100% Real Ice Arena: Who Is Ofelia Hunt?

When we think of famous Ofelias, we first try to remember how Shakespeare spelled it, then we realize that isn't going to help. As we start talking about Today & Tomorrow, there will be a lot to dive into: zambonis, grandfathers, violence, trauma.

But first: who is Ofelia Hunt?

True, she blogs and she seems to like the poet Kenneth Koch a lot, but is she even real? Several people who are familiar with her work have contacted me and asked me to spill the beans.

Here, in a Lit Pub exclusive, I'm prepared to tell you this: get a copy of Today & Tomorrow, look carefully at the copyright page, and then think about those times when you were a kid when you put on your favorite holster and smudged your voice. Or, if you played role playing games, how you made up the best names you could think of. Or how before high school tennis matches, the coaches had to formally introduce each player: "Blurgity will be playing #1 against Blurgity, Glurgity will be playing #2 against etc." And sometimes I convinced my coach to introduce me as Xavier Damocles or Daradamand Fashuga, and I would pretend to be a foreign exchange student. All of which goes a little way toward the idea of how our imaginations construct their own ways of self-understanding, and the way writing a novel turns you into someone somewhat beside[s] yourself.

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In an interview with NOÖ Journal's Alicia LaRosa, Ofelia Hunt playfully talked about how being Ofelia Hunt is a process:

AL: Do you take on a specific persona as Ofelia Hunt? Do you dig deep within yourself to find this person, detach yourself from reality this way by projecting this personality, or do you simply act au naturale?

OH: I'd like to say I put on a special bathrobe and eye makeup and kitten slippers. But I'm far more boring. I decided Ofelia liked a number of specific things and typed them out: 11 point Garamond, hyphens, repetition, trickery, 'math rock', parking lots… I made a list of writers Ofelia admires: Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Stacey Levine, Franz Kafka, Lydia Davis, Kenneth Koch, Kurt Vonnegut, Lisa Jarnot, Diane Williams, Joy Williams, etc... Ofelia Hunt does not like or understand plot. Her favorite move is Suicide Club (a Japanese movie sometimes called Suicide Circle). I woke every day for about two years at four a.m. to write and revise for sixty to ninety minutes before work. This may have detached me from reality. I remember feeling tired a lot, and listening to a lot of hiphop. Ofelia often writes about the kinds of things I muse about throughout a day, the things I find funny or strange. I think of Ofelia as both the "I" in the novel and the writer of the novel, so the novel may be a memoir.

AL: Are any of the characters in the novel based off of people you know personally? Related to?

OH: No, or not really. At most, certain moments, memories, instances, are based on reality. I grew up near Highland Ice Arena, and throughout middle school the Friday night skate was the place to be. I'd like to say that every character is a composite of every person I've ever met if that composite had been born me. The grandfather character is probably the parent I wish I had, and to some degree, has a sense of humor very much like my mother's.

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As June continues, we'll be having more interviews with Ofelia and more discussion about identity and more talking about how who we are copes with who we imagine we are.

Before you start the novel, I think it's interesting to think about notions of authorship, and to try imagining Ofelia Hunt less as an "author" and more as an identity for testimony. After all, there is a long and rich literary history of pseudonyms, anonymity, authors putting themselves into their books, and other such identity shenanigans.

So what do you think of all this? What books have you read by pseudonymous authors? What do you believe to be the author's role in claiming their voice? What exactly is a "voice" anyway?

Sunglasses For Your Brain: Ofelia Hunt and How Reading Changes Seeing

When movies show you how flies see, they always like to focus on the fractals. How, supposedly, insects see like kaleidoscopes: lots and lots of tiny windows, all showing duplicates of the same image. Of course, this isn't how insects actually see, but it's fun to think so. What's even more fun about being a fly is: flying. You get to fly. And flying, of course, is a way of moving that's also its own way to see.

In 2006/2007, I first discovered Ofelia Hunt through her blog and later her Bear Parade e-book My Eventual Bloodless Coup. You've probably already guessed this, but now I'm going to try making an analogy that Hunt writes like a combination of the way Hollywood thinks insects see and the way insects fly into thinking. Here we go: Hunt's narrators see the world divided into fantasies, daydreams. A girlfriend tells a boyfriend that she wants her "left eyeball and right ear removed while you watch through a two-inch glass panel," and then she proceeds to keep telling him every intricate detail she can make up because he doesn't stop her. Finally her boyfriend looks at her forehead and says:

"Why do you say things like that?"

"I was joking."

"I don't think you're joking, you're always saying stuff like that."

"I'm just being funny because I'm bored and tired of watching TV with you and I wanted to know how long I could talk without you stopping me but you didn't stop me because you don't care about anything and are a nihilist or something."

The lies and delusions and whimsy of Hunt's narrators are undercut by concrete realities of violence and trauma, the reasons and results of too much making up. People are kidnapped and stuffed into refrigerators. Sisters punch their eight-year old sisters and apologize by saying "I thought your face looked kind of like a speed bag or something, and I thought I could be a boxer, and boxers need to practice." A masked man waves a knife and tells the world to admit that he's a sloth bear, that his genes were spliced. This exploration of how imagination intertwines with violence, how the imagination makes objects of everything, runs through all of Hunt's work, and gives it an existential awareness and a contemporary significance that I find hypnotic and true, true as any buzzing daydream that seems incapable of landing.

Her language, too, flies and divides. The physical world is rendered through repetition, the world boring as the world. Station to station, parking-lot to parking-lot, the world wheezing along like a strip mall of hyphenated connections, temporary sidewalks. No wonder we imagine ourselves away, into flights of imagining Bill Murray driving a giant robot in the Carlsbad caverns and then the next thing imagined and the next, because any stopping of the "ands" means the attention is no longer suspended and we have to get back to paying attention to a world where—as one boyfriend in a Hunt story says— "One baby is like any other baby so who cares what baby you brainwash or whatever?"

After I read My Eventual Bloodless Coup, I started reading Ofelia's blog, where she was posting excerpts of the novel that would later become Today & Tomorrow. I emailed asking if I could publish one of the chapters in this literary journal I co-edit, NOÖ Journal, a chapter about the narrator as a child at the zoo with her grandfather. This was about a year before I started Magic Helicopter Press. Later, when I decided I wanted to start the press, I knew I wanted to publish chapbooks and books by writers whose voices rendered an uncompromisingly honest and singular worldview, but whose work challenged that voice, put it through the ringer of a world that doesn't care about any view at all.

That's what I say now, anyway. That's me trying to describe a feeling without just turning the feeling into a description.

In high school, I read Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and then I walked around thinking everyone had a secret phone number, that the world was basically a Thomas Pynchon novel. This, I realized, was the benchmark of a certain kind of great book. It takes over. When I read T&T, I walk around seeing the way Ofelia Hunt's imagination swoops. Reading certain great novels is like wearing sunglasses for your brain, and Today & Tomorrow has frames shaped like anarchist penguins.

Many thanks to Molly and Chris for hosting me in the Lit Pub's inaugural month to talk about T&T and other great books. Thanks to you for tuning in, and please feel free to join the conversation with any thoughts you have about insects, small presses, novels-as-ways-of-seeing, and whether you yourself are actually Bill Murray.