by Kenneth A. Briggs 

KB: And that exists not only in small-town America but also in suburban America?

JH: Absolutely, possibly worse in suburban America. It’s an even bigger problem because more things are hidden and more uniform. One thing that I definitely got growing up was awareness of class discrepancies and things about American life —the old-time farmer, populist way of looking at things I got from my father, who in his younger days was an FDR Democrat. I wouldn’t have gotten that if I’d grown up in suburban Chicago.

KB: Were there also some people in town who didn’t fit in?

JH: In my era, there was a guy who came back from Vietnam, shell-shocked, who spent his days in the town library and walking around town. "Odd" is the way we’d characterize him. One thing I’ll say about a small town, if you are one of us we will tolerate and even protect you. One learns these values. The problem for me is that it only seemed to apply to our community as we defined it.

KB: If you had not had that experience with the college professor who encouraged you, would you be teaching now?

JH: I worked in publishing for a while, so it was a conscious choice. I just couldn’t go on doing that. I really wanted summers off, and I wanted more time to write. So I went back to get a Ph.D. and hoped and prayed I’d get a job, which I did, so it worked out well. My dad was a teacher, and one brother’s a college professor and another has taught journalism. I like the role of teacher, the idea that you can influence somebody. The most influential people in my life were teachers.

KB: Do you see students every year who look like they might feel like you felt?

JH: Yes, I do. And sometimes I think I project too much onto my students. It takes different forms with different students, but I see a lot of myself in my students at Moravian. A lot are quiet, self-effacing, polite – all the things I was — yet in many of them you can see a fire. A lot of the young women are harboring a lot of anger that gets directed at themselves. That’s not unique to Moravian but to the female population at that age.

KB: More so than 20 years ago?

JH: I don’t know. It was true when I was in college, and that was 20 years ago. I think it’s gone on for a while. I think it’s an extension of what we know goes on in adolescent girls — that they don’t tend to have an outlet for unpleasant emotions. One thing that’s changed is that there are more athletic, competitive opportunities for females; some seem to find an effective outlet that way.

KB: Are they open to feminist analysis?

JH: Not as open as I want them to be, usually. I think they have a real fear of it, a real mistrust of it. Some are wonderfully articulate about it, but it takes a real strength in that late adolescent environment to say you’re a feminist. Most students at Moravian don’t want to be identified that way.

KB: Somehow, the anti-feminist movement managed to equate feminism with man-hating.

JH: Yes, that’s a big fear — that they’ll be seen as hating men.

KB: Are you invigorated by teaching? Do you take things from it that you can use in your writing?

JH: I do. Some students need much more discipline; others in a weird way need less — they’re hard on themselves, very self-critical, and don’t give themselves room to make mistakes. That’s a deadly place to be if you’re trying to be creative, trying to expand your skills as a writer. So I’m constantly seeing things in my students that maybe I need to be seeing in myself.

I’d read about, heard about and dreaded creative-writing students who could only write about themselves — sappy love poems about their girlfriend or stories about two college roommates who don’t get along. But the vast majority of mine do not do that, maybe because I warn them off that pretty early. That’s not what most want to write. If they do, they realize pretty quickly that this is not the place for it. I’m pretty adamant that while a creative writing class can be therapeutic, this isn’t therapy. So if you’re writing because you really want to express your feelings and you want unconditional acceptance of that, this may not be the place for you. When students take upper-level writing classes, they should want more than an emotional outlet, they should want to learn a craft.

KB: Does teaching undergraduates in any way inhibit you as a writer?

JH: I don’t write as well; my writing goes better on breaks. And I don’t think it’s because — at least I’m not aware — that its because of a self-consciousness of how can I expose myself on the page when two hours from now I’ll be standing in front of a class of impressionable 20-year-olds. It’s not that direct. I think it’s just a matter of the energy that goes into teaching, reading, critiquing students’ work — it’s a different energy, it’s draining. That doesn’t mean a lot for the writing. Content-wise, I think it makes me feel less inhibited because I feel they’re such explorers that you feel challenged to keep exploring.

KB: They’re more brash than you would have been?

JH: Absolutely. Many of them are. And you know I have students who explore things like sexual identity — things I would not have had the courage to explore in my writing while I was in college. And I’m very inspired by a lot of it. So I think that’s not inhibiting, it’s very liberating.

End