Ask the Author: Mike Hilbig
Answered Questions (16)
Mike Hilbig
The main question I would like readers to ask themselves is how does white supremacy also harm white people? It is my belief that if we could get white people to see the psychological damage that being an oppressor inflicts on them, then we might be able to get them invested in the struggle for liberation of marginalized groups more readily. As far as religion goes, I am primarily interested in deconstructing the redemption narrative that Christianity promotes and show how it plays into a cultural progress narrative that assumes without critical thought that all technological progress is good and that as time moves forward social progress is inevitable. I think these assumptions actually lead to many periods of stagnation and they invite incremental change over radical change, when if you study history, you realize that far more often, lasting change comes from revolutionary mass movements that are forced through political systems by culture and are not the result of making practical demands and voting on them. So I'm hoping people will also ask themselves, what actually counts as progress? Who gets to claim that progress? And how do their own personal battles with addictions and weight loss and unlearning toxic behaviors also get coopted and interfered with by that larger societal progress narrative?
Mike Hilbig
I am still working on booking readings for the release, but expect to see me in several local locations from mid-february to late april.
Mike Hilbig
This book was originally my grad school thesis, so it was based in a lot of the research I was doing for my classes. I was super compelled by narrative theory and the idea that narrative is a form of perception that allows us to track our lives from birth to shit happens to death in the form of a beginning, middle, and end. I also have always been interested in Marxist and race theory, as I believe the key to ending capitalism in America is to find some way to unite white and black workers, and I just feel like most of our failures to end capitalism have been thwarted by this fundamental division in our culture, so I used the platform of grad school to write papers on Marxist theorists and black activists. I read lots of fiction itself as well for comp exams, as well as for my fiction workshops. In particular, I became highly fascinated with Greek epic, as I feel like we read so much of the irony out of the hero narrative in America, and I don't think Homer was looking to bolster heroes when he gave us those ancient works. Finally, I developed a theory in the process of working in those milieus that narrative is like a fractal, in that it creates self-similar worlds to the world you live in and traces its symmetries across magnitudes, like how a tale is similar to a genre which is similar to a tradition and so on and so forth. So I started reading fractal math books as well to create a new form of literary critique, and in the collection itself, the stories are constructed so as to be directly thought of as narrative fractals. I'd say the main thing to writing interesting fiction is to construct interesting milieus and connect patterns that aren't obvious. So, I always like to tell any aspiring writers or artists to read widely and to read outside of the genres in which you operate in and to find interesting books to make your own book out of.
Mike Hilbig
I feel like I am mostly done with this collection. Ha. I spent a ton of time editing and revising it. I suppose if I had to pick one character that would be a fun spinoff, it might be the Professor Threat character, who teaches a class on the politics of pimping at Rice University. But, I'm not sure that I would ever actually do that. Ha. I will say, there is an experimental play called "All the World's Mike Hilbig" that made it into the original draft of the collection but did not make the final cut. The ending just wasn't all the way there and the pacing was a bit off in places, but the good sections of it are some of the best writing I've ever done, and each scene offers clues to what is both fictional and non-fictional in the rest of the collection, especially in the areas of the book where I critique myself as the white writer of the book. It also deals in some pretty personal themes and reveals the collection as not just a question about society in general, but a personal question about how whiteness has meant tragedy in mine and several of my friends' lives because of how we attempted to reject our privilege in ways that were taught to us but were not ultimately all that beneficial to the groups most oppressed by white people. My theory is that if we had been taught more effective political and social ideas as young adults that we would have rebelled in more useful ways than self-harming behaviors. But yes, trying to figure out why two of my best friends died of drug overdoses only months apart in my twenties, and why I survived that lifestyle, and how it felt weird how miserable we were being in the white middle class in America, which is supposed to be your ticket to success in this world, was the main thrust of the initial development of the collection.
Mike Hilbig
I think almost every story in the collection with the exception of the flash fiction "The Bell Witch Hunter & The Curse of Jacksonian History" was written from start to finish at least three times before I even started revising or editing. However, two stories in particular were probably the most painfully constructed in the collection. First, "Judgment Day," the title story, was first written for my tumblr blog over a decade ago. I was still fresh in learning how to write, and while I loved the idea, the execution simply wasn't there. Then, when I got the idea to do a story collection that was based in retellings of Greek and Christian myths, I decided to dust it off and start over. It is about a hallucinogenic plant called "Judgment Day" that causes people to feel born again after they smoke it. In this case, the character who smokes it gets trapped inside the head of another character as a set of memories he can't get rid of. The execution was difficult because I essentially had to characterize two characters in one protagonist and show how their competition for legitimacy created an all new identity type. The second story that took much time and painful revision was "Per-C: A Narrative Representation of a Graphic Epic by Angela Ames, PhD," because it was a formally challenging experiment. It is an homage to postmodern experimental fiction and is written as a detective story featuring a female academic in the form of a fake scholarly article (complete with footnotes and citations of fake sources) trying to figure out the compellingness of a graffiti writer named Per-C's artwork, which is primarily 'Dusa heads that cause viewers to become so enraptured that they just stand there drooling on themselves indefinitely. Of course, the artwork is a bit of a red herring, as the story is really about her quest to understand what it is like to play the role of female in a man's world and uses the medusa myth as a way into that question. It is also a critique of the concept of cultural appropriation and is meant to show how whiteness invites misappropriation by voiding white people of tradtional cultural markers. I didn't originally write it as a fake scholarly article, but once I got it into that form, the story began to make so much more sense. Then, it was a matter of making sure that the narrative has two different reading experiences for if you read the footnotes while reading versus if you wait and read them when you're done with the main through line. It is my hope that readers will try it multiple ways and see how the story transforms as they take agency over the critical process of reading the story.
Mike Hilbig
Yes actually, most of the stories take place in my hometown of Houston, TX, which I like to describe as a site of envy and forgetting, which I feel like are thematic corollaries to the political narrative on whiteness that the book engages. In fact, I have written about it on my blog, and if you'd like, you can read the full description of all the locations and their thematic contributions to the book here: https://mikehilbigwriter.com/envy-for...
Mike Hilbig
Capitalism came like a thief in the night and then stayed for good. Climate change ensued.
Mike Hilbig
I'd go to Ursula Le Guin's Anaris to see an anarchist colony up close. I am not necessarily even the biggest fan of The Dispossed. I like it, but think the prose could do more work and that it feels like a light rendering of anarchist ideas, but the world building itself is compelling and the world described sounds like a world I would enjoy living in much more than our own.
Mike Hilbig
Roberto Bolaño's Amulet, Percival Everett's Erasure, GM Gittlitz's I Want to Believe, Paul Ricouer's Memory, History, Fogetting, and Tade Thompson's Rosewater to name a few.
Mike Hilbig
Actually, my first book, Judgment Day & Other White Lies, is an attempt to ask the question of what role did whiteness play in the deaths of two very good friends from drug overdoses in my twenties? Not sure if I've answered it sufficiently or not, but I do think I have found some compelling narratives for how our culturation failed us in America.
Mike Hilbig
I like having the ability to express myself as directly as I intend to. Learning to write also taught me to hone language better in my personal relationships.
Mike Hilbig
I know not how the muse works, only that it does.
Mike Hilbig
I give myself permission to write badly knowing that I can always revise or delete later.
Mike Hilbig
A novel as told in 4 zines called Punk Rock Jesus that is a loose contemporary retelling of the Jesus story in The Bible. It is a story about a lead singer in a punk rock band called The Moral Minority in the 1980s who some punks have taken to describing as the second coming of Christ. He performs miracles like turning cough syrup into methamphetamine and hangs out with sex workers and drug dealers.
Mike Hilbig
Read a lot. Read widely. In genres other than you write in. As Cormac McCarthy says, "Books are made of other books." If you want to write an interesting book, then you need to read a lot of interesting books and understand how they are put together.
Mike Hilbig
While in grad school, I was studying a milieu of classical literature, postmodern experimental fiction, magical realism, narrative theory, phenomenological philosophy, and interestingly enough, fractal math. Judgment Day & Other White Lies is a mashup of all those topics used to create a metacritique of the fictional form itself, especially as it is rendered by the cishetero white male writer.
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