{"id":35974,"date":"2022-06-01T12:33:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-01T19:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=35974"},"modified":"2025-02-21T09:21:40","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:21:40","slug":"issue-91-brandon-hobson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-91-brandon-hobson\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 91: Brandon Hobson"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Found in Willow Springs <\/em>91<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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JUNE 202<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>2<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

JOSHUA HENDERSON, MORGAN HENDERSON, JENNIFER KRASNER, & SAMANTHA SWAIN<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH BRANDON HOBSON<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Brandon<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in Willow Springs <\/em>91<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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THROUGHOUT HIS WORK<\/strong>, Brandon Hobson presents stories of Native lives shaped by intergenerational trauma and atrocity and also by cultural continuity and hope. As his characters navigate familial separations and systemic racism, they find themselves in circumstances both relatable and astonishingly surreal. They discover and recover identity; they hurt, heal, fall in love, leave, and find home in a fractured contemporary society. In her review of The Removed<\/em> for NPR, critic Marcela Davison Avil\u00e9s writes, \u201cThe story in this book is deeply resonant and profound, and not only because of its exquisite lyricism. It\u2019s also a hard and visceral entrance into our own reckoning as a society and civic culture with losses we created, injustices we allowed, and family separations we ignored. It\u2019s a path of renewed mourning, meditation and trauma which at once seeks the vitality of what once was, and justice for what was taken.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brandon Hobson is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of The Levitationist<\/em> (2006); Deep Ellum <\/em>(2014); Desolation of Avenues Untold<\/em> (2015); Where the Dead Sit Talking<\/em> (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award;  The Removed<\/em> (2021); and The Storyteller<\/em>, Hobson\u2019s first middle grade book, which will be published in April, 2023. His short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in Best American Short Stories<\/em> (2021) and McSweeney\u2019s<\/em> among other publications. Hobson served as a judge for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. He teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Puerto del Sol<\/em>. Hobson is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We spoke to Brandon Hobson over Zoom in early June of 2022, a couple of months after hearing him speak and teach a craft class as a featured author at the Get Lit!<\/em> festival in Spokane. We discussed the symbiotic relationship between music and imagery, representation, and ways to approach multiple perspectives and world-building in novel writing. We began by discussing intention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MORGAN HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you start your pieces with clear intentions, and do those remain the focus throughout? Or do you find meaning as you go?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRANDON HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I usually start with an image, and then I build from there and see what happens. Sometimes I have an image that I think is something to end with, and I might work toward that image. I might think of a sentence, like an opening sentence, but it\u2019s usually an image. Part of the process early on in writing is trying to figure out what the story is about because I think it\u2019s about something when in reality it\u2019s about something entirely different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JOSHUA HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can I ask what image you had in mind when you were beginning to write The Removed<\/em> or Where the Dead Sit Talking<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure. With Where the Dead Sit Talking<\/em> I had an image of a man at a grave site in shackles. That image was in an early draft at the beginning of the novel. With The Removed<\/em>, a lot of the images came from thinking about the Darkening Land, which is a mythological space used in traditional Cherokee stories, and making that Darkening Land my own\u2014a great old downtown space with these crooked and falling-apart buildings and people walking around sort of bug-eyed and very gray. For me, at least with Edgar\u2019s sections, what was exciting about The Removed <\/em>was being removed out of this world and into the mythological space of the Darkening Land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JENNIFER KRASNER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with David Heska Wanbli Weiden, you mentioned Kathy Acker as an influence for the Darkening Land. It was such a suffocating dystopia in that basement. She has some scenes like that, too. I\u2019m curious to hear how you took that traditional origin, a literary influence, and your own vision and pulled those all together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know that I was thinking so much about her when I was writing those scenes in the Darkening Land or writing the book necessarily, but that influence might be there somewhere because she was such an early inspiration for me. Kathy Acker is a writer from whom I learned to be bold and unafraid in my writing. She was one of the first writers where I was just knocked out and thought, \u201cWow, you can do this?\u201d She does a lot of stuff with language. I think she was absolutely brilliant. My interest in surrealism grew out of reading Kathy Acker and William Burroughs, who I know was a friend of hers and an influence on her. That drew me into writing early on. Exploring that surreal space felt very exciting. I asked myself, \u201cHow can I incorporate this surreal element into a modern story?\u201d Thanks for reminding me about her. She was amazing. She still is. I think she\u2019s very underappreciated. Many students have not heard of her, so it\u2019s always fun to introduce her. I know you\u2019ve interviewed William T. Vollmann. I think they were kind of compadres back in the early 90s and were big writers at the time. I was reading both of them, and they influenced the way I\u2019ve been writing fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Joy Williams essay \u201cWhy I Write,\u201d she describes writers as sharks that move \u201chidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment.\u201d I saw this as describing a writer\u2019s relationship to truth. In Deep Ellum<\/em> and Where the Dead Sit Talking<\/em>, it feels like these sharks\u2014the emotional core or truth of the story\u2014are obscured, like the characters either aren\u2019t fully aware of the sharks or there\u2019s something so difficult for these characters to talk about that they can\u2019t quite access it. In Where the Dead Sit Talking<\/em>, Sequoyah imagines scenarios of tying Rosemary down. These imagined acts of violence feel like they\u2019re expressing something that he can\u2019t otherwise express. In The Removed, the shark\u2014this truth that I think Williams is talking about\u2014feels more like it\u2019s coming closer to the surface. As much as Edgar gets trapped in the Darkening Land, he does escape. The red fowl is killed. What is a writer\u2019s relationship to truth in a story and how does a writer choose to obscure or reveal that truth?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those are the big questions, very difficult to answer. I discover along the way. That\u2019s done through revision. I don\u2019t know how much I revised those sections, especially those sections of the Darkening Land. I was working with my agent at the time, revising it, and then revising with my editor, and that was after having revised it several times already on my own. What\u2019s the truth I\u2019m looking for, for this character on this journey? What is the question? What\u2019s the image? What am I trying specifically to say? And how am I going to go about doing that in the most effective way or the most artful way possible? The red fowl was actually a later addition in revision. In fact, it may have been the last revision. Then, I went back and added the red fowl throughout the whole book. And I started thinking more about metaphor. I started thinking about colors. When Edgar escapes the Darkening Land, this dark gray world, I wanted it to be a colorful experience, which is why I mentioned cherry blossoms and the colors of other important Cherokee lore\u2014golds, greens, and reds. These three combined colors are on the cover of the book as well. I focused on colors representative of justice, representative of returning from removal, representative of healing. So I began in revisions to start thinking about: How can I use color? How can I use symbol or metaphor to help show what I\u2019m trying to approach\u2014returning from removal\u2014and do it in a unique way, in the most artful way I can? With the Darkening Land, what is Edgar\u2019s truth? And how does that mirror the truth I\u2019m trying to reach\u2014the truth of the entire novel, which is exploring the answers to questions: What does it mean to heal? What does it mean to deal with trauma? What does it mean to deal with generational trauma? Abuse? All these are issues I love to write about. How do we approach them and look for ways out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s interesting that the red fowl is one of the later revisions because that really guided me through the Edgar sections. It felt like it was always there, but I guess that speaks exactly to what you\u2019re talking about with finding the meaning through revision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SAMANTHA SWAIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to ask about crafting those ambiguous endings in As the Dead Sit Talking<\/em> and The Removed<\/em>. In As the Dead Sit Talking<\/em>, we\u2019re left with Sequoyah\u2019s question about whether he contributed to Rosemary\u2019s suicide. In particular, he said something like, \u201cno one suspected murder.\u201d We had some argument about whether he felt like his attempt to stop her contributed to her  pulling the trigger or whether he had intentionally helped her pull the trigger. Likewise, in The Removed<\/em>, I interpreted the Darkening Land as an overdose and thus the ending where Edgar walks down the blossom path as him crossing over. Yet, simultaneously, I thought, \u201cWell maybe he really did live and arrive at the bonfire.\u201d Both of these endings feel really satisfying. I wondered if you could talk about how you conceptualize and approach open endings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m interested in blurring the line between reality and fantasy. I\u2019m also very interested in unreliable narrators and their effect on the reader and how seductive an unreliable narrator can be. With Where the Dead Sit Talking<\/em> I was getting into the space of a fifteen-year-old boy\u2014well, technically, it\u2019s a man looking back and trying to retell his story. When we\u2019re writing fiction, we\u2019re telling lies, right? We\u2019re making things up. Even if it really happened, how can we alter this a little bit to make it a better story because it\u2019s not a great story right now, so we have to embellish or exaggerate, and we have to do that in a very seductive way. Our job as writers is to seduce the reader. That sounds creepy, but when I\u2019m a reader, so often I\u2019m seduced by the voice, by the narrator, especially when we\u2019re talking about first person, these two works specifically being first person. When I read first person, I\u2019m so easily seduced that I\u2019m willing to follow this voice wherever it takes me. I\u2019ve come across the narrators who, at some point, I\u2019m asking, \u201cWait a minute, what\u2019s really going on here?\u201d That lends credibility to the story, to the voice of the story, no matter if it\u2019s an adult or if it\u2019s a child. Take To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> for example. When I taught seventh grade years ago, I taught that book. I remember talking about how effective Scout\u2019s voice is. Is she telling me everything? Is she leaving something out? How reliable is she to tell me these things? These very dark thoughts that Sequoyah is getting when he\u2019s looking back, why is he choosing to give these to us? Why is Edgar or why is Sonja telling us these details, and what are they leaving out? Those are the choices we make with first-person narratives that, to me, become very exciting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SWAIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see, the ambiguity of the ending stems from unreliability. That\u2019s really interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m much more interested in how something is done than I am in a satisfying, happy ending. The Removed<\/em> was chosen early on as a Book of the Month Club selection, which was great in that it sold a whole lot of copies, but I just wonder whether my work is too weird for many people. And that\u2019s okay. It\u2019s not going to be for everybody. I never want to write something that I think will have a feel-good ending. Not everybody loves Kathy Acker. Not everybody loves David Lynch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll sometimes go in to Goodreads and see what people have to say about a favorite book, and they\u2019ll be brutal. It\u2019s like getting tossed to the dogs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, that\u2019s part of it. You have to deal with that kind of stuff and overlook it. I don\u2019t have a profile there and don’t go there, nor do I look at Amazon reviews. People love to have an opinion about things. I was looking at hotel reviews\u2014we\u2019re going next week to New York\u2014and it\u2019s the same thing, right? They absolutely trash hotels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SWAIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a past interview you talked about feeling like you were not Native enough to write novels like Where The Dead Sit Talking <\/em>and The Removed<\/em>. I have often struggled with thoughts of like, \u201cWell, I\u2019m not disabled enough to tell this story.\u201d Could you talk a bit about how you overcame this sort of thinking? What advice would you give to young authors dealing with similar feelings?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still struggle with those feelings. At some point, it\u2019s about stepping out and being entirely honest with yourself and being the type of writer you want to be. It helped to think of myself as the audience. You\u2019re putting aside what other people are going to think and just saying, \u201cFuck it. I\u2019m going to write this book for me. This is the kind of book that I want to write. And these are the characters who are dealing with these issues that I want to write about.\u201d It\u2019s also important to lean on the support system of whatever group you\u2019re in. I talk with my friends who are Native about this issue a lot, and it\u2019s really surprising to hear how many have felt the same way. \u201cAm I really Native enough to have this conversation?\u201d It helps to know that everybody feels this way, whether you\u2019re writing about gender identity, disability, or anything else. What also helps is thinking that this is just one story or one book. I\u2019m going to write more. This is something I love to do, that I\u2019ve been doing since I was young, and I\u2019m going to continue to do it. It\u2019s not going to be the end of the world if this one story or book doesn\u2019t work out. Speaking of, Sam, a colleague of mine, Connie Voisine, just got a grant for writers with disabilities here at New Mexico State University. [https:\/\/www.zoeglossia.org]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you manage what you demand of the reader versus what you give them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know that I think too much about the reader, especially when I\u2019m drafting. And again, I\u2019m really writing this for myself, and I\u2019m writing the kind of book that I would like to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you know when you\u2019re going to construct something that needs to be interpreted versus something you\u2019re going to straight up tell the reader? Is it just intuitive?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of that comes out in revision. When I\u2019m first drafting, which is the most fun, I\u2019m not thinking so much about the demands on the reader. Let\u2019s say I\u2019ve written a scene where someone is hurt by someone who\u2019s just left. I might have them say it, but then, going back, I say to myself, \u201cWell of course, it\u2019s so obvious. I\u2019m showing this person going through this struggle, why would I have them speak it out loud?\u201d So I\u2019m going to cut that. I start thinking about the demands of the reader. Am I being too ambiguous? Am I not looking at my sentence structure? Is this sentence that goes on for a page and a half too demanding? Do I really need this? Is this doing what\u2019s it\u2019s meant to be doing? Should I shorten this? All that is done later on. I actually really lean on my agent and my editor to help me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SWAIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s something I really appreciate about your work, its accessibility. It\u2019s still nuanced and complex, especially your characters. In past interviews, you had talked about letting the characters speak for themselves and speak through you. I was curious what your character-building process looks like. When you\u2019re first starting a novel, how do you get to know them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These last two books have first-person narrators, so I have an idea before I start what they look like and what their voices sound like. I don\u2019t know them fully when I begin writing about them, although by the end of the first draft I know them pretty well. Sonja in The Removed<\/em>,<\/em> I love her character. I\u2019ve heard people say, \u201cWow, she\u2019s really disturbing and dark and unlikable,\u201d but I don\u2019t see her that way at all. When I was writing her sections, she was very confident, maybe a little bit eccentric, riding her bicycle to the library and sitting outside on the steps, but I certainly didn\u2019t mean her to be dangerous in any way. If anything, she\u2019s a victim. She becomes a victim of the assault of the police officer\u2019s son. I have her being very confident, very sexual, open about the relationships with younger men. The more I wrote about her, the more I felt that confidence, and that eccentric woman came out. At the beginning, I wanted to have her very fixated on Vin. The more I write, the more I discover about these characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KRASNER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It makes me think of something you said in your craft class at Get Lit! <\/em>in Spokane, \u201cWriting is kind of like acting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, thanks. I don\u2019t want to take credit for that. I heard that from Ottessa Moshfegh. I\u2019m a big fan of her work, and seven or eight years ago in Wichita, Kansas, I had dinner after her reading with her and an owner of a bookstore. She was fantastic. That was one of the things she had talked about, how much working through your characters feels like acting. And I thought, \u201cThat\u2019s right!\u201d Especially in first-person, though you can do it with a close third, too. You decide how you want them to perform on the page instead of on the stage, right? Even though I find myself too cripplingly shy to be an actor, I can understand it as a writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ottessa Moshfegh is my favorite!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019s one of my favorite writers working today. And, at her age\u2014I would say young, forty-one or forty-two\u2014her body of work is just amazing. My favorite story in her collection is the last one [\u201cA Better Place\u201d] where the brother and sister go to kill the \u201cbad man.\u201d It has a fairy tale quality. Her new novel coming out this summer, Lapvona<\/em>, is in a fairy tale style. I haven\u2019t read it yet, but I have the galley here, and I\u2019m excited to read it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In writing workshops as MFA students, we hear all the time about this dichotomy of active and passive characters. It\u2019s not a strict rule, but we\u2019re often told to avoid passive characters who avoid conflict. But in your work there are characters we might not traditionally think of as being active. Like Sequoyah\u2014a lot of the time he\u2019s just listening to people, observing, sitting back. There\u2019s that teacher who corners him in the bathroom talking about how he misses his house and his ex-wife. Even if he\u2019s just listening, he\u2019s doing so in a way that feels active. He\u2019s drawing these stories out of people. I\u2019m interested in hearing your thoughts on what makes an active or passive character. Is that something that matters to you at all? Can a character become active just through the telling of their story, even if they\u2019re just sitting back and not literally doing something?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks for that question and that scene. I don\u2019t know that I think about active versus passive so much as I think about what\u2019s
bizarre about human behavior. I have these conversations with my wife where we\u2019ll say, \u201cDid you notice that guy and what he was doing? What the hell was that?\u201d We\u2019ll laugh about it. I feel like those happen to me all the time. I don\u2019t know that I think as much about active and passive as I do about situations. A large part of Where the Dead Sit Talking <\/em>takes place at this new school, and when I think about schools, I always think about how strange my experience was, the strange things that teachers would say or do. I\u2019m really dating myself, but going way back, pre-internet, using overhead projectors, and that light flashing\u2014one of the scenes in that book was the weirdness of sitting in a dark room, drowsy, and listening to a teacher drone on and this weird light flashing in his face and finding myself way more interested in looking out the window. I always had this feeling I\u2019d give anything to be able to walk outside and be by those trees, but no, I\u2019m confined in this horrible space listening to this strange guy. I think those situations in the classroom or in P. E. are universal. Maybe I picture the characters as passive because I\u2019m very passive, or just more observational. There\u2019s a scene in Where the Dead Sit Talking where Sequoyah goes in the bathroom and sees a stick figure holding a gun, and I was thinking about all the drawings that I used to see and all the terrible, disturbing things that people wrote as graffiti\u2014hateful, rude, disgusting drawings. Someone drawing a gun. I mean, especially right now. Is that a sign that there is something we need to be looking out for? I wanted to incorporate some of that in the book. I constantly, and I mean constantly, almost daily, when I go to the grocery store, find myself overhearing or seeing things that seem very strange. I\u2019m fascinated by it as a writer because what a great opportunity this is, listening to this couple, this elderly couple, argue about what they\u2019re arguing about. I\u2019m very interested in making the normal feel absurd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was thinking about the video game in the Darkening Land that Jackson Andrews is developing, how that feels so absurd but also real, and how the absurdity heightens the way it feels real, something dark and true about America. The video game was fascinating both in the way your approach to handling politics has evolved throughout your work and the way there\u2019s a mixing of humor with a subject that is not funny. It\u2019s really compelling. Also, there\u2019s a manual for the game. How do you go about putting a manual in a novel?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s really that absurd. Video games with shooting have been around for a long time, and recently there are video games where people have assault rifles and are killing people left and right. Now we\u2019re seeing it play out in real life, not necessarily because it\u2019s the video game\u2019s fault. Edgar is going, \u201cMy brother was shot by a police officer. Now I\u2019m in this space where I\u2019m the target because I\u2019m Native.\u201d That\u2019s part of the game, shoot the Indian. I pushed it into absurdity where in the basement Jackson has created this whole sort of replica and Edgar sees his brother. That\u2019s absurd, but on some level, I don\u2019t feel like it\u2019s that much more absurd than what\u2019s happening right now. My eight-year-old son is playing the Oculus. That feels more absurd. Part of my job as a fiction writer is to try to exaggerate those things. Ray Bradbury was onto virtual reality back in the sixties when he was writing The Illustrated Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the manual, I used one of my son\u2019s video game manuals as a model. I actually had a much longer manual and my editor was like, \u201cDo we really need this many pages?\u201d and I thought, \u201cI kind of like all these pages in here, but I see your point. Let\u2019s just stick to the objective of the game and the specifics.\u201d She had a very good point and I think it\u2019s ultimately better shorter, but it was fun to create that manual. I like to experiment, and I like it if a novel or a story has something in it like a manual or something seen as non-traditional that lends itself to the story. Do we really need this script in here? Well, yeah, of course we do. It\u2019s showing something about the character we\u2019re not seeing in a different way. One of the fun things of being a fiction writer is that we can incorporate little plays or drawings or whatever, manuals, and use them in our work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SWAIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I feel like that\u2019s part of world-building. It\u2019s very accepted in the fantasy and sci-fi realm that those sorts of things will be in there, but of course it also has to exist for something in the Darkening Land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing should be fun. You want to find the pleasure in it. The more pleasure you have, the better it\u2019ll be. The Darkening Land sections were the most fun to write because I could build that world and create my own video game, and I created my own manual and created my own little place there and tried to do it in a, you know, \u201cliterary fiction\u201d way that hopefully works. We forget about the fun when we\u2019re all in workshop and we\u2019re talking about active conflict and asking, \u201cSo what is the point of this story?\u201d We all become so critical of one another. We\u2019re heavy with criticism and doubt. We\u2019re doubting ourselves. \u201cAm I Native enough? Should I write it?\u201d I could have given up and said, \u201cAm I even Cherokee enough?\u201d Cherokee doesn\u2019t follow blood quantum, so of course I am\u2014these questions of doubt and these insecurities are a burden on us, whatever they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s really important for us to go back and think, \u201cWhat drew me into writing?\u201d Maybe it was Salinger or maybe it was Alice in Wonderland<\/em>. It\u2019s important to write for yourself like maybe you did when you first started writing stories. I remember the first stories I was writing in college, which were absolutely terrible. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew this is fun. We need to come back to that because we lose that. I constantly deal with people who give up on writing, and\/or give up on their books, and I think they\u2019re going about it the wrong way. They\u2019re looking for success or bestsellers. I didn\u2019t start writing stories because I thought maybe I\u2019ll get on a New York Times<\/em> bestseller list. I did it out of some space of, \u201cI love reading, and I would love to create my own world, I think things will fall into place.\u201d That\u2019s what I have to remind myself. I\u2019m going to write whatever book I want to write. You know, I just wrote a middle grade book for Scholastic that\u2019ll be out next year. I thought, \u201cIf I\u2019m going do this, I\u2019m going to have fun with it,\u201d and I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are some things you\u2019ve edited out of your books?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tsala had longer sections in The Removed<\/em>, and we scaled back on those. I had more stories from traditional Cherokee folklore, and we decided at some point it was a little too much. Keep it to a minimum since Tsala wasn\u2019t part of the timeline of the novel. Tsala was this sort of ancestor spirit telling his stories. Too much of that would possibly be too much of a digression from the timeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mention digression. One thing that struck me was the smaller stories placed throughout the novels, like the stories characters would tell. I\u2019m interested in stories within stories in my own work. I rarely intend to do it; it just ends up happening. How do you make sure they fit and that, even if there\u2019s a digression, it doesn\u2019t feel like something that doesn\u2019t belong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you\u2019re drafting, I wouldn\u2019t worry too much about that. I would just get the draft done and enjoy it as much as you can, and then focus on your revision. It\u2019s much easier to cut that stuff. A story within a story is asking, \u201cWhat is this saying in the overall context of the novel? What is this telling us about the storyteller?\u201d Let\u2019s say that you have a character and she\u2019s writing a play. You decide to put the beginning of Act One of her play about a woman who is trying to kill her husband. That\u2019s a way of revealing that she is not happy with her husband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chekhov says, \u201cBegin with questions.\u201d For me, those questions are: How do we heal from trauma? How do we deal with racism? How are we dealing with abuse? What is justice? Those big questions are important to think about early on. Then, you can start thinking, \u201cI want her story here within the timeline of the novel to reveal something that she\u2019s not going to tell us.\u201d I haven\u2019t read it yet, but Hernan Diaz has a new novel out called Trust<\/em> that I believe has a novel-within-the-novel, not a whole novel, but one of the characters in the novel is writing a novel, and I think there\u2019s another story within the story, too. I\u2019m excited because I\u2019m like you, Josh, I like stories within stories. Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em> has a digression and then there\u2019s a digression from that digression. Pretty soon I\u2019m lost as to what\u2019s the point of this digression after this digression, and what does that have to do with the main storyline? Five hundred pages from now I\u2019ll need to remember this because it\u2019s got to be important. That\u2019s very, very difficult. That\u2019s very demanding for the reader, but it probably serves a purpose. But there has to be a point; otherwise, it would have been cut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The setting and imagery in Deep Ellum<\/em> was intense and vivid, but you\u2019ve lived in Oklahoma most of your life. So why Deep Ellum? And what kind of research did you need to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deep Ellum is a district in Dallas near downtown that I was interested in because I used to go there when I was younger. There would be bands playing, and it was kind of gritty. It\u2019s been a long time since I was there, though. Now they\u2019ve put in nice condos and coffee shops, and it\u2019s not the gritty, kind of druggy area that it once was. I wanted to relive that through the novella, through the imagery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M. HENDERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was all of it based on memory, or did you have to do some research?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just my memory. I\u2019ve been there so many times, and there are so many different clubs and bands that would come through. It felt like this weird space in a city like Dallas. It was its own little artsy space. I skewed it a little bit and blended a little fantasy with reality. Think of like The Royal Tenenbaums<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s supposed to be New York, but it\u2019s skewed a little bit. It\u2019s Wes Anderson\u2019s New York from his own view. Stanley Kubrick did that a bit with New York. So I was thinking about that idea, of taking a place and altering it to make it your own, which is risky because you always have those assholes who\u2019ll say, \u201cThat\u2019s not where that is\u201d or \u201cThere\u2019s no light post on that corner of Elm and Crowdus.\u201d But I like blending and doing something a little fantastical. So I took this space, this area of Deep Ellum, which I loved. I knew the story, the brother returning home, sick mom, and a sister who\u2019s dealing with addiction problems. I\u2019m interested in that, like, here\u2019s downtown Spokane but here\u2019s Morgan Henderson\u2019s vision of downtown Spokane. I know she did this for a reason. What is that reason? What is it telling us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SWAIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did you weave the multiple perspectives in The Removed<\/em> together to make a complete story, and what was that process like structurally?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difficulty in juggling these multiple perspectives is that they all need to meet at one specific place. What can you do by the end that would somehow thread all of their stories together to make it one unified story? Your multiple characters all need to be probably addressing the same theme or dealing with the same question and then reaching maybe a conclusion. Early in drafting, I had Tsala sections, I had Edgar\u2019s sections, and, okay, I\u2019ve got these four different characters, they\u2019ve all got to come together. There has to be an event or something at the end that draws them all together. For me, it was the image of the bonfire. Granted, it\u2019s ambiguous when they see Edgar or spirits coming toward them, but I hope that the fire is representative of returning home, the last word of the novel being \u201chome.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A big question in a lot of my work is, \u201cWhat is home?\u201d I think that\u2019s a big question in a lot of Native literature. There\u2019s a TV series called Reservation Dogs<\/em> on FX; Sterlin Harjo is a friend of mine. Early on, he and I talked about one of the things that a lot of his other work, his films, explores, \u201cWhat is home? How do I get home?\u201d In some ways Reservation Dogs<\/em> is approaching that question as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KRASNER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a scene in The Removed<\/em>, in the Darkening Land, where Edgar puts on a Bauhaus record in Jackson\u2019s house and listens to each side over and over again and parts in Where the Dead <\/em>Sit Talking<\/em> where Rosemary and Sequoyah listen to a lot of music together like X, The Velvet Underground, and, I think, Elliott Smith comes up in both books. Do you listen to music to create a writing mood? And how do you pick out bands for your characters?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOBSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s probably no surprise I\u2019m an Elliott Smith fan, so he probably did show up in both books. I always put in music. I\u2019m a huge music fan, I listen to music all the time. When I listen to certain music it sparks an image. In the middle grade book, I have a snake that\u2019s Bela Lugosi reincarnated as a snake, and the chapter\u2019s called \u201cBela Lugosi is dead,\u201d right? I\u2019m making my Bauhaus reference there, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Certain songs will spark memories that you can then transfer into images or will create fictional images. Gideon, for example, in Deep Ellum<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s been over ten years since I wrote that novella, but I remember thinking about Gideon\u2019s character walking at night wearing his sister\u2019s coat. Music was helping these images form in my head. I\u2019m a little bit obsessive about music. I want to make it part of the books. I think it\u2019s a good space to go into when you\u2019re thinking about your characters. What are those images and how can you use those images on the page? Music feeds our creativity, it feeds the image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THROUGHOUT HIS WORK, Brandon Hobson presents stories of Native lives shaped by intergenerational trauma and atrocity and also by cultural continuity and hope. As his characters navigate familial separations and systemic racism, they find themselves in circumstances both relatable and astonishingly surreal. They discover and recover identity; they hurt, heal, fall in love, leave, and find home in a fractured contemporary society. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":4346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35974"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35974"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38883,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35974\/revisions\/38883"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}