Amy Hempel does not enjoy interviews.

She quotes her friend Patty Marx: �I�m not

good at small talk; I�m not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn�t come
up.� Talking about the self is both unseemly and unnerving, she feels, and
dissecting her own deliberate process of composition through, in her words,
�pointy-headed questions,� tends to provoke her exasperation. This makes for an
elusive interview. However, over a humid June weekend at her home last year, Hempel
behaved as a polite and gracious host who pointed out the sights and chatted about
movies, politics, and theories of pet care, but nonetheless wanted very much to be
doing all of it away from the tape recorder. Talking about writing, in particular,
meant noticing how Hempel loves to quote, at length, those friends and writers
dearest to her�and how much she prefers their words to her own.

Born in 1951, Hempel grew up in Chicago and Denver before moving at sixteen to
California, the inspiration for what would eventually become the extraordinary,
unreal setting for her earliest fiction. She spent time in and around San Francisco
until, over a two-year span, a series of significant events unfolded: her mother
took her own life, her mother�s younger sister soon followed, she was injured in
two massive auto accidents, and three years later, her best friend�a young woman
who became well-known through Hempel�s most anthologized story, �In the Cemetery
Where Al Jolson Is Buried��died from leukemia.

In 1975, Hempel moved to New York City, worked through a couple of publishing
jobs, then located a nighttime writing class at Columbia with Gordon Lish, a writer
and editor at Knopf whose demanding workshops (Tactics of Fiction) became
legendary. Their classes together would mark the start of a long professional
relationship, resulting in the 1985 publication of her first book, a brilliantly
stylized array of short pieces entitled Reasons to Live. At a time when short
stories were a publishing standard, hers were an immediate success. She wrote for
Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. She taught classes across the country.
In 1990, Hempel brought out her second collection, At the Gates of the Animal
Kingdom, which, in her words, saw her �branching out from grief to fear.� Seven
years later, confirming a pattern of taking a long time to write short stories, she
returned with Tumble Home, a book that put her formal considerations�the packed
sentence, the mutability of voice, the suggestive and highly condensed moment�to
use in the title novella, her longest work to date.

Hempel recently returned to New York City after five years in Bridgehampton, New
York; at the time of this interview she was temporarily in Cold Spring, New York,
living in an isolated, modern, one-story wooden house near a lake. Around the house
were photographs by William Wegman. Moving boxes. In a sunroom facing a corner was
a handsome antique library table. On its surface were the following: a ceramic
three-headed dog, a Southwestern lamp, a copy of the Star tabloid, books by Walter
Kirn and Denis Johnson, fragments of dialogue written in longhand on typing paper,
letters from writer friends, an empty silver box the size of a pickle, to-do notes,
and a beautifully framed photo of Hempel raising a glass of wine with her two
brothers, Gardiner and Peter. There in the country, her newly installed directv
wasn�t working, and the only alternative, a VCR, was missing a cable.

INTERVIEWER

There�s a theory I was curious if you agreed with, that writers invariably come
from formative experiences where language, in some way, meant power.

AMY HEMPEL

Oh, I have a form of that, I�d say. I had a mother I could only seem to please with
verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read
constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she
would recognize that and it would please her. We could talk about what we read�that
was safe territory. This was the way I had a chance of getting her approval.
Language. Language and literature.

INTERVIEWER

What were you reading back then?

HEMPEL

I can�t remember much of it. Jane Eyre. I read whatever you read when you�re a
girl. The Bront�s. The Secret Garden. I read the books in my parents� library that
were beyond me, just enjoying being a reader, acting the part the way, as a kid,
you see yourself someday carrying a briefcase and going to an office and maybe
picking up a paycheck, but you can�t quite see yourself working.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a writer who alerted you to the fact that writing was an actual job?

HEMPEL

No, no. It was just there. The two things that were always there were reading and
animals. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic
chemistry. I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing
itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I
did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to
write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty
easily. How to write a lead and so on. I had some kind of aptitude for that
apparently. But fiction . . .

INTERVIEWER

Aren�t there some rules for fiction?

HEMPEL

Yes, but I didn�t know any. And it didn�t occur to me that I could do it. It was
intimidating.

INTERVIEWER

There are connections between what became your style and journalism�a number of
journalistic ideas.

HEMPEL

The inverted pyramid.

INTERVIEWER

The headline, the grabber.

HEMPEL

Right. Moving to fiction was a straight transition�journalism was great training,

as it turned out, because you have to grab readers instantly and keep them. I knew
how to do that, and it happened to work very well in fiction. I hadn�t been a good
reporter because I didn�t care about getting the story before the general public
had it. I didn�t care about being the first one on the scene, the first one at the
accident. I also started to feel the limitations. Obviously, in journalism, you�re
confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it�s in
us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how
to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are
trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your
article, assuming a person�s going to stop reading the minute you give them a
reason. So the trick is: don�t give them one. Frontload and cut out everything
extraneous. That�s why I like short stories. You�re always trying to keep the
person interested. In fiction, you don�t need to have the facts up front, but you
have to have something that will grab the reader right away. It can be your voice.
Some writers feel that when they write, there are people out there who just can�t
wait to hear everything they have to say. But I go in with the opposite attitude,
the expectation that they�re just dying to get away from me.

INTERVIEWER

So how did you get from journalism to fiction?

HEMPEL

I wanted to do something that involved books, I didn�t know what, but I knew you
had to go to New York to do it. So I got an entry-level publishing job, and worked
in a couple publishing houses. I booked author tours for Robin Cook and Hank
Williams, Jr. I wrote press releases. I used to define a press release as what
falls out of a reviewer�s copy on its way to the Strand.

INTERVIEWER

Before New York City, you lived in California. What was that like?

HEMPEL

I didn�t get it. I didn�t know how to navigate. I was on my own, didn�t understand
anything, and didn�t know what to do with all of it. I first went to San Francisco,
drove with a friend when I was fifteen and just graduated from high school outside
Chicago. I went to join my family, which had moved there while I was a senior. San
Francisco was odd. I was just sort of on my own in the late sixties. Wandered in
and out of different �scenes,� the Haight-Ashbury stuff, concerts in Golden Gate
Park, the Dead, Jefferson Airplane; all very beautiful. But it was difficult. A lot
of very difficult things happened out there to the people around me, but the place
was so beautiful. Such terrible things were happening in this beautiful place.
There were serial murders, the Zodiac and Zebra murders happened when I was there.
Harvey Milk was assassinated and Mayor Moscone. There was Jim Jones and the
Peoples� Temple; that led to the mass suicides in Jonestown, in Guyana. A bomb blew
up in the Iranian consulate, around the corner from where I lived, on the two
thousandth birthday of the Shah of Iran�it blew windows out for blocks.

INTERVIEWER

Were you writing during this time?

HEMPEL

Just journals. Things I didn�t want to forget. And some journalism. Not very much.
I did a little medical reporting in L.A. I didn�t start writing fiction until I was
in my late twenties when I took Gordon Lish�s workshop at Columbia.
INTERVIEWER

Why Lish?

HEMPEL

At Esquire in the seventies and, later, at Knopf, he was publishing the voices that
interested me most. I felt allied with his choices, so he was the one I wanted to
work with. Writers like Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Mary Robison. These were the
three who had the most effect on me when I started.

INTERVIEWER

What about their work interested you?

HEMPEL

They didn�t sound like anyone else I had read. For me, they redefined what a story
could be�the thing happening off to the side of the story other writers were
telling; they would start where someone else would leave off, or stop where someone
else would start. As Hannah said later in Boomerang, a lot of people have their
overview, whereas he has his �underview,� scouting �under the bleachers, for what
life has dropped.�

INTERVIEWER

Do you remember the first class?

HEMPEL

Vividly. The assignment was to write our worst secret, the thing we would never
live down, the thing that, as Gordon put it, �dismantles your own sense of
yourself.� And everybody knew instantly what that thing, for them, was. We found
out immediately that the stakes were very high, that we were expected to say
something no one else had said, and to divulge much harder truths than we had ever
told or ever thought to tell. No half-measures. He thought any of us could do it if
we wanted it badly enough. And that, when I was starting out, was a great thing to
hear from someone who would know.

INTERVIEWER

What was, if you can say, your �worst secret�?

HEMPEL

I failed my best friend when she was dying. It became the subject of the first
story I wrote, �In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.�

INTERVIEWER

You stayed on in his workshop as a student for years. You must have been repeatedly
humbled.

HEMPEL

I felt humbled by realizing how hard the job was. How hard it is to write a moving,
worthwhile, memorable story. But more often I was inspired. It turned out that one
of the most helpful things I did without knowing it would be helpful later was hang
out with stand-up comics in San Francisco. I went to their shows night after night
after night. I watched them performing, working through the same material. I saw
some nights it killed and other nights it bombed. All that time I was observing
nuance, inflection, timing, how the slightest difference mattered. How the littlest
leaning on a word�or leaning away from it�would get the laugh, and this lesson was
so valuable. And the improv work�they called it �being human on purpose,� this
falling back on the language in your mouth�was hugely important. Just listening to
what you�re saying. I learned this when my late friend Morgan Upton, an actor and
member of the Committee, took me to a Steve Martin show at the Boarding House in
San Francisco. Back in the green room, Steve Martin was sick, but preparing to do
his show anyway. I told him I admired that, I said I couldn�t go out there and make
people laugh if I were sick. And he said, Don�t be silly�you couldn�t do it if you
were well. A brilliant reply on any number of levels. I based an early story,
�Three Popes Walk into a Bar,� on that night. Then I ran into him about twenty
years later and reminded him of our exchange. He laughed and said, �It sounds mean!
� But I thought it was great.

INTERVIEWER

Can you talk more about your influences? Grace Paley, in particular, seems like a
strong one, especially around the time of the early stories, like �In a Tub.�

HEMPEL

It was important for me to know about Paley just before I started writing. To hear
her voice. And that was thrilling. It wasn�t just about telling a story, it was
about that voice. She�s one of the great voices, and one of the great hearts. �A
Subject of Childhood.� God.

INTERVIEWER

Her style is a clear antecedent to yours. What about someone like Tillie Olsen,
whom you�ve described in similar terms?

HEMPEL

Yes. I love �I Stand Here Ironing,� and I always use it when I teach because it�s
such a technical feat�the way the story keeps opening up, following directly from
the first line, from what is troubling this child, to her family, to many
struggling families, to a nation in the Depression, and back to the original child,
the last line answering the first line. It�s so well made. There are many stories I
admire or keep rereading because they are technical feats in addition to the
tremendous emotional power they have over me. That was one of them. But the writer
who did that the most for me when I started, who really turned on the lights, was
Mary Robison.

INTERVIEWER

A contemporary.

HEMPEL

Yes. I think the most recent, brilliant use of breaks and selectivity and many
other things is in her novel Why Did I Ever. I think you can learn almost
everything you need to know about writing from that novel.

INTERVIEWER

Like what?
HEMPEL

The whole book is an example. The whole book is it. But I can point to things in
other work that stand out. In terms of selectivity, I think of her story �Pretty
Ice.� Where a lesser writer would describe a character by saying, He had brown hair
and was six foot five, Mary�s character says, My father had been dead for fourteen
years, but I resented my mother�s buying a car in which he would not have fitted.
This tells you the kind of person the narrator is, how she sees the world. I�m very
partial to this idea of defining a person from outside, through the action of
another. In an early story I wrote, �Pool Night,� I was trying to find a way to
convey a boy�s appeal. Instead of saying something about him, I pointed to his
effect on the girls who knew him. So that the point was made like this: �I knew
girls who saved his chewed gum.�

INTERVIEWER

You�ve said that one of your commitments in writing is strict attention to the
individual sentence.

HEMPEL

Yes. Writing conducted at the sentence level has always made perfect sense to me.
Allan Gurganus put it very well. He was sitting on a panel on the novel with
Stanley Elkin and several others, and there was all this talk about theories of
novels and he said, There are those of us who are still loyal at the level of the
sentence. That�s the great attraction and motivation. That�s what gets me in,
writing or reading. Though it�s unlikely you�ll write something nobody has ever
heard of, the way you have a chance to compete is in the way you say it. Now I�ve
been writing for almost twenty years, and I still feel the same way. That is how I
assemble stories�me and a hundred million other people�at the sentence level. Not
by coming up with a sweeping story line.

INTERVIEWER

You�ve said you can�t bear to have a bad sentence in front of you.

HEMPEL

Yes. I still can�t. Makes me ill.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any favorite sentences?

HEMPEL

I always have in mind certain sentences friends have written, and I try to pull
myself up with them. There is the extraordinary large-heartedness of the late
Christopher Coe, dying of AIDS when he wrote, �It was possible to love life,
without loving your life.� Or a similar construction from Jim Shepard, �It was
possible to have kinds of homecoming without home.� I think of Gary Lutz�s all-new
sentences; for example, where a lesser writer might have a divorced narrator say he
has custody of his son twice a month, Gary writes, �I was in receipt of the
mothered-down version of the kid every other Saturday.� I think of Rick Barthelme
using a natural wonder turned tourist attraction as a verb, saying that a place in
the desert had been Carlsbad Caverned. I think of Rick Moody�s italics retrieving
trash language; Pearson Marx amplifying musings on romance to the level of
philosophy��It is as cruel to deprive a person of doubt as it is to deprive a
person of hope��Julia Slavin reviving metaphors and clich�s by taking them
literally, so that a �consuming passion� becomes a woman who swallows the lawn boy.
I think of the first sentence of Gordon Lish�s story �Frank Sinatra or Carleton
Carpenter,� and the incantatory effects of repetition: �The man who stood, who
stood on sidewalks, who stood facing streets, who stood with his back against store
windows or against the walls of buildings, never asked for money, never begged,
never put his hand out.�

INTERVIEWER

That must create an agonizing standard, moment to moment, at the desk. Don�t you
ever fall back on ordinary, connective-tissue language?

HEMPEL

Oh, sometimes you just want to, you know, �talk it out.� Everything must not be
fussed over. Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don�t get all
writerly: �He opened the door.� There, it�s open.

INTERVIEWER

Have you developed new techniques over the years?

HEMPEL

One thing I have learned is that I can get interesting results if I start at the
point of most contentment, the most satisfying moment, instead of the most
jeopardy. The idea is to overturn an expectation, maybe the expectation of drama,
of coming up against something. So the question becomes: what does calm feel like?
And how can you make it compelling? In these cases the writing becomes sensate in a
different way�you put a slight polish on what is ordinary. The first story I ended
up doing that way was �The Rest of God� in At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom. I
was just describing a happy day. But then, of course, I couldn�t completely get
away from habits; the story contains a close call. A couple almost drowns. But they
don�t drown. And they go on to have a very lovely picnic. The sculptor Elyn
Zimmerman did this in her Palisades Project in 1981. She proposed putting a huge
strip of polished granite on the west bank of the Hudson River, over the craggy
stone of the palisades. In the proposal, you see the palisades as we know them,
divided by a ribbon of stone polished to reflect the sky above and water below.
It�s simple, beautiful, thrilling.

INTERVIEWER

You once said that place was probably the most important aspect of your writing.
Has that changed?

HEMPEL

I�m not sure why, but I�ve felt most comfortable the last few years being in
motion. Not one place, not another, but in-between. I�ve put a hundred thousand
miles on my car in just under two years. Just back and forth. Some people make
transitions very easily, and I apparently don�t. I have to work up to them. There�s
a poem by Yevtushenko that reads:

Let my nerves be strained

like wires

between the city of No

and the city of Yes!

That�s a pretty good description of my life the past few years.

INTERVIEWER

I just realized how often your stories begin in motion and dispense with
transitions. Why is that?

HEMPEL

Transitions are usually not that interesting. I use space breaks instead, and a lot
of them. A space break makes a clean segue whereas some segues you try to write
sound convenient, contrived. The white space sets off, underscores, the writing
presented, and you have to be sure it deserves to be highlighted this way. If used
honestly and not as a gimmick, these spaces can signify the way the mind really
works, noting moments and assembling them in such a way that a kind of logic or
pattern comes forward, until the accretion of moments forms a whole experience,
observation, state of being. The connective tissue of a story is often the white
space, which is not empty. There�s nothing new here, but what you don�t say can be
as important as what you do say. I think my favorite compliment that I got from a
writer early on was someone saying to me, You leave out all the right things. That
was wonderful to hear. To know you�ve given your reader credit for being able to
understand without you having to say it. In �In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is
Buried,� when the narrator heads for the gift shop to buy her dying friend a gift,
the sick girl says to get her anything, anything but a magazine subscription. No
need to explain why.

INTERVIEWER

That story was in your first collection, Reasons to Live. When it came out in 1985,
you got lumped with writers who had a certain tag on them�minimalist. Did you mind?

HEMPEL

The term had meaning in the art world, but quickly became meaningless and
pejorative when applied to literature. It came to denote what certain reviewers
felt was missing in fiction�conventional plot or obvious emotion, for example. I
had the sense that these reviewers who leaned on the term felt that certain ones of
us were getting away with something. Some of these critics had a very limited sense
of what story could be.

INTERVIEWER

So what do you think a story is?

HEMPEL

Years ago, Lenny Michaels was publishing some really fine short-short paragraph-
long stories in good literary magazines. And I asked him if he took some heat from
people who thought they weren�t really stories. He said, �You tell them what a
story is. They don�t know.� This corroborated what I already suspected. It harkens
back to the way you examine experience. Some writers have a more defined sense of
cause and effect. Plot. My sense of life is more moment, moment, and moment.
Looking back, they accrue and occur to you at a certain time and maybe you don�t
know why, but you trust that they are coming back to you now for a reason. And you
make a leap of faith. You trust you can put these moments together and create
story.
INTERVIEWER

Doesn�t that leap imply a good deal of mystery? If you begin with something small,
a line or an object, and if neither you nor the reader knows what�s behind it,
doesn�t mystery become the point of writing the story?

HEMPEL

But I do know what�s behind it. Only I don�t like having anything spelled out. Of
course, mystery is not vagueness. Mystery is controlled. It involves information
meted out only as needed. Tim O�Brien used to say that stories are not
explanations. Certainly if you teach writing you see that some students think they
are. They feel they haven�t made their point clearly enough so near the end of the
story there will come an extremely spelled-out emblematic section. I not only don�t
want the explanation, I want the mystery. I wrote a very short story called �Celia
Is Back,� in which a man comes unglued in front of his two children while filling
out sweepstakes applications. His unraveling assumes an initially benign form�he
gets carried away answering the sweepstakes questionnaire, making less and less
sense�until his children get frustrated and then alarmed, and then angry. Anger is
stronger than fear, so you typically get angry at the thing that frightens you. At
the end, when he is en route to his �appointment,� presumably a doctor, he finds
assurance that all will be well in a sign in a beauty salon that he passes,
announcing the return of one of their hairdressers. What�s wrong with him? What
will happen to him and his children? That is left open at the end; that doesn�t
interest me. I wanted to show what a breakdown might look like to children, where
the deviation is just off center, and by underplaying it, it became more menacing.

INTERVIEWER

When Reasons to Live came out, the so-called renaissance of the short story was
taking place. There was an atmosphere of writers emerging from behind an
experimental school of fiction that was fully aware of its own exhaustion. Critics
compared what you were doing with the lost generation of the twenties. I was
curious about any connection you might see in philosophy or style.

HEMPEL

Carver was a Hemingway fan and Carver became a great influence in the eighties and
into the nineties on almost everything. I admired him, hugely, but that�s the only
connection I make myself. I can never speak for other writers, except to say simply
that good writers are always trying to get to something clearer, deeper, not said
this way before. Gordon used to ask us in class, Why would you want to add to
what�s already in the world? We didn�t and that was the job. Ultimately you write
the way you can write. Someone once complimented Carver on a story, and he modestly
said, It�s what I can do. I always thought that was a lovely thing to say, and
accurate. Barry Hannah�s version was, Be master of such as you have.

INTERVIEWER

Was your novella, �Tumble Home,� an intentional broadening of scope? Did you know
as you wrote it that it was going to be, by your standards, long?

HEMPEL

I�d written a sentence. Then I wrote a second sentence. Instantly I knew this would
be something much longer. It�s not the sentence that appears first in the novella,
but the first one after the space break: �The trees are all on crutches.� That
line. I knew it had a feel to it that was longer, and bigger, and my heart sank.
INTERVIEWER

Why?

HEMPEL

It was never a goal of mine to write a novel. I thought the demands of a novel were
beyond me, and that I would not be up to it. And I wasn�t! I wrote a novella. I was
perfectly happy continuing to do stories.

INTERVIEWER

But why do you think the demands of a novel are greater than what you do? I think
the short form is incredibly demanding.

HEMPEL

I do too. But I understand it. And I don�t understand the novel. The amount of
stuff to hold in mind, the number of things you have to keep bringing forward over
time I found entirely daunting. How do you keep everything a novel requires in your
head? A friend of mine was about three-fourths done with her novel when she
realized she had two characters named Bob in it. That�s the kind of thing that
would happen to me.

INTERVIEWER

The structure of �Tumble Home� breaks away from a strictly logical progression to a
more intuitive, emotional movement. Was it freeing, at all?

HEMPEL

Well�yes. I�d never quite worked that way before, never trusted that things would
connect on such a large scale. In Eric Pankey�s poem �Sortilege� there�s a line
that goes, �He opens a book at random and consults randomness.� Or remember that
popular book years ago, Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler? There�s one line that I
remember: only the flexible will survive. When I was younger in San Francisco and
moved something like twenty-six times in four years�now I seem in danger of doing
it again�the way I characterized it was �activity without action.� It�s a waste of
time. It doesn�t get you anywhere. Mine was an extreme exercise in flexibility, I
guess. But these kinds of moves go to the heart of how I defined myself, and what I
needed around myself to know who I was. You look back with perspective and see a
pattern. It was like that with �Tumble Home.�

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a reader in mind when you write?

HEMPEL

I�ve always had three or four actual people in mind that I would want to win over:
my editors�Nan Graham published Tumble Home and her involvement had a profound
effect on my work�Mary Robison, Grace Paley, for example. It�s different for
everyone. If you have a reader in mind, fine. If you don�t, fine. It helps me to
think of actual people I would love to entertain or surprise. In the beginning, I
think maybe I started trying to reach people who didn�t take me seriously (and I�m
going way back in time). Later, that ceased to be a motivation. When I started
taking myself seriously.

INTERVIEWER
When did that happen?

HEMPEL

I think when the first book, Reasons to Live, came out. But in a way, it didn�t
change anything. You�re still you with your life, book or no book. But it did give
me an object to point to and say, I did that.

INTERVIEWER

That�s quite a big title.

HEMPEL

At the time I was using it somewhat ironically, because the reasons were, you know,
small. And then as time passed I came to feel differently. It�s a very satisfying
title, without irony.

INTERVIEWER

In that book you began a kind of signature, using the peripheral figure, one
commenting on the action between others and detached from the goings-on.

HEMPEL

No, no�the peripheral figure is anything but detached. On the periphery you feel a
little more because you�re on the edge. I remember going to these huge rock
concerts in San Francisco in the seventies and I�d be on the edge, not watching the
performer but the people watching the performer. Much more interesting.

INTERVIEWER

Observation is clearly a big part of your working process.

HEMPEL

I don�t feel I have a particularly large imagination, but I do have some powers of
observation. Part of it stems from training as a reporter, when you�re trained to
see the salient points of any situation and see them fast. I can select the one
thing that will tell you the most about a character, but this is just from looking
around, not from thinking it up. Recently I overheard someone say that she had
given a friend of hers a ladder. The gift of a ladder. The reason was that the
friend was a woman who�d just been widowed, and her late husband had been very
tall. I�m sure I made a note of that.

INTERVIEWER

Do you keep a notebook and record observations?

HEMPEL

Early on, yes, I made notes of things, scraps, sentences I heard and might want to
do something with. As time passed, I pretty much stopped doing that because I just
figured if it was good enough, I�d remember it. And if I didn�t, that was that.

INTERVIEWER

Your stories often approach a topic sideways, or through humor. It�s like asking
yourself, Well, as long as I can see the absurdity, how bad can it truly be?

HEMPEL

There�s something to that. It�s certainly a gift to see irony in things. George
Plimpton once asked Philip Roth if his work was influenced by the stand-up comedy
of Lenny Bruce. Roth said it was more influenced by a sit-down comic named Franz
Kafka and a funny bit he did called �The Metamorphosis.� A friend pointed
out�shortly after September 11�that now every apartment building in New York City
could truthfully advertise itself as �prewar.� A mind that is trained, or tuned, to
see that side of things will keep finding it no matter what happens.

INTERVIEWER

Stanley Elkin said humor tends to come from helplessness.

HEMPEL

I agree. But it can also come from funny people.

INTERVIEWER

Isn�t humor a detachment?

HEMPEL

I don�t know how to answer that because I don�t feel detached doing it. It doesn�t
make sense to me. If anything, it seems highly engaged. When Barry Hannah describes
the feelings of a man for his wife as �an embattled apathy each morning goaded into
mere courtesy,� you see that he has an intimate understanding of that marriage. A
more extreme version is �Mr. and Mrs. North,� a story by Gordon in which a husband
and wife wake up each morning and enact the �connubial symphony� of vomiting into
mixing bowls at the side of their bed.

INTERVIEWER

But there�s a delay in many of your stories that seems to suggest a certain
pressure, a genuine dread or unwillingness to get to the point. The thing you must
speak of but can�t just yet.

HEMPEL

I would call this a narrative strategy. Gordon used to say in workshop that there
are two kinds of pressure. �I have to tell you this,� or �whatever I do, I can�t
tell you this.� It�s like if you have a secret you�re dying to tell somebody, you
almost want the person to pull it out of you. That can propel a story.

INTERVIEWER

How do you normally begin?

HEMPEL

It takes me getting a line�and if it interests me enough I come back to it. A line

or a highly charged image, or an unusual realization. At one time in my life I knew
five people who had all been pronounced clinically dead. I was working as a
volunteer counselor for people who were dying or had just lost someone. And I
thought, What if they formed a club?�these people who had died. This was the start
of �The Day I Had Everything,� featuring a woman who �died ten years ago; she can�t
stop talking about it.� I included the man I had met who �died� on the operating
table and sheepishly admitted he couldn�t remember what it was like, saying, I
slept right through it!

INTERVIEWER

You�ve quoted an opening line by Mark Richard in his story �Strays� as an example
of what first lines can dictate. It begins, �At night, stray dogs come up
underneath our house to lick our leaking pipes.�

HEMPEL

Yes. Everything he�s going to talk about in that story is in that first line. Our.
Dogs. House. There�s a version of that in �In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is
Buried.� The opener contains the whole story: �Tell me things I won�t mind
forgetting.� Why? Because I�m not going to be around, so what do we talk about?
Trivia. The whole time trying to forget the fact of what�s happening. Or the first
line in �Tom-Rock Through the Eels�: �Are you here for all the things that I don�t
have?� This because I went into a hardware store in San Francisco shortly after my
mother died and the clerk had a sale advertised and sold out of everything quickly.
People kept coming in to ask him for things he didn�t have any more. He came up and
asked me that very question and it was one of these bolts�that was the whole story
of my mother and me.

INTERVIEWER

That rules out the labor of piling up pages in order to locate a topic.

HEMPEL

If you don�t have anything to say, then I think you shouldn�t say it. Oddly, I�ve
always known the first and last lines when I start�I didn�t set out to do that, it
just happened�and I needed to know where the story ended. Those few times I tried
starting without the last line in mind, it didn�t work.

INTERVIEWER

If you know the first and last lines, the bookends, then the obvious question is:
What pulls you through? How do you build the stuff in the middle?

HEMPEL

I can�t analyze a lot of it past a certain point. I don�t even want to. It should
promote mystery and it�s boring if you can take something apart all the way. It�s
partly intuitive, trusting the reader, and that�s a strange thing if you�re
teaching, since students always want to know how you made this thing�but stories
are logical. It�s one of the useful things to keep in mind. Stories. Are. Logical.
I was working on a story, �Weekend,� in which a guy is playing baseball, running
the bases with his gin and tonic, and the game is getting interrupted all the time
by dogs. I had written �the ice cubes in his gin and tonic clacking like castanets
in his glass.� I liked the assonance of clacking, castanets, glass, but I remember
my editor circled the word castanets. The minute he circled it I blurted out, Dog
tags! Because they�re playing baseball with roaming dogs, it�s much more pleasing.
If I�d been paying attention, I might have hit upon that one before castanets. It�s
the principle of recursion, something I learned in the Columbia workshop years ago:
You do what you do because of what is prior.

INTERVIEWER
In �Tom-Rock Through the Eels,� there�s an unusual stylistic device: a litany of
different mothers that pops up near the end as an extension of the first line.

HEMPEL

You�re right, but it�s twofold. �Are you here for all the things that I don�t have�
was my relationship with my mother. Not that she withheld things from me; they just
weren�t there to give. That was sort of a sad but interesting thing. A story. My
mother had killed herself, and one year later her younger sister killed herself.
Their mother, not surprisingly, went into a depression and had electroshock
therapy, which helped, but which knocked out some of her memory. So my grandmother
called me and asked me to help her remember the �good times� with my mother. In
fact, I didn�t have any. So instead I called on things I liked about my friends�
mothers. I gave them to her as though they were memories of her daughter. At the
moment she asked me to do this I was fully aware of what an amazing thing was being
presented to me. So I was there for all the things she didn�t have. And my
grandmother wanted all the things I didn�t have, the good memories. That�s where
that came from.

INTERVIEWER

And you were fully aware your grandmother couldn�t tell the difference between real
and invented memories?

HEMPEL

That was something to reckon with.

INTERVIEWER

You don�t speak a great deal about your family. But the subject inspires some
curiosity if only because you pull so much from observation, and often use as a
starting point something drawn from real life. Is the sibling set-up in many of
your stories, like �The Lady Will Have the Slug Louie� or �Today Will Be a Quiet
Day� drawn from real life?

HEMPEL

If there�s a brother in a story of mine, and that brother says something witty,
chances are one of my real brothers said it. The cool father in �Today Will Be a
Quiet Day��my father.

INTERVIEWER

Fans of your work?

HEMPEL

The running joke with my brothers is that my books should come with an eight
hundred number. 1-800-find-out. The idea being that they have no idea what I�m
talking about.

INTERVIEWER

Does structuring a story that takes its departure from real life pose some
technical problems? Doesn�t the real event impose its own parameters?

HEMPEL
Of course. And also because if you�re writing about something that actually
happened, you tend to include things that have no place in the story, until you let
it do what it needs to do. My favorite illustration of this process comes from the
artist William Wegman. Years ago I wrote about his work for The New York Times
Magazine. I went up to one of his studios, just built in the Hudson Valley. The
floors were of light-colored wood covered in a kind of abstract floral pattern in
green. They looked very striking and I asked how he had achieved the effect. He
told me that his dog Fay kept getting in the way of the workmen so he had tied her
outside on the deck. But she would break free and go back inside and get in the way
again. After this had happened a couple of times, he stopped trying to impose his
will and direct the course of events. Instead, he painted the bottoms of her feet
green and let her loose inside. He let her do what she needed to do, instead of
insisting on the form he felt it should take. And he achieved a successful result.

INTERVIEWER

In the form of your story �The Harvest� that was published you wrote about the
motorcycle accident that left you hospitalized; you placed the �true� account
alongside the fictional account.

HEMPEL

Yes. In the case of �The Harvest� I wrote the first part as fiction. Then in the
aftermath I wondered why, in fact, I�d changed what actually happened when writing
it as a story. A few weeks later I gave Gordon, who was then editor of The
Quarterly, an addendum that he published in the �Letters to the Editor� section. It
deconstructed the story, pointed to everything I had changed from the way it really
happened, and why. When it came time to put the collection together, we simply felt
they belonged together. Now�I could have written a third version about everything I
had modified in the �real� version. Point being, you can�t help mythologizing your
own experience. It comes naturally. Even when you�re not trying, you keep asking
why a huge, dramatic event can�t be told the same way and work on the page. Like
Degas saying he didn�t paint what he saw, but painted what enabled another to see
what he saw. That�s from a Jack Gilbert poem.

INTERVIEWER

Do you revise heavily?

HEMPEL

No, I do most of it in my head, before a sentence hits the page. There�s no method.
There�s no formula. If you really proceed a sentence at a time, if you pay
attention to the sentence you just wrote and look to it for the clue for what to do
to the next sentence, you can inch your way along to what may be a story. This
wouldn�t have occurred to me starting out, for example, when I thought you wrote
one sentence, then just looked out to the world trying to snag the next one. That�s
not how it works. You look back at what you gave yourself to work with. Sharon Olds
said something beautiful about sometimes thinking of her poems as instructions for
how to put the world back together if it were destroyed. Or another way of doing
it�to live in the �two landscapes� of that Charles Wright poem. �One that is
eternal and divine / and one that�s just the back yard.�

INTERVIEWER

You�ve said if you weren�t doing this, you�d rather be a poet.

HEMPEL
If I could, I would. Really, I think I�m �influenced� by certain poets more than
fiction writers. Sharon Olds, Jack Gilbert. I like Billy Collins. Mark Doty and
James Dickey. John Rybicki. Dean Young, Marie Howe, Edward Hirsch, Richard Howard,
Russell Edson.

INTERVIEWER

Is it part of your impulse to make stories strive for cohesion, from language to
logic, to how an image develops?

HEMPEL

I think so. An influence, too�on that topic�is music. Often I�ve started a story
knowing the beat, the rhythm of the first line or first paragraph, but without
knowing what the words are. I�ll be doing the equivalent of humming a tune over and
over again and then this tune will be translated into a sentence. So I might be
thinking, da-da-da-da-da-da-dadada, that�ll become, �Tell me things I won�t mind
forgetting,� which is the first line of �In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is
Buried.� And I trust that. There�s something visceral about the musical quality of
a sentence. I often end stories that way too. I�ll know what sound I want, and know
what I don�t want. Not gentle, maybe something else, and I�ll go at it that way,
which is a lot of fun. It can be about where the stress falls. If you get a
masculine ending in a sentence where the stress hits the final syllable of the
word, it just holds more strongly to the page. So that you get �and wait� instead
of �and waiting.� There�s less trailing off.

You can call up emotions with the sound of words, no matter what the words mean.
You can really get under someone�s skin that way, especially if you�re writing
about something upsetting in words that soothe. There�s the famous Philip Larkin
poem that gets a good deal if its impact from a rhythm like children jumping rope,
jarringly contrasting with the words: �They fuck you up, your mum and dad . . .�

INTERVIEWER

Is music still an influence? What do you listen to?

HEMPEL

I have a great tape of old blues singers recorded in Yazoo City, Mississippi, that
I got down in Oxford at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss.
It�s called Bothered All the Time. I like Jimmy Reed, Big Maybelle, Dorothy Love
Coates, a lot of singers from the old Stax/Volt series, the early Verve recordings,
a lot of Southern blues, Chicago blues. What I like about this music, well, it�s
the difference between holding a note longer than a commercial singer would hold it
or putting the stress on it in a place where a commercial singer wouldn�t. An
unexpected place. Barry Hannah has this great comment about how Bob Dylan can�t
sing but he has the desperation of not being able to sing, which is better than
Glenn Campbell, who can sing. That�s what it is. What affects you is hearing the
attempt at a note, it�s more moving than someone hitting the note perfectly. So you
feel in writing maybe you can create a certain effect by going for a certain kind
of language and not making it. In my short-short story �In a Tub,� the narrator
goes to a church and says, �It was as quiet as a church.� Instead of making the
reach and doing the writerly thing, you just say, You know what, it�s as quiet as a
church.

INTERVIEWER

So why aren�t you a poet?

HEMPEL

Because I don�t understand the line. The sentence, yes, but not the line or line
breaks. The last time I tried to write a poem, it sounded better as a paragraph of
prose. That paragraph is in my first published story, and it pleased me enormously
that this paragraph was often quoted in reviews and, to my knowledge, every
reviewer who quoted it did so in its entirety�so I felt it was recognized as
something. But it�s as close as I�ve come. And it was better as prose. I was
talking to Sharon Olds a few years ago, writing a piece about her. We were in a
restaurant in downtown New York, and she looked at the building across the street.
�I look at that,� she said, �and I see wall window wall window, wall . . .� She saw
metric apartments. I mean, this wasn�t something she set out to do, seeing this
way; it was just so much a part of her.

INTERVIEWER

Was �Housewife��your shortest piece, a single sentence�written as a poem? �She

would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same
day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she
would exploit by incanting, �French film, French film.��

HEMPEL

Oh, no�I had the line. And I thought it was the first line of a story for about two
years. Then I thought, Either I�m really dumb and can�t think of anything else to
say, or it�s done. Dumb or done.

INTERVIEWER

You volunteer at Guiding Eyes for the Blind. How many dogs have you owned in your
life?

HEMPEL

I�ve had six of my own. And many, many, many foster dogs. I started working at
Guiding Eyes because dogs were my great passion, and that had nothing to do with
writing�part of why it was so appealing at that time, and naturally it became the
next thing I did write about, both in fiction and nonfiction, because the people
involved in this world, as well as the dogs, I found tremendously moving and funny
and inspiring. There�s a book I�m very fond of, a memoir by an Australian woman of
the last century, Elizabeth Von Arnim, called All the Dogs of My Life. She said,
Looking back, how was it that there were such long periods during which I wasn�t
making some good dog happy? That�s exactly how I feel.

INTERVIEWER

In 1995 you co-edited the anthology Unleashed: Poems by Writers� Dogs, where
somehow you got people like Arthur Miller and Edward Albee to write poems in the
voices of their dogs. How exactly did this happen?

HEMPEL

It grew out of something friends and I were doing to entertain ourselves. Mark
Richard started everything with Bob Shacochis, writing poems for their dogs one New
Year�s Eve fishing in the Florida Keys. We traded them back and forth; Mark sent
them to me, I�d write one and send it to Jim Shepard, who�d write one for his dog,
they�d circulate and then at some point, Jim and I said, These are pretty funny, we
should solicit some and collect them. We did, and gave half the profits from the
book to animal-welfare agencies.
The title story in At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom has to do with a problem that
afflicts many people who work as advocates for animals. That was the only story I
wrote that was in any way political at the outset. I really mistrust that, going
into a piece to get something across, a message; it can be the kiss of death. Good
idea for an essay, lousy idea for a story. I remember reading The Paris Review
interview with Francine du Plessix Gray. She was asked if writers have an
obligation to be political. She said writers have an obligation to write well. So I
went in there with an idea, which I never do. But I was terribly upset about the
mistreatment of animals around the world and belonged to all these organizations
and signed petitions and mailed checks�it was never enough. A) I wanted that known
in fiction and B) I did not have an answer to the question: What do you do when
your own knowledge of terrible situations starts to sink you? Because it is not
useful. It does not help. How can you possibly crawl out from being paralyzed by
the scale of something like that, and do what you can? Without being destroyed by
the horror of what you know? I used to go to animal-rights conventions. Invariably
there would be somebody in the audience who would ask a version of that question,
since it was what we all wondered. Coming unglued from sympathy, covering your
eyes, bursting into tears at this photograph doesn�t help. It doesn�t help get
anything done.

INTERVIEWER

You teach a fair amount, at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Sewanee. Do you
find it helpful to your own work? Is it settling?

HEMPEL

It doesn�t facilitate my writing, but it probably keeps me reading more than I

might otherwise. I like the matchmaking aspect of teaching, pointing people to the
books they didn�t know they needed; I like dispatching limited notions of what a
story can be; I like seeing someone get it�suddenly, finally�and the charge of
that.

INTERVIEWER

Do you require a certain environment to work?

HEMPEL

I used to write only at night. All night, with a Walkman on. Did that for the first
book. Much of the second book. Now there�s too much I have to get done in the day.
You try not to be precious about it. An average day includes around two hours of
writing writing, about six miles of dog walking (which also counts as writing), a
lot of time on E-mail, a movie, some forensics shows, and CNN to see what I missed.

INTERVIEWER

So is there a process where you store up, gestate, let something build?

HEMPEL

Yes. And that�s writing. Staying open for business, as Gordon used to say.
Listening for story, as Eudora Welty put it. My Bennington colleague Jill McCorkle,
who�s from Lumberton, North Carolina, can�t help but find stories in her own
immediate experience. I remember her saying to me by way of trying to recall when
something had happened, �That was the year the urologist who misdiagnosed my
uncle�s prostate cancer invited us all to a swan bake.� A couple years ago when I
taught for a week on an Apache reservation in Arizona, the great icebreaker was
giving them the assignment of writing a page that began, �That was the year . . .�

INTERVIEWER

And as of now, what do you ask from a story?

HEMPEL

The two things I want are interesting language and genuine feeling. And one other
thing: Years and years ago I knew a very wise woman who was tremendously
accomplished and who had excelled at many things, a lifetime achievement for
anybody else, and I asked what was her goal now? And she didn�t hesitate for a
second. �To love deeply.� A lesson there.

INTERVIEWER

So what is it you give a reader? Are you here to �help� people?

HEMPEL

No, no. How presumptuous is that?

INTERVIEWER

It depends on what you see your job to be.

HEMPEL

�Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being
alive.� That was Gordon twenty years ago, and that�s what I�m still trying to do.

INTERVIEWER

You�re quoting other people again.

HEMPEL

I misquoted Barry Hannah to a friend once, and in so doing said the truest thing
I�ve said about my own relation to writing. I meant to cite my favorite two lines
from his novel Ray: �I live in so many centuries. Everybody is still alive.� But
what I said was, �I live in so many sentences.�