hika.

What writers/artists find yourself looking to for inspiration? How do you feel they inspire your work?

So I like to write essays. That’s like the main thing I like to write, short form stuff. I love Jia Tolentino’s essays. Her collection Trick Mirror is awesome. She kind of has my dream career. She’s a staff writer for The New Yorker, but she used to write for Jezebel. She is just the coolest. I like David Foster Wallace, which I feel kind of bad saying because he’s kind of the worst, but I like the way he makes sentences. I had to make a rule for myself that I can’t read him before bed because then I get to think-y and then I can’t fall asleep. I just love his writing. I like his nonfiction much more than his fiction. I’d say his nonfiction inspires me most. This also sounds pretentious, but I love James Joyce. I love a Portrait of the Artist. That’s one of my favorite books. It makes me emotional, the way he crafts the experience, and it feels so universal. I like how he takes the particular and turns it into narratives everyone can understand and relate to. And I like how experimental he is with words. 

What’s your dream writing project to work on? 

There’s this episode of The Simpsons, and it’s called “A Streetcar Named Marge.” And it’s where they do a musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire. And they were just going to do the play, but then they couldn’t get the rights. But his estate was like, well, you can make it a musical if you want. So they did. And it’s my favorite thing ever. It’s just a four minute clip because they had to condense it, but I think my life’s mission is to turn it into a full length musical. My biggest ambition is to write that. 

The title of this piece is very unique, and I remember the original title was “My Day of Dappled Seaborne Clouds,” a reference to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Why did you choose to title this piece after a reference to this book and what made you change it?

I always kind of knew I wanted [the piece] to be about the experience in my life of my dad with the hamsters. But what stood out to me about it is that it fostered my love of writing and why I love to write so much. The climax of a Portrait of the Artist is he’s standing at the water, and he starts coming up with this sentence, “a day of dappled seaborne clouds.” And that’s kind of when he realizes his life’s work is to be a writer. That wasn’t quite my conclusion then, but a step along the way was writing that story for my class. So I knew I wanted it to be a reference to that. And then it was originally “My Day of Dappled Seaborne Clouds,” but I felt like “My Day of Dappled Hamsters” was funnier, and it also felt more personal to the story. I thought it flowed a bit more. And it was also a little absurd, which I like.

I think it is so cool that this is a piece of writing about writing, in which the younger you seems to find solace in writing at the end of the piece. Can you talk more about when you started writing, and how that has evolved into your writing now?

Even before I could read and write, I used to say stories out loud and I’d have my parents write them down in a journal for me. So I think I’ve always liked telling stories, I’ve always been driven to storytelling in all its forms, like movies and theater. So I always loved to write. I would have so many journals just full of stories I’d write or I would draw covers of books. It took me a really long time to connect the dots that I liked to write because I thought it was just a hobby I had. I knew there were people that wrote for a living but I didn’t think that that was something I could do. So for a really long time I was like, I guess I’ll just be a lawyer or something. But then it kind of occurred to me that I’ve only ever enjoyed English classes, and I had kind of a midlife crisis at 16. And I was like, “Mom, I don’t think I would like to be a lawyer, I think it would suck.” And she was like, “Well, I think you should be a writer like, that’s all you do.” So I was just like, “Okay.” That was kind of the moment for me. But I think it’s always been something I’ve taken comfort in. Even if I pivot down the road, it’s always something I think I’ll do.

Is your love for writing what brought you to Kenyon?

Yes, for sure. I actually applied on a whim. We read This Is Water in my AP Lang class. So I knew [Kenyon] existed from that. And then I was looking at colleges that had no application fee, and this was one of them. So I just sent in an application. And then I got in. I had never really looked it up. And I looked it up and I was like, wait, this is the perfect fit. That was what drew my attention. And I loved John Green when I was little.

What inspired you to write about this event in your life now? Was there something about that memory that brought you back to it?

So I wrote it the first week I came here. And I think I was reminiscing on my childhood a lot because I was homesick and I was just thinking about it. And I remembered the story of the the time my dad released a bunch of hamsters into my classroom. And I was like, Whoa, I have to write about that someday. And then I remember writing the story afterwards. That was a big event for me. I was so proud of that. I didn’t mention this before, but I drew little hamsters in the margins. And I just had so much fun with it. I had too much free time because it was orientation, and I wrote it in Ascension. It was really nice.

Are you primarily a nonfiction writer? If so, what makes you gravitate towards nonfiction? If not, what genre do you typically write in and why?

I generally gravitate towards nonfiction. I like the personal essay. This is a little more fiction oriented, it’s a little straight storytelling. But again, I like relating the very particular to these larger themes that everyone can understand. I think that’s really interesting. I think also part of it is maybe that I’m 18 and kind of narcissistic. So I feel like everything’s kind of about me at this point. I would love to write fiction more. But even when I write fiction, I like to write it about people I know. I guess everyone does that maybe. I like fiction because you can take things that happened and fuse them and make them interesting, and you can Frankenstein your life experiences together. But I think that’s kind of cool. The hamster thing did happen, though. I like how you can kind of tweak events. That’s cool to play with. 

Would you categorize this as somewhere between fiction and nonfiction?

Yeah, so it is nonfiction [because] all of that happened. But I feel sensitive about calling it nonfiction because I did reconstruct it from memory. And I feel like in some ways that it will always kind of be fiction. So I was kind of insecure about what if I got a certain detail wrong. So I like to say it’s fiction to give myself that safety net. The story itself is nonfiction, but I like to blend elements of fiction. There are certain details that are pulled from other points in my life. So in that way it’s fiction. I Frankensteined the middle, but the core of the hamster thing I don’t think I could make up. 

How do you navigate writing about real people in your work? 

It differs from person to person. With my dad, who was the central character in this, he’s difficult to write about, and I’m just starting to figure out how to write about him. And with both my parents, I think I’m at the weird transition period that most people my age go through, where you figure out that [your parents] are people, and you want to make them people, but you also have to separate that from your view of them. But also, he’s clearly kind of complicated. And the story’s complicated in real life. I didn’t want to try to seem like he was written, I just wanted to let his actions show. Let him come through. Especially with people who are very clearly based on real people in my life, I try to put in certain actions and let those actions speak for themselves. I try not to over describe, which I think especially works for someone who’s kind of larger than life like he is. I also don’t know if I have an adjective to describe my dad. I changed names a lot too, and I always find that fun, because then you can fit in little allusions to other stuff. But the name of Mr. Ben is related to one of the characters in [The Remains of the Day]. So I like to do little things like that, little easter eggs. It’s kind of fun. 

The diary entries were such an interesting element of this piece. How did you decide to incorporate them/how did you go about choosing which ones to include? Are these exact transcriptions of the original diary entries?

No. My diary does speak to the things that were happening in my life at the time, but a lot of it was me complaining about really trivial stuff. You can find subtext in my old diaries, but you can’t find anything explicit enough for the story I wanted to tell. The reason I [incorporated diary entries]was because I read The Remains of the Day for a class and for the final paper [the professor] let us write something creative. The book is about a butler who writes this diary about having his first weekend off in so long. And he starts to write about his old boss, and he slowly realizes and comes to an understanding of himself and his old boss. And everything fell into place a little bit more for me then, and the way that a diary can help you understand yourself. Even if you don’t explicitly know what’s happening, it’s a step along the way. And I liked that idea. So I changed the format around because originally it was just a straight narrative. And I thought this was just a better way to incorporate the love of writing that came through at the end.

How do you feel about the connection between writing and publishing? Do you believe that publishing is an essential part of being a writer?

Definitely for me and my writing it’s an important part. Even if I’m just sending it to my mom, or my friends, I think just having someone else see it is really important for me. I don’t feel like I’ve written anything unless someone else has read it. Because I write about myself so much, what distinguishes it from a diary entry is the indirect connection between the writer and the reader because it can be fully realized through publishing. 

How would you describe your voice as a writer/who you are as a writer? What subject matter and themes are you most concerned with in your writing? 

I don’t know how I would describe my voice yet, I think it’s still forming and developing. I think it changes every year. I’m still young and still starting. I like incorporating humor in all of my writing, or some element of comedy. My favorite personal memoirs are the ones that are funny, because I like the commentary, life’s absurdity and things like that. I also really interested in gender in the media, and how women and gender nonconforming people are presented on this public scale and the reactions to them. That’s the most interesting thing for me to look at. I wrote a research paper in high school about Monica Lewinsky. Which is kind of a very general example, but it presents itself in such small ways that are kind of cyclical, and get smaller as you look down, but it’s just everywhere. And I just think that’s so interesting.

What are your writing aspirations for the future?

I want to write, I think probably just writing a little bit of anything. Right now, every time I try to write something, it either turns into an essay or a short story, or it wants to be an essay, and I’m like, well this has to turn into something else. So I probably would end up writing a collection of things. I’d love to write a novel one day, but I’m not quite there yet. To be like a columnist, or even editing I really enjoy. I like reading other people’s writing, too. I think I would enjoy anything artistic, generally. I’d love to try writing plays. I’ve written a couple, but none seriously. I like to write a little bit of anything.

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Blake’s story “A Day of Dappled Hamsters” will be published this May in HIKA’s 99th annual issue.