Joel Heng Hartse Interview (Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do)
Joel Heng Hartse is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where he teaches courses in academic writing, TESOL, and education. His academic work has appeared in a variety of journals, and he's the former editor of the journal Discourse & Writing / Rédactologie and incoming president (2022-2024) of the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing. His music criticism, meanwhile, has appeared in Image, Geez, and many more. His latest book is Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do. If you'd like to check out the book launch event, you can register here.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I’m primarily an academic (technically my job title is “Senior Lecturer” but I’m basically a professor) who does music writing on the side, but I’ve been trying to find a way to bring those two things closer together for years. I’ve been in love with pop music and language for as long as I can remember, and 25 years ago thought I’d either become a rock star or a journalist, not realizing there are various degrees of things in between one can be.
I started writing about music when I was a teenager who was obsessed with Christian rock—which was the subject of my first book, Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, which is a sort of memoir of 90’s Christian rock fandom—I wrote a fanzine that I never published; it just sat on my dad’s computer in the basement. I was an avid reader of music magazines and just devoured and absorbed everything I could get my hands on, from Christian rock websites to CMJ to Rolling Stone to the Rocket (RIP).