G. Merrick Justice

I recently had the privilege of “interviewing” Hop Dac, to most of us here just Hop, about the ups, downs, and round-abouts of life. Not having known his as well as some of the other RB Administrators I have interviewed so far, I had to do a little background first. None of it, however, could have prepared me for just how thoughtful, deep, and well educated the person I was approaching was. Later, repeatedly while going over his answers I found myself writing down things to go out and discover more about for myself. I hope as you read this interview, all of you will do the same, and remember that in this world, unassuming and unfamiliar often hides the simply unbelievable.

Hop, though on your profile page here at RB you briefly mentions some things you excel in, you almost make it sound as though you are a receptionist – yogurt and permanent markers indeed! Why when you sent me an e-mail shortly after I arrived here kindly asking I remove my pornography collection from the galleries, I certainly thought as much. I have come to see, read, and overall learn, however, that you are quite the amazing… well, most everything. What, though, is your most driving passion in the artistic, literary life?

Construction. It’s the simple enjoyment of putting something together from an initial idea. With painting and writing, that’s all done on my lonesome, but I also have some experience with theatre, film and publishing, and working with a group of people on a project is very satisfying. I’m pretty much the office bitch at RedBubble, though. I’m the dude who answers the phone.

Recently (well, I’m always a bit behind… it was the end of last year), you got the honor of reading one of your short stories to an audience of slightly lubricated fans at the Collected Works Bookshop, what was the short titled? How did the entire experience go?

I read out a story that I had been writing over the course of seven years called ‘The Solar Eclipse’. It started with one image. There’s a New Zealand musician, electro-folky sound, named Alistair Galbraith who had a song ‘Flickering Birds’ that I liked and the song rattled around my head and knocked something out. The story basically unfurled from those two words.

The book launch was great. I’ve always enjoyed reading out loud, as opposed to spoken word performance, which for the most part I find detestable. But there’s something about the human voice wrangling with a well written sentence that gives me a lot of pleasure. Anyone who’s heard the wonderful BBC recording of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood, narrated by Richard Burton, will know what I’m talking about. It was in the middle of the day and we got the crowd to sit at our feet like school children, then Shane and I each read out a story to them and they clapped and bought our book and then later we all got incredibly drunk. Good times.

Now, you don’t have, well, let’s just say the “calmest” literary style around… indeed, your book of shorts (co-authored by Shane Christmass) entitled “Croak&Grist” included a cautionary statement. What, no pastures and butterflies? But I thought everyone here at RB was so normal and straight-laced… So, what is it that draws you to that which “may cause a contamination of the mind?”

When I first met Shane, it was at a studio in Perth, Western Australia, that I was a co-founder of called 6A Non Institutional Contemporary Art Studios. It was a gallery/studio/performance space. Shane was the writer in residence at 6A. Each month or so, we’d have a performance night and Shane would read these epic, sprawling 20 page poems in the vein of the Beats that I found very impressive. That’s when I began to take writing seriously. This time was probably my most fertile period. Everyone at the studio grew very close, we were all damaged in one way or another, mentally, spiritually, and creativity was the salve that joined our broken parts and mended us. The contamination started then, and the virus has grown ever since.

Croak&Grist was in the pipelines for three years. Each of my stories in the book was an exercise in form as much as content, so each one is quite different in the way they’re written. Lately I’ve felt that I’m finally writing in a way that I want to, but without these exercises, I don’t think I’d have gotten here.

Who were some of your earlier influences? Or did you have any? I know many a fine artist/writer who delved into no one but themselves to find their artistic way (despite what my mother would love to tell us all)…

I thinking delving only into yourself is limiting. You can’t think what you don’t know, I like to say, and ideas come from the orgiastic union of two accepted things that overlap to create something entirely different. So the more aware you are, the more you want to learn, the more likely you are to stumble upon an idea. You need to have an interest in the world, not only in art, to be an artist. My early writing influences were the beat poets, Baudilaire and Rimbaud, Jean Genet, Jorge Luis Borges, John Steinbeck, William Blake, the Chinese poet Li Po, and the great Indian mystical poet Rabindranath Tagore. I started off writing poetry before prose. Artistically, I started with the impressionists. My high school art teacher was mad for them. Then I got into German Expressionism: Kathe Kollwitz, mostly, and then the Symbolists, Redon and Moreau took over, and from them the Surrealists. There’s a new wave of German painting that I’m getting into at the moment, extolled by the painter from Liepzig, Neo Rauch.

You also do some painting, and some darn good painting too (if I may express a bit of my own personal taste here). Does your visual art come from that brilliant literary talent inside you, or from some other place entirely?

Both forms diverge from the same creative source and I don’t favour one over the other as they are like two dialects of the same language. David Lynch talks about ‘Diving within’ when he meditates and the world of ideas is opened to him, and in this way, I think it’s important in creative work to find a way to get to this world of ideas that you can rely upon. Meditation is good for this, guys like David Lynch and Leonard Cohen have been practicing transcendental meditation for decades. Some people use drugs, but this is a hapless exercise that squeezes the creativity out of you until you’re spent and mad. Instead, you want to find a way that will ‘open up the valves’, as William Burroughs says. Others will exercise, or perform their own little rituals that get them into the headspace. For me the world of ideas is omnipresent, I just have to tune into it by forgetting about myself. It’s a watchfulness that allows me to see the world outside and in as one movement that has the potential for anything. Ideas emerge from that and I just write them down when I get them. It’s a method that has no room for cynicism.

The writing dominated a bit for a while as I had stopped painting for a couple of years to concentrate on it. I was spreading myself too thinly to be getting anywhere with either disciplines, as I was also working full time, so I opted to write, even though painting was my first love. Now the writing is rolling along, I can get back to the paint.

You were not one of the originals to RB, coming on later to supplement a short-handed staff (isn’t it always). What drew you to the open position?

I was already a member before I was a staff person, but hadn’t been active on RedBubble at all. What drew me to RedBubble was that it was a creative space. After kicking shit in office jobs for too long, the idea of being surrounded by creative activity was very appealing. Then, when I had the interviews with some of the staff, I finally caught the excitement and saw a great deal of potential in what RedBubble was doing, and thankfully, still see that potential. It’s growing exponentially by the day, it seems.

AND you edit? Anything of note, or do you simply work for one of those online “We’ll write your research-paper for you!” Sites? After all, for most writers, editing is not their favorite part of the process, somewhat akin to the disposing-of-raw-matter-after-intense-liposuction” part for surgical cosmologists… What drew you to the technical/mechanics side of the literary process?

English is my second language, although it’s superseded the mother tongue (Vietnamese). All my life, without realizing it, I had tense problems with my writing, stemming from the differences between the languages. I studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT and although it was dry and incredibly difficult, what I enjoyed most was the class in punctuation and grammar. That straightened me out pretty good. I got hooked on the structure of language. Since then I’ve edited a music magazine for a community radio station (3PBS), some stuff on the net (Gangway), helped edit a couple of anthologies and started up a small press with my special lady friend that we called Sunday Drivers Press. We launched a book last year that did quite well. Last month, the publisher of Croak&Grist, Paroxysm Press, asked me to join their editorial board and we’ll be putting out the 10 year anniversary anthology later this year. And fortunately, I get to use some of these skills at RedBubble too.

I’m a believer in knowing the rules before you break them. All great, successful writers will know their punctuation and grammar. Even those flakes who did the automatic writing, like Kerouac, they knew the structure, and then they used it to purge their consciousnesses for musical serendipity.

Who (or what) are you when you are not a writer/artist? Is your life outside the viewfinder and ink like the life through them, or are they split worlds entirely?

Everything in my life comes from the creative source I mentioned before. It describes everything. My relationships, my life choices, the activities I do. A creative life is a life lived deliberately, that at no time identifies with anything, and at all times is aware that the moment moves inexorably regardless of whether you’re in it or are still waiting at the station. I’m pretty wary of people who say, ‘I am this, or I am that’, because as soon as they do, they’ve just told me that the part of them that likes to inquire and learn has gone into hibernation.

If you could be any classical figure in literature, model in a visual work, or artist behind a camera, who would you choose to be and why?

I would be Albrecht Durer while he was painting that great watercolour of the rabbit. In that moment, in the 16th century, dealing with unwashed Germans who styled their hair with rancid pig fat, or the teenage Arthur Rimbaud, writing Une Saison en Enfer (A Season In Hell), in a farmhouse, smoking opium and recovering from the shotgun wound inflicted upon me by my lover Verlaine. The bastard.

Ok, how about some personality test questions. Give me short answers to the following:

Glass half full, or half empty?
Neither (I’d rather watch the meniscus bulge before it bursts)

Friends close and enemies closer?
I don’t really have enemies, but there are a couple of people I would cross to the other side of the room if I saw them walk into the pub (sorry, these aren’t one word answers).

Right handed or left?
Right, although I can throw with both and am working on kicking with both feet.

Pen and ink or word processor?
Bit of both. I touch-type, so it’s easy enough sitting in front of a computer, but I carry a notebook around too, and a few stories, poems or paintings have been started sitting on public transport.

Finally, (and as tired as I grow of asking this, the answer never fails to make me hungry), if you could have a meal of any three things, food or drink, what would the three things be?

It would be some kind of seafood feast.

I would have a large table covered in white linen, on the shore where the water meets the land, a platter of crabs, a platter of prawns and some crayfish. I’d have a bowl of lemon juice, salt and pepper to dip it all into. I would eat it standing up and I would throw the shells back into the ocean. And if permitted, I’d have a sixer of Peroni beers in an esky under the table.