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Beyond Beginnings: An Interview with Karl Hendricks
TNY (KG):
First of all, we both like the stories a lot—they’re really great. The stories involve lost causes, failings—at
least, that’s the impression I got.
What was the theme you wanted to come up with for these stories? Was there a theme regarding all of them? KH:
Well, I’d say the very loose theme connecting the four is that each
story, in one way or another, deals with multiple generations—parents, and
children, and grandchildren. I’m trying
to think—is that true? So, family and
the different ways families come together and don’t come together. It’s a very loose connection, but I think
that that’s the connection. TNY (KG):
I like that. Especially with how
you put in, with “Stan Getz Isn’t Coming Back,” the actual story itself—it was
you, it wasn’t just a group of characters.
There’s that sense of, not necessarily dissatisfaction, but the whole
idea of, “Is this it? Is this
everything that you wanted it to be?”
Well, there’s a great line in there—“The vast dismal space that
separates what we wanted and what we end up with was all right there for anyone
to understand”—I think that’s a great line. KH:
Well thank you—I think that in some ways, inasmuch as I can look back
over these and know what I’m up to, I think that line maybe says something
about it, but I think that’s what a lot of fiction is about. It’s what makes us human—our capacity to
imagine perfection but not achieve it. TNY (SS):
Can I ask how you view how autobiography plays in with your
fiction? I mean, these are obviously
stories. But do you feel that some of
them come out of your life more or do you think they come out of stories you
hear? Where do you feel that your
material comes from? KH:
Well, I feel that a lot of the things come out of my life. Not in direct ways, but the feelings the
characters have are certainly ones I share.
It’s a hard question to answer.
I don’t think any of these stories, or maybe any of my stories relate to
exact events that have happened in my life, but I think they’re like
things. This is something I was just
talking about in my class at Pitt—how much of your own life should you look to
when you’re writing a short story? I
think it’s good to start with your own experience because you want the events
and the feelings to be authentic. Not
that they’re real because they actually happened, but they feel real. And having experienced similar things or
feelings helps to make things genuine. TNY
(KG): One thing that I noticed, and
that Kris [Collins] noticed, was the literary influence of Richard Yates—with
the lack of sentimentality that you have in your stories, which actually makes
it more authentic. What would your
influences be for these particular stories? KH:
Well, these are all stories that I was working on in graduate school, so
these are all stories I wrote, let’s see, what year is it? Six to three years ago. So it’s all stories after I had been writing
for a couple years. And I would say
Richard Yates is someone I like a lot—I’m not sure if I would say he’s a
specific influence, but I do really like his stories. And I think that the not being overly sentimental is a way to
have the emotions ring true. So it’s
not necessarily a lack of sentimentality, it’s more wanting the sentiment to
resonate. I started writing fiction
seriously when I was in my late 20s and I think that the first writer that I
read that really struck a deep chord with me was Raymond Carver. I think he’s inspiring to many young
writers. So I think that he was someone
I started off really wanting to emulate, to achieve the same kind of effects as
in his stories. And I think that since then, there’ve been many other writers
I’ve really admired a lot—whether I think that they’ve influenced me or not is hard
to say. But, I like Richard Ford a
lot. Tobias Wolff is one of my
favorite writers. There have been times
when I’ve been struggling in a story, and I’d just read a Tobias Wolff story
and go, “Okay, what does he do?” So I
think that some of those four stories still contain a little bit of my
influence of Carver, though I think I’ve tried to be a little more expansive
recently. TNY (SS):
So you said these stories are from before you entered the MFA or during? KH:
Probably more or less, I wrote these all during the MFA. TNY (SS):
In the chapbook, you thank Chuck Kinder and Michael Byers—I was
wondering if you could try to articulate what you think they did to help you
along or influence your writing at all? KH:
Well, I had a lot of workshops with Chuck Kinder—between my
undergraduate years and graduate school, I took maybe eight or nine workshops
with him. I took workshops with him as
often as I could. And what I liked
about his workshop was the relaxed feel—and yet a lot of serious work got done. And I really liked how we would all talk
about a story, and more often than not, Chuck would say, “Okay, here’s what
this writer needs to do—move this paragraph here and do this, this, and
this”—this set of very specific things and it always felt just perfect to
me. So I really admired that about him
and just witnessing that many times over made me think about how to structure
short stories. So all the work I did
with Chuck Kinder was very valuable for me.
Michael Byers I only had for one class, but he particularly read the
last story, “The Card Party,” and that was a story I wrote when I was taking
one of his classes and that sort of arose out of conversations we had in his
class about the writers we were reading there.
One of the things I was trying to do in that short story was to write a
story not just from one character’s point of view—which is something I’d never
really done before. So I think that
that story really rose out of that. TNY (KG):
How has being a husband or father influenced your fiction-writing? KH:
Well, I would say that being a husband and being a father have made me a
more disciplined and more resourceful person, which helps any writer. At the same time, it gives me much less time
to write. But all things considered, I
think having a family has definitely changed me in ways I wouldn’t have
expected when Megan and I started a family.
And I think it’s good for a writer to be complex, and grow, and change. TNY (SS):
I was curious if you had any ideas about the short story form and why
that appeals to you? And if you made a
choice at some point about that form as opposed to the novel or poetry. Obviously, with song-writing—writing poems
would be a pretty easy transition, since you’re writing lines and breaking
lines. KH: Well, I think I’ve consciously gravitated specifically towards the
short story as opposed to the other forms…I think that the short story is
particularly good at illuminating moments in people’s lives that are both
mysterious and telling at the same time.
And even though it can become sort of trite in the wrong hands, I never
get tired of that epiphany-moment in short stories where you feel whatever
feeling the character’s feeling, and that resonates with you and through the
rest of the story. That to me is a very
special moment in writing. And as I
say, that can become a trite moment in the wrong hands, but it still gets me—I
don’t get tired of it. In the textbook
I’m using for the Intro. to Fiction class I’m teaching right now, one of the
points made by Janet Burroway is that short stories are like faces in that
faces all have particular features that we recognize as needing to be there for
the face—the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears—and all these things come
together to make what we recognize as a face and yet, we can still look at a
face we haven’t seen in twenty years and recognize it. Of the hundreds or thousands of people we
meet and get to know we can always pick out the individual characteristics of each
face—even if we can’t describe it, we just sort of know it’s different. And I think that short stories are like
that, too—well, that’s her point. That
they all take similar forms, do kind of the same things, and yet there are
those nuances in each story that make it its own recognizable thing.
TNY (KG):
So you haven’t written any screenplays?
Because one thing I noticed was you have a really good sense of
dialogue. Have you thought about doing
anything outside of short stories? KH: I
haven’t really. I probably would if I
was sitting around, looking for things to do.
But life seems to just sort of keep me moving all the time, so I haven’t
really had a chance to experiment or do… TNY (KG):
I was wondering if in grad school you tried anything… KH:
No, I mostly did fiction in grad school. When I started grad school, I had to make the choice between
whether I wanted to do fiction or creative nonfiction, which I had also taken a
number of undergraduate classes in. And
I had really enjoyed that, too. But I
decided to stick with fiction and that’s so, yes, short-stories are pretty much
all that I’ve written…And well, I really like to write dialogue and for a long
time I would just have story after story which was basically just dialogue… TNY (SS):
Like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”? KH:
Exactly. And I think that more
writers like to write dialogue than like to write description or visible
description or setting. Dialogue’s fun
to write. And I think those stories
that you read, and most of my stories, are pretty dialogue-heavy. But it took me a long time before I could
reach the point where I could cut out fifty-percent of the dialogue—I just
loved reproducing conversations. And
it’s funny—now that I’ve started teaching fiction, I’ll see the same thing in
my students’ writing and I just want to say, “No, we don’t need a conversation
here—we just need three lines.” TNY (KG):
Do you find it difficult to write dialogue involving intergenerational
characters, like with “The Card Party,” with Robbie and his grandmother? Or a generation younger than you or older
than you? KH: I
don’t think I did find that particularly difficult. Many, many years ago, during my first go-round at college—my
freshman year—I took a playwriting class.
And I remember one of the first scenes I wrote was between a grandfather
and a granddaughter. And my teacher
said, “How do you know how to write dialogue between someone who’s old and
someone who’s young?” And I was like,
“I don’t know.” So, maybe that’s just
always been a talent. I spent a lot of
time with my grandparents when I was a kid.
I don’t know if that helped. TNY (SS):
I was curious if you have any thoughts on differences and similarities
between music-making and fiction-writing and if you feel those art-forms help
each other or conflict with each other? KH: I
would have to say that I don’t notice any particular influence or interaction,
positive or negative really. In my
first go-round at being an undergraduate, I thought about writing fiction, but
didn’t do it very seriously. But what
happened in my late-twenties was I went back to school because I had kids and
was trying to do something. And I don’t
know exactly what happened—I took a class with Chuck Kinder, I read Raymond
Carver, and suddenly, I thought, “Well, fiction is something I want to
do.” I don’t know if I had a particular
vocation for it before that. And I
guess that at the time, I thought that if maybe if I pursue fiction and become a
teacher—I realized that music wasn’t something I could pursue full-time, partially
because of the family, but other reasons—so I thought, “Well, maybe writing
fiction can kind of fill this space in my life.” So, I think that’s sort of why I started doing it—looking for
some creative thing to do that wouldn’t hamper the rest of my life. And I’ve since found out that all my hopes
and dreams of having all this time to write fiction have sort of fallen by the
wayside, at least at this point. And of
course, any excuse is a lame excuse.
But in any case, it hasn’t quite worked out the way I wanted. But I think that that was my initial
impulse, like, “Okay, well, music isn’t working out as a full-time thing, what
other creative thing can I do?” TNY (SS):
And, along those lines, do you feel like you’re transitioning more
towards writing fiction than writing music, or do you still feel that they’re
both pretty important things to you? KH:
I’d say they’re both pretty important things to me, and both things that
I don’t pursue a lot, or haven’t pursued a lot in the past couple of years—just
done in little spurts. But certainly
both things I don’t want to leave behind.
On a personal level, I don’t know if I really prefer one over the other. I mean, I guess, all things being equal, if
anything was possible, I’d probably rather just be playing music. TNY (KG):
It’s definitely more immediate, I think. KH:
Yeah. Music is sometimes not
fun, but writing is rarely fun. TNY (KG):
How has your story-telling evolved?
You say that from the time you were an undergrad you were writing. And you decided to really focus on the short
story. How has that evolved as far as
were there any big moments that happened? KH: I
don’t know if there’ve been any big moments.
I think I’ve seen some progress… TNY (KG):
…or a series of small moments? KH:
Yeah, I mean, I think that when I first started writing fiction, I
wanted to capture reality. I wanted to
capture life. So, to me, it didn’t
matter if I had four pages of an on-going dialogue that wasn’t really moving
forward, that wasn’t telling a story, where we were just sort of getting to
know these characters. And today, I
would have no patience with that—with myself or with other writers. So I think that as writer, and as a teacher,
and as a reader, I think that I respect story-telling more today than when I
started nine years ago. It’s not as
hard—though it’s maybe not easy—to capture a character on the page, but then to
have that character do interesting stuff and to have interesting stuff happen
to that character is the challenge, I think.
And I’m still working on it. TNY (SS):
I noticed in these stories—in most, if not all of them—this thing with
the endings. I really enjoy the endings
because the stories end without the future being determined. It’s a very open-ended kind of ending usually. But what I like about it is that it’s not
ambivalent—it’s just barely hopeful, barely positive. It’s always ending with the possible, with possibilities, but for
me they always end just a little bit hopeful with possibility. And I just wondered how intentional that
was, and how much you thought about endings and if that was a theme? KH:
Well, I think that I do try—and I don’t know if I could say how
consciously—try to have the endings not be completely downbeat. Because—well, Richard Yates—that’s my
impulse. And there are some
writers—have you read William Trevor?
I’ve just started reading him, and I’ve read maybe ten of his
stories. But in every story, it’s a
character who starts out lonely, and there’s this tiny bit of hope that they
can escape their loneliness, but through some small failing of their own, the
hammer comes down, and at the end of the story, we realize that, “No, you’re
going to be lonely for the rest of your life.
You have no hope.” And I love that.
But as a writer, I try to resist it a little bit. So, yeah, I think there’s a semi-conscious
effort to put the tiniest bit of hope in there. To sort of have a moment where the character still can make some
choices. Even though my characters
don’t make as many choices as some other writers’ characters, I still like a
little bit, subtly, to keep having them make choices.
Karl Hendricks lives in Pittsburgh with his
wife, Megan, and their two daughters, Maeve and Nell. A chapbook of his stories
entitled Stan Getz Isn’t Coming Back has just been published by Speed &
Briscoe. He teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh and works at Paul's
CDs. He also is a musician and songwriter, and with his band the Karl Hendricks
Trio (sometimes Rock Band), has released eight albums and toured the country
numerous times. Their most recent CD is The World Says.
Kurt Garrison enjoys moonlit walks to the convenience store and often practices Kung-Fu in an inebriated state. When not sleeping in a queen-size bed he's been known to make a mean blueberry pancake. His cat is still named Isaac (for now).
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