An interview with Kevin Ahern
What is, in your opinion, the best thing (or your favourite thing) that you’ve ever written? Tell us about it.
Hmm. That’s hard to say. Most of what I write is in verse form. I guess one of my favourites would be “In the Big Inning,” which was a story in verse form about the game of baseball written in a biblical fashion. I was (and am) very happy with it, but have never been able to interest anyone in publishing it. A recent one I am very happy with is a spoof on the use of clichés called “Low Hanging Fruit”. My wife is a pretty good barometer of the quality of my writing and she laughed out loud at it. I haven’t yet submitted it for publication. Some prose pieces I wrote that I’m very happy with include “Men With Balls” (a view of American sports as viewed by a space alien) and “The Division of Complaints,” an impossible journey through the maze of a phone-in Complaints department. My wife also loved that one. I also write song lyrics to popular tunes. My favourite is called “Tweet” and it’s to the tune of “Smile”. As you might expect, it is about Twitter and Tweeting.
Who are your favourite writers, and what influences your writing?
I love Ogden Nash and enjoy Edward Lear. Steve Martin, I think, is brilliant among modern comedy writer, in addition to being an amazing performer. Dave Berry is also great. I also like the Shouts and Murmurs humour column of The New Yorker. In fact, Esperanto was me mimicking the Shouts and Murmurs style of writing.
What are your hobbies?
Writing. I was a biochemistry professor at Oregon State University for all of my career until I retired in 2018. Though I was writing a fair amount of creative material during the last 6 years of that stint (including 3 textbooks), I’ve had almost full time now for over three years to write and I’ve taken full advantage of it. I’ve reached that 10,000 hour mark that they claim starts to make you an expert. I’m not sure about being an expert, but I do find that it gets easier to write the more I write. I know my own style much better than I did when I started and I write to it quite easily now. Apart from writing, I enjoy working in the yard and recently took up computer programming - a VERY different kind of writing.
Describe yourself as if you are a character in one of your own stories / poems.
Ah, I like this question. My best writings generally involve me taking on different personas. As I noted above, I played a space alien or someone who has never seen a sporting match in “Men With Balls.” It was, I think, one of my best pieces. In “Welcome to Microshaft Word,” I play a hapless user of a modern word processor. The word processor wants to do everything and the user accomplishes nothing. When I write things like these, I laugh out loud as I’m writing them. They are a great joy.
Tell us something crazy.
Crazy? My biochemistry colleagues thought I was crazy. I had great success as a biochemistry professor, though, because the students loved my shtick and my methods of teaching worked, as demonstrated by the performance of my students on standardized exams. My lectures on YouTube also have over 5 million hits, which, I like to say, puts me in the realm of a good cat video. My colleagues were much more straight-laced and never really figured me out. For the most part, I think they dismissed me which was kind of odd because everyone else across the university and outside it seemed to “get it.” For example, I have about 100 song lyrics about biochemistry/science (and over 100 on other topics) that are to popular tunes. I call them Metabolic Melodies and I sang a new one to my classes every day. Most of my colleagues just rolled their eyes to this. None of them ever commented negatively, but almost all of them acted as if the songs were merely attention getting stunts and (I think) they never really appreciated them as creative works. It was, in fact, the Metabolic Melodies that led to all of my other creative writing endeavours.
What’s the weirdest question you’ve ever been asked in an interview? And what did you answer?
I got interviewed on a talk show on Sirius one time regarding some Metabolic Melodies I wrote (“Biochemistry Pie” to the tune of “American Pie”, for example). Anyway, they had heard of this “singing professor,” from Oregon State as I was known and invited me for an interview. I hadn’t heard of them before, so I looked them up online and discovered the most raucous, rude, over the top kind of show I had ever heard. I was rather nervous - wondering how I would respond to something like poop jokes or inappropriate questions. The weird thing was that they didn’t ask me anything weird at all! I kept waiting for a zinger and everything was very standard stuff, kind of like your questions here. I guess they thought that because I was a professor, I wouldn’t engage. Maybe they thought it was funnier to have a weird guy and act straight with him. I don’t know. My answers were pretty much in line with the straightness of the questions.
What is your writing set-up? (E.g. your garden shed, a café etc.) and are there any things you must have to get the words to flow, e.g. a lucky hat or a favourite shirt?
I’m pretty dull. I sit in a comfy chair next to the fireplace and write away. Alcohol and, to a lesser extent, marijuana help with the creative process sometimes, but neither of those is extreme and neither is required. I get creative bursts and when those happen, I write a LOT of stuff in a short time. I do write at least one verse and one “one-liner” every day and have done so for the last 10 years. Other things I write on top of that and I probably average 7-10 of those other things per week. I have thousands of unpublished verses. I keep these organized in a computer book format and it currently tips the scales at over 750 pages. Lately I’ve moved into writing verses based on oddball headlines in the news and I do those every day now, as well. The regimen of doing all this writing on a regular basis is great because it means I’m always looking for inspiration or coming up with ideas. Some sure-fire ways of inspiring me include stupidity, frustration, and anger, which is odd because 95% of what I write is humorous. For me, humour is a tool for fighting back.
Hmm. That’s hard to say. Most of what I write is in verse form. I guess one of my favourites would be “In the Big Inning,” which was a story in verse form about the game of baseball written in a biblical fashion. I was (and am) very happy with it, but have never been able to interest anyone in publishing it. A recent one I am very happy with is a spoof on the use of clichés called “Low Hanging Fruit”. My wife is a pretty good barometer of the quality of my writing and she laughed out loud at it. I haven’t yet submitted it for publication. Some prose pieces I wrote that I’m very happy with include “Men With Balls” (a view of American sports as viewed by a space alien) and “The Division of Complaints,” an impossible journey through the maze of a phone-in Complaints department. My wife also loved that one. I also write song lyrics to popular tunes. My favourite is called “Tweet” and it’s to the tune of “Smile”. As you might expect, it is about Twitter and Tweeting.
Who are your favourite writers, and what influences your writing?
I love Ogden Nash and enjoy Edward Lear. Steve Martin, I think, is brilliant among modern comedy writer, in addition to being an amazing performer. Dave Berry is also great. I also like the Shouts and Murmurs humour column of The New Yorker. In fact, Esperanto was me mimicking the Shouts and Murmurs style of writing.
What are your hobbies?
Writing. I was a biochemistry professor at Oregon State University for all of my career until I retired in 2018. Though I was writing a fair amount of creative material during the last 6 years of that stint (including 3 textbooks), I’ve had almost full time now for over three years to write and I’ve taken full advantage of it. I’ve reached that 10,000 hour mark that they claim starts to make you an expert. I’m not sure about being an expert, but I do find that it gets easier to write the more I write. I know my own style much better than I did when I started and I write to it quite easily now. Apart from writing, I enjoy working in the yard and recently took up computer programming - a VERY different kind of writing.
Describe yourself as if you are a character in one of your own stories / poems.
Ah, I like this question. My best writings generally involve me taking on different personas. As I noted above, I played a space alien or someone who has never seen a sporting match in “Men With Balls.” It was, I think, one of my best pieces. In “Welcome to Microshaft Word,” I play a hapless user of a modern word processor. The word processor wants to do everything and the user accomplishes nothing. When I write things like these, I laugh out loud as I’m writing them. They are a great joy.
Tell us something crazy.
Crazy? My biochemistry colleagues thought I was crazy. I had great success as a biochemistry professor, though, because the students loved my shtick and my methods of teaching worked, as demonstrated by the performance of my students on standardized exams. My lectures on YouTube also have over 5 million hits, which, I like to say, puts me in the realm of a good cat video. My colleagues were much more straight-laced and never really figured me out. For the most part, I think they dismissed me which was kind of odd because everyone else across the university and outside it seemed to “get it.” For example, I have about 100 song lyrics about biochemistry/science (and over 100 on other topics) that are to popular tunes. I call them Metabolic Melodies and I sang a new one to my classes every day. Most of my colleagues just rolled their eyes to this. None of them ever commented negatively, but almost all of them acted as if the songs were merely attention getting stunts and (I think) they never really appreciated them as creative works. It was, in fact, the Metabolic Melodies that led to all of my other creative writing endeavours.
What’s the weirdest question you’ve ever been asked in an interview? And what did you answer?
I got interviewed on a talk show on Sirius one time regarding some Metabolic Melodies I wrote (“Biochemistry Pie” to the tune of “American Pie”, for example). Anyway, they had heard of this “singing professor,” from Oregon State as I was known and invited me for an interview. I hadn’t heard of them before, so I looked them up online and discovered the most raucous, rude, over the top kind of show I had ever heard. I was rather nervous - wondering how I would respond to something like poop jokes or inappropriate questions. The weird thing was that they didn’t ask me anything weird at all! I kept waiting for a zinger and everything was very standard stuff, kind of like your questions here. I guess they thought that because I was a professor, I wouldn’t engage. Maybe they thought it was funnier to have a weird guy and act straight with him. I don’t know. My answers were pretty much in line with the straightness of the questions.
What is your writing set-up? (E.g. your garden shed, a café etc.) and are there any things you must have to get the words to flow, e.g. a lucky hat or a favourite shirt?
I’m pretty dull. I sit in a comfy chair next to the fireplace and write away. Alcohol and, to a lesser extent, marijuana help with the creative process sometimes, but neither of those is extreme and neither is required. I get creative bursts and when those happen, I write a LOT of stuff in a short time. I do write at least one verse and one “one-liner” every day and have done so for the last 10 years. Other things I write on top of that and I probably average 7-10 of those other things per week. I have thousands of unpublished verses. I keep these organized in a computer book format and it currently tips the scales at over 750 pages. Lately I’ve moved into writing verses based on oddball headlines in the news and I do those every day now, as well. The regimen of doing all this writing on a regular basis is great because it means I’m always looking for inspiration or coming up with ideas. Some sure-fire ways of inspiring me include stupidity, frustration, and anger, which is odd because 95% of what I write is humorous. For me, humour is a tool for fighting back.