{"id":390,"date":"2018-12-31T12:05:41","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=390"},"modified":"2018-12-31T12:05:41","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:05:41","slug":"12-27-2015cliff-hudder-partisan-promoter-of-texas-authors-discusses-the-fun-side-of-fiction-and-the-serious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=390","title":{"rendered":"12.27.2015Cliff Hudder, \u201cpartisan promoter of Texas authors,\u201d discusses the fun side of fiction \u2014 and the serious"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pretty Enough for You has been described as a rollicking carnival of a debut novel<\/span> for Cliff Hudder.<\/span> It\u2019s the kind of book that reminds you that literary fiction can be fun, so it seems only fitting that its author is our final front-page profile of the year, as we look back and forward at the same time.<\/span><\/p>\n

With Conroe novelist Hudder, Lone Star Lit has now interviewed all ten authors of our <\/span>Top Fiction of 2015 list.<\/span><\/a><\/span>Hudder, who teaches English at Lone Star College-Montgomery, took time between semesters for an email interview with us.<\/span><\/p>\n

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LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE:<\/span> Where did you grow up, Cliff, and would you describe that for us?<\/span><\/p>\n

CLIFF HUDDER:<\/span> I grew up in Pasadena, Texas, a refinery town on Houston\u2019s southeast flank. Back then, the 1960s and \u201970\u2019s, Houston radio stations commonly used Pasadena as the punch line for jokes about rural country redneck hicks, but those are our chemical plants you see John Travolta\u2019s pickup driving past in the opening credits of Urban Cowboy.<\/span> The sinful megalopolis where the poor lad brings his inadequate cowboy values is actually Pasadena, not Houston.<\/p>\n

In my youth it was lily-white and ultra conservative in addition to being carcinogenic. The schools were quite good, though \u2014 Mrs. Bowen had us reading Hemingway, Fitzgerald,<\/span> and Thornton Wilder<\/span> as high school freshmen \u2014 but I met exactly one Latino and no black people in my classes. On Red Bluff Road was a low red brick building that served as regional Klan Headquarters, and I don\u2019t mean secret headquarters: a sign on the roof spelled out KNIGHTS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN in red letters five feet tall. I grew up thinking every town had a branch office.<\/p>\n

Of course, several decades ago the building was sold and the sign replaced by five-foot red letters that spelled out HERNANDEZ UPHOLSTERY, and the area is now largely Hispanic. Unlike some Texas writers I don\u2019t look back with nostalgia to my small-town youth and despair of the changes. After college I moved and spent about twenty years in the Montrose area of Houston \u2014 not far from Pasadena in miles, but pretty distant otherwise \u2014 and I still consider that my spiritual homeland, though I spend my days now here behind the Pine Curtain in Montgomery County.<\/p>\n

Was there anyone you knew and remember in particular from your youth that was a great storyteller, and how did they influence you?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s an interesting question because I was kind of a nerdy only child who stayed indoors reading comic books and building models most of the time, and I appear to have just spent a good paragraph bad-mouthing my hometown, but in fact I was surrounded by wonderful working-class East Texas and Cajun families, and the parents especially were all terrific storytellers. My dad liked to entertain, and I couldn\u2019t get enough of hanging out and listening to the grownups, especially around the cocktail hour. In addition to great stories, they had a way with language and turns of phrase, and were big gossips. Everything was high stakes. A close friend of our family would give me dating advice like: \u201cStay away from her, Cliffie. That girl will kill you so fast it\u2019ll make your head spin.\u201d I loved that imagery. I\u2019m not just going to be betrayed, I\u2019m going to die, and be so surprised my head will still be spinning in the next world! They constructed elaborate curses as well that I won\u2019t go into, plus malapropisms. The people in my neighborhood complained about being misunderestimated long before George W. came along. So typical, I\u2019ve griped about their narrow-mindedness above, and now you\u2019re making me miss them.<\/p>\n

As you were making your way in the world you switched from pursuing a law degree to an MFA. What drove that decision?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to think of it as a \u201cswitch\u201d because it happened over the course of a decade. I had an anthropology degree and what can you do with that but go to law school? There they talked a lot about \u201clearning to love the law,\u201d but that never happened for me: in fact the opposite. I left after a semester and a half, got interested in film, took classes in filmmaking at the University of Houston, and even sold popcorn at the Greenway Theater for a while so I could watch free foreign movies. Then I got hired on at an audio-visual production company where we made corporate and industrial films (\u201cAdvanced Barge Tankerman Navigation,\u201d \u201cThis Is Your Sump Pump,\u201d etc. . . . ), and working there I became interested in still photography so did that for a while.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019d been thinking about writing the whole time, and I\u2019d always been a big reader. When I divorced my first wife in 1991 I felt adrift, without responsibilities, and thought: \u201cIf there\u2019s something you\u2019d really like to do this would be a good time.\u201d I took some fiction writing classes at the University of Houston, where, because of the creative writing program, mere citizens could sign up for undergraduate classes with excellent writers like Robert Cohen<\/span> and Glenn Blake.<\/span> I started publishing stories in small journals, and after a while the program admitted me. I guess it was based on the stories I wrote because I badly bombed the GRE Subject Exam: I knew next to nothing about the critical study of literature. Getting that MFA was like nothing I\u2019d done before, and was a pivotal experience in my life.<\/p>\n

Pretty Enough for You<\/span> is your debut novel. For people who haven\u2019t yet read it, would you describe it for them?<\/p>\n

I usually say to people that it\u2019s a re-telling \u2014 or better a mis-telling \u2014 of Hawthorne\u2019s<\/span> The Scarlet Letter,<\/span> set as a contemporary office romance in a Houston law firm. There\u2019s a triangle involving a passionate young Hester-type, a Dimmesdale-like milquetoast she loves, and a manipulative jerk who wants to make them both miserable. When I stumbled across the idea of letting the Chillingworth character narrate the thing it started to come together. I\u2019m not totally sure any of the Hawthorne connection is obvious in the final product (maybe in a certain letter of the alphabet featured on the heroine\u2019s tramp stamp). The narrator is a mess, a product of the \u201cbad choices make good stories\u201d school of fiction writing, so it\u2019s also about his responsibilities \u2014 especially when it comes to caring for his autistic son\u2014and how he balances those against his tawdry, self-destructive desires. Or fails to.<\/p>\n

In other interviews you have mentioned that Kurt Vonnegut was an influence. (I can see that.) Which Texas authors do you appreciate?<\/p>\n

That to me is such a dangerous question because I am a partisan promoter of Texas authors. I have writer friends who don\u2019t like that Texas label as they feel it limits their readership \u2014 and they\u2019ve got a good point \u2014 but I\u2019ve decided to embrace it. The late Tom Pilkington<\/span> at Tarleton State felt our state\u2019s writing is poised to come into its own, achieve a renaissance, as American literature did in the mid-nineteenth century, and I\u2019ve decided to believe that, too. (Why else set The Scarlet Letter<\/span> in a Houston law firm?) The dissertation I\u2019m working on presently at Texas A&M concerns Houston writers, and I teach a class at Lone Star College\u2013Montgomery called \u201cWriting About Texas Film and Literature,\u201d so I have many favorites.<\/p>\n

Now, that sermon being over: there are twentieth-century greats I appreciate like Billy Lee Brammer,<\/span> the early Larry McMurtry, Katherine Anne Porter, Elmer Kelton, Bud Shrake, William Goyen, T\u00f3mas Rivera,<\/span> and Am\u00e9rico Paredes.<\/span> More current authors include Ben Fountain,<\/span> Benjamin S\u00e1enz, Farnoosh Moshiri, Dagoberto Gilb,<\/span> and Sandra Cisneros.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, because I\u2019m program director for the \u201cWriters in Performance\u201d monthly reading series our college hosts in partnership with the Montgomery County Literary Arts Council, I\u2019ve been fortunate to actually meet quite a few Texas writers I admire a lot: Rick Bass, Stephen Harrigan, Elizabeth Crook, Wendell Mayo, Bruce Machart, Jim Sanderson, Lowell Mick White, <\/span>and more. All of the series writers meet with my students, too, so I get to eavesdrop and learn new things constantly.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading Sarah Bird<\/span> for a while and got to meet her last year when she visited the series: her most recent, Above the East China Sea,<\/span> is so awesome. Nan Cuba\u2019s<\/span> Body and Bread<\/span> is very unusual, \u201cunusual\u201d being my highest mark of praise when it comes to books. I got to meet Rolando Hinojosa-Smith<\/span> a few years back; the Klail City Death Trip<\/span> series is very important to me. A friend of mine is San Antonio native David Samuel Levinson,<\/span> who lives now in Brooklyn, New York, but I insist to his dismay he\u2019s still a Texas writer. We look over each other\u2019s manuscripts\u2014he\u2019s great at asking the hard questions like \u201cWhy am I reading this?\u201d\u2014and he has something coming out soon that will knock America on its behind. I\u2019ve got Antonio Ruiz-Comacho\u2019s<\/span> Barefoot Dogs<\/span> on the nightstand at this moment and like it a lot.<\/p>\n

See what I mean? Is there space to mention poets? I\u2019ll just make a quick start with Larry Thomas, Sarah Cortez, Carmen Tafolla,<\/span> and David Parsons.<\/span> Dave is the 2011 Texas poet laureate, my partner in producing the reading series, and is a great poet, good friend, and the reason I\u2019ve kept writing for the past fifteen years \u2014 writing more than comments on student essays, that is.<\/p>\n

How has publishing changed since you began writing?<\/p>\n

All of my works have appeared in specialized literary journals or come from small, independent, or university presses, like Sam Houston State\u2019s Texas Review Press for Pretty Enough for You.<\/span> Sadly, such presses are under constant pressure from economic forces, and some fine ones in Texas have gone under or drastically cut back their yearly titles. I don\u2019t know that their approach has changed, as they\u2019re still full of dedicated people, like Paul Ruffin<\/span> at TRP, who publish what they believe in and often lose money doing so.<\/p>\n

The growth in technologies like Kindle and other eBook platforms is worth noting; conceivably that could help with small-press production and distribution costs. Other aspects of publishing have really overturned, like the self-publishing explosion. I\u2019m not sure what to make of that. I have friends who have had both good and bad experiences with larger, national commercial houses. It does seem with those imprints these days that if your work doesn\u2019t show ultra-fast success, your book is in danger of disappearing. Meanwhile, every writer I know has had to invest more time personally in marketing, no matter who publishes their work. The landscape is shifting, but I\u2019m hoping small and university presses will find a way of holding onto their niche into the future.<\/p>\n

One thing that hasn\u2019t changed is that if you worry too much about publishing, you\u2019ll never find time to write.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your writing process like?<\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to say I write every day with great discipline but in fact I am too busy for that, so I have to clear space to go on productive binges. I write different kinds of things, but my approach is pretty much the same. There comes a time after pondering, note-taking, head-scratching, and researching that I go spatial. I arrange the paper scraps, sketches, legal pads and bev naps on some flat surface and start to sequence. There\u2019s a teaching theater on our campus with twenty tables and I\u2019ve been known to use them all. I knit together a rough draft, then start to pare, polish, and re-arrange.<\/p>\n

I recently tried to learn how to play chess, and I\u2019ve concluded that I\u2019ll never get it because it requires thinking ahead. I need everything to be out there already, all at once, and then I can start to sculpt away at it, seek the pattern, sometimes weave threads backwards into the narrative fabric. And, of course, I\u2019m open to change during the process. It\u2019s the surprises that are most gratifying when writing: the connections you didn\u2019t see when you started, the characters who climb up out of nowhere and do the damndest things you never expected. Keeping in mind the possibility of such wonders allays the drudgery of drafting.<\/p>\n

As an academic, can you give us your take on the question of \u201cCan writing be taught?\u201d<\/p>\n

The first thing I tell my fiction-writing students is that I can\u2019t teach them to write. A student who is now a good friend, Diane Logan, still tells about how this almost made her walk out the first day and demand her money back. Like many academics, I do think writing can be learned, but the responsibility on the writer herself is high: there\u2019s no list of menu items I can hand over that will insure the production of a good story.<\/p>\n

Having said that, the conventions of good storytelling can be both taught and learned, and should be: something stressed by my mentor at UH, Daniel Stern.<\/span> But that\u2019s different and has to do with the level of seriousness you\u2019re willing to undertake to work in this art form; understanding the \u201claws\u201d so you can break them on purpose if the story demands is one way of looking at it. But you can know about plot, character, and point of view forwards and backwards and that alone won\u2019t ensure a good story, no matter what Writer\u2019s Digest tells you.<\/p>\n

I took a workshop recently with Angie Cruz<\/span> at A&M (taking one after teaching them for many years is quite weird), and she feels writing is a state of being, more about what you are than what you know. I\u2019ve been mulling that over and am starting to believe it. You don\u2019t have to enroll in writing workshops to learn to write, but as an academic I will throw in that if you\u2019re in the Houston area there are so many high-quality writers in the various schools, plus resources like Inprint, Inc., that I always say you\u2019ve got nothing to lose giving them a try.<\/p>\n

A workshop probably can\u2019t help or harm a good writer, but writing requires a long apprenticeship and there are other intangible advantages to joining a community of people who take what you do seriously, and who are trying to do the same thing themselves. If you\u2019re lucky you might also uncover a deeper way of reading: one of the gifts I received from my MFA.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the most important lesson you\u2019ve learned from the experience of putting a debut novel out in the world?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned how hard it is to find readers. Especially serious readers who will then give you some kind of feedback or come and sit down and talk with you, or take a minute and put some stars on Amazon, or anything. I do have some people like that and treasure them a lot, but . . . maybe I expected masses hungry for fiction to materialize after the book appeared\u2014some kind of magic caused by publication? It\u2019s partly that the society we live in doesn\u2019t value reading much, or maybe it\u2019s just an artifact of how many books there are out there vying for attention, or a result of all the other distractions there are in everyday life . . . or maybe the book really sucks and offends (very possible) but I want to know. To find out what people think about the thing, I\u2019ve sunk big parts of my days into trying to drum up attention for it, but then it\u2019s like waiting by the phone for that important call. I\u2019ve come to think that this is the greatest desire of writers and I\u2019ve heard it from more than one: we want readers, and they are hard to find.<\/p>\n

One final question. If you could give aspiring authors one piece of advice, what would it be?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s so much advice on writing flying around out there, and my students will assure you I\u2019m full of it. Here\u2019s something I\u2019ve been pondering. Recently we had the poet, critic, and novelist Reginald Gibbons<\/span> at our reading series, and he said the thing he\u2019s trying most to get his students and aspiring writers to do is just loosen up. As in: don\u2019t be afraid of what someone is going to think of you when they read your work; don\u2019t self-edit or pre-censor out of worry; be honest and write the world you see. I like that a lot, as it seems to speak to so many other issues.<\/p>\n

Loosen up. So simple. So not easy.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pretty Enough for You has been described as a rollicking carnival of a debut novel for Cliff Hudder. It\u2019s the kind of book that reminds you that literary fiction can be fun, so it seems only fitting that its author is our final front-page profile of the year, as we look back and forward at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}