Lee Henderson | Issue 9
Interview
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Lee Henderson: As a kid, I was always drawing and making up stories, but the moment when it dawned on me this was something to take seriously was in Evan Hardy high school in Saskatoon, where my English teacher in grades eleven and twelve was Al Forrie, co-publisher of Thistledown Press, and he brought in all these authors for us to meet, like Lorna Crozier and Sean Virgo, but he also brought in Crad Kilodney, who completely blew my mind.
KM: How has the pandemic impacted your writing or creative life? Or what has writing in the pandemic been like for you?
LH: I got a social distancing head start on everyone because I broke my leg in December 2019 and was already stuck at home for the first three months of the 2020. By the time of the lockdown in March I already had in place all my coping strategies. As part of my physical therapy, I decided to finish an artwork every day. I couldn’t move around very much because of the leg, but if I didn’t move at all, I wouldn’t recover, so I hoped that making art would provide me with a bit of activity. Art therapy / physical therapy / mental health therapy! I probably ended up making about 400 pictures. I learned a lot. I also learned healing from a major injury takes a long time. But I also had two deadlines during the pandemic, thanks to Jean Marc Ah-Sen, who inspired me to write the Kurt Schwitters novella for Disintegration, and then write another novella this year.
KM: In your recent book Disintegration in Four Parts, written with Emily Anglin, Devon Code, and Jean Mare Ah-Sen each writer responds with a novella to the sentence “All purity is created by resemblance and disavowal”. How did this project come about?
LH: Yeah, Jean Marc Ah-Sen approached us with this sentence and the idea of a novel of novellas. I’m a big fan of Ah-Sen’s writing and the other authors are amazing, how could I say no? Sounded like such a fun project to be a part of. I had this very unfinished draft of my story about Kurt Schwitters and realized it fit well with his theme so I set to work finishing it.
KN: What was your process for your novella Merz in the Arctic Circle in responding to this prompt?
LH: Fortunately, I had this piece that suited the prompt. But keeping that idea of purity in mind, “resemblance and disavowal” was very helpful in tracking the purpose of each scene and what to think about the disturbing climax and conclusion.
KM: Your novella situates Dada artist Kurt Schwitters in a WWII internment camp in Norway. Can you tell us about this choice of character and setting?
LH: I wanted to write something that could address the courage and traumas of refugees. The issue is too often generalized in the news to the point that we don’t understand even half of what refugees endure or care half as much as we should. I hesitate to articulate how Kurt Schwitters, as an artist, speaks to the plight of the refugee. But the novella asks the reader a question: Under similar circumstances, could you be like Kurt Schwitters?
Lee Henderson is the author of four books, including most recently one of four novellas in Disintegration in Four Parts, published in 2021 by Coach House Books. He teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria and also makes visual art.
Disintegration in Four Parts
by Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Emily Anglin, Devon Code, and Lee Henderson
Coach House Books, 2021
Four writers, four different perspectives on the problematic notion of purity.
"All purity is created by resemblance and disavowal. " With this sentence as a starting point, four authors each write a novella considering the concept of purity, all from astonishingly different angles. Jean Marc Ah-Sen writes about love blooming between two writers belonging to feuding literary movements. Emily Anglin explores an architect's search for her twin at a rural historic house. Devon Code documents the Wittgensteinian upheavals of the last days of an elderly woman. And Lee Henderson imagines Dada artist Kurt Schwitters finding unlikely inspiration in a Second World War internment camp in northern Norway.
Wildly different in style and subject matter, these four virtuoso pieces give us a 360-degree view of a philosophical theme that has never felt so urgent.
“Despite the disparity of their subject matter – a Nazi-evading Dadaist detained in Norway, urban and familial estrangements, complicated love amid the avant-garde, the vicissitudes of old age – these brilliantly inventive, delightfully strange stories cling together like four unlikely soulmates, unified by art’s pursuit of coherence through life’s various disintegrations. ” —Pasha Malla, author of Kill the Mall
Issue #9 of Send My Love to Anyone
Micro Interview with Lee Henderson
Excerpt from The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour by Dawn Dumont
Excerpt from If I Die, Will You Die? by Kathryn Mockler
September 2021 Recommendations
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