By Keith Walsh
Among the mythmakers of popular culture, authors of fiction are some of the most creative minds. It’s sometimes the case that an interview with a maker of literature leaves the reader with more questions than we started out with. American author Hermester Barrington is one such figure.
I was glad to have had the chance to submit some questions to this enigmatic scribe, to discuss his recent publication “JohnBear, Janine, and I” in Mythaxis Magazine Issue 32, out of the UK, as well his upbringing, influences, and the role of imagination in his work.
Popular Culture Beat: Your style is nostalgic, ironic and learned. Who are your literary heroes and how did you come to find your voice?
Hermester Barrington: “I read constantly, and have been doing so since I was a child, so it’s a real challenge for me to list only a few sources for my voice. My grandfather read Conan Doyle’s The Lost World to me so many times that I hear it in his German accent whenever I re-read it, and that work, more than any other, drove me across the globe in search of strange organisms (most of which are microscopic in size). My father read me the Baron Munchausen tales (and my relatives still insist that we are descended from him, which assertion I find barely credible), and I have very pleasant memories of my mother asking me, when I was a child—and indeed, to the end of her life—questions such as ‘What will that cloud do when it becomes a dragon again?’ or ‘What is the name of the dryad who lives in that sycamore?’ And it has always puzzled me how the Spanish could create the most rational language on the planet, but use it to write works which celebrate the imagination—I’m speaking of Don Quixote, One Hundred Years of Solitude and the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges—those works also inform my writing. And Terry Gilliam’s films had the same effect upon me, as did my rediscovery, in the early 1980s, of the invisible world of the protozoa which surrounds us—it is as mind-shattering as anything created by the surrealists, and it exists all around us, for free, to those who are willing to look.
I’m pleased by all of my literary works, which were born out of this literary and cinematic and scientific pile of odds and ends, but I would never have begun writing if the esteemed Vandal Drummond had not asked me to write for his zine The Físico Nuclear Experience. I realized that I enjoyed writing, and it was Mr. Drummond who inspired me to do so—and for that, I am forever grateful to him.”
Popular Culture Beat: Where did the inspiration for ‘JohnBear, Janine, and I‘ come from?
Hermester Barrington: “Like most of my stories, it comes unbidden from a number of sources. One of my favorite books as a child was H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. The protagonist, Griffin, is ultimately a tragic figure deluded by Western ideas of science and how it might give us power over others—the exact opposite happens in the book, of course—but Wells clearly sympathized with him, despite his flaws. He is even more sympathetic in James Whale’s 1933 film—the moment he walks into the inn, he is viewed from below, which in the language of cinema signals that he is to be respected. The director clearly sides with him against the villagers who are, I think, stand ins for Whale’s working class origins, which he spent his life trying to escape. In any case, I suppose I felt a similar separation from those around me, to the point that—I don’t remember this personally, but my parents have told me that when I was about 5 or 6—I thought I was actually invisible. That illusion ended, apparently, when I tried to creep up on my older brother and the young woman he was wooing. I was not, of course, invisible, and my brother made sure that I would never try that again by dunking me in the pond. In any case, this is one of several stories I have written in which the protagonist is invisible in some sense, and it is the first to be published.
The setting comes from my visit to Ursula K. Le Guin’s neighborhood, when I was there for the tribute to her life which took place some months after her passing in 2018. The houses where the action takes place are on the street she lived on, and the stream that Janine and Charlie mention in the story was inspired by Balch Creek. I still have moss and liverwort from that creek growing in my protozoarium, by the way, and, possibly, some protozoans from the stream as well.
And JohnBear himself? Well, there is an old French folktale of Jean de l’Ours, who is half-man, half-bear, and I used his name as inspiration. I’m certain, however, that the image of the giant teddy bear has two sources: one is Andre Norton’s story “Teddi,” in which a child’s imaginary friend, shaped like a giant teddy bear, rescues the protagonist, and the other is Ursula’s ‘The Diary of the Rose,’ which features an imaginary friend very similar to a bear.
Oh, yes, I should mention that Charlie’s uncle Matthew was named after the character in the John Denver song by that name, and Janine was inspired by the character of Connie from Steven Universe.”
Popular Culture Beat: In ‘JohnBear, Janine, and I,’ it seems the figure of the stuffed bear represents the unwillingness or inability to let go of childhood?
Hermester Barrington: “Well, I think that the narrator has fewer choices in that matter than most of us do, but I’m a great believer in Wordsworth’s idea that ‘The Child is the father of the Man,’ or, as E.O. Wilson put it, ‘Most children have a bug period. I never outgrew mine.’ Our sense of time changes as we grow older, but I find that I can still slow time by going out into the garden and looking at the world, or bringing it into my study to examine under the microscope, or by writing a poem about it…those are things which I did in my childhood, but stopped when I became an adult—fortunately, although ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’ I lose myself in the moment, and I am like a child again…for a moment.”
Popular Culture Beat: What is your experience with imagination in ‘keeping us safe?”
Hermester Barrington: “Imagination can keep us safe, I think, by confirming that we are not alone. If one person reads my stories and thinks, ‘Ah, I never knew that anyone else felt that way before—I guess I’m not as alone as I thought I was,’ I will have accomplished one of the goals I set for myself in writing fiction. Imagination allows us to set goals that we otherwise might not accomplish. Einstein once responded to a friend who had kept him waiting for a meeting by saying (paraphrasing here) ‘Not to worry—the kind of work I do, I can do in my head, and I can do it anywhere.’ While few of us can imagine the sorts of worlds he saw, and with such discipline, his ability to visualize experiments and narratives is something that all artists know. And if I didn’t imagine—and then write about—the giant teddy bears and doppelgangers and demon infested stone walls and so forth that populate my imagination, they’d still be taking up room in my psyche. We all know Goya’s dictum about what the sleep of reason produces, and no doubt that it true, but I prefer Le Guin’s take on the subject, which is: ‘People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.’ Our imaginations are integral to our being.”
Popular Culture Beat: The graphic in Mythaxis 32 was done using artificial intelligence. What is your opinion of this new technology, and its impact on artists making actual traditional art?
Hermester Barrington: “It’s unfortunate, but this seems to be another case of the market shaping art. The graphic fits the story perfectly, without giving too much away. I know that art and some essays can be created with AI—I don’t see how this would be possible for music or for literature in a way that would satisfy the reader. I think that we are just going to have to see.”
Hermester’s Bio: Hermester Barrington is a retired archivist, a rogue haiku poet, and a deliberately genre-ignorant artist who has recently published pieces (under his pseudonym, Hermester Barrington) in Fate Magazine, Underland Arcana, and Robot Butt. For over four decades he and his impossibly beautiful wife Fayaway have traveled the round earth’s imagined corners in search of bats in flight, falling leaves, and stratospheric protozoans. His next publication, co-authored with Fayaway, is “Marginalia in Library Copies of Jim Brandon’s Weird America and The Rebirth of Pan in the Ohio and Kanakwa Watersheds, 1978-2021,” and will appear in American Libraries Sciences Journal in the Fall 2023 issue. He can be found at Cenotaph Of The Jackalope.
Hermester Barrington on Facebook
“JohnBear, Janine, And I” at Mythaxis Magazine
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