Joel Van Noord ~ Interview

by Sean McGahey

Joel Van Noord doesn’t need a bio: read his work here: -

http://the-beat.co.uk/author/joel-van-noord/

Or Google “Joel Van Noord” This guy is a “writer” and not some fly by night trendy pretender.
Here’s hopefully the first of many interviews.

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SM - What do you think of the more alternative, cultural phenomenon of the Internet based lit-Zine scene? Is it a good thing? Or is it killing off the traditional paper based publishing industry??

JVN - I figure it can only be a good thing. It brings more competition and theoretically this will improve the engine of literature. Granted, there is reciprocally more slush at the bottom to dig through. But that’s the price for a more open access. Online magazines and print magazines are similar but there is a vital difference between then. The online zines are merely thinning the paper based publishing. They can’t kill it. Most anyone would agree that permanence and the fact you can pick it up and carry it about says a lot. Not to mention hip glossy pictures of partying girls, or whatever magazines other people subscribe to.

SM - What role has the Internet played in your writing?

JVN - The internet has played a large role. It has played the only role in my ‘publishing’.

SM - There’s quite a bit of dialogue in what you write. You seem to have a good ear for dialogue. Is that something natural? Where did you develop that?

JVN - I actually didn’t think there was much dialogue in my work. Especially when compared to older writers who use characters to say and describe everything. In that case there is never any action and only the describing of action. Which is a derivative and can’t be as exciting. But, I would have to say it comes ‘naturally’.

SM - Is what you write about purely literary, or is it a depiction of a certain world you’ve been a part of?

JVN - Most of what I write starts as something literal and then is morphed to make a point or give a feeling or be hip or whatever. There are things that are completely fiction from the start on through. But there will be real events that slip in and out. Settings are usually real.

SM - Do you ever write autobiographically?

JVN - Autobiographical? Not even in my bio’s. But that’s a secret.

SM - Do you write a novel/short story for a reaction or do you write novels/short stories for personal reasons?

JVN - It’s easy to write for personal reasons. It’s harder to write to produce a desired effect in a reader, which is probably a truer art form. I aim to do both, if you fail at the second and disguise it to look like the first, you can still win them without them knowing.

SM - Top 5 books you’d rescue from a burning building?

JVN - Books for me or society at large?

JVN - if it was society, it’d have to be stuff by Chomsky, Bertrand Russell, and Edward Wilson, McKibben or some other doomsday environmental writer. for me, it’d be Steinbeck’s shorts. Hemingway’s ‘Islands in the Stream’. Something by Hesse. Jospeh Heller’s ‘Catch-22′, and Vonnegut’s ‘Cats Craddle’. Besides for Steinbeck I’d probably just grab something I hadn’t read before.

SM - Top five films:

JVN - I’m not a indie film guy. Big Lebowski.  Anchorman. Zoolander? A surf movie or two?

SM - Top five books you’d happily burn!!

JVN - Any random five you’d find in a grocery store. But they make some people happy, right?

SM - If you could have a beer with any writer dead or alive who’d it be, and why?

JVN - Hemingway. He’s THE writer of the 19th century. But mainly because he’s been everywhere on the globe and at the epicenter of many movements and moments in history. Watching this surf video the other day I learned he wrote most of the Old Man and the Sea in Peru. At this random, hidden lodge overlooking double over-head waves. I always figured it was Cuba.

SM - What are you currently working on?

JVN - I recently read Vollman’s Butterfly Stories and I really liked the pace and energy and snippet type snap shots he uses. So, I’m writing a novel that I want to be fast, high energy and action packed, from one thing to another with a poetic connection between. I also have a collection of short Steinbeck type lulling stories all about the same 4 characters.

SM - Anyone else on the scene you’d recommend?

JVN - I’d recommend this slow and methodical old man named Omar Hussain Al-Gassabi. I’m not sure if he’s technically ‘in the scene’. But he’s a gamesman in the sense he’ll set you up and knock you about.

SM - What is the one thing you truly want people to get out of your work?

JVN - I want people to get a feeling from my work. An intense feeling would be cool. But a calm bewilderment is equally neat.

SM - If you were asked to pen a screenplay for one of your stories, would you be interested in doing it? And who’d you pick as director?

JVN - For sure. All the money’s there. Off the top of my head, Tarantino’s the only I can think of, and he’s a dork. I would say definitely not the schlep from Barfly, cause that movie was a let down.

 


 

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~ This piece was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 and was filed under Blog, Interview, Featured. You can make comments on it below. ~