My name is Christine Borne and they’re telling me to say that I’m a Cleveland artist, but really I feel like less of an artist than someone who just isn’t good at having a normal job.
On Friday I’m being interviewed for my official Creative Workforce Fellowship video, so I took the time to write out answers to questions they seem likely to ask. What you’ll see in the video is a rambling crazy person who badly needs a haircut. But here’s what I really mean:
Q. When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
A. I’ve been making up stories as long as I can remember, daydreaming myself into basically every TV show I ever watched. I have a huge catalog of Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 fan fiction that no one is allowed to see, ever. The first storyline I remember being really obsessed with was this 1970s Japanese cartoon called Battle of the Planets (or Gatchaman in Japan). I was really little, maybe five. It was very emotionally heavy, with a lot of the traditional samurai themes. I can’t imagine parents today letting kids that young watch something like that, and to be honest I think that’s to our detriment.
My favorite thing to play with was my mom’s electric typewriter. I had this wonderful olfactory memory the other day of the way it smelled while the motor was running – hot metal and ink. I learned to type when I was about four. I don’t think I could write letters at that time, but I could type.
I’ve really had no formal training as a writer, save for one class in Fiction Writing with the late and wonderful Sheila Schwartz at Cleveland State, about thirteen years ago. She said I had a good ear for young, alienated people, and I’ve carried that around with me ever since.
Q. What inspires you? Where do you get your ideas?
A. Here’s a quote from a very famous Midwestern author that I love:
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful.” -Ray Bradbury
I’d also add that if you want to be a writer you should find day jobs that expose you to lots of different ideas. For example: museums, libraries, bookstores. I had a job in reference publishing that involved me reading encyclopedias in every subject, 8 hours a day, 4 days a week. Well after a while you start making these connections between, say, the life of Charlotte Bronte and the ghosts of evolution and medieval Serbia that you never would have made before. I have enough material left over from that job to last me until I die, if I never have another idea again. It’s actually a little overwhelming.
It’s just as important to me – perhaps more important – to immerse myself in film and music as it is in literature. I’ve learned just as much, if not more, about how to set up a story arc from watching Mad Men as I have from reading books, and how to set a scene and build characters from listening to Bruce Springsteen, how to create a mood and metaphor by listening to punk rock. Grant Hart, the greatly underappreciated Midwestern songwriter, has this wonderful piece called “You’re the Reflection of the Moon on the Water” which works brilliantly as a backhanded insult or a backhanded compliment. I want my own work to have that quality.
I also think it’s important to get out of your element. As a writer of fiction you need to empathize with people who are not like you, so that you can get your reader to understand people who are not like them, and maybe not be so quick to judge. I think this is especially important in times of economic hardship.
Q. Tell us about what you’re working on right now.
A. The novel I am working on now is (for now) called Coming Home to Die: How Robbie Brennan Gave Up His Dreams and Slunk Back to the Rust Belt, which is set in a fictitious Rust Belt city that’s of course loosely based on Cleveland. It’s full of people who feel stuck and trapped by circumstance, by ambitious dreams that they never really developed the skills to manifest. There’s a common Hollywood narrative where the native goes off, becomes glamourous and successful, and then comes back to their hometown to realize the importance of community, family, “home is where the heart is,” that their successful life is really shallow and all that greeting card schmaltz. I don’t subscribe to that idea of a romanticized Heartland: a friend of my mother-in-law once described a certain Cleveland suburb to me as “the only place in America where you still find lawn jockeys.” We want to hear a lot of “good news” about people moving back to Cleveland or the Rust Belt but sometimes it isn’t all good news. My protagonist feels very ambivalent, and isn’t sure whether his hometown has changed or he has. It’s a book I’d very much like to get out of my system so that I can move on to more important things, such as a cozy mystery series featuring a wiener dog detective. I realize I’m doing my literary career backwards, but there you go.
Q. What do you like best about Cleveland?
A. I like that it’s a weird place that no one’s writing stories about. It feels a little undiscovered in that regard. I like Loganberry Books, where I work. I like that I can go to the Literature Department at Cleveland Public Library and get any book I want, or just sit there and work in absolute quiet with no one bothering me. I used to be a librarian, and it’s not PC to say this, but I absolutely hate it when libraries become raucous community centers where you can’t go when you need quiet.
If you want to write American stories, you have to stuff yourself full of American history. If you want to write Cleveland stories, you also have to stuff yourself full of local history. It’s something that isn’t taught well, and what we end up with are people who are full of not the history of Cleveland, but this mythology of Cleveland, handed down by word of mouth, spoken about in hushed tones. With the city of Cleveland proper usually being this HERE THERE BE DRAGONS kind of hole on the map. As a writer, this disconnect is interesting to me.
Q. What can Cleveland do to enhance its artistic community?
A. If Cleveland wants to attract artists, we need more than just cheap rent and a positive attitude. We need decent day jobs. We all like to think that if we do what we love, the money will follow, but the truth is that probably some money will follow and for all other life expenses we need a backup plan. I think the lack of day jobs is a real weakness here. Sometimes I daydream about the entire publishing industry moving from New York to here.
I also think the best thing you can do as a local artist is not to be a local artist. By all means, explore regional themes in your work, but make sure your work is making it outside the region. I think that’s the biggest thing we lack in the Rust Belt: an incoming/outgoing flow of ideas. I think the best way to attract artists is to make Cleveland or Detroit or Youngstown or wherever look interesting to artists. Show yourself to be an interesting person, and people will want to be around you.
The Creative Workforce Fellowship is a program of the Community Partnership for the Arts and Culture, made possible by the generous support of Cuyahoga County citizens through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.