Interview with Bill Hayes

ABSTRACT

John Gosling interviews Bill Hayes, author of the memoir Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me. This interview explores Bill’s experience of his creative process in writing this moving memoir. His six-year relationship (and subsequent loss to death) with renowned neurologist and author Oliver Sacks served as a source of inspiration for him. Bill reveals how his remarkable creative process, which was different from anything he had previously experienced, unfolded over a six-week period while on a scholarship in Rome. He describes how the many losses and deaths he has experienced have informed his creativity and capacity to be more present in his life. He is also a photographer, and he interspersed several of his New York photographs in the book while describing quite movingly his love affair with New York and the people he encounters on its streets. He ascribes his interest in photography to a template in his unconscious from his childhood experiences of being surrounded by books and magazines of photojournalism. Our creativity—what inspires us, where it originates, and how it manifests in us as humans—remains a mystery. This interview offers a window through which we can glimpse the unique creative process of one person who is an author and a photographer.

KEY WORDS:

• chance
• creativity
• creative process
• death
• gay
• inspiration
• insomnia
• loss
• memoir
• Oliver Sacks
• photog-raphy
• synchronicity

ENDNOTE

1. We put together this beautiful little book Gratitude, which is a suite of his final essays about facing illness and death. A quote from the book captures the essence of Oliver’s approach to his life and approaching death: “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Gosling

JOHN GOSLING, MB, ChB, MMedSc (Pharmacology), is a Jungian analyst living in Cape Town, South Africa. He serves as a feature editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. He trained as a psychiatrist in Cape Town and then moved to New York City in 1982, where he spent twenty-two years and trained as a Jungian analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of New York. He served on the board of the C. G. Jung Institute of New York for several years before repatriating back to Cape Town in 2004. From 2011 to 2015 he was president of the Southern African Association of Jungian Analysts (SAAJA). He is an SAAJA training analyst and has presented seminars both locally and abroad. Correspondence: [email protected].

BILL HAYES has written three nonfiction books—Sleep Demons, Five Quarts, and The Anatomist. His subsequent fourth book, 2017’s Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me, is a memoir of his life in New York City and his six-year relationship with neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. After learning about photography from his mother as a child, Hayes took up photography again in 2007. He has produced one book of photography, How New York Breaks Your Heart. His freelance writing has appeared in a number of periodicals, most notably The New York Times. Hayes has been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation grant and a Leon Levy Foundation grant, and was a resident writer at Blue Mountain Center. He has also served as a guest lecturer at Stanford, New York University, University of California, San Francisco, University of Virginia, and the New York Academy of Medicine.