Interview about the essay “Hose”
Conducted by Janet Pocorobba and Amy Yelen
MFA students at Lesley College, August 2007

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

Q. Hose” seems to be about two things: the devilish glee of the hosing incident, of this pure moment from childhood. Yet it also seems to be about the subjective nature of memory. What is the story about for you? Why were you compelled to write it?

EH: Thanks, Amy and Janet for your thoughtful questions. I’m honored to have you as readers. I think the best way to understand this particular piece is to see it in context; it is one of a series of true stories about identity and place that I wrote in my early 40s when I was thinking a great deal about my family and childhood, and landscapes and important people in my life. At that time, in early middle-age, I had just begun to recognize “the past” as a place of interest and increasing significance. The memory of the incident described in “Hose” came back to me in that context, and the story was part of taking stock and perhaps making some kind of inner map for the future. 

I was six at the time of the events of “Hose,” and by that age I was well aware that it was considered wrong to squirt a jet of water at a grownup, most especially one who was wearing white gloves and a silk dress.  Thanks to our parents, my brothers and I were polite, generally very good children and morally aware. But on that day, as I say in the story, “something strong and ancient rose up in me” to override the moral teachings my parents had worked so mightily to impress on us.  I wanted to write about this unusual, anomalous event to understand it more fully, including the joy that it gave me. That was the motivation.

You are right that the story explores aspects of memory, including the unreliability of memory and how memory is shaped by our consciousness and point of view. In the story, my mother and I recall the events differently, just as we experienced the event itself from radically different perspectives. While I felt, principally, a sense of liberation and abandon, my mother felt, as she says, like a mother “who wants to crawl under the foundation of the house and never show her face again." My mother also remembers the facts about Mrs. Bayliss differently than I do. For instance, my mother recalls that Mrs. Bayliss was neither terribly old nor a widow, as I had thought, but a married woman in her early forties (younger than I was when I wrote the story.) 

I was also surprised that the event gave me so much pleasure even in memory. As an adult, I am someone who would be grieved to appear even slightly disrespectful to another human being. But remembering the incident was like a wormhole to a vivid, liberating sensation. I looked back on the child-me with a kind of wistful admiration. It’s probably not a coincidence that the memory of this incident came back to me in a season when I was seriously overburdened by responsibilities and duties. Perhaps I longed to reconnect, imaginatively, with the sense of liberation that I experienced so unexpectedly that summer day in 1953.  It’s obviously a delicate matter. I hope the story also lightly suggests why a small, otherwise very good girl, growing up the 1950s, might have felt tempted to turn a hose on an extremely proper woman wearing white gloves, a hat, and a silk dress. This was a transgression perpetuated by a young girl in a time and place when girls were being raised according to a very traditional concept of womanhood. Some girls at that time were not enchanted by that ideal. We did not then have words for what we were feeling, but perhaps my action was an early, if very clumsy, declaration that I wanted to be a different kind of woman when I grew up. 

It might also bear mentioning that, to six year olds, in their bathing suits on a hot summer day, squirting and being squirted with a garden is a joyful, friendly activity.  It’s probably too much to think that EJ and I subconsciously wanted Mrs. Bayliss to abandon propriety and join our joyful game. But we did not feel “mean” when we were squirting her; it was some other, new feeling altogether. 

Q: How do you typically choose your writing material/find inspiration?

EH: I think I write, and make photographs, to explore, and for the sheer pleasure of working with language and images. For me, both writing and photography are like passports, they give me permission to venture out into the world, to go on field trips, to inquire and think about things. I’m not especially brave socially, but taking photographs, and being on assignment for an essay or article give me courage to set forth into the world. Many of my essays are about nature and human nature, identity and place, how various cultures inhabit their landscapes. I’ve written about particle physics, infrastructure, Belize, Sweden, Linnaeus, neon auto accessories, my Aunt Nan Dean, the urban forest, our community garden and neighborhood store, the Orkney Islands, the Everglades — the world an endless trove of subjects. But I something think my real subject is language itself, that the overt subject of a piece is, above all, a good occasion for putting sounds together.   

Q: We found it interesting that you decided to begin your story with two characters who play no role in the bigger story — the "fattest woman in the world" and her daughter. It was a beginning that drew us in but also made us wonder why you chose to start the story this way. How did you come to this entry point to your story?

EH: That opening passage was written very intuitively, based on how I actually started remembering the event, and it’s one that I might have edited out of another story, precisely because the characters in the first sentences never reappear.  It’s not unusual for the first sentences or passage of a new piece of writing to turn out to be “throat clearing” — valuable only because they eventually lead to the real themes of a piece. But in this case, I realized that it was important to keep this bit because it does several things that are important for the story:  it immediately establishes the child’s voice and limited awareness, and the exchange gives some relevant information about the cultural setting.  The fact that the word “pregnant,” and even the concept of pregnancy, are suppressed, tells something about the decorous, restrained world in which I was being raised. 

Q: What really struck me about this piece is how joyful and fun it is...against a backdrop of mostly more serious pieces in that same anthology. I felt joyful reading it! At AWP's most recent conference, I went to a seminar discussing whether joy was the last taboo in creative nonfiction. Did you intentionally set out to write something that wasn't dark but happy, or was it surprising to you that it went in that direction? And what is your response to the notion of joy being taboo in creative nonfiction?
 

EH: I had not realized that joy might be a taboo in contemporary creative nonfiction. You’ve just introduced me to that idea!  I wonder why joy would be taboo in creative nonfiction. I’d like to hear more about that hypothesis.

As a reader, I find that I have the most trust in writers who can be funny as well as explore the shadows and sadness of experience. Writers who have a feel for comedy seem trustworthy as guides for navigating and understanding the wholeness of our life. Your question also makes me think about the difference between “joy” and “fun.” I think of joy as a soulful state of happiness, an inner peace and gratefulness that can be enduring. As I understand it, for the Greeks, joy (‘chara’) is a virtue, a state of being that we can develop over the course of our lives.  Fun is rangier, more fleeting, and includes joking around, playfulness, and amusement, often tied to specific events with others. 

The “Hose” story actually taught me some things about fun, including how much fun it is to make audiences laugh. After I started reading the piece out loud to audiences I also saw that this story could be more comic with a few changes. Appreciative audiences will show you where they want to laugh, and my audiences helped me see that just a few changes in phrasing, timing, and cadence would make the “Hose” story funnier.  Reading out loud is so important.

Many parents have told me that “Hose” is a good story to read to kids, and that children relish a story about an adult confessing unabashedly to naughty behavior. In my experience, the people who enjoy this story most are other adult women. After I give a reading of “Hose,” several pillar-of-the-community type women always come up to me to relate various guilty-pleasure deeds they committed in as girls. Perhaps they feel liberated to share these incidents, and to see them as humorous because of the tone of the “Hose” story. Another aspect of this story is that it is a miniature mock epic. It was a large event for me — and for my beloved mother, of course — but on the world stage, spraying someone with a garden hose does not rise to the level of tragedy.

Q: What makes the piece so joyful seems the voice, and your word choice. For instance, you use the word joy several times, and you write 'the ecstasy of dissolving an absolute rule' and then 'by great good fortune, silk turns very dark...'  Did you labor over these choices of words/language — or did it come organically? In addition to the young, mischievous voice, there also seems to be another voice — an older, more reflective voice, one who is drier and more sophisticated and who uses phrases such as “eschatological, end-of-the-world timbre.” Can you comment on how you wove these two voices together in the piece? 

EH: The voice, the language, and the rhetorical style of this story owes a debt to the storytelling styles that I learned from my southern relatives.  In their way of talking and telling stories, it was natural for them to mingle stately, formal language with informal, colorful, colloquial phrases and idioms.  Some of the pleasure of the “Hose” story may also lie in the contrast between the rhetorical decorum and the naughty behavior. As I think about, it may be possible that the rhetorical style of the piece modulates the behavior described, that the finesse of the language acts as a subtle reassurance that a raw, immature action is being shaped and civilized. 

Another memory-related feature in this story is a double-consciousness: the story weaves the child’s sensations and point of view with the mature consciousness of the adult self. The adult consciousness has the power to explore and reflect on the child’s experience. The child’s mind, re-entered, provides the sensory vividness of the story. Together, these two states of awareness generate a kind of time travel — two versions of the self, having a conversation across two time periods, about a long ago event. It’s amazing to me that the mind can do this, and that writing allows us to record it. 

Q: Regarding your insight at the end — when you say you wanted to thank Mrs. Bayliss for the happiness she brought you — it seemed slightly surprising. Now that you are this moral adult (l love the line "I am often these days trusted, not only with hoses but with several hearts, with civic causes, sharp knives and jumper cables.") And, as the reader, I expected you to feel some remorse or empathy for Mrs. Bayliss — did the insight that you came to at the end of this piece surprise you, or did you know where it was going all along?

EH: I’d like to suggest that there is empathy, and affection, for Mrs. Bayliss expressed in this story. The final passage includes these sentences: “How I would like to have visited her once more, or to have taken our chances on a walk together down the hill to Jackson Square. Could I have found a way to thank her? “This passage expresses my wish that Mrs. Bayliss and I could have met again, as adult women. In our imagined meeting, I would easily have expressed my grown-up remorse. That would be easy. But finding a way to also thank her for the transgressive joy, that would be harder, more delicate to articulate.

Your question is extremely helpful, however. It makes me think that I need to make that distinction clearer in the story. I see this piece as, in part, a tribute to Mrs. Bayliss, an unconventional form of tribute admittedly, but entirely sincere. Note that at the close of the story, I refer to her as “the Lady, Mrs. Bayliss.” At that moment in the story, and in part because of the phrasing and the pause in the rhythm of the sentence, the word “Lady” is stately and ceremonial. The word is used as an honorific to show that I hold Mrs. Bayliss in high regard. She has a place in my personal pantheon, one of the people who have given me something important in life. I hoped to show that the concept “lady” evolves in this story — from the overly proper, repressed sort of person (as seen from the very limited perspective of six year old me) to a person for whom I have gratitude, respect, and affection  — “the Lady, Mrs. Bayliss.” But I see I need to make that clearer, so thank you so much for the question!

Q: You chose the simple title “Hose”' for this piece. Was that always the title or did it take some time to figure it out?

EH: Many of the stories Domestic Travels — the book that “Hose” first appeared in — also have single word titles, such as “Store,“ “House,” “Watershed,” “Hymn,” and “Drive.” I was focusing on single word titles for that collection because the epigraph for the book is the following passage from Rilke’s Duino Elegies: 

“For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained… Perhaps we are here in order to say:  house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window.”

I gave most of the stories in this book single word titles to resonate with that idea from Rilke.

Q:  Can you talk about your revision process with this piece — did you go through many drafts? How important is revision to your writing process, and how do you go about it?

EH: While the tone of a piece is usually established early on – it may even be the originating quality of a piece — for me, creating a shapely, meaningful narrative structure is a more painstaking process. I’m not a natural narrative writer, or especially gifted at creating structure. My first training and way of perceiving is as a visual artist, and I think in terms of illuminated moments, visual scenes that embody meaning. Often I am describing scenes, or painting images with words. So shaping a narrative structure is time-consuming process for me. Some of my pieces are structured with what the critic Judith Kitchen called “tiles”— scenes, events, or commentaries that are placed next to one another, but are not always linked by an obvious narrative thread. The aspect of rewriting that I most enjoy is shaping the nuances of music, rhythm, and syntax. Sometimes when a piece is almost finished, when the main ideas and structure are in place, a single right word or phrase can make the whole piece shift to another level. It wouldn’t happen without the structure being in place, but at that point, a single shapely gesture can make the whole piece more alive. 

Q: This piece was included in an anthology called Short Takes, all pieces under 2,000 words. Did you set out to write a “short short,’ as some people call it? Do you find writing these types of shorter pieces more difficult than writing longer essays? Why or why not?

EH: It seems that my natural length for an essay tends to be between 3,500-8,000 words, a scope that allows for exploration and digressions and for orchestrating several themes into a complex whole. In the case of “Hose,” however, the piece is a miniature mock epic and needs to be short to be funny and satisfying. My sense is that more detail or analysis in the piece would make it overly earnest. 

Q: What advice would you give a writer wanting to learn more about writing short creative non-fiction.

EH: I don’t practice short pieces as a rule, so I’m not sure I have special insight about the form. I do think that the leanness and deftness of short pieces can be very satisfying. Even more than usual, every word counts. Perhaps the advice would not be so different from advice about creative nonfiction in general: do good research and reporting; have your facts clear; play and experiment with syntax, musicality and tone; show don’t tell (the mantra); compose the pace; restore worn out words; and embody ideas in the nature of the language. 

As the poet Geoffrey Hill used to emphasize in his classes, language is not a conveyer belt trundling a cargo of something called "the idea," but is itself integral to the idea. Poets, who are perhaps the pure research scientists in the laboratory of language, might say that language is entirely the idea. But even in prose, whatever else our words mean to convey, the nature of the language is itself a mighty signal. Idiom, cadence, the leanness or languor of language, often communicate as strongly as an overt message. The links between ideas and language may emerge unconsciously; I noticed a stately, burnished sound—long lines and calm rhythms—showing up in an essay on the history of my local watershed, and a sparkling feel in a story about neon. A writer's voice has a signature, of course, and tonal changes from one work to another are not a chameleon act. They are variations within a voice, representing our capacity to enter into various ideas imaginatively, to explore subjects via language. 

I might also encourage experimentation with form. One glory of the essay is that it is not bound by a firm structure — like the plot points of the Hollywood screenplay, or the inverted pyramid of traditional news. Instead, the essay is elastic, promising exploration. There are significant distinctions among the forms of literary nonfiction, but all of them combine the power of fact with the pleasures of style. Not only can an essay take various forms, a single work can incorporate aspects of, say, a short story, reportage, and biography. By its nature, a narrative implies order in the world. Very appealing! And yet, the past is imperfectly known, the future uncertain. Biological order is based on dynamic change; the earth itself proceeds with the open-endedness of radical creativity, neither rule-bound nor chaotic, but creative within evolving forms. So we also need storytelling that experiments with structure, and creates clearings for new ways of thinking and being. Perhaps all narrative and creative nonfiction is at once daring and humble, in the way that science is, offering provisional truths, saying in essence: This is the best story we can tell now, based on limited knowledge.

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance