Henry Hoke’s Genevieves was an SPD best-seller! He was able to carve out some of his time to respond to some EWN questions for National Short Story Month.
EWN: Your short story collection, Genevieves, was published in 2017. What story within the collection had the earliest publication history outside of being in the collection, and what was that history?
HH: The first piece published was Genevieve Exists. The writer and cook Saehee Cho selected it for Entropy magazine in Spring 2015, and then Javier Taboada translated it into Spanish for publication in a New American Writing issue of the Mexico City magazine Tierra Adentro, curated by Janice Lee. Genevieve Exists is a ghost story about my time working in independent film, and was also the first of the nine stories that I wrote. It served as a guiding light when I assembled the collection that summer.
EWN: How did the publication of this particular collection come about? Were you solicited by the publisher, win a contest, agent submission, etc.?
HH: I love independent presses, especially those that elevate genre-defying hybrid work, and so I submitted to a handful of my favorites. One of those was Subito Press at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Elisabeth Sheffield chose Genevieves as the winner of their 2015 prose book contest.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as an author? Primary form to work with, or something you write when an idea hits, or …?
HH: My writing practice is hopelessly fragmented, so the short form is definitely my primary form. I weave larger webs out of the distilled pieces, trying to keep each one’s solo flair intact.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as a reader?
HH: I read lots of short stories online, from friends and favorites, and I buy a couple short story collections in print a year. I like that collections feel like albums, various concentrated expressions placed in a larger sequence. Themed issues of literary magazines hold a similar pleasure. My father has had a subscription to GRANTA for my entire life, so there were always shelves full of short stories. The book I just began writing is a tribute to Dad’s particular literary weirdness. It’s a novel but it’s also a bunch of short stories, because fuck dividing lines.
EWN: How will you be celebrating National Short Story Month this May?
HH: I’ll be anticipating the imminent release of Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto’s Tiny Crimes anthology from Catapult. It contains 40 flash noir stories and it’s a sharp reminder of the vibrancy of the short form. Otherwise I’ll be writing and submitting, reading and weeping. The usual.
EWN: Thank you very much for your time!
Henry Hoke is the author of The Book of Endless Sleepovers and the story collection Genevieves, which won the Subito Press book prize. His writing appears in Electric Literature, Hobart, The Collagist, Carve and the Catapult anthology Tiny Crimes. He co-created and directs Enter>text: a living literary journal.
Born to Alabamians, Henry grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia and currently lives in Los Angeles. He has curated events at the &Now Festival, Machine Project, the Neutra VDL House and the Poetic Research Bureau. His play At Sundown premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and his short film Taking Shape screened on HBO. He holds a BFA from New York University and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, where he now teaches. For a decade of summers he has been screen and playwriting instructor at the UVA Young Writers Workshop. www.henry-hoke.com
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