“I started at the Village Voice in the design department, and then I started writing articles for various departments there.
“It has something to do with all the different types of writing I’ve done,” Hannaham said.
It’s a bold departure from his previous novels: “God Says No,” the story of a young gay man wrestling with conservative Christian life and his secret desires and the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning “Delicious Foods,” a beautifully written and brutal horror story in which the monsters are systemic racism, crack cocaine and America’s legacy of slavery.įor a novelist on the rise, this unclassifiable book could be viewed as a risky career move. “I think there’s still some rules I’m working out, even though the book is here.” But that the genre in which I wrote was not going to be important.” Hannaham laughed.
“But the main rule was that I made it a daily or semi-daily practice to read a poem, think about how to respond to it, and then write something that was related to it in some way. “I started to make all these crazy rules about how it was going to happen.” he said. To help himself structure the project, Hannaham created terms of engagement. I mean, isn’t that what we do in our prayers?” “It was probably a better situation to be talking back to someone who doesn’t exist. “I didn’t mind that so much, because it was really ideas that were the more important part of what I was wrestling with,” he said. I asked Hannaham if it felt weird to be having a conversation with long dead Portuguese writers, some of whom never actually existed. Think of it as the literary version of Liz Phair’s rejoinder to the Rolling Stones, “ Exile in Guyville.” The Pessoa poems that inspired each piece are credited in the margins, and although his book stands on its own, if you read the two together, the experience deepens and exposes both the gaps and the similarities in how each of these writers sees the world. It is by turns funny, disturbing, puzzling and evocative. The resulting book is a collection of rants, philosophical musings, poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, loosely built around the dread of airplane disasters, spiked with collaged images of Lisbon and planes falling apart. So by the time the plane ride was over, I had kind of conceived of the idea that I would write a response to every last poem in this friggin’ book.” “That line struck me as particularly indicative of what our times are like right now. ‘I’ve never kept sheep, but it’s as if I did.’” Hannaham exhales. “The first line of the first poem begins with a lie on his resumé.
One of Pessoa’s more famous heteronyms is the sheepherder poet Alberto Caeiro. As Hannaham says, “He was doing sort of fragmented identity stuff long before anybody was.” In the early 20th century, Lisbon wasn’t known for having a literary scene, so Pessoa provided it, creating more than 70 distinct personalities. “I was on a plane, and I had finished the book that I brought by a Cape Verdean author and I decided to start reading the book I brought by a Lisbon-based, Portuguese author, which was Fernando Pessoa.”įor those unfamiliar with the work of Pessoa, he was notable for concocting “heteronyms” - what we might call avatars - fictional writers who work in a variety of voices and styles and who often review and translate each other’s work. “My husband and I were in Cape Verde and on our way to Lisbon,” he said. In a recent conversation over Zoom, he explained his inspiration. “ Pilot Impostor,” James Hannaham’s follow-up to his acclaimed novels “ God Says No” and “ Delicious Foods,” is one of these singular works, a book impossible to categorize. The results are sometimes catastrophic but often lead to the creation of singular and surprising works. In a business that encourages writers to repeat themselves, to stay relentlessly on brand, it’s exciting to see artists take a chance, cast off the dictates of publicity and marketing, go rogue. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.