TDR
Interview: Andrew Hood
Part of the Montreal
Fall Books Spectacular
 Andrew Hood’s debut collection
heralds a young talent with an irresistible style and merciless eye.
These unapologetic stories deal with an assortment of foolish
self-destructive small town anti-heroes. They are unlikely odes and
elegies for human shabbiness.
Pardon Our Monsters (Esplanade
Books, 2007) is Hood’s
first book. He won the Irving Layton Award for Undergraduate Fiction at
Concordia University, and his stories have appeared in Concordia’s Soliloquies
and Headlight Anthology.
He lives in Montreal. Says Montreal
playwright and novelist Trevor Ferguson: "Andrew Hood is a young
(really young), driven (really driven), perceptive, under-the-skin
writer. He’s the real deal, and coming on strong; this is a writer you’ll
want to hitch a ride with from the outset, as the journey promises to be
monumental."
Interview by Nathaniel G. Moore,
photograph by Crystal Porcher
(November 2007)
*
TDR: When did you start working on
these stories?
ANDREW HOOD: Well, working in the loosest sense. The oldest one
goes back probably three years, and is now, well, the title track or
namesake of the collection. Which seems really weird to me, for some
reason. I'd been doing mostly forced, cold, undergraduate-minded writing
up to that point, and this first story really helped me shake that. It
came out quick and angry and easy, and all the stories that followed
became – for me – responses to that first one. Around this time last
year I realized that I had a cache of stories that worked really well
with each other, all taking place, for one, in the same geographical,
but they also occur in a shared emotional landscape, I think. After the
book was taken, I was lucky to be able to write three more stories,
which cap off that period of my writing quite nicely, shut the door on
that specific energy.
 TDR: Who are some of your inspirations? Literary or otherwise?
ANDREW HOOD: For about two years now I've been reading nothing but
short stories. Not that I've eschewed novels, but more and more, there
is something so essential about stories that I'm constantly compelled to
ferret out, but still can't quite put my finger on.
The collections that I've been really
into are the "album" books, you know, a real cohesive grouping
of stories as opposed to those "greatest hits" collections
that get put out, a hodgepodge of stories that might come out in between
novels. Michael Chabon's Werewolves in Their Youth was
important, as well as Salinger's Glass stories. And I don't know why
it's taken me this long, but just last month I read my first Alice
Munro story and now can't stop. Every one kicks my ass.
It's funny and frustrating that so much
is made of how she changed the way we think about the short story, when
that's not really true. Such a staunch notion of what the short story
should be still persists, defined so often by length, which is such an
arbitrary stricture. Munro strikes me as that one wily inmate who
got over the fence and it was such a feat that even the guards and
warden couldn't help but respect her, but also they had to make sure it
never happened again. "Now, don't the rest of you get any
ideas."
TDR: What issues do you stories deal with?
ANDREW HOOD: To be vague, I guess the stories deal with issues of
monstrosity, from the extreme and more subtle. This may overlap with the
fifth question. In writing the first draft of Pardon Our Monsters,
I was very sure about who was right and who was wrong in that story, but
after I'd swished it around in my mouth for a while, I understood that
all the characters act monstrously, especially the narrator, who,
because of his being in charge of the telling, is able to excuse his
perfidy, justify it. That was the extreme example that I kept returning
to in thinking about the stories that deal with the more minor
transgressions. There are those minor character flaws and ticks like
selfness, or carelessness, or callousness that, when introduced into the
right situation, will grow to such terrible, large extremes. And,
ultimately, when I started to group all these scattered stories
together, I realized that they all had one thing in common. They all
lack apology, lack contrition, catharsis. Seeing what I'd done, I felt a
little monstrous myself. With my characters, I'd been unforgiving as the
author, which works for the book, but is ultimately something I'd like
to exorcise.
TDR: What promotional plans for the book are you looking forward to?
ANDREW HOOD: This is all very new to me. I don't really have a
clear idea of what the consequences of publishing a book will be, but
I'm up for anything. Answering your questions is the first booky thing
I've done yet and that's exciting. Presumably, I'll do a tour and
readings, which I'm jazzed about; talking to people I don't know, people
that I would otherwise never meet. I think that's reason enough to do
something like this.
TDR: What is your idea of "monsterdom" or let us say, evil?
ANDREW HOOD: When I think about monsterdom or evil, I think about
it in terms of our manners and personalities. We like to think that we
are cultured and polite, functional in society, but I think that
everyone harbors these aberrations within themselves, prejudices and
pettiness. Though they may be slight, under the right duress, like I
said before, I think those flaws can become surprisingly massive. The
fallacy of our society is that we have these things under control, but
most of these monstrosities haven't been purged from us, only muffled.
To say that our generation is any less racist or sexist or classist than
the generation before us is silly. It's better, sure, but we like to
flatter ourselves in saying we're above it, when, really, we've just
learned to stifle our prejudices. And repression certainly isn't any
good. We've become very good and treating the symptoms, but the malady
ultimately gets overlooked.
TDR: What is your impression of the Montreal literary scene?
ANDREW HOOD: Well, Montreal's a port town, right? So there's this
feeling of everyone here being on some weird, extended shore leave;
everyone seems to be just passing through. I've been here about five
years now and don't necessarily feel either settled or tied to the
place. I feel more connected still to my hometown, Guelph, and
ultimately tend to write about that. Maybe this transient attitude
precludes any tangible scene, though at the same time, if there is a
scene, it would somehow have to be defined by it's not being a scene.
There are groups and niches, for sure.
The Concordia/Matrix scene is the one that sticks out, to me,
having come out of that. But at the end of the day, any literary scene
will or at least should be halfhearted and willy-nilly. The nature of
literature doesn't really support regionalism, or shouldn't. Which is
what I like about Montreal. It allows everyone to maintain and mingle
their cloths and creeds.
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