Online Exclusive: A Conversation with David Huddle

A NATIVE OF IVANHOE, VIRGINIA, David Huddle served as an enlisted man in the Army during the Vietnam War. After returning to the United States, he completed his undergraduate education at the University of Virginia. He went on to attain additional degrees from Hollins University and Columbia University. Of his education he says, "I couldn't have become a writer without the two graduate writing programs that I went through. I needed that time to be able to believe that I could be a writer, to have people treat me as if I were a writer."

Since that time, Mr. Huddle has built an impressive body of work, including two novels, four collections of short stories, five books of poetry, and various novellas and essays. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Ploughshares, Story, and Best American Short Stories. His novel, The Story of a Million Years (1999), was selected Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review and named a distinguished first novel by Esquire.

"I love good sentences,"Huddle says. "I have a lust for a good sentence, as a reader and as a writer. " That passion for fine writing has garnered him two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and position on the faculties at the University of Vermont, Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English, and Pacific Lutheran University's low-residency Master of Fine Arts program.

We interviewed Mr. Huddle over lunch at Europa restaurant in Spokane.

 

J. DUNCAN WILEY

When we first met, you said you sometimes read things and it was like you hadn't written them.

HUDDLE

I meant to say that I read with more and more detachment. I often can't remember names of characters or stories I've written. Sometimes people describe stories to me they thought I wrote, and I nod and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Later it occurs to me that somebody else wrote that story.

One of my beliefs as a writer is that you need to move on. What you did once you can't do again, and you need to always be breaking into new territory. I believe that intellectually, but it's also my natural inclination. I admire musicians who have been able to sustain careers over a period of time—Paul Simon , Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, people like that.

THOMAS KING

Is there material from your previous writing that, like a jazz musician, you want to do a different riff on? Material you could treat differently at this point?

HUDDLE

Yes, my collection of poems, Glory River, is actually a remake of my first book of poems, Paper Boy, which was about the quaint goings­ on of my family and some townspeople. I came to know them when I delivered newspapers as a boy, probably around ten, eleven, twelve years old. In the first version of those poems, I tried to stick more or less to what really happened, with some notable exceptions—an occasional exaggeration here and there. In the remake, I'm lying and exaggerating at every possible opportunity.

WILEY

In your essay "What You Get for Good Writing," you say your original aspiration as a writer was to profit as "a commercial hack." Has that changed?

HUDDLE

I guess it has changed in how I've come to regard literary writing, to value it and to almost believe in it with a religious fervor. What goes with that sometimes is a contempt for the work of commercial hacks, but if there were some halfway point, I could go for that. I think Stephen King believes himself to be a serious writer. I think in that same essay I say if I could write like Stephen King I would. Maybe that's still true. Certainly if I could write like Haruki Murakami I would, but I don't think he's a hack. He makes a lot of money, but he does, it seems to me, do a lot of very foolish things in his otherwise superb books.

WILEY

In that essay, you also write that the "high-minded" and the "trashy" have equal parts in your writing process.

HUDDLE

I think I'm stuck with that aspect of my upbringing, which is sort of tragic, but I think I need to be true to it. I feel obligated to be true to it, even though I have sort of a refined taste in some respects. I love good sentences. I have a lust for a good sentence, as a reader and as a writer. I think you're stuck with that, even if you come from Ivanhoe, Virginia.

KING

With several novels published and many short stories in the nation's best magazines, what inspires you at this point?

HUDDLE

I'm one of those people who needs to write, and I'm not really myself if I'm not writing. The act of writing brings me into balance on a daily basis. It's like running, or practicing meditation, or prayer if you're spiritual. I need it for my mental and spiritual well-being. I suspect that long after I am able to get anything published, or long after I even continue to write coherent sentences, I'll be pecking away.

I don't know that I would have gotten as deeply into writing if I hadn't had some luck getting published, or if l hadn't found some people who seemed to like what I did. I have always depended to some extent on getting a positive response. Though I'm probably far enough into it now that I would just go on doing it. My editor at Houghton Mifflin once said, "Well, you know there are people who need to write—it's kind of like a disease." And she looked right at me when she said it.

WILEY

How do you feel about the proliferation of MFA programs across the country?

HUDDLE

I am of conflicted opinions about that. At the University of Vermont, we've talked about having an MFA program, and I've opposed it. One thing the country does not need is another MFA program. There are so many graduates within that base, and there are only so many jobs, and that relationship is outrageously disproportionate. But at the same time, I've done that. I've signed on to work at the new low-residency program at Pacific Lutheran University. So that must mean I'm still willing to make a buck out of it. I think there's a real ethical issue about it, which MFA students are very much aware of. What jobs are available when you get your degree? I think most MFA students are not under any illusions about what jobs are out there. But it's a suspect enterprise that academia carries out.

For me, I couldn't have become a writer without the two graduate writing programs I went through. I needed that time to be able to believe I could be a writer, to have people treat me as if I were a writer. But, assuming you can get to the point where you believe that you can be a writer, then the issue of how you're going to make a living or survive in the world is one you have to work out for yourself.

KING

What was that point for you, when you started to see yourself as a writer, rather than someone who-

HUDDLE

Was trying to write? It was probably at Hollins University when I first sent out a story that was accepted. I had written a story when I was still an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, and my professor, Peter Taylor, had liked the story and suggested I send it out. I sent it to the Sewanee Review and had it rejected. Then I revised it, and another of my professors, George Garrett, suggested sending it to the Georgia Review. That editor wrote me a letter and asked for revisions, and I did those and it got accepted. If you get a story accepted, you think, "Oh, okay, I can do that." That was in my first year of graduate study. Then when I was at Columbia, which was very intimidating—and which probably would have been extremely discouraging, except I thought "I got this story published, by God"—then I was able to get another one published at Esquire. So that was two solid things: I could say, "Okay, I did this. I'm at least that much of a writer." Neither of those would have happened without the graduate programs I was in.

SARAH HUDGENS

Do you still find time to write every day?

HUDDLE

Ordinarily I write every day. But this semester I've sort of turned it off because I can't keep up with it. One method that I've started doing is writing with my classes. At Bread Loaf, we'll do four poems a week, and I write those with the students. So that means I'm very productive in the summer—four poems a week. I tried that with a fiction class I taught there, but with the logistics of covering fiction in class I couldn't make it work very well, even though I tried to make them write very short, sudden fiction. I didn't write very well that summer because I don't have much aptitude for that form.

HUDGENS

Is the flash fiction form the wave of the future, or will it always be a side thing some people do?

HUDDLE

Some of them are very charming, but I can't think of many I re­ally love. There's one by Stuart Dybek called "Pee Milk" that you may have run into. I think it's quite a wonderful piece. There's another one by Tobias Wolff called "Bullet in the Brain." It's an interesting story, a memorable, worthwhile piece of work. But chose are almost the only ones I can think of that I really loved. Otherwise, you read them and think "That's really cool," then you sort of forget them.

KING

What are some lesser known books that you think serious readers and writers ought to have on their shelves?

HUDDLE

In terms of poetry three collections—Marie Howe's What the Living Do, Tony Hoagland's Donkey Gospel, and Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires—have been very valuable to me. And I learned a lot about poetics from reading Theodore Roethke because I could hear meter and cadence and see things going on in his work. I learned a lot about prosody from reading him. But in fiction, I'm not sure. Inspiring writers for me were certainly Faulkner and Hemingway. More recently Andre Dubus has been important to me. And Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor are probably my instructors in the short story. But they're not lesser known, by any means. O'Connor's Mystery and Manners has been a powerful influence. After I read an essay of hers I find myself crying to not only say what she says in content but trying to say it the way she says it.

HUDGENS

What are you reading right now?

HUDDLE

I'm halfway through Haruki Murakami's The Wild Sheep Chase. I have several books that have been sent to me to blurb; a fair amount of my reading these days is of that sort . The last book I read of short fiction that really made an impression on me was Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker which I have taken to reading. And I'm a big admirer of Edward P. Jones—The Known World, and the one before that, Lost in the City. I taught Lost in the City from when it first came out until it went out of print, then began reading it again when it came back into print. I admire Annie Proulx's Close Range: The Wyoming Stories.

KING

Any young writers to lookout for? Maybe people whose manuscripts you have?

HUDDLE

Well, Greg Spatz's book, Fiddler's Dream. I think that's a gorgeous book. Since it's going to be published by a university press, there's a possibility that it may not become very well known, but it should. It's really a lovely thing. And I'm sure he qualifies as somebody young. Edwidge Danticat probably qualifies as being young, though she must have three or four books out at least. I'm an admirer of Jhumpa Lahiri, though I don't think she's especially young. We have a creative nonfiction writer at the University of Vermont , Greg Bottoms, who has one book of creative nonfiction, Angel Head, and I think he qualifies as being young. I think he's mid-thirties or so. He's really good.

KING

I wanted to ask you about some other crossover writers, especially the vanguard of fiction who have gone into non fiction—Jonathan Lethem, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen. What do you think about their work as they navigate between the two genres?

HUDDLE

I know Lethem a bit, and I think his achievement in fiction is the big thing about him, and the essays I think are interesting. I'm guessing the same is true of Franzen. I didn't have any luck with The Corrections. It's one of those books that sort of put me off. I stopped around page sixty and didn't go on. I've read essays of his that were really wonderful, so I suspect I would like his essays more than his fiction. But it seems his fiction is what's really important about him. People who did get through The Corrections know that it's a book of consequence. David Foster Wallace I should admire more than I do, because he's a tremendous tennis player. That should recommend him, but I have trouble with him. I have to say I don't know much about his work. I bought his most recent book of stories, Oblivion, which I mean to read for my Contemporary American Short Story classic Bread Loaf to see if I could teach it, because he seems to be important enough that he should be taught. So we'll see what happens. Franzen and David Foster Wallace seem to be following in the footsteps of Don Delillo and other writers who are very, very ambitious, who want to create monumental works of literature. I have to say that the whole school of writing is alien to me. I think of myself as more of a local, down-in-the-dirt kind of writer than those people are.

KING

You write about restraint in your book of essays, The Writing Habit. Most of the examples you use are from short fiction. How do you see employing restraint in a longer piece?

HUDDLE

I think it's more a sentence-by-sentence ethic, rather than resorting to exaggerated diction or language with more potency than you require for the occasion. I tried to pick a more exact and understated way of presenting things. I think that applies to longer works, too. I forget whether I say it in that essay, but there's a very successful writer, and I think a very much-admired and much-liked writer, Pat Conroy, whose work I find just awful in this regard—just sentence-by-sentence heaping on of excessive and exaggerated diction. I was assigned to review The Prince of Tides, and I read halfway through it and said, I'm not going to review this book—I just can not, will not do it. Of course, he made millions off it, so he shouldn't care what I think. And maybe that's the rule: Flannery O'Connor says, "If you can learn to write badly enough, you can make a lot of money."

WILEY

In the introduction to A David Huddle Reader, "The Confessions of a Multi-genre Writer," you say that many pieces you start don't end up in the same form you start them in. Your novella Tenorman, for example, started as a poem—

HUDDLE

We just had Edward P. Jones visit at the University of Vermont. He said this astonishing thing about the book he published a couple years ago, The Known World, which was that he thought about it for about ten years without writing on it. He essentially worked it all out in his head. So when he sat down to write it, the first draft took him only about three months. And then he took another year to revise it and rework it. But I'm exactly the opposite. I start with a piece of something. If it's a poem, then that something usually has to do with language, maybe a first line or combination of words or a title. If it's a story, it's usually a scene or something I know will happen. But I rarely have much of it in my head when I start. And I also try to stay open to unexpected, unplanned things coming up. The nature of what you think you're writing can change because you haven't really filled in enough of it to know what its true nature is.

I think that's kind of a stupid way to write, and I think that a lot of people practice it, but a lot of people argue against it. I think John Gardner argued against it. He called it "snowballing," when you start with a snowball rolling down a hill and you just go with what comes to you. That is my method. Hearing Jones talk about how he did his work, I thought maybe I should rethink my approach.

HUDGENS

But doesn't your way open up imaginative possibilities more than if you just go in with a plan and execute it?

HUDDLE

I think so, but one could hardly wish for a more wildly imaginative book than Jones'. A lot of very strange stuff happens in that book.

So maybe one could—I don't think I have that quality of mind—but it could be that you carry our the imaginative work in your thinking about the book, as you plan it.

KING

You said that as a writer, you're in service to the writing. Do you think that follows here? Do you ever find yourself in territory you didn't want to be wading through?

HUDDLE

Well, I have found myself in that territory, and I think the best rule of thumb in that case is to get out of there. But I suppose if you write with a plan, there is a temptation to organize it around your opinions—you think people ought to behave better toward each other, so you write fic­tion chat shows people learning that they need to behave better toward each other. It seems to me that if you go into the work without having done that planning, things bubble up out of the subconscious that may or may not be very welcome. It may be that what you really want to write about is one's inclination not to be nice to the other person or to do harm to the other person. And sometimes it may be a place where you don't want to be, but I think you're obligated to pursue it and see what it comes to.

HUDGENS

When you're composing section poems that bring together stylistically different parts—I'm thinking of "Things I Know, Things I Don't Know" and "The Penguin Sonatas"—what is your organizing principle?

HUDDLE

My organizing principle is, as much as possible, not to think about organization as I compose. But clearly you know you're writing a poem that came out of the poem before it, and maybe you hope there will be one that follows it. Writing poems in sequences interests me a great deal. It's almost a fiction writing impulse that I carry into poetry. I don't see a poem as a one-time experience, I see it as a piece of something that can lead to something else. Then, when you've generated a bunch of pieces, you take a look at them. Sometimes they don't fall in the order you thought they would and you rearrange them. That can be a pleasurable activity. That was probably more the case with "The Penguin Sonatas," which was more of a fooling around kind of project than "Things I Know, Things I Don't Know," with the final poem that straight-on tries to come to terms with the death of my father and what it means. When I came to that conclusion, I knew I had come to what I needed to come to. So it clearly was the closing part. But with "The Penguin Sonatas," I think I changed my mind several times about what I wanted the end to be. And the end doesn't seem very good. If I read from "The Penguin Sonatas," I usually don't read the end.

HUDGENS

In the poems about your father's death, I was struck by how honest you were about him, but also about your reactions to him—

HUDDLE

Anybody who practices poetry knows that you can't lie in some basic way about it. You sort of have no choice about being honest, you have to be or else you don't write about it. I think a lot of people steer around it. The book of poems I value most is probably Marie Howe's What the Living Do. There are two, really three, parts of that book—the first deals with sexual abuse as a child, and the second has to do with the death of her brother by AIDS. They're both transforming sequences of poems about having gone through these periods. But they're not the kind of poetry people want to read if they're looking for a sunny, cheerful experience.

HUDGENS

In the poem "The Episodes," which deals with your mother's Alzheimer's, you write, "I don't really want to tell this, but I have to." When you write about emotionally difficult subject matter, how do you deal with that tension?

HUDDLE

I write the poem as a way of dealing with that tension. It seems that if the poems have any current going through them, it comes out of my using that occasion to work through it. It didn't happen in the poems about my mother, but it did happen in the poems about my father's death. A reviewer in the Burlington newspaper took me to task for my choice. I think his point was that I should have kept choosing things for myself, the unattractive aspects of my father that came out in the course of his illness. But I think sometimes a poem is testimony to your having gone through a difficult human experience and quite often can be of use to other people. I know it has been in those poems about dealing with Alzheimer's or dealing with slow death by emphysema, in particular. A lot of people have those experiences and not many people are inclined to write about them directly. Poems about those subjects exhibit an understanding that somebody else had this experience and came out the other side. I believe in that.

HUDGENS

So much of your poetry is straightforward and honest about personal events in your life—your hometown, your family. What effect has that had on your relationships?

HUDDLE

Not so much as you might think. There were people I was really concerned about who would read those poems in Paper Boy. There was one guy called Jeep Alley, whose real name is used in the poem—I think the poem is called "Jeep Alley, Emperor of Baseball." And it shows him to be kind of a character in a way that is both flattering and not flattering. If I could have chosen, I would rather he had not had access to that poem. But he wrote a letter to the University of Pittsburgh Press saying, "My name is Jeep Alley, I am from Ivanhoe, I am David Huddle's friend, I am Jeep Alley, Emperor of Baseball." And he wanted a copy of the book, so I was pleased by that.

But there's another story of mine that uses the name of a young woman that I grew up with and that I had a crush on in high school. She just sort of appears for a moment, along with a sort of bawdy thought that this character had about this girl. I took it to be kind of an homage to her beauty, so I put it in there. It had to do with a period of time when I think I was in eighth grade, which is at least fifty years ago. And I had a phone call from her this summer, saying that she had heard about this story, and that she heard that I had said something that wasn't very nice about her. She was really irked and wanted to see the story. So I told her to write to me and give me her address, that if she would do that then I would send her the book. She hasn't written to me yet, so I haven't had to send it to her.

But, compared to what some people have gone through, I have had very little of that, and I don't think I have truly alienated members of my family. I think my older brother didn't much like a story of mine called "Summer of the Magic Show." When I sent it to him, it took him a long time to write back, and when he finally did he said, "Well, my the memory of that summer is a lot different from yours." But he didn't stop talking to me. I suppose I haven't had as bad an experience with that as I might have, or is yet come.

KING

Do you have some writing that's so personal no one ever sees it? What disappears in your private drawer?

HUDDLE

That's an unfair question. [laughs] There are a couple novels that certainly not many people have seen, and I have a few stories and some poems. I actually have a few story beginnings or novel beginnings that take up what seem to me my darker interests. If l'm not able to take those and make something of them then nobody gets to see them. But I feel the obligation to kind of push against what's appropriate and acceptable, so in a lot of my attempts to do that I'm not able to make a piece that seems very good. The latest thing I've been working on is a sequence of poems called Glory River, a kind of a cartoon or exaggerated version of Ivanhoe, Virginia, where I grew up, and it uses a lot of unacceptable language, very unpoetic language and sentiments. So I feel like even though I'm being pretty risky with those, I still bring them out for the public to see. But I can't tell you about what I won't let you see.

KING

Is it easier for you now, later in your career, to push those limits?

HUDDLE

I think so, but I suppose that as a young writer that's a way to become noticed or get published. I admire Mary Gaitskill's work a great deal. Bad Behavior was a collection of stories she published some time ago, and it just blew me away. And I really like Two Girls Fat and Thin. She's always been into a territory that most writers don't write about. But she makes literature out of it. That's what I'd like to do.

My parents, I should say, were very staid people, and my mother, when it became evident that I was going to be pretty serious about writing in my twenties, sort of collared me and said "David, you know what, we write lives after us." I think she didn't want any trashy writing on the record with my name on it. I think about that every now and then.

WILEY

Your essay, "Just Looking, Thank You," seems to encompass that desire to push limits and take risks and seems to court controversy in a way the rest of your work doesn't.

HUDDLE

Since you read it in that reader, you must've seen the letters that followed it, so you know it did generate a good deal of controversy. It wasn't written that way. It was published in Playboy, but I didn't write it for Playboy, wasn't thinking about Playboy when I wrote it. It was written back at a time when New York Times Magazine was publishing short essays about men, and I actually published a couple of other essays in there about male experience.

I think I probably began it that way. But it got into that territory of looking at the opposite sex, and what that's all about, which really interests me. So I think I pursued it in a kind of honorable, aesthetic way. And when I finished it, I liked it. I thought it was a pretty good piece of work. I thought it was confessional, but I didn't think it revealed anything really terrible about me. I actually thought to put that out there would perhaps be liberating to people with similar experiences. But the fact that it appeared in Playboy I think enraged people who didn't even read it. And the cover of that issue of Playboy seemed to me particularly salacious. It was a startling picture—they were twins, I don't know what those twins are called, but they were fairly famous back at that time.

I guess it also hit right at a point in time when that kind of discussion would be questioned by people. And Playboy—I don't know what can be said about this—but because they want attention brought to their magazine, I think Playboy does a little poking at this kind of thing. So I believe they might have called newspapers and said, "Hey, your local boy's got an essay in here. Don't you want to read this?" So then it got into the newspapers, and people were furious. "There's this professor at the University of Vermont who's looking at women and writing about it." For a while I was scared I would lose my job, scared I would be thrown out for having done this awful thing.

KING

After that essay, did you notice people looking at you differently?

HUDDLE

I did. As a matter of fact, newspapers called the university. I think the university spokesman had to make a statement about this, and he said "Well, of course we encourage our professors to have freedom in how they express themselves."

So I didn't write it to generate controversy, although I suspected that some readers wouldn't particularly like it. A couple of women writer friends of mine didn't like it, and they told me so in a kind of mannerly way. From early on, I sort of have been inclined that way. I think my mother understood that when she said, "Our words live after us."