Interview with Brendan Heneghan

By Sebastian Vice & Brendan Heneghan

1. Tell our readers about yourself

I’m 25 year-old graduate of Louisiana State University, you’re classic all-American boy, I guess. I often describe myself as “Chicago raised, Louisiana made.” Reading and writing have been the rocks to which I’ve been bound for most of my life. 

Short stories sparked my passion for writing. I “wrote” several before I could read or write. Of all the fond memories of the 2000s, some of the earliest involve my mother sitting at the big body computer while I verbalized what to write down. Once I became literate, that was all she wrote—by age ten I had a typewriter.

Sports has also always served its purpose too, from a very young age. My grandfather held starting positions in both basketball and football (point guard and quarterback) at Purdue back in the fifties. To his dismay, I bleed LSU Football. 

I figured I’d be like him, an athlete. By age twelve, I was already 5’8. Reading and writing faded into the past. Sports took their place. Thirteen years later, and I’m only two inches taller, which compels me to use my mind over muscles to achieve something.

2. Tell us about your forthcoming The Hard Road (Fall 2023)

The Hard Road isn’t merely a novel, but an experiment. During the Summer of 2020, two friends and I were bored. The lockdowns swooped in and we were highly skeptical of the “good intentions.” We felt our youths were on the line. An existential crisis had set in. With college graduation closing in, how would we make our mark in this world? How could we avoid being bricks in the wall, mechanically going through the motions of school, career, retirement and death? There was never any desire to conform to a status quo we believe doesn’t benefit our species.

That July, we packed up the car and beelined west. Joe, Mike, and I are highly philosophical. We can’t help ourselves. Constantly trapped within our minds, we concluded a westbound, balls-out journey to the abyss was something worth exploring, wherever the road would take us. The trip was lonesome not simply because of the remote deserts, mountains, and highways. We were gripped in the lockdowns. Cities everywhere between New York and LA we’re on fire. Racial strife had rocketed into riots and demonstrations (the latter of which I participated in). Streets were empty. Nobody in a million years could’ve imagined Venice Beach so empty.

Months later during my last semester at LSU, it dawned on me. Write about it. The Hard Road is based on that trip. It’s deeply autobiographical. I would say at least half the book is true word-for-word. Probably sixty, maybe seventy-percent. The rest is there for creative purposes. 

Three childhood friends, under the boot of pandemic lockdowns, their worlds upside down, essentially say “fuck you, we’re going to make some memories.” As a work of radical political thought, it’s a highly unorthodox coming of age tale, and a documentation of American life during times that seem to be growing more dystopian with each passing day. From the Mojave Desert to Louisiana’s swamps, it tells a story of America—a fire-breathing critique of the establishment, but a love letter to the land itself. It’s a book people a century from now can read and get an idea of what the times were like. The protagonist both loathes and believes in himself, as well as his generation. It’s certainly a story many from Gen Z and beyond can relate to. The 2000s and 2010s are extensively reflected on throughout. I can’t give spoilers, but one fact that transcends the book into real-life, is that we didn’t return to Chicago quite the people we were when we left.

3. What, and who, are your sources of inspiration?

Jim Morrison (and some acid after the governor shut everything down in Louisiana during March of 2020). His poetry inspired me to write some of my own while tripping balls. All day I wrote random shit. The next day, sober, I read everything and said to myself, “woah, this is poetry, maybe you can make something out of this.” By eighteen I was reading Thoreau, whose environmentalist libertarianism appealed to me. It’s important to point out that I wouldn’t be who I am as a writer without Camus, Nietzsche, and Hunter S. Thompson. I read the great body of all three writers’ work between May of 2020 and October of 2021.

Then of course, the horrendous circumstances under which I was born. I came into the world one month premature. Not only did the doctors have to break my collar bone during labor, but I was diagnosed with Stage 4 neuroblastoma at birth. Had I made it to nine months, I would’ve been stillborn. My mother once told me that she always believed I somehow knew I had to leave the womb, that fighting my way into existence was my last and only chance to live. I don’t really believe in some great destiny to fulfill or anything like that, but I’m convinced I have a purpose. I found it through writing. Cancer-free twenty-five years come August, I think of this every day. Memento mori, and all that jazz.

4. We’ve talked extensively. Any wild stories?

Wild stories? It’s a Promethean challenge figuring out where to begin or end. The 2020 trip was certainly dangerous, especially taking acid in the desert when it’s 110 degrees. 

We were stopped by Border Patrol near Slab City. They waved us on when we showed our IDs. I was pulled over going 105 miles per hour in southern Utah. Given the amount of psychedelic drugs we possessed, it’s nothing short of miraculous we didn’t wind up behind bars.

Whether it’s ecstasy at a rave in LA at 2:00 am, rolling high as a kite on Bourbon Street, locking car keys in the trunk at a gas pump in Farmington, New Mexico, hanging out backstage with rock bands, or drinking with a charter from an infamous biker organization I shall not name here, there’s no shortage. All I could do was go along for the ride.

5. Care to impart any writing wisdom?

I’m a strong believer in Stephen King’s advice to write when inspired, and read while in a rut. But there’s more. I have a tendency to write as if I’ll die tomorrow. After all, I was keenly aware of my own mortality from too young of an age.

I guess my own original advice to both aspiring and established writers is this: just fucking do it. Write paradoxically—like there’s no tomorrow, but simultaneously do so as if a random archaeologist two-thousand years from now might dig up your text and wonder who you were, and what things were like when you walked the earth. Perhaps this advice isn’t for everyone, we’re different as writers and individuals. There’s no rule book to telling a story from the soul. I suppose that sentence in and of itself is writing advice.