Mykle Hansen – Famous Interview With Famous Author Mykle Hansen
Mykle Hansen is the author of the books Eyeheart Everything, Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! Rampaging Fuckers… and The Cannibals Guide to Ethical Living. His latest book is the short story collection, Hooray For Death! His writing is as funny as his book titles are crazy. A member of the bizarro genre, Mykle’s books stand alone to anyone with a good sense of humor. Thanks Mykle, for joining me.
Mykle’s books can be found on Amazon UK here and Amazon US here
1.) You have recently released your latest book, a short story collection titled Hooray For Death! You have released a short story collection before, Eyeheart Everything. Do you feel there is an issue about releasing a short story collection where using the same voice or style of writing too often will lead the audience to get bored?
Dude, I feel your pain! I have read collected shorts by brilliant writers — Wells Tower, Joy Williams, Sam Lipsyte, George Saunders — that read like watching a magician repeat a trick too many times. Those stories were not written to be read one after the other. Frankly those authors did repeat themselves a bit too often and the anthologies are where they got caught doing that. Myself, I try to avoid repetition. I’m always wanting to write a different story from my last one, and to reach outside of whatever is my “style”. I hope that makes a banquet of my stories easier to digest. My editor friend Bradley Sands and I put a lot of thought into how to make this new collection bigger than the sum of its parts, which stories to include and exclude and how to order them to give the book flow and momentum and meaning. Fortunately, Death is a bottomless theme. I’ll probably keep on writing about it until I meet it personally.
I’m a liberal; we live for Schadenfreude.
It isn’t easy to laugh at Death, but what other options do we have, really? Ignoring Death is easy when you’re younger, but the older you get the more Death taps your shoulder and clears his throat. To stare down Death is hard, because Death never blinks. Urinating on Death sounds promising but it’s unclear how you would actually do that. I suggest we laugh at Death while we can — not because Death is all that funny, but because Death hates laughter! When we chortle, Death sneers. Laughter gives us courage and takes the edge off oblivion. And five minutes of solid laughter is good cardio; combined with Pilates and a diet rich in antioxidants, it’s sure to extend your life by at least a month.
4.) Your novels are often quite short in length. Why did you choose to release Rampaging Fuckers Of Everything On The Crazy Shitting Planet Of The Vomit Atmosphere as a collection of three novels rather than releasing them separately?
I think they fit together nicely. They share the themes of hubris, exploitation and enormous body parts. They’re also the first three consciously Bizarro stories I wrote, and they celebrated my new working relationship with Eraserhead. Plus … okay, I admit it, I was trying to impress readers with my thickness. I used to believe that readers are turned on by really thick books. I’ve since learned that it’s not the size of the book that matters, but the size of the author’s penis. Which is quite large by the way. In fact, it is infinite.
The usual advice: read tons of great stuff. Dig deep into funny writers, read them analytically, imitate them to learn from them. Learn to tell a joke. But even more importantly: beware of the soul-deadening effects of glibness and sarcasm! It’s possible to be so funny that you become numb to other emotions.
Books and e-readers are equally good for whacking a bear on the snout. There’s room in the world for both. I don’t read on the Kindle, but I get what people like about it. And it’s hard to argue with the money Amazon sticks in my bank account every month. But printed books are an amazing, highly-evolved technology. They have certain clear advantages that are not going away. They’re also beautiful artifacts, and in an era where more and more of our tactile and interpersonal experiences are being replaced with taps and clicks, there is something really delicious and liberating about carrying around a book, cracking the spine, flipping through its pages, underlining passages, spilling coffee on it, dropping it on your foot, accidentally setting fire to it while smoking in bed … our weightless, soundless texts need all the physicality they can get, I think.
I feel tingly about it, and slightly moist. The scene has grown and grown. We’ve welcomed a lot of young, interesting weirdos into the fold. On bookstore shelves and in the interwebs, Bizarro is thriving like a fungus. This year, Eraserhead Press is winning harder than a six-pack of Charlie Sheens! But a good publisher only publishes what they know how to sell, and not everything I write is Bizarro. For instance, I’m dying to do a certain pop-up book — a racy, silly one for parents, but with all the beautiful flaps and folds and die-cut moving parts of a real 3D book. Only a few publishers in the world can even figure out how to print those. So I’m asking around, trying to get connected to publishers who might be interested. And that’s easier to do with a book agent, so I’m investigating agents. And it’s hard to get an agent without a 3-piece Armani suit, so I’m trying those on. It’s a complex process.
8.) Your novel collection, Rampaging Fuckers of Everything On The Crazy Shitting Planet Of The Vomit Atmosphere has a pretty crazy title. Did you worry that you would alienate potential sales with that title, and what was the story behind it?
The title is lifted directly from a song by Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, one of my favorite bands ever, from their album “I Hope It Lands.” From the moment I first read that title I wanted to see it on a book. I knew some people would recoil but others would have to laugh. The title alone has driven a lot of sales. It was featured on a list of Books With Strange Titles that made the rounds on the Internet last year.
The swearing in the title has provoked a lot of reactions, but mostly positive ones. Curiously, Amazon.com sells the book under its un-censored title but censors any attempt to include that title in a book review! There are probably some booksellers out there who find it inappropriate for their stores, and that’s entirely their decision. But for better or worse 2011 was the year that saw the word “fuck” enter the top forty and the title of a best-selling children’s book. Nobody’s afraid of that word any more. I almost want to throw a funeral for “fuck” now. It used to be such a bad-ass. Look what it’s been reduced to.
Funny you should ask … I’ve recently had some interesting conversations with Chicago’s RoShamBo Theater about adapting The Cannibal’s Guide to the stage. it could be brilliant; the book is basically a monologue, but you’re always getting little clues and glimpses of other nearby characters. Michael A. Rose, the director of RoShamBo, has some cool ideas for staging that. There’s a lot to figure out, of course, but I’m excited about the possibilities.
I’d also like to see HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! as a gem sweater on an old lady with really huge glasses.
I think you have hit the comedic nail on the ironic head there, Jay. Famous Author Mykle Hansen began as a joke on a name-tag at a convention, but has now become the official public persona of Neurotic Introvert Mykle Hansen. It’s the identity I wear when it’s time to interest the world in whatever madness I’ve been up to lately. As an independent small-press author and artist, I have to promote my own work. I’ve learned that whining and pleading are not good sales strategies — though they have done wonders in my personal life. Instead, I have FAMH. He’s like an amusing carnival barker, luring readers toward the sideshow in my brain. I hope he’s not too annoying. He only wants to freak you out. Meanwhile, I have a bunch of projects on the table but I don’t want to promise them in advance of finishing them; that just seems to jinx things. And it’s the Chrismas season, so I’m focused on shopping and overthrowing fascism until January.
Great interview. That was fun.