Few things are more disappointing than a predictable work of fiction, but one worse thing is the work of fiction that aims to surprise but falls flat. There’s a big, fat, twist in November’s online exclusive work of fiction, “Edge Habitat,” by Helen Hooper. It’s a particularly welcome twist because, well, it blindsided us. We recently emailed Hooper and asked her to tell us a bit about that twist, her other work, and about her previous life as a DC-based policy analyst with The Nature Conservancy.
Nate Brown: When I first read “Edge Habitat,” I was immediately taken with the language. The sentences—often just fragments—clip right along, and in the process, we get a clear picture of a woman who is having to figure things out. I’m curious to know where you start with a piece like this. Is it a sentence? An image? A character?
Helen Hooper: I often begin with some phrase, maybe something overheard, which gets me wondering about the character it might come from. A kind of reverse engineering. But that’s not how it worked in this case. I wrote the first draft of “Edge Habitat” a couple of years ago in response to a writing prompt in a writing workshop. It wasn’t the kind of thing we normally did, but as a warm-up at the beginning of the quarter we all turned in short-short pieces that were supposed to include an herbivore and a major shift. I thought about herbivores, how they were constantly in search of food, as opposed to carnivores with their big kills. I pictured deer, and how they strip plants and bark and gardens, which got me thinking about humans and deer occupying the same territory.
I’m glad you liked the language. I’m thrilled to have it appear in American Short Fiction!
NB: And we’re so happy to have it! While we aim to publish sub-2,000 pieces in this space, “Edge Habitat” clocks at 700 words, making it one of the shorter pieces we’ve run. Do you typically write short?
HH: This is the second short-short story I’ve published. My other short stories are around 5,000 words. Right now I’m working pretty obsessively on a novel.
The pieces seem to assume the size coded in their DNA. I knew I wanted to go into the deer’s head in “Edge Habitat” but that’s not something I wanted to sustain for very long. It wouldn’t work. It was dicey enough dipping into the doe’s head in a way that felt plausible. I had to get out pretty fast.
NB: Yeah, I want to talk about that point-of-view shift. It’s really startling, and you could have simply had the woman witness the deer in the yard and call it a day, but you don’t. You make that bold turn and actually take us into the doe’s head. I have to ask: how do you see the doe functioning in the story? Why the shift in perspective?
HH: I saw the woman and the doe on opposite sides of the dark window, and while mostly I stayed in the head of the woman in the house I also wanted to be out in the yard, viewing it from the doe’s perspective. Here was this little scene and landscape I’d invented, and I wanted to move around freely in it. Maybe shifting out to the yard, into the doe’s head, allowed me to pull the camera out, to see the little “exclosure” of the woman’s house from the exterior; maybe it allowed the narrative to exit into the natural world. But I’m making this up after the fact. When I was writing it I followed my interests and instincts. Sort of like the doe.
NB: Ah, that’s interesting. Is that how you typically draft? Or do different projects require different approaches, an outline, say?
HH: I try to proceed by feel. Turn down the brain, listen to the gut. There’s probably not a bright line separating intellect and intuition; at some submerged level they probably mingle and feed each other. But I try to stick to instinct and resist analysis.
Different projects, different approaches? Maybe. The groping-forward approach might be particularly fitting for very short, compressed pieces like “Edge Habitat.” I’ve never written an outline for anything until recently, when I took a very messy first draft of my novel and restructured it. Though now as I rewrite I still trust and follow my gut more than I follow the outline. Groping is my default mode.
NB: Your bio notes that you spent twenty-five years as an environmental lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Is that an experience you’ve written about? Were you writing much during that time?
HH: I haven’t set out to deal with environmental matters in fiction, but there are little areas of overlap. For instance, the term edge habitat is definitely something I picked up from years in land conservation. But generally these are separate realms in my mind.
For a long time I didn’t have much too time to write. I tried to get up early and get something down, and took writing workshops when I could. I never submitted anything for publication. About seven years ago I started to pursue an MFA at Warren Wilson College, while continuing to work as a senior policy analyst for The Nature Conservancy. Then I got a Stegner fellowship and left that job.
At first, going from work that revolved around doing the most good in the public interest—doing my bit to protect endangered places, advocating increased funding to restore oyster habitat or revised mercury pollution rules, and so on—to work that meant sitting alone in a room worrying about whether a fictional character would say “Hey” or “Hi” seemed ridiculous. But I got over that.
NB: Can you be willing to tell us a little about the novel you’re working on?
HH: It’s set in a northern Alabama, where I was born. The starting point was childhood sense-memories of car camping along the Tennessee River, but the story’s really about family connections and disconnections. Probably better stop there; it’s still taking shape.
Helen Hooper spent twenty-five years as an environmental lobbyist in DC before turning to writing full time. A recent Stegner Fellow, her work has appeared in The Common, The Hopkins Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New South and elsewhere and has been awarded support from the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Stanford University. She was also a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is currently working on a novel set in northern Alabama.