Richard Hoffman

Author of Interference and Other Stories (New Rivers Press, 978-0-89823-247-9)

Where did you spend your childhood? What was your favorite past-time as a child?
I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the fifties and sixties, the setting of my memoir, Half the House. One of my favorite pastimes, solitary and peaceful in the midst of a family chaotic with suffering and illness, was tying trout flies, and later, fishing on local streams with those creations. I believe that this was the beginning of an understanding about making art, learning to create an illusion so convincing it would be taken for real, by a real creature in the real world.

When did you start reading, and what did you like to read as a kid?
My mother taught me to read before I was old enough to go to school. She also applauded my first efforts at drawing. Because the books I read with my mother were stories with pictures, I assumed a kind of unity between drawing and text. Later, comic books would reinforce this, and I tried to make my own — four panels to a page, drawings with narration underneath and dialogue in balloons — that my mother would bind for me with a sewing needle and thread. So reading and writing were one and the same activity for me right from the beginning.

The public library was only blocks from our house. I loved that place! They let me bring home six books at a time. Another time, when I had the mumps, I think, my uncle came by with a big box of books for me to read while I was bedridden: The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, Jr. and a set of Bomba, the Jungle Boy. I can recall the smell of those old hardcovers, held open by my thumb at the bottom and nose at the top of the binding, as I dozed. I also loved the "Silhouette" series of biographies. But now I’m indulging in nostalgia, making the past more pleasant than it ever was. Life was hard. Books were an alternative; they were peace and order, as was the library.

When did you think about becoming a writer?
When I was a kid, I liked to draw: baseball players and saints, copies of my two card collections. Then, when I was 10 or maybe 11, my father met an art teacher and mentioned that he had a kid who liked to draw. We were very poor, and my father had taken on the job of cleaning out her garage for her. When she paid him, she also gave him a wonderful set of oil colors, several canvases, and an easel. Those materials, real artists’ materials, were a miracle to me. I loved everything about them, the smell of the paints and turpentine, and linseed oil, the various brushes, knives, sponges. I went to the library and took out books about painting, and I painted and painted: again, mostly baseball players and saints, but also still-lives and landscapes. I loved the time alone, and I had a sense that I was making things that hadn’t existed until I painted them. I painted my way through that box of supplies. But that was it — those paints were expensive, and when I asked for money to replace them, well, there was none. We were poor, as I said, and even the money I later made on my paper-route was family income.

But right about that time I wrote a story for a class at school that one of the nuns praised. I remember that she used the word art, that stories were a kind of art. And that’s when it occurred to me that I could keep making things, without money, that all I needed was a pencil and paper.

It is hard to say where a vocation begins, how and when it becomes a career, but I have been writing all my adult life, whether in verse or prose. I have worked in multiple genres for many years now, exploring the clutch of themes that compel me in poems, essays, a memoir, and short stories.

The first step I took in professing the art of writing was to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a contributor in poetry in 1972, the year after my graduation from college. I had already been reading all the poetry I could find, all kinds, haunting Wilentz’s 8th Street Bookshop and the Gotham Book Mart in New York City where I lived then. There seemed to be so many ways to make a poem! I needed some guidance. At Bread Loaf, the poets William Meredith and Maxine Kumin were encouraging to me, along with fiction writer Laurie Colwin, and soon I was publishing my first poems in quarterlies and attempting my first short fiction. In my zeal I even started a magazine, Glyph, which, although short-lived, published the work of such writers as Frederick Busch, Dabney Stuart, and the Austrian writer Peter Handke. I found a kind mentor in the poet Richard Howard and began auditing his classes at Yale and at the New School. My own work was being published in South Dakota Review, Carleton Miscellany, Kansas Quarterly, Shenandoah, and American Review.

Then a number of deaths in my immediate family left me reeling and unable to write. I had never felt such pain and I wondered what good writing was that could not — no matter how hard I tried — make sense of death or summon beauty out of grief.

About this time, I came across an ad, in American Poetry Review, I believe, for a Master of Fine Arts program at Goddard College — a program in which one studied with real poets, not English professors! I believe that the Goddard low-residency MFA was the first of these now numerous programs, and I was a member of its first graduating class. While there I studied with Barbara Greenberg, Robert Hass, Stephen Tapscott, and Donald Hall. I believe that program, and those people, along with Ellen Bryant Voigt, Louise Gluck, Richard Rhodes, George Chambers, and others (and believe me, I know how histrionic this might sound) saved my 26-year-old grief-stricken life.

I began the work that would become Half the House: a Memoir (Harcourt, 1995; New Rivers, 2005) in 1977, and over the next seventeen or eighteen years I contended with the material of that book: the grief, the tragedy, the anger; but also questions of form and structure, presentation and tone. I learned a great deal from working so long and hard on that book. I also continued to write and publish poems and stories in quarterlies and "little" magazines.

How do you write?
I usually write in longhand, and only later move to the computer. Maybe this comes from developing in the age of the typewriter, when revision was so much more clerically cumbersome. I always have a number of projects going at once. I try to write every day, and I work on what seems alive to me that day. Sometimes a poem that's been intractable suddenly becomes viable again, or I suddenly know what must happen in a story, or how to push an essay a bit further. I try to stay eligible for inspiration, which is the thrill for me in all this, writing something I didn’t know I would write, feeling "yes, that’s it, that’s right."

The stories in Interference & Other Stories were written over the course of several years. Over and over during that time I felt myself standing in the doorway, so to speak, between being a father and being a son. In a way, the theme of all those stories is the difficulty men have growing up in our culture. It’s been said many times before, but there are a lot of big boys who pass for men, who lack the self-knowledge and seriousness that would make them dependable. In my stories, I feel a great deal of compassion for men who are struggling against constricting roles and expectations. Elsewhere I’ve written about how toxic a narrow definition of masculinity can be, not only to men but to women and children as well.

But let me say something about the title story in particular. After my memoir Half the House was published, it resulted in the arrest of a youth coach who was a serial child rapist. I had been one of his victims when I was 10. I became something of an activist, serving on Boards of child welfare organizations and on the Governor’s commission here in Massachusetts where I live now, and I spent a great deal of time reading from the book and talking with people in law enforcement, the academy, community groups, etc. I found it frustrating to find that most adults no longer recall the experience of childhood consciousness, somehow retrofitting their adult selves into the situations of childhood, forgetting the magical thinking, the yearning to be grown up, what Orwell called "the lunatic misunderstandings of childhood." Even people who should know better seemed to think that childhood rape is mostly accomplished by physical force. So I tried to portray the boy's mind first and then show how the adult whose predations depend on his understanding of a boy’s psyche is able to "play" him to get what he wants. My working title for that story, a terrible title but one which served me as a guide, was "How It Happens."

What are you reading these days?
I read a lot of poetry, from all over the world. In fiction, I just finished Richard Russo’s hilarious novel Straight Man which friends had been urging on me for years. I’m crazy about the short stories of the Scots-Irish Bernard MacLaverty, a realist, and Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, a fabulist. I’m currently reading Ha Jin’s A Good Fall.

What's some advice that you could offer young writers?
Read! It sounds weird to have to say it, but I teach in two Masters’ programs in writing, and I find that too often my students have not read much, and not very deeply or widely. Like most readers in a consumer society, I suppose, they read the latest books marketed to them. Some of those books are very good but, especially as publishing has become more and more corporate, that’s a very narrow portion of the spectrum, and driven largely by the entertainment value of the stories. Stories, and poems, and plays, have much more to offer than that.

Reading the literature of other countries, even other Western democracies, I mostly come to the conclusion that it takes American writers a long time to get serious, to address death and grief and how love makes life possible and hate makes it intolerable. Is this an affliction of American writers or Americans in general? I don’t know, but it does seem to take us, most of us, an awful long time to grow up.

What I tell my students is to not hang out their shingle too early, don’t announce to everyone that you’re a writer — most people don’t know what you mean, and it places a great deal of pressure on you to produce. It’s important to take your time, to discover what is important to you and then explore it in your work. Everybody’s in a hurry. Writers don’t develop on a fast-track. Take your time.