emily nemens, kerouac resident

In the November 24, 2005 issue of Time Out New York, an article entitled "Feast for the eyes" talked about new art installations in the city. Seven artists were mentioned, including Picasso, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Matthew Barney and Emily Nemens. Emily was a friend of a friend who started coming to our weekly soccer games in McCarren Park about a year ago. We became fast friends and I soon became privy to tales of her art shows, concerts, and book readings. Over the summer I read about half of a draft of Blue Eyed Apples, her novel about two 20-somethings, and her graphic novel, A Long Walk Home, about the bombings in Madrid. Four months later she sent out a mass e-mail saying that she would be living in Florida for three months, the latest recipient of The Kerouac Residency. She will live rent-free in the Orlando home of Jack Kerouac where he wrote parts of The Dharma Bums. I spoke to Emily last Thursday night, a week into her stay, about some pretty lofty things - the 50th Anniversary of On the Road, living and writing in Orlando, and whether or not she is a polymath. How long have you been in Orlando? I arrived last Wednesday, so 5 or 6 days. What is the house like? I would call it bungalow-esque. It's from the 50s, if not earlier. It was a duplex when Jack Kerouac lived here. You enter in the front and there's a kitchen and a bathroom and a bedroom, which is where I am sleeping. Then in the back there's a separate entrance where there is a big workroom and a small bathroom and a small bedroom, which is where Jack and his mom lived. How did you hear about the program? I was looking for a residency through NYFA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, which has a really big searchable database of resources. What did you use as a writing sample? I used the first chapter of my novel, which has yet to be published. Is it going to be published? I'm workin on it. Will you publish it? Were you a big fan of Jack Kerouac? I like him. I hadn't read anything more than On the Road, in all honesty, but I liked that book a whole lot. I have since read The Dharma Bums, since he wrote that when living here. But I like On the Road more. What about On the Road do you like? When I first read On the Road, it opened my eyes to so much: this youth culture, this American landscape, this remarkable style of literature. Now I see it more as a cultural icon and reference point; I've seen a lot of those places, know a lot of people like that, read other things that pushed literature in new directions. But this one book did so much of that for millions of people, really opened America's eyes, helped the country come of age. What if it were The Dean Koontz Project or the Dan Brown Project, would you have applied? Yeah, I would have. Actually, Bob Seger also used to live here, so I guess there was a big debate about whether or not there'd be the Jack Kerouac House or the Bob Seger House. But mostly I was looking for a way to get out of New York City and write for a while. What do you think of Orlando? Is it a good place to live if you want to stay in and concentrate on writing? It's a good town to concentrate on writing in. I've gone out once, on Friday, with a kid I travelled with once. It was a little like an overgrown frat party. - none of us were in love with it, but it's also the place where people go, begrudgingly. It's also a very car-centric city, and I don't have a car. 5 blocks is a long way to walk here. So it's a good place to buckle down. I've been here less than a week and I'm still working out the schedule. I've been getting up at 7 or 7:30 - I like writing in the morning. In Brooklyn I'd get up at 5:30 or 6 and write for 3 hours before work if I had a good idea. I'm trying to cope with the mid-afternoon doldrums, when you've been working but the day's not over yet - either I'll settle down or I'll buy myself a small trampoline. What are you working on? Right now I'm trying to get some illustrations out the door. I'm collaborating with Harvey Pekar - which is wild and crazy. A professor of mine edits a lot of graphic novel anthologies and Harvey Pekar was looking for someone to illustrate a script for an anthology of a bunch of stuff by Studs Terkel. You're Ryan Hagen's wet dream right now. Hi Ryan! Yeah, it is random and fun. The drawing style isn't exactly my scene or come particularly naturally to me, but with due diligence, it'll look the way comic books are supposed to look. I did the drawings in New York but there's a million hours of Photoshop work at the end, retouching the scans. So in addition to the Pekar stuff, I also want to write some short stories. What's the expectation for you down there? Do they know you're going to be painting? I don't know that they know about the art stuff, but I don't see why it would bother them. Especially if I'm like, "it's a graphic novel...." But it really is a very open residency. I came in saying to them, "I wrote this book and I really want to write more but I can't think hard enough in New York." I have to give a reading at the end, that's my only obligation. What's it going to be like? I think it's going to be wine and cheese-y, with a lot of people from the community, but I'm not sure. The last woman that was here kind of took Orlando by storm; she just sold her book and is starting the Columbia MFA program now, so she had her shit together in a way I can only aspire to. Using her as a model of what the residency is like would be problematic for me. But then again, I could. What are your short stories going to be about? I have an idea that they will have the same cast of characters as my novel and tie into the novel in some way. Instead of saying, "I will compose a novel," I like working in a way where things come back around. Novel is done? Maybe near the end of the residency I'll pick it back up but for now I'm really happy with it. So I just need to convince someone with a press of the same. Do you want to give a short synopsis of it? Sure. It's called Blue-Eyed Apples, and it's a coming-of-age story that is set about five or seven years ago. It's about a boy and a girl who grow up together and move across the country and learn how to make buildings and make movies side by side. Have you been focused on the story between the two characters, or is there a big preoccupation with the style? Well I had this idea, and, well I still think it's a good idea, but it's put me into an experimental realm of fiction that's harder to get out there, but the idea that the novel is written as a film. As a painter I really like to talk about art and visual things, so I wanted the narrative to be very visual. So it almost reads like a movie. Has that changed in the past months? The draft I read had parts written as a screenplay. I took out most of the screenplay elements. That's a physical...that's a movie written down, and it's not quite the same effect for the reader. So now it's just written in a very fast paced and intense style. You have a piece of writing on the Kerouac Project website. What's that? That is adapted from a chapter in the novel. I had this idea of the American road and seeing the country, experiencing that as a young man. It's two friends driving to every baseball stadium in the country, one or two a day, over the course of a month in the summer. I really like baseball. They asked for something and it something that is obviously...Kerouac-ian. Is that what the Kerouac people expect from you? What if you wrote, say, a meditative love letter to isolationist stock brokers? Would they ask you for rent? Well no, they're a pretty laid back crew down here. You're talking about travel with regard to writing now, and from what I know of you personally, you talk about travel fairly often. But what you're writing about isn't an undiscovered little cave in Andora with giant green frogs - or the converse, critiquing that kind of thing. You're talking about the flyover zones and stuff that's in front of us. David Foster Wallace wrote a little thing once about how he thinks domestic or familiar travel is endlessly better than foreign travel that is an imposition on places that would be unequivocally better and realer without tourists. Something that always comes back to me is nostalgia. Collective nostalgia and personal nostalgia. My mom is from Nebraska and I've been there, but once my grandmother passed away, I didn't know when I was going to go back to Omaha. On your website you can see the links to your articles from the Brown newspaper, bits of your fiction, your graphic novel, paintings of yours, mentions of your saxophone gigs. Why so many things? I think because I have to. I wish I didn't; I wonder sometimes if it's lack of principle, and if I want to be a writer, why did I bring my saxophone to Florida?, but I like learning how to express myself in different ways and I like putting myself in hard situations in that way. I would have been fine being an English major in college, but I decided that I wanted to learn how to paint, and painting with oils is one of the hardest things I've ever done. So I could have stopped at any point, in learning these different mediums, but I chose not to. I don't know, we're still young so maybe something will get ousted in the next few years, but I hope not. Do you think of yourself as a polymath? Oh, I don't think I've mastered any of those things. I've been fortunate that some things come pretty easy to me, but I also take that to mean I work very hard. The fact that I learned how to play the baritone saxophone doesn't mean that I think a lot of myself for it. I want to learn it better. I think it's just more that I like knowing about the different things out there and having a cache of experiences through them. The traditional graphic novel form doesn't really do it for me. But the idea of putting words and images together is great. I'd love to find a way to put them together that is more synergistic with my practice. When you work in all these different mediums, are you dealing with similar issues, or is it, "I generally paint when I am sad, write when I am inspired" type of thing? Like I said, I really think nostalgia. I keep coming back to being an observer of person. There's a lot of different ways to observe. I'm not a science-fiction writer. I really am trying to capture the human emotions and the beauty in the world around us in my writing. And with painting as well. A lot of times those are fleeting things, that are gone, but I want to find them. My favorite thing to do is to get my saxophone and play a jazz ballad, one of those really old-timey Duke Ellington kind of things. I know there's a lot more music out there and I should be playing different things, but that's what I like to do. I wish I could write adventure stories or play be-bop better, but I'm drawn to the sort of beauty of either sadness or nostalgia or memories. Sadness, but when you say nostalgia, you're trying to get at it in a positive sense, more like Our Town than Winesburg, Ohio? Because I'm an optimistic person, but, well, my graphic novel wasn't particularly optimistic. It was me walking around literally for a year with these images in my head and not knowing how to cope with them; I'd been in this foreign country during this bombing and I didn't know what to do, and it took literally drawing pane for pane all of that confusion and all of those horrible images, it took going through all of that again, and I came up with a coherent work out of that. In that case, you experienced it and a graphic novel was what came from it. Yes. I think even my fiction is an extension of that, taking people or places I've been and re-imagining them. If I meet someone at a coffee shop, what happens when they go home? Or someone tells me a story about their mother and I'll think about that mother six months from now, what it was like for her to grow up. It feels very weird to be our age and be stuck in the past, to be so enamored with old-timey music and wear vintage dresses and to prefer making hand-made books instead of websites. But then again, I'm stuck there. Stuck there as in, your job was doing graphic design and making websites for people. Yes. But with my art, I feel like painting is on its way out. Of course there's digital stuff now and it feels very antiquated to commit yourself, but also necessary, and I'm interested in taking old images, paintings or found photography, and giving them a second life with an outdated medium. So even my painting has something to do with nostalgia and things past. Do you find that because you're doing writing and music and painting, and living in New York, that it's hard to concentrate on any one, or even to read a lot of books or listen to new things? Yeah, it is. It's really good to be down here. There were times [in New York] when I found myself only listening to Swedish power-pop for a few weeks, just because I forgot to try something new. There are weeks when I only read The New Yorker. And that doesn't make me happy, I don't like that. It's amazing that since I've been down here I get up, I write, I write some more, I read some, I work on this Harvey Pekar thing, and then it's 11pm. It's amazing anyone functions in New York I guess. Emily Nemens is 24 and will return to Brooklyn in December. Some of her work is available at her website. If you own a printing press, she will gladly send you her novel.