Meet Cliff Hensley of Riverside

Cliff Hensley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cliff Hensley.

This can be a more difficult question for an artist in any medium to answer than it sounds. It isn’t easy to pinpoint precisely when things started for you. I think it’s human nature to do things. Different people are compelled to do in different ways, and the doing begins when we’re very young, and we start to explore the world around us and discover ourselves. It’s also in our natures as humans to connect and communicate, although to varying degrees of need. These urges to do and connect are fulfilled for different types of people in many ways. For some of us, they synergize as one or more modes of combined action and expression that are quantified by others as The Arts. There are undoubtedly formative points along the way that have calibrated me into precisely who and what I am now, but taken as a “Point A” to “Point Z” list of how I got here, I think they leave a lifetime of important context behind that informs their being. So, I guess the answer to where I started is, “I was born.” As for how I got here: “I woke up today, and I’m not dead yet; I guess that means I have to keep doing it.”

Oh, not at all, not even remotely. There have been waystations and watering holes, certainly. There are moments of respite and calm between storms, but art life is not easy.

These days I’d say, hands down, what I’m proudest of is “Now You See,” a work of macabre psychological horror that is physically constructed uniquely (or at least I like to think so). We call it a “prose LP” or “a concept album in words.” It tells the story of the coolest band you’ve never heard of and all the terrible things that happened to them, which is why you haven’t. But the story is not the story. It’s told from the perspective of an amateur music journalist, a maybe-or-maybe-not reliable narrator, who puts the pieces together while confronting or eluding his inner demons. Guilt, grief, and repression are recurring themes, with plenty of digressions into the worlds of underground music and cinema along the way.

I’m mainly a writer and a filmmaker, but I’m also a playwright, musician, game designer, copy editor, and film editor.

As an author, I create metafiction that taps the veins of surrealism, magical realism, dirty realism, minimalism, macabre horror, and ergodic literature; I like to throw as many in the blender at once as possible when I can.

As a filmmaker, I make ultra-low-budget guerrilla chamber films. I like my films to look rough around the edges like they were made by a few passionate amateurs in their garage with only their lunch money. In that world, I’m most known for my 2004 feature film “The Scam Artist,” which was first a cyberpunk play that I wrote for a black-box theater when I moved back to Atlanta from Los Angeles in October of 2001. I later decided to adapt it to film after I watched “Plan 9 From Outer Space” with a friend and we jokingly wondered what a cyberpunk film might be like if Ed Wood had made one. As a kid with no money and just a Canon XL1-S video camera to work with, it was a eureka moment: I knew that by leaning into melodrama and cheap production aesthetics, and combining that with the script of my black-box play, I could make a sci-fi movie, which at the time is what I really wanted to do, even though other genres may have been better suited to what I had to work with and my budgetary limitations. But thanks to “The Scam Artist” I discovered the aesthetics and processes of moviemaking that I enjoy, and I’ve been evolving and refining that garage-auteur vibe ever since.

(My newest output in that regard is actually a feature film called “What Lies Within.” It’s a macabre supernatural thriller in the chamber-film tradition that I presently only exhibit in private screenings—but that could change in the near future, so stay tuned.)

As an editor, my most recent offerings are the inaugural and second issues of “Seven Story Hotel,” a counterculture prose, poetry, essay, interview, and psychedelic art anthology series from Jacksonville-based publisher Subtle Body Press.

Also, in another life, many years ago, I wrote briefly for a tabletop roleplaying game called “Shadowrun.”

According to my parents, I played too many video games and went outside too little, which is patently untrue (although I did love and play a lot of video games): I loved climbing trees (it’s a miracle I never fell out of one and broke anything), I rode my bicycle every day I could (and I did sustain a few injuries on that front), I played make-believe with my friends in the yard or around the neighborhood or in the surrounding woodlands (sometimes we filmed the scenes we created using my dad’s VHS camcorder). I loved to play board games with my friends: Samurai Swords, Axis & Allies, and Risk all hit the floor in my room a lot growing up. I listened to mountains of music, read mountains of books, and watched mountains of movies. I distinctly remember falling asleep at night a lot to the sound from the television of the theme song for Doctor Who because it was often coming on around that time on public television, and I’d wake up later when “Georgia on My Mind” started playing just before the station went off the air for the night. I loved the sound of ice cream trucks in the summer while I sat outside by the pool and the smell of the crisp fall air in North Georgia, where I grew up, as the leaves began to turn. I lived for the moments when I could be free from the drudgery of childhood obligations, such as school and homework, to use my imagination instead, create, and play, play, play. But don’t we all?