Aleksandar Hemon in San Francisco

Tonight I saw the writer Aleksandar Hemon here in San Francisco. A Sarajevo native who now lives in Chicago, Hemon read from his two books "The Question of Bruno" and "Nowhere Man." After reading, he took questions. I wrote down some of his better quotes, taking the liberty of slightly paraphrasing here and there. Here are some of the things he said, possibly out of context, but hopefully still useful, along with some of the questions:

How did you decide on the structures for your stories in "The Question of Bruno"?

"Each story has its own structure. There are not templates of structures that you can use whenever you want. I tell my writing students you can't separate the story from its structure."

"There is no good writing, (there are) only good stories."

How do you start writing a story?

"I imagine a space where the story takes place (before imagining the characters or anything else)."

"I find the space that I want to spend time in."

What was it like when you first started writing in English?

"Early on in Chicago I wrote, and this is a good way to write, in complete anonymity."

Excerpts and tidbits:

"It's very, very hard to glamorize Chicago (comparing it to New York)."

"The two best American books of the 20th Century were "Lolita" and "The Adventures of Auggie March."

About writing now that he's had some success:

"It's always one story at a time (or one book at a time or one page at a time)."

Is your writing autobiographical?

"It is not autobiographical in a sense that it is not a concealed confession. I start with a personal space, but I like to think I transcend the personal space."

"I hate confessional memoir. It's pain without imagination. I embellish heavily."

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