HEIKO JULIEN interviewed by LK Shaw

Heiko Julien is a musician, writer & poet. He is the host of the new poetry talk show, ‘Tubbin’ with Heiko’. He is the author of three e-books. He is turning facebook into an art-form. He has three new poems in the Shabby Doll House spring edition.

I am interested in his life and work, so I asked him some questions… 

1, you write under a pseudonym, but i get the impression that ‘heiko julien’ is more than just a name and more like a character or a persona for you. could you tell me how ‘heiko julien’ came about and if you ever feel like you are two people?

heiko was what they used to call me in german class in high school. everyone in german class had to choose a german name. my friend sean chose ‘adolf,’ which seems kind of obvious. my friend adam choose ‘christ,’ which i didn’t know was a common german name. i chose ‘heiko’ because it sounded nice. i still think it sounds nice thats why i use it. sean never stopped calling me ‘heiko’ after high school, so i guess it probably made more sense to him than other people when i started calling myself that on facebook and posting personal poetry stuff multiple times a day. the ‘julién’ part is french. i thought it’d be funny in a pretentious way to have a german first name and a french last name and have neither of them be real.

i’m not sure if i am two people. my girlfriend didn’t want to date my facebook with my real name. she broke up with me and asked heiko if he wanted to be in a relationship. i think thats probably significant.

2, what is the most enjoyable part of ‘the artistic process’ for you?

i feel like i am a person who is compelled to create expressive things. i need to do this in order to make sense of the world around me, by which i mean i need to create my own world, to a certain extent, because this one isn’t doing it for me in a lot of ways. that may sound selfish. it probably is selfish to look at all these things people have worked so hard on collectively and say ‘i am sorry, but what you have built is not good enough for me’ but that is how i feel.

i most enjoy when i can set aside stray, invasive thoughts and bodily discomfort and all these other awful distractions and focus on something for an extended period of time. it can be very difficult to focus for me but when i can i feel like i am in The Zone, like they say in sports. it feels good. i like to get in The Zone.

3, what did you read when you were a teenager? was there a book or writer which ‘got you into’ literature or were you doing something else? if yes, what?

i was much more into reading and writing as a child until around middle school, which i understand is how it often goes. i enjoyed learning to read. i learned to read early because my parents insisted and spent time reading to me and put the idea in my head that this was a way to be a Special Person and create my own identity, and i really bought into that. when i got older i lost faith. when i was a Sad Teen i must have felt that most of what other people had written had very little to do with me. there were few books that i related to or were on my level, so to speak. music was what really spoke to me, i prefered the sensation of sound and probably tried not to think about words a lot of the time, so i focused most of my creative energy on sounds. i did read to prove to myself and others that i was Smart and was keeping up, but i didn’t love it.

when i went to college i met my friend carl aagesen (http://fossilonapaper.blogspot.com.) he was the first person i’d ever known who was writing poetry just for the sake of writing poetry. like, because he enjoyed it and thought it was a good thing to do, i assume. i had forgotten that i could play a creative role in my own relationship with reading and writing stuff. im glad i remembered, it has been very helpful for me.

4, do you follow ‘the news’?

i watched the jody arias trial on cnn headline news the other day. they have 24-hour coverage of the trial this week with every show on their network covering the same trial. it’s weird to me, all the hosts and personalities want to kill this woman and that’s what people want to watch.

i dont know. feel like Cool/Entertaining Alternatives like the daily show or whatever aren’t really that much better. if there is somewhere to just read what has happened and it’s written in the most objective way possible, i think that is what i like read sometimes.

5, do you feel interested in being famous? do you feel interested in having a ‘cultural impact’?

i would probably like to have as much power and influence as i can handle, which i think is a very unwise thing to want. it might be best to be a part of a community of somewhat-like minded creatives that is relatively small and stable, but i would probably let oprah yell at me in front of millions of people if it got me attention.

6, what are you working on at the moment?

i am working on getting a collection of my ebooks published in print through a third party, which feels validating and also risky. writing a new chapbook to go along with the collection. finishing an album of music because that is also something i feel compelled to do.

slowly making progress on a novel which i am very proud of so far but is the hardest thing i have ever tried to do.

7, if i asked you to come live with me and a bunch of other people ‘from the internet’ on a small farm in wyoming, where we would have time, unlimited art resources, food, drinks and a karaoke machine BUT no wi-fi and no way of leaving the farm’s estate for 1 year, would you be down!? (everyone invited has made work that made you hopeful)

yes.