An interview with Jon Raymond [writer]

conducted by Ramona W. DeNies

Part II.

(Read Part I. here)

THE BELIEVER: Portland really is changing, and fast. In the last ten years or so, whole neighborhoods have been razed and rebuilt, fancier, native populations are in flux, and meanwhile people continue to move here in droves from across the U.S. What’s going on here, do you think?

JON RAYMOND: : Somewhere around 2003 or 2004, Portland discovered ambition. You can almost pinpoint it to a certain moment. But I’ve always quibbled with the idea that Portland was so easy; it’d be much easier to go to New York and tap into the thousand industries that are waiting to use your creative energy. The idea of Portland prior to 2003 was really bound up in a kind of loser ethos; Portland was the kind of place where people came to disappear, or get stuck. In the 1990s there were not that many people here taking writing that seriously. Music was more the bedrock of Portland’s creative life. The art bubbled up on top of that. Portland is a strangely prolific incubator of the little mayflies that appear and then go away. That’s since flipped; now Portland is a place where people might come to get discovered. It’s only recently that a writing “community” has really emerged.  Though I’ve never gravitated much toward hanging out with other writers. 

BLVR: You hang out with a lot of artists and also film types, I imagine. Why not writers?

JR: There’s a sort of banality to that imagined conversation; you’ll have your ideas, I have mine. I’m not at the point anymore where I need to talk about it. But there’s also this part of me that’s still intimidated by other writers. They’ll have read a lot more books than I have, maybe. Oh, I don’t know what I’m talking about. 

BLVR: Ok, but I don’t get that you have much ego wrapped up in your writing life. Is there a competitive edge somewhere in your personality that I’ve totally missed seeing?

JR: Undeniably ego is wrapped up in the enterprise! Issues of recognition, fairness, invitations, publishing hierarchies. It’s impossible to deny that ego is part of writing. A lot of people want to be writers for the fantasy of it, of being interviewed like this, of vindicating their own childhood. There’s a Walter Benjamin quote I use in just about every workshop I teach. The gist of it is that every writer writes to prove that his or her childhood was not in vain. A lot of people don’t even read and want to be writers. But I...