Award-winning writer Arna Bontemps Hemenway begins each day by watching cartoons.
Hemenway is the most recent recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, but he”s also a professor at Baylor University and a father of two.
When Hemenway received the call announcing his award he said he couldn”t believe it.
“I never thought it could get the kind of attention that this award shows,” Hemenway said. “I thought my mom would buy 50 copies and my coworkers would buy another 50 copies, and that would be it.”
Arna Bontemps Hemenway | Courtesy
Arna Bontemps Hemenway is the recipient of the Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction.
He said to receive the recognition of readers through this award has been extremely gratifying and validates his work as a writer.
Hemenway said, “These are readers saying, “Hey, your book reached me. You”ve done something that matters.””
He said a writer has to become very acquainted with failure. A writer has to experience rejection many times before it no longer hurts. Hemenway said eventually you have to sit back down, start writing again and believe that it will pay off.
“When you”re a writer, 90 percent of the time you have to sort of blindly believe in yourself,” he said.
Hemenway said his passion, aside from writing, is teaching.
“I love teaching. I find it really energizing to be around beginning writers who are excited and experiencing things for the first time,” he said.
Similar to his students, Hemenway said it was during college that he really developed his passion for writing. He said he”d always been a very avid reader and at some point he realized that he wanted to create the content he enjoyed so much.
After graduation, Hemenway went on to pursue his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers” Workshop.
Hemenway said a big part of his writing process is gathering new experiences and combining them in interesting ways to build stories. In the past he has worked as a tour guide in Europe and Africa and also lived in Israel for a while. He said meeting new people in those settings had a profound effect on his writing.
“I think having to imagine entirely different lives in order to relate to them helped my writing a lot,” he said.
Hemenway said he used those experiences to write his book, which is a short story collection including the novella “Elegy on Kinderklavier.”
Jennifer Hawk, director of the Hemingway Festival at the University of Idaho, said Hemenway”s writing is surprising in many ways.
“I think the story is taking me in one direction and then all the sudden it takes me in a completely different direction that”s just full of so many complicated emotions,” she said.
Hemenway said interesting stories are built from things that cultivate a person”s interest in real life and are expanded upon in writing.
“Sometimes when I”m teaching, I tell my creative writing students to be aware of things they encounter that seem to have emotional density, whether it”s in the news or in a story,” Hemenway said. “I think one thing you learn to do when you write or you love writing is to feel the best things in real life and make them better in your stories.”
He said he is usually intrigued by a subject or haunted by a person”s story and then does as much research as he can to create an immersive story.
“The biggest reward of writing is really just an active and increased practice of empathy,” Hemenway said.
He said most people imagine the reward is getting published or getting an award, but for him it”s just the practice of sitting down and discovering new emotional and intellectual territory.
Austin Maas can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @austindmaas