Interviews
A Conversation with Justin Hocking, Author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld
From the title of your memoir, it's clear that Moby-Dick is a personal obsession. What is it about the book that fascinates you so much?
My true obsession began after discovering a critical comparison of Moby-Dick with psychologist Carl Jung's concept of the "nekyia," or "night sea journey." Another term for this is the "dark night of the soul." Moby-Dick is ultimately a very dark and tragic journey, but the main character, Ishmael, emerges as the lone survivor—he is basically reborn from the wreckage. That particular image—and the idea of Moby-Dick as an archetypal guidebook for surviving life's dark transitions and traumas—really stuck with me. My obsession became much more visceral and immediate in the aftermath of a traumatic robbery incident in 2006. I was living in New York City at the time, and started spending more and more time surfing out at Rockaway Beach, taking some dangerous risks, paddling out by myself way past sunset. I was in a precarious emotional state and making reckless decisions, which, as I learned, can have serious repercussions when you're dealing with a force as powerful as the ocean. Looking back, I realize I was in the midst of my own night sea journey. I had lost my life's narrative, to paraphrase Joan Didion in The White Album. So, more than just an obsession, Moby-Dick was like a narrative life raft for me during that period.
Beyond the personal, I love that Moby-Dick speaks to us on so many levels: political, environmental, metaphysical, philosophical, etc. Melville wrote it as the country was careening toward civil war. As scholar Nathanial Philbrick claims, Moby-Dick is an important book to consider as we strive to live up to the ideals set forth in our constitution, especially in the face of any number of looming catastrophes. Ahab and his crew on the Pequod represent what Ishmael calls "the all-grasping west;" they set sail at the beginning of a new era of corporate exploitation, when the concept of the sacred was superseded by an endless quest for resource extraction. Whaling was primarily about oil; whale oil lit the world and greased the gears of the industrial revolution. It was the original "Big Oil" industry. I felt that we missed many of Moby-Dick's important lessons about hubris and its consequences during the Iraq war. We continue to miss them now, as we consider completing the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast, and as millions of tons of plastics—definitely a petroleum product—poison the sea. We're in the belly of oil, and Moby-Dick has something to teach us about our predicament.
What inspired the unique structure of your book?
The structure was inspired partly by my admiration for poetry and the lyric essay. From these genres I've come to appreciate narrative that's filled with gaps. Many poetry collections are staged in cycles—a slow accrual of resonating images and voices and stories—rather than in a strictly linear way, and I tried to replicate this to a certain degree in memoir form.
I was also inspired by an idea that Jonathan Lethem discusses in The Ecstasy Of Influence, which is that, rather than an "emptying out" process, finding one's voice as a writer is more about fully embracing and acknowledging multiple sources of influence and inspiration. David Shields is another big proponent of literary collage and hip hop-inspired "sampling" that I find pretty thrilling. So, of course, the central influence for The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld was Moby-Dick. I tried not to simply ape Melville, but I did allow myself to feel liberated by what I found in Moby-Dick, which is that all things are admissible within the bounds of a single book: memoir, history, literary criticism, environmental writing, sports/adventure writing, humor, taxonomy and listing, stagecraft, etc. Moby-Dick is such an epic, polyphonic masterpiece, and it was exciting to let myself just riff off a classic work, employing multiple voices and modalities and digressions. The structure of Moby-Dick is comprised of a series of "dives" and "breaches": at times it dives deeply into the human soul, while other times it breaches the surface and expands infinitely outward, to expound on the intricacies of the whaling industry, the anatomy of the whale, cosmology, even a kind of early food writing in the "Chowder" chapter. So, interspersed with dives into my own deeply personal story, I also tried to expand way beyond myself by incorporating stories about my seafaring uncle, the history of surfing, ocean ecology, Jean Michel Basquiat's own appropriations of Melville's work, etc. I didn't want to tell a straightforward, linear story; I wanted to "tell it slant," so to speak. And I wanted it to be about much more than just myself, although my "nekyia" is what I hope gives the narrative its larger emotional arc.
What was it like learning to surf while you were living in NYC? Is there a large surfing community in the NYC area? What was it like to surf alongside skateboarding legend Andy Kessler?
I grew up in Colorado and California, and spent summers in Oregon during my twenties, so moving to New York City at age thirty was a shock to the system. I will always have a fierce love for that city, but the lack of open space induced a real sense of claustrophobia, especially at first. So discovering a place like Rockaway Beach, in Queens, was a kind of revelation. Just the fact that a designated surfing beach exists within New York City limits—and that it's accessible by subway—is still amazing to me. It was the one place in the city where I felt like I could breath, and where I could grasp a literal and metaphorical horizon. The waves are fairly manageable on a typical summer day, so it was a good place to learn. And the Rockaway surf community is intriguingly diverse—it's not unusual to find Wall Street executives trading waves with kids from the projects.
I struggled as a writer in New York; there were times when I felt like the city was stripping me of everything—money, self-confidence. But now, having had some time and distance, I realize how many gifts New York gave me. One of the biggest was meeting Andy Kessler. Andy started skateboarding back in the 70s, before I was even born; he was a true east coast legend, on par with Jay Adams and the Dogtown crew in L.A. Given his background, he had a pretty raw, street-sharpened personality. But he was also one of the most purely authentic and generous people I've ever met. I spent quite a few weekends surfing with him out at Montauk, a place both of us loved, and the place where he eventually passed away, in 2009. Those surf sessions with Andy were honestly some of the best times of my life. The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld is dedicated to him.
We've just passed the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the Far Rockaway region that features so prominently in Great Floodgates. Have you been back to the region post-Sandy? How do you feel the hurricane impacted that region's surfing community in particular?
The last time I visited Rockaway was just a few months before Sandy. So much new construction and development was happening then. I wasn't able to make it back after the hurricane, although I did try to help with fundraising efforts via an article on The Rumpus. I don't think the storm had much of an impact on the surfing community, other than some surfers whose homes were flooded, which is no small thing. But you have to understand that Far Rockaway is lined with dozens and dozens of large housing projects and low-income buildings. Thousands of vulnerable people live there; they were by far the most affected. Surfers did play a small but significant part in the recovery—the New York City chapter of the Surfrider Foundation was highly involved. There was also the story of a young surfer named Dylan Smith, who, on the night of the storm, helped rescue six people using an improvised rope bridge and his surfboard.
How does your pursuit of extreme sports like surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding affect your writing?
On the most basic level, skating and surfing are deeply physical pursuits that keep me located in my body. I'm definitely captivated by intellectual lines of inquiry, but as a writer who also surfs and skates, I only have so much patience for the purely cerebral. I'm always trying to bring things back to the body—to descriptions of sensory and kinetic experience, motion and flow, concrete and skin.
On the other hand, I find that the term "extreme," connotes a form of adrenaline seeking. And to be honest, I don't really like adrenaline. When I show up at a place like Burnside skatepark or a new surf break, my initial reaction is often one of pretty deep discomfort and fear. Some people enjoy that, but my body doesn't process it very well—it's almost like I have an adrenaline allergy. So the ritual actions of skating and surfing are a way for me to mitigate that anxiety, to move through the initial adrenalin rush, and hopefully to reach something more sustaining and centered—a peak flow experience where you have a sense of being out of time, deeply focused and connected. I generally score pretty low on the bravado scale, but moving through this process over and over helped me build the courage to become a writer, which, when you think about it, is just about as perilous a choice as dropping in to a thirteen-foot bowl or paddling out in overhead waves. You put yourself at considerable emotional and financial risk, and there's absolutely no guarantee you'll make it. My fellow skater/writer Bret Anthony Johnston puts it this way: learning a single skate trick involves literally hundreds of failed attempts and a lot of time on the hard cement; the writing process requires a similar kind of obsessive persistence and willingness to pay some painful dues.
But I don't mean to paint a gloomy picture of these activities I love. The truth is that there's so much joy in all of them; that's what keeps us coming back. Beyond the fear factor, skateboarding and surfing are purely creative pursuits that, when practiced well, feel more like improvisational art forms than organized sports. There are generally no teams competing against one another, but there are strong and lasting communities. Especially with surfing, there's a kind of alchemical bonding process that happens between friends out in the ocean. Similarly, the process of writing Wonderworld, and then the opportunity to work and connect with the amazing community at Graywolf Press, has been one of the best experiences of my professional life.
Can you tell us some about the Independent Publishing Resource Center, which you head?
The IPRC is a magical place; I'm so honored to have been a part of it for nearly a decade now. The Center's mission is to empower individuals to publish their own creative work by providing them with access to printing equipment, technology, education and resources. We have a huge new physical location in Portland, Oregon, with nearly 4,000 square feet of public workspace, including a traditional letterpress studio, a screenprinting studio, a computer lab with five new iMacs, photocopiers, two classrooms, and one of the nation's largest zine and small press libraries. Anyone is welcome to join the Center and our vibrant community of writers, self-publishers, comics artists, and zinesters. The publishing industry is changing so rapidly, and the IPRC is at the forefront of an increasing intersection of visual art, books arts, and graphic design with literary pursuits. Every day I see members creating exquisite, handcrafted books, zines and comics; more than just publications, they're true art objects. I'm also excited to see quite a bit of cross-pollination of traditional and digital publishing, thanks to the IPRC's regular e-book workshops and Adobe software.
The aspect of the IPRC that's closest to my heart is our yearlong Certificate Program in Creative Writing and Independent Publishing, which I co-founded five years ago with the talented writer A.M. O'Malley. The Certificate Program is an inexpensive alternative to a traditional MFA; we offer a unique combination of graduate-level writing workshops with hands-on publishing and printing intensives, with optional college credit available via the University of Oregon. To serve people outside of Portland, we're also launching a low-residency version of the Certificate Program in late summer 2014; more information is available at iprc.org.
Other than Moby-Dick, what are some of your favorite books that inspired you to write?
One of my major inspirational and aesthetic touchstones was Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. I'm attracted to writers who have themselves plunged into the metaphorical abyss, then emerged humbled but whole, and who can artfully recreate the experience in a way that brings the reader in very close, but also provides a little respectful breathing room. I'm thinking here of Lit by Mary Karr, Wild by Cheryl Strayed [Winner of the 2012 Discover Award (nonfiction). -Ed], Jesus' Son by Dennis Johnson, The Blessing by Gregory Orr, Half a Life by Darrin Strauss, The Aderall Diaries by Stephen Elliot, Oh the Glory of it All by Sean Wilsey. I also love adventure and wilderness books: Caught Inside by Daniel Duane; Into the Wild and Into Thin Air by Krakauer. And anything by Rebecca Solnit.
Who have you discovered lately?
I'm grateful to live in Portland, where there are so many excellent writers, and where the scene feels highly accessible and tight knit. I just read Kevin Sampsell's gift of an essay, "I'm Jumping Off the Bridge," from Salon.com, now anthologized in The Best American Essays 2013. I'm inspired by my coworker A.M. O'Malley's cross-genre experimentation; she's working on a hybrid memoir that's definitely one to watch for. I'm equally enthusiastic about Aaron Gilbreath's book-in-progress about the topic of crowding. And many of our current and former IPRC Certificate Program students are doing amazing work. While finishing te Program, the writer Michael Heald launched a small but ambitious company called Perfect Day Publishing, and later published a very smart and vulnerable collection of essays entitled Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension.
