Fol­low­ing the Sound − An Inter­view with Hol­lis Hamp­ton Jones

27 / 11 / 2024 / Interview

Inter­view by: Sam Buchan Watts

I first met Hol­lis Hamp­ton Jones when I was intern­ing for a Lon­don lit­er­ary magazine, over ten years ago. She was per­form­ing at Rough Trade East to launch an LP, a col­lab­or­a­tion with the band (and fel­low Nashville res­id­ent) Lam­bchop: a dub remix of mater­i­al from her nov­el, Comes the Night, that saw the troubled interi­or voice of her young prot­ag­on­ist spill out moodily into oth­er son­ic dimen­sions. In her writ­ing, Hol­lis inhab­its char­ac­ters who slip between life’s cracks. She’s become fas­cin­ated by sub- or under­ground cul­tures like fash­ion, strip­ping and more recently, skat­ing. Her new book of stor­ies, Spin­nings, echoes the spir­it of that dub remix: Hol­lis has an anthropologist’s interest in the unsung, and takes pleas­ure in col­lab­or­a­tion and exper­i­ment­a­tion. Each of the stor­ies in Spin­nings is told from the per­spect­ive of a skater in a dif­fer­ent city – the pro­ject itself is the product of a fruit­ful dia­logue with the skater Sylvain Tognelli. Spin­nings launches at Vladi­mir 2024 with read­ings and dis­cus­sion over two sched­uled boat rides on Fri­day afternoon.

— Sam Buchan-Watts

What was the seed for this book of short stor­ies about skateboarding?

The first thing that got me was a video of Jason Dill skat­ing to Cass McCombs. I watched that video and I just was mes­mer­ized by it, the way it moves through a city and a point of view of a city that I had nev­er really seen before. And the almost bal­let­ic approach: to me, it’s almost like a dance with the city.

And then at a party here in Nashville, I happened to meet Alex Olson and nobody was really talk­ing to him, nobody knew who he was. And I star­ted talk­ing to him about skat­ing and I thought it was really fas­cin­at­ing. And then shortly after that I met Sylvain Tognelli through his wife Ash, whom I’ve known for a long time, and at a din­ner I just star­ted ask­ing him a lot of ques­tions. He had thought that lit­er­at­ure and skate­board­ing hadn’t really crossed over that much, that there were a lot of art­icles and mem­oirs and essays, but not so much lit­er­ary fiction.

And I just got really inspired to write about this through talk­ing with him and so I feel like it’s very much been a jour­ney with him. He doesn’t give him­self very much cred­it, but in fact this book would not exist without him.

In his pre­face to the book, Sylvain refers to you as a kind of under­cov­er agent. What is it about your work as a nov­el­ist that allows you to do that?

I would say curi­os­ity and an open-hearted­ness about what it is that I’m explor­ing. I’m explor­ing it because it fas­cin­ates me and there’s a beauty I see in it. So I’m very open to exper­i­ences. And I felt really priv­ileged to have that inside win­dow on a world.

I write in the first-per­son nar­rat­ive. It’s just kind of the way I write. And so I was really just inter­ested in try­ing to get inside the mind and the ima­gin­a­tion of a skater. When I was among skaters, I tried to be very sens­it­ive about not intrud­ing: I tried to kind of main­tain the fly-on-a-wall per­spect­ive and not to get in the way, basic­ally, and simply observe.

Can you talk a bit about any chal­lenges you faced in the research?

The chal­lenges were pretty prac­tic­al chal­lenges: how do you keep up with skate­boarders? I thought maybe I should have an elec­tric wheel­chair that I zoom around or something.

The first time that I met up with people was in Lon­don and the spot was not a known place and my Uber driver had no idea where it was. A Google pin was a whole new thing for me. But that group of skaters was kind and con­sid­er­ate. And Sylvain was there that day, my very first day out with skaters. He walked with me while some of the oth­er skaters might’ve been ahead of us.

That was also a day of film­ing where they were focus­ing on spe­cif­ic places, stay­ing for a long time in each one, and then we’d move on. So I was able to keep up with that. But you know how it is: you can’t plan very much in advance because it’s moment by moment, like, ‘oh, we’re going to film here’, or ‘oh, that’s not work­ing’, or they get kicked out by the secur­ity guard or an old lady or whatever. So it’s a con­stantly mov­ing thing, and I’m phys­ic­ally not able to keep up with the guys on their boards. That was par­tic­u­larly a prob­lem in Greece because my phone wasn’t work­ing. There were like 16 guys, and they would take off. I just had to fol­low the sound of it.

The book is a very inter­na­tion­al view of the skate cul­ture. You render the tex­ture of dif­fer­ent scenes and loc­ales. One of the things that all the stor­ies have in com­mon is that skate­boarders often brush up against people on the mar­gins: work­ers, undoc­u­mented migrants, street home­less, gig eco­nomy workers.

You encounter a lot of people, people on the streets. For my stor­ies, the city itself is a char­ac­ter in a sense. Part of why it took me so long to write this col­lec­tion of short stor­ies is because I really had to have a sense of the place, I had to spend some time there.

Watch­ing skate­board­ing in the Olympics, for instance, what they call street skat­ing to me has noth­ing to do with street skat­ing. They put up a rail, and they put up a ledge, but that’s not what street skat­ing is about. It really is about inter­ac­tions, and not only with the phys­ic­al ele­ments of the city, but with the people of the city as well. You learn a lot about what is going on in a place by meet­ing the guy who is sleep­ing on the park bench or run­ning across protests in Paris.

Vladi­mir seems like an import­ant envir­on­ment for the book: you’ve been many times, one of the stor­ies is set in Fažana and the fest­iv­al pub­lished an early selec­tion of these stor­ies. Can you talk about the connection?

While I’m not a skater myself, I con­nect with the spir­it of skat­ing very much. And the camarader­ie of it. I’m as excited as any­one when some­body finally lands these tricks. I guess I feel like my spir­itu­al home as a skater, if you will, is Vladi­mir. It has a par­tic­u­larly lov­ing envir­on­ment. It’s an inter­na­tion­al film fest­iv­al that has no cor­por­ate spon­sors. Everybody’s doing it from their hearts. The films are fant­ast­ic – it’s a fest­iv­al of the art of film – and the ven­ues, and the pho­to­graphy, it’s very excit­ing to me. I think that the area also has a really inter­est­ing his­tory. I did inter­views with both Nikola and Oleg that were really help­ful to me in writ­ing the Fažana story. And, of course, Oleg has done this incred­ible lay­out for the book. I’m most moved that they really con­nec­ted with that story.

Your bio men­tions you dream of being a teen­age boy who skates around the world. What kind of skater would you be?

I think Sylvain’s skat­ing is so beau­ti­ful. I mean, if I could do some­thing like that, I can’t ima­gine what a feel­ing that must be. He makes everything look very easy, and he’s so grace­ful and cre­at­ive with what he does, you know, in what he sees. He’s not a teen­ager, of course; but he’s on the top of the heap, for sure.