Author Seán Hewitt
MELISSA WHITLER | NBCU Fellow
Melissa@DallasVoice.com
This past week, Seán Hewitt published his debut novel, Open, Heaven. The story follows 16-year-old James as he comes to terms with his sexuality.
Set in a remote northern English village, James longs for a different kind of life. Then the dangerous and handsome Luke arrives in town to live on his uncle’s farm, and James has his first experience of desire.
The two boys are drawn together, yet their competing responsibilities try to keep them apart.
Ahead of the book’s release, Seán Hewitt answered some questions for Dallas Voice about his writing and inspiration.
Dallas Voice: How would you describe Open, Heaven in your own words? Seán Hewitt: To me, the novel is about memory and time. It begins 20 years after the main story has taken place, and the narrator is in some way trying to get to the heart of what went wrong.
Love makes our imagination run wild, and when we see the world through the haze of love, it is difficult to look back and see what was real. Love can make us very selfish, and the narrative has moments where all consuming love makes James forget about those around him.
Previously your only published work was poetry and your memoir. What was your experience writing a novel? I feel like my memoir was a stepping stone because it helped me feel more comfortable writing a longer prose work. The difference with a novel is, you’re completely making it up. It is, in some ways, a test of nerve, as it’s quite easy to second guess yourself when doing something so childish as inventing something out of thin air. Over time the characters and story started to feel very real, and I found it very freeing, the realization that I could invent anything.
What was your inspiration for this story? I wanted to write about unrequited love, to examine the texture and summeriness and ease of a love story and have it be entirely one sided. A lot of it came from speaking with friends. For queer people there is this shared experience of our first love being unrequited, and I wanted to explore how that shapes the way we experience desire. The book really looks at what love does to the imagination, and the ways we misinterpret the world around us.
The setting is pretty much a thinly-veiled version of the place where I grew up. In queer literature, there is the trope of an isolated person moving to the city and having their horizons expanded. I was interested in the part before they moved.
This is more a pastoral novel to expand where queer people in literature live and what kind of lives they have. A lot of us grow up in small towns, but there are not as many stories set in the countryside.
Part of the reading experience with Open, Heaven is this feeling of uncertainty and questioning what is real, what is really happening. How did you create that in your writing process? I wrote a much more explicit draft to start and slowly deleted my way out of it. I didn’t want it to tie up too certainly. It’s a romance novel with hints of a mystery, involving readers in a guessing game. Since the book is about memory and forgetting and imagination, I wanted readers to feel that, to toe line of how much you trust this narrator.
James himself doesn’t know what happened. The journey is him trying to figure it out. It’s up to the reader how much they choose to believe. It’s important not to take the narrator at his word or to assume he is always right.
It also meant I had to leave the characters in not the greatest place. The word I had in my head for the ending was bittersweet. Many of my favorite books end unresolved. By leaving things unresolved, the story continues.
Another important aspect of the book is family relationships. How did you craft Luke and James’ families, especially James’ brother Eddie? In many ways, they want what the other has. For Luke, family is so important to him, while for James, he is willing to give up his family in favor of romance and desire. Love can take all these different forms that often pull against each other. Love for family can pull you away from others.
Eddie is one of my favorite characters in the book and was probably the one I was cruelest to. He is collateral for James’ experience of love. Eddie is tangled up in the guilt Jamie feels about his relationship with Luke, as Eddie reminds him of his responsibility to other people.
Eddie is a pure and innocent child, and he demands a lot of responsibility from James.
How does it feel to have the book out in the world? It feels like when you introduce your friends to other friends. These characters have lived in my head for so long, now I feel like they’re almost more real. It’s a weird magic trick to put something from one person’s imagination to another, and that is what storytelling is. They’ve taken on a life of their own.
For more information and to buy Open, Heaven, see Seán Hewitt’s website, SeaneHewitt.com.