Pedro Hoffmeister’s disaster thriller American Afterlife and Meredith Hambrock’s dark humored crime novel Other People’s Secrets were both released by Crooked Lane Books in recent months. The publishing house mates connected to talk about writing, process, and what’s next.
PH: First, let’s each answer a few of the same rapid-fire questions. Then we’ll go deeper. What’s your current “pop vice”? (For example: watching “The Kardashians.”)
MH: TikTok! You?
PH: For me, it’s the NBA. I love the players, the drama, the speculations…but more than all of that, I love Damian Lillard.
MH: If you could read only one writer for the next year, who would it be?
PH: I’d probably have to choose Toni Morrison. You?
MH: David Sedaris.
PH: What musical album is your biggest inspiration right now?
MH: Laura Elliot– “People Pleaser.” You?
PH: Earl Sweatshirt’s “Doris.” I’m big into lyricism.
MH: If you were stranded completely alone for a month, where in North America would you want to be?
PH: If it’s somewhere I’ve never been, maybe Escalante Canyon, Utah. I LOVE water-filled desert canyons. What about you?
MH: A movie theatre with unlimited popcorn.
Okay here’s a deeper question for you: In your novel American Afterlife, an earthquake has happened and forced all of this dirtbaggy American ephemera—prescriptions drugs, weapons, growlers, Pepsi, Ritz crackers, Luna bars— to float to the surface. There are also so many unique smells, so many sounds. So much of Cielo’s fight was sort of, wading through this sensory wreckage to find out what happened to her mother, and this stands in contrast to her past journey to come to the United States from Mexico which was defined by, in a sense, a more “barren” time in the desert, eating simpler meals and sleeping in wide open spaces, hoping to find water. How did you approach crafting this apocalypse? How does Cielo’s experience of the wreckage of the world relate to your experience living in the United States?
PH: “Dirtbaggy,” I like that. When I was a kid in Tucson, my mom used to pull the car up next to the dumpster at the supermarket, I’d climb up on the roof of the car and jump in. We dumpster-dove for food there and got free church food boxes as well. Later in my childhood—in Seattle—we dumpster-dove for food as well as finding all of our home’s furniture from the University of Washington dumpsters. And again, my brother and I scrounged the fraternity dumpsters in Eugene once we moved there. So I’ve had a lot of searching and scrounging experiences in my life, as well as times on food stamps as a teenager and in college. And I still scrounge food sometimes. If my friend Greg and I go order a beer at a bar or restaurant, when people near us get up and leave, we take their unfinished food and drinks from their table and finish those instead of ordering more of our own. I don’t know how all of this relates to the desert—to abundance or barrenness—but I used to live out in the desert in Southern Arizona, and I love the expanse of a desert, the open space. I was also the Writer-In-Residence of Joshua Tree National Park in the spring of 2015, given a cabin in the back country, and I would wander the desert alone each day after writing.
Alright, here’s my next question for you: In Other People’s Secrets, you seemed to be having so much fun with key names in this novel. It reminded me of some of the names in Toni Morrison novels, or Jesmyn Ward’s. You had names like Dumpster Baby and DJ Overalls, etc. But even the rich family seemed like they had carefully picked-out names. What were you trying to say with the names in your novel? What was the goal or message or allusion? And/or, how did these names come about?
MH: Well, those are really flattering comparisons! I am blushing. With the names… part of this came from a worry that I wasn’t writing from my experience. I felt a lot of imposter syndrome writing a crime novel, so I thought “if I can make this world feel really specific to my own weird taste and sensibilities, hopefully, no one will call me a fraud.” Also, I wanted Dumpster Baby to be shameless about her past in an attempt to control others’ perceptions of her. By calling herself Dumpster Baby, she’s getting ahead of the joke a bit. She’s claiming herself. And within that I wanted her world to feel really special, for everyone to have these strange nicknames because nicknames are all about history and connection and inside jokes. When Amelia Pomoroy—a rich woman who buys the resort all these weirdos live and work at—takes over and wants to renovate it, we become worried that specialness is going to go away. At the same time, it felt true to give the wealthy characters sort of famous-sounding names to highlight how they stand out, even if they’re defined more by how they threaten the world these characters live in than anything else.
PH: Okay, this one is on process and focus. Psychologist used to say that attention span is calculated by our age times two or three, in minutes, so a 15-year-old would have a 30-45 minute attention span. But I read an article recently that said due to social media training, most of us are closer to 30 seconds than 3 minutes as far as our ability to focus on a single, specific thing. Do you have trouble sitting down and writing for an hour straight? Or can you write for more than that? What’s your attention and focus like as a writer?
MH: It really depends. When I’m writing a first draft, it comes in 200-250 word spurts, but I really have no idea about timing. I’ll usually write for 2-4 hours in the morning, but that’s interspersed with a lot of time staring out the window or at people in coffee shops or at my dog, and I definitely spend more time on Twitter and Instagram than I should. That said, Twitter and Instagram and all my various groupchats and DMs (hahaha) are where my co-workers are, and spending time to cheer other writers or book people on, or post about their work, or otherwise engage is something that really helps me feel less lonely. So that’s my argument for having a bad attention span! I get to be my own boss when I’m writing and why not be like, a cool, fun boss?
When it comes to revision, I find that if I’m not also, the lack of focus is really problematic. So when revising/writing second drafts I try to make sure I’m spending a few hours a day reading, which can help me focus for longer spurts. Honestly, I don’t worry too much about it. I like to save my anxiety for all other areas of my life, like book promotion, teaching, and socializing!
What about you? Do you feel your attention span is reflected in your writing style? What or how do you read during the drafting and revision process?
PH: Good question. Maybe? I do struggle with attention, and I love to write short chapters to create a mosaic of scenes and moments. Or maybe I’m not smart enough to write long chapters. But yes, I struggle with focus and attention because of the traumatic brain injury I suffered, and this seems to be most pronounced when I’m writing a rough draft.
But when it comes to revision, THAT is the part of writing I love. One of my favorite activities is revising a chapter for an hour or two, cutting bad paragraphs or scenes, writing new ones, adding imagery or crafting better dialogue. I love to question myself as I go and I love to improve a book piece by piece. For some reason I can pay attention and focus better as I revise and edit, much better than when I draft.
And I’m completely with you on the importance of reading. The more I read, and the better writers I read, the better I write. It’s almost that simple. If—on the other hand—I read poor writing, I struggle to write well myself. I’ve heard the rule of trying to read 10 books for every one I write, but for me it’s more like 30 books for every one.
So what’s next for you in book-writing? Can you explain your new book-length project?
MH: I’ve got one project about to go on sub about a struggling actress who has been hired to be the childminder for a production of “The Sound of Music” but decides she’s going to win the lead role of Maria by any means necessary. And I’m currently drafting a mystery novel about a super yacht crossing the Pacific Ocean that happens upon a mysterious young woman floating in the ocean whose story just doesn’t quite add up.
What’s next for you?
PH: American Afterlife is the first book in a trilogy about the Cascadia Quake and my narrators’ interactions with the cult The Collection of Redeemed Souls. But the trilogy is also about neuro-divergence. In book one, the narrator struggles with narcolepsy. In book two, The Infinite Universe, the narrator has a traumatic brain injury. And in book three, the narrator is beginning dementia. But the jury’s still out on books two and three. We’ll see in a year or two?
MH: Sounds awesome. Deal!
Meredith Hambrock is a Canadian fiction and television writer who grew up in Toronto and now lives in Vancouver. Her short fiction has appeared in several magazines including Maisonneuve and Descant. She’s been a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize and most recently wrote for the sitcom “Corner Gas Animated.”
Pedro Hoffmeister is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Graphic the Valley, Too Shattered For Mending, and others. Arrested and expelled from three high schools, Hoffmeister now runs an outdoor program for teens, teaching survival, climbing, spelunking, and whitewater rafting. He lives in Eugene, Oregon where this novel is set.