaming, smoking, steaming rubble, as well as the bright bands of connection, which are quite undeniable…  I think we deal with both, are obliged to deal with both, when we try to take stock of the contemporary mind.

3. In that same paper, you talked about how constraint-based writers “reify their belief… that devilish complexity in writing is the most appropriate way to attend to the devilish complexity of life. Life is a tricky, highly fraught affair. Sadness abounds.” Now, after having read Ray of the Star, I can’t help but go back to that paper, and to use it to read into your novel’s structure: as far as I can tell, the entire novel is written in sections which, while often spanning several pages, are each a single sentence long. What comes first for you: Is it the structure that suggests the character, or the character who suggests the structure?

Hard to say. The narrator and the novel’s main character (Harry) developed as the novel did. Some of the secondary characters and the city the action takes place in were sort of there as image units from the start, but nothing was terribly concrete, all of it was a haze. What is it that gets anything started?  Perec laid out all his constraints and word sets and other wizardry before writing Life: A User’s Manual, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he started with them. I just don’t know. I’m fairly certain I wanted to write a novel dealing with the aftermath of the worst loss before I came up with/came across the mechanism of the long sentences, but I can’t quite remember now. The Impossibly started with a child’s stapler. The Exquisite with the desire to explore the identity of the character at the center of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson. Indiana, Indiana dealt with, at least initially, nothing much more than loneliness in the face of a long winter’s night. I’m trying to look for trends here but don’t quite see them. Each book waged a long war on some set of problems that only slowly revealed themselves as I wrote. I suspect they all bear the traces of this fight.

4. What’s the hardest part of writing a novel in this way? What are the advantages?

Ha!  I’ve just admitted to not being sure there was any particular way of it – so it would be something for me to now speak to its pros and cons. Here’s the thing: writing novels for me, even ones written relatively quickly, is an endless, miasmic affair. The only way I’ve been able to keep myself feeling somewhat fresh in the face of so many hundreds of hours of work spread out across the years is to work on more than one project at a time, or rather to move from one project to the next until they slowly move toward something I can call done. Generally these projects have quite different characteristics. While I was working on Ray I started a long historical novel set in New York and Colorado in the 20s and 30s and a short historical novel set largely in antebellum Kentucky. Indiana, Indiana, The Impossibly and The Exquisite were all “in play” for longer than I care to remember. Perhaps then they are all one book. One giant chimera of a chimera. I shudder to think of it this way.

5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

So, yes, the Colorado and the Kentucky books. They are both fairly close to feeling presentable. I have been flipping back and forth between them a fair amount this summer as I waited for Ray to come out. I’m not sure just before and just after a book comes out is the best time for me to be trying to deal seriously with the problems of other projects, but I seem to be under the sway of what Blanchot calls the “tyrannical prehension” – I can’t stop my fingers from moving toward the keyboard. Maybe someone ought to take said keyboard away from me.

6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

I very much enjoyed Forrest Gander’s As A Friend; am getting great pleasure out of reading Donald Breckenridge’s You Are Here; am looking forward to reading Joanna Ruocco’s The Mothering Coven; loved John Ehle’s The Landbreakers; quite enjoyed (but not so much as, say, Wyatt Mason who raved about it in the New York Times) Roberto Bolaño’s The Skating Rink; found fabulous Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sydney Poitier; really dug The Men by Lisa Robertson; and am looking forward to teaching Joanna Howard’s On the Winding Stair and Brian Evenson’s Fugue State this term.