Western Writers

An Interview with Brian Hart

By Jenny Shank, 2-26-10

	Brian Hart, photo by Lilli Kendle.

Brian Hart grew up in McCall, Idaho and recently moved back to his hometown after spending over fifteen years away.  In December Hart published his first novel, Then Came the Evening, to wide critical acclaim.  The New Yorker called it a “quietly exceptional début novel” and noted that Hart is “an astute observer of the transitional Western landscape.” Hart worked as a janitor, carpenter, welder, commercial fisherman, and framer of elevator shafts before he earned his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.  In 2006, Hart’s manuscript won the school’s first annual Keene Prize for Literature, an award of $90,000, “the world’s largest student literary prize,” according to UT.  I recently interviewed Hart via email about how his friends in McCall ended up “on the government fishing team,” how he saw grad school as a “vacation from the inevitable,” and how characters for his future novel came to him during long walks home from school when he was a boy.

New West: When did you leave Idaho?

Brian Hart: As soon as I finished high school and saved up some money.  I was seventeen.

NW: Where do you live now?

BH: Idaho once again. I spent the last four years in Texas and was ready to get back to some snow and free flowing rivers. I live in McCall, where I was born and raised. Here, at the moment, home foreclosure notices are taking up four full pages in the local paper. And it’s been going like this for a year or more. Most of my friends are on the government fishing team, as in collecting unemployment and fishing. It’s good, though, at least there’re fish because there isn’t any work.  Steelhead season is in full swing.  We’re having the best run this year, more fish than anyone can remember.

NW: Your biography lists several occupations that you’ve held—janitor, carpenter, welder, commercial fisherman, and framer of elevator shafts.  Were you writing all the while that you worked those jobs?

BH: Not really. I guess I tinkered with short stories a little but never could dedicate the time to them that they deserved so I let them die. I didn’t begin to write seriously until my late twenties.

NW: So it didn’t help your writing when you spent part of your time doing physical work.

BH: A little ‘physical work’ never hurt anybody’s writing, but forty and fifty hour weeks often do.

NW: Did you take notes on the details of your experiences at the time to use in later writing?

BH: No, I was working to get by, not for material.

NW: Did you have any mentors in your writing at that time?  And how did you decide to attend the MFA program at the University of Texas?

BH: I started thinking about applying to grad school during my last year at Portland State University. I’d been in the environmental science program but had switched to English at the last minute.  I took a writing workshop and was reminded how much I enjoyed putting sentences together. At that time I was working nights and weekends hanging drywall and framing and frankly I was over it. I applied to the Michener Center and a few other MFA programs basically as a vacation from what I saw as the inevitable. Which turned out to be true. Up until a month ago I was still pounding nails and the only reason I’m not today is because I got laid off and there’s no work to be found. But more time to write is the best kind of time.

NW: What was it like to win the Keene Prize?

BH: It was the most money I’d ever seen and I’d like to think I didn’t squander it.

NW: How did the story idea and the characters for Then Came the Evening occur to you?

BH: Over decades. I used to walk home from the bus when I was a kid, about a mile and a half down a dirt road, and I’d be making stuff up the whole way home to keep from getting bored. I’d create characters at first, then whole families. They weren’t imaginary friends or anything, I never talked to them, but they existed for me. They lived nearby. As I got older they more or less disappeared until I started writing. When I settled in to write Then Came The Evening, some of the bus-walk characters returned, although drastically changed by my adult experiences. They were informed by their injuries, their losses, and it seemed to me that in some ways the Idaho—the physical place—that I knew as a boy had kept pace with them.

NW: Have you heard any reaction from people in Lake Fork to the novel?  Why did you decide to use a real town name instead of an invented town?

BH: Lake Fork isn’t a real town. It used to be but the gas station where the post office was housed went under. No post office, no town. Of course, the people that live there might disagree. I haven’t heard anything yet. I barely made it into the local paper.

NW: Did you write short stories before you wrote this novel?

BH: Yes, and still do. Just got one into the Alaska Quarterly.

NW: What are you working on now?

BH: A short story collection called Split and a novel called Meeker that takes place on the central coast of Washington.

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