Carleton alumnus Jeremy Hanson-Finger, who graduated with a master’s in English in 2010, is releasing his first novel Death and the Intern in April. The Charlatan sat down with him to talk about his book, Carleton’s influence on him, and his advice for aspiring writers.
The Charlatan (TC): What is your fondest memory from your time as a Carleton student?
Jeremy Hanson-Finger (JHF): I would probably say attending the open-mic events of the Carleton English department.
TC: Do you think that your time at Carleton had a significant impact on your development as a writer?
JHF: Definitely. I took a poetry class in second year with Armand Ruffo and met a couple of people who were involved in that community. I hadn’t really pursued writing in first year, though I had been really involved in high school. That got me back into it. Just realizing there was this community and having the monthly open-mic events, I felt a pressure to produce something each month and I slowly got to know more and more people in the community through that.
TC: Can you tell us a little bit about your novel Death and the Intern coming out in April?
JHF: Sure. The premise is basically about a med student intern who’s at the Ottawa Civic Hospital for two weeks on a placement in anesthesiology, and he has a patient die during an operation and becomes convinced that it wasn’t his fault and it was part of an overarching conspiracy. So it’s kind of a combination of a hospital drama, a detective novel, a coming-of-age story, and black comedy.
TC: What inspired you to write this book?
JHF: It was actually inspired by one of my childhood best friends who had a placement as a med student intern, and told me about these two different anesthesia philosophies that the department was really divided over. It takes about four or five different drugs to do all the things to someone’s body [and] put them to sleep for an operation. One school of thought is to give one drug per injection and the other school of thought is to mix everything together in one. I kind of ran with that—that there was this animosity between these two groups.
TC: What were some of the challenges you’ve faced as a writer and how did you overcome them?
JHF: Well, I did apply to do an [Masters of Fine Arts] in creative writing at several different schools after my undergrad degree. I got waitlisted at [University of British Columbia] and rejected everywhere else. That was a little bit demoralizing . . . But in the end, something Rick Taylor, a creative writing prof at Carleton, said to my friend, actually really made me feel better. What he said to her was that a lot of writing programs want people who haven’t figured out what they’re doing yet, to mold them and teach them in their style. He told her that I already had my style figured out and that I could just go and do it. Hearing that from her second-hand was really nice, so I just continued to write after that, and went back and did my master’s. I didn’t do a whole lot of creative writing that year because I was working on my thesis, but following that I went back to it.
TC: What advice would you give your younger self as a Carleton student?
JHF: Probably spend more time outside of the Carleton community. There’s no reason to just be stuck in the university writing community. You can just go out and try and take part in the larger Canadian literary community.
TC: What advice would you have for aspiring writers?
JHF: The best advice that I ever got was the idea that writing is like any other skill. You may have some people to whom it comes a little bit easier than others for various reasons but, ultimately, it’s something that you have to practice. There’s no shame in turning out bad stories and poems because you’re just going to get better as you keep practicing and as you keep reading more . . . My advice is basically if you want to be a writer, don’t be afraid of writing badly. The woman who wrote A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan, said in an interview when asked how she dealt with writer’s block, “I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.” I really agree with that.
TC: What are your future goals for your writing career?
JHF: I’m not really sure about my career as a whole. The next thing I want to do is write near-future science fiction. I’m really interested in mixing genres and I’ve been watching and reading a lot of science-fiction lately and this world, this year especially, has been so surreal and is going to get even more nuts. So, I think it’s a good time to be imagining the near future. I have a full-time job, and I like having that balance—I don’t mind that it’s probably going to take me another five years to write my next book . . . Writing is also very lonely when that’s the main thing that you do.
– Photo is provided.
