by Kenneth A. Briggs 

KB: Who told you?

JH: The professor, who was very influential, whom I really admired. He encouraged me. From there, I went to taking as many writing classes as I could.

KB: Do you think of yourself now as a writer who teaches or a teacher who writes?

JH: I’d prefer to be called a writer who teaches. I think of writing as coming first. I struggle to keep that balance, because teaching can be very consuming. Teaching matters to me, so I never want to become cavalier about it or think of it just as an aside. I want to do it well. But the most important thing for me is the writing.

KB: When do you write?

JH: I’m sporadic. I’m not as faithful to it as people who are religiously at their desks every morning. It’s probably the way it’s going to be and probably okay, but I still feel guilt-ridden about it. When I’m working on a project, I’ll keep pretty doggedly to a schedule. Mornings are my best time.

KB: You’re working on a novel?

JH: I’ve been working on it for a number of years.

KB: Is that your principal work now?

JH: It has been for the past three years. I’ve done bits and pieces on essays and stories in between, but I now have an agent who’s shopping it around, so maybe it’s almost finished.

KB: Did growing up in a small town in Indiana give you resources for writing?

JH: I would guess that a majority of stories in the collection [Tell Me Everything] are set in a world like that — a small-town world in the Midwest. It really influenced me in the early writing that I did.

KB: What did that setting do for you?

JH: It made me very aware of landscape — I think I’m very conscious of place and the influence of landscape — in stuff I most like to read, things I’m most happy writing, the place, the setting, the landscape is almost as important as the characters. It shapes the characters in very significant ways.

KB: So many good writers come from not only the Midwest but small towns. Does the pace allow for closer observation? You’re good at detail, for instance, good at picking things out. It seems to me you can’t do that with life rushing by at 80 miles an hour.

JH: Yes, and I’m of two minds about it. I also wanted to flee that world. I feel a little hypocritical if I wax too eloquent about it or am too grateful about it. When I lived in that town, I wasn’t one who said I couldn’t wait to get out of it. I never experienced it that way — and yet when I did leave, I didn’t want to go back.

I was critical of it in many ways. It’s extremely rigid, extremely narrow at the same time. It offers tremendous things to a child, but it’s hard to live where everyone knows everyone. That’s part of what I like about Flannery O’Connor, because she gets the hypocrisy and hateful stuff that can go on in places like that at the same time she sees the value in it. So I think I’ve had to go through various stages of my own feeling about the world I grew up in — and it’s still evolving. I’m less bitter than I used to be — and I think you can probably see that trajectory in my writing.

KB: Though there’s a certain edginess that I value. I wouldn’t want too much of that lost because I value a social critique, rather than simply baptizing everything in sight.

JH: I feel that the cloak of sentiment, of a golden time in a golden place in a small-town America, is a lie. For the most part, not to say that there aren’t wonderful things about that pace of life, about a world where people know each other and take care of each other, but nothing’s that pure.

KB: Sounds like it has been a source of great motivation over the years.

JH: Yes, to write my way out of there. I want to say I want to be more than this. I want to see more of the world and understand more.

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