Interview by Hannah Felt Garner
I Tell My Students All The Time, “Your Job Is to Make Art. Your Job Is Not to Explain Shit,” a conversation with Christopher M. Hood, author of The Revivalists (Harper)
I met Christopher M. Hood in the English teacher’s lounge at the Dalton School in New York City, where he’s been a teacher since 2008 and where I periodically substitute. Starting out as a high school English teacher, Christopher went on to found Dalton’s Creative Writing Program, which he now runs full-time. My first impulse for this interview was envy-tinged curiosity: how does he approach creative writing to college-bound high-achievers? And how did building a curriculum for teenagers impact his vision of the craft? Which brings me to the interview’s other major impulse: to discuss Christopher’s debut novel, The Revivalists. The premise: Bill (our narrator) and his wife Penelope are surviving in Westchester in the aftermath of a devastating shark-flu pandemic in the near future. When they hear disturbing news from their daughter Hannah, stranded in California, the couple set out on a cross-country road trip beset with obstacles both comedic and horrifying. Christopher and I sat down to chat during school lunch hour, where Christopher reflected on the making of his pandemic-inflicted family drama, and the impact of its release last fall.
Hannah Garner: While I was reading your book, I found myself thinking a lot about genre. Maybe the obvious generic traditions that we could put it in are the pandemic novel, the dystopian novel, disaster, road trip…But then I noticed the structure of the narrative, which is rather episodic. I was starting to see how different episodes seem to veer into different genres. For example, there’s a little Wild West moment, there’s a man-versus-nature moment with the lions, Utopian moments where we encountered the black feminist collective, maybe even the gothic, the comedic? So I was wondering if we could start there, by asking: how were you thinking about genre as you were writing this book?
Christopher M. Hood: First of all, part of that episodic nature is that every chapter is directly inspired by a book of the Odyssey. And so that gave me some of the creative impulse moving along. I think of it as literary fiction but my definition of literary fiction is pretty expansive. I loved Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel. I think some of the tropes that you find in genre—so many of my favorite books use those in literary fiction! I think to me, what keeps it from being a dystopia novel is that it’s about a marriage. And it’s interesting because the feedback to the book—when I do get negative feedback—can be people saying like, “This isn’t what I wanted it to be. This was a dystopian thriller, but I didn’t get the conclusion that I wanted to get.” Because to me, the conclusion is: we’ve arrived at the family, you know? Like if it’s the Odyssey, and he’s trying to get back home, that’s where he has arrived at the end.
Hannah: Still keeping in that genre line, I was thinking that there’s an arc in which you go through all these disaster genres—or genres of violence you could say—and what wins out, what the book ends up being is domestic fiction. I wanted to read a passage where your book was telling me this. It’s towards the end of the novel, when Bill has finally been reunited with his daughter Hannah.
“We just want you to be hap—” My voice trailed off as I saw her mouthing the words along with me.
“To be happy. Yeah, I know,” she said. This is so fucking classic.”
“How is this classic?” I waved my arms at the Armageddon-haze of the cult encampment around us, but I knew precisely what she meant. Like a tsunami casually obliterating a seaside resort, our domestic drama was sweeping over the firelit scene and drowning it. A man with a rifle could have dropped into the ditch, barking orders and firing warning shots into the dirt at our feet, and we would have spun toward him in unison and said, “God, do you mind, we’re talking!” until he backed away, apologizing, palms up.
Christopher: That was so much fun to write by the way. I was like, this is exactly it, right? This is the thesis of the book: sure, the world ended, sure, the majority of the population died, sure, it’s dystopian yada yada yada—we’re still going to be fighting about the same shit. If there’s a thing that made me write the book, it’s that. This sense of like: all these things are going to survive the end of the world—gender, or like the family dynamics. Bill’s still going to say this wrong thing and Penelope’s still going to be like, why did you say that?
Hannah: It seemed to me that one of the things the book is most interested in figuring out is what survives after devastation. What it is that withstands in humanity. Thinking more specifically about what survives in America—since this book takes place in America and we don’t really have a sense of what’s happening elsewhere in the world—what ideas about America informed the writing of the book and then maybe did new ideas about America come to the fore for you?
Christopher: I think the way I survived the writing of the book is really by focusing on the couple. For me as a writer I’m more trying to stay narrowly focused and then hoping that this all says something about the broader picture. I’m not going in saying “I shall now share my thoughts about America.” But I think it’s inevitable that they would come in. I think the easy answer is that I’m writing about race and class and gender and the ways that those survive the apocalypse and the ways that those split apart and unite and stratify America. A friend of mine was talking about why novelists aren’t being asked to explain our moment. I guess I find myself shying away from that idea—that that’s a novelist job. I don’t think I can really explain for anybody. On some level I’m just trying to talk about this couple and trying to get it right. I tell my students all the time: your job is to make art. Your job is not to explain shit. Your job is not even to necessarily know what you have written. Maybe you just feel like it’s done. It’s the reader’s job to figure out what it means.
Hannah: I want to start making a connection to your teaching. The central couple in your book leaves their very verdant, fertile home in Dobbs Ferry, where they have certain resources to get through the pandemic world they live in. And then those get stripped down over the course of the narrative. There’s a pivotal moment in the desert in the West where they no longer have any means of transportation and—it’s kind of a funny moment—all they’re left with is a gold bar and a San Cristobal necklace, which are just vestiges of things that used to be useful in their former lives. That felt like a very symbolic moment of this stripping down process that happens in disasters. Colloquially, we talk about the COVID pandemic this way, that it brought us down to bare bones. That was one thing that I really connected to in your book, that felt very true. And it got me thinking, by an association with the metaphor of “bare bones,” of what you might do in the classroom when you’re teaching writing. This seems like a weird connection but I’m curious, what your “bare bones” of writing are, and then maybe has this kind of stripping down effect we’ve been experiencing over the last couple years affected what your take on that is?
Christopher: My teaching—the core belief—is that I take my students seriously as writers, even before they take themselves seriously as writers. So, some of my baseline things. One is: your goal as a writer, the baseline, the very rock bottom goal, is to keep the reader turning pages. So that’s partially why I wrote something that is sort of a page turner. Because that’s the goal! Then the other piece as it relates to fiction. You were talking about the gold bar and the necklace with San Cristobal. Both of those things end up serving these super important purposes at the end of the book. And a reader could think, “Oh how smart, he knew he was going to need these things.” And if you’re writing a paper about the book, you might write about the symbolic importance of St. Christopher who protects travelers and why that necklace, dadadada…Why did I put those in the book? Because with the necklace I had some lines of dialogue and I was like, “Oh, I need a thing because I’ve had too many lines of dialogue.” So I put in a thing. I tell my students all the time: this is how it works! You don’t plan it all out, you don’t have to know. That’s not your job. I put stuff in the book, like I populate it with things, because then those things give me material, they build the world of the book.
A huge part of what I do is I have all these students who are very earnest and hardworking. And they’re high school students, which means they have an incredibly difficult job. They’re being asked to juggle seven subjects, to get an A in all these subjects, and it’s all so much stuff that the only way to survive is to be organized, efficient—all of which are death to writing. So much of what I do is I’m like, “Just play, stop trying to make sense.” My theory of writing that I’m trying to teach them is you build the world and you populate it with characters and with things—and then you see. Because otherwise you’re just trying to be super smart. And it may be that there are people who are just super smart and that’s the way they write, in which case: great. But I think for the most part when writers are writing a poem or a story or a novel, they know some of what they’re doing, but they’re also trying to create something where things will happen.
Hannah: I want to ask you about your article, “The Gold Standard” that you wrote for Writers and Teachers. In it you write that one of the problems you see with schooling’s emphasis on grades is that students start to lose the connection between the works of literature they study for class and the writing they produce for class. You write:
“Many students today don’t really understand that writing can be judged on its own merits, that it can be good and bad, more and less interesting. They only know that it can be graded.”
You argue that teaching creative writing in high school, as you do, helps them make that connection by teaching “contextual thinking.” Quoting you again,
“I’m not trying to teach Joey to write Heart of Darkness or The Great Gatsby. But I am trying to teach him that they are written documents; that they are the product of human decisions made on the basis of criteria that he can understand. They have lessons to teach. Not moral ones (although they may have those as well) but stylistic ones. Lessons about writing.”
I was curious if that’s still how you’re thinking about teaching and also if you have any anecdotes of instances where you see that working in the classroom.
Christopher: I think that even more than I used to. One of the things that I say to my students—and let’s be very clear that I am really aware of my privilege that I teach creative writing and run a creative writing program in a high school. I tell my students, “I will read whatever it is that you write. Do you know why? Because they pay me! It’s my job! But your goal is to produce writing that I would read even if I wasn’t being paid. In other words, your goal as writers is to transcend this dynamic.” Because that’s how writing works. You go into the bookstore and you’re not like, “Gosh look at all these books, the writers must have worked so hard, I better buy all of them.” No! You are selfish, you read what you want to read, you read what you like. What I’m saying is: if you’re teaching writing, the goal has to be to produce writing that matters. I have multiple students—lots of students!—that have written poems or stories that rattle around in my head along with ones by Emily Dickinson and John Berryman and James Baldwin and all these writers that I love. Because they’re great! They’re really good poems. Or, wow, that was a really good story. And the kid wrote it eight years ago, and I still remember it. Because when I was reading that story, I wasn’t a teacher evaluating a piece of writing within a rubric. I was a reader wanting to know what happened next.
Hannah: You shared with me some documents that go into your teaching. One of them is articulating the ethos of your classroom which is informed by this workbook Dismantling Racism. One of the tenets of white supremacy culture as outlined in the workbook is “urgency.” And I thought that one was particularly interesting for aspiring writers, for writers, for young people who might be even more susceptible to the sense that they need to achieve a certain thing in a certain amount of time. I was curious how you integrate resisting this culture of urgency in your classroom.
Christopher: So, I just finished writing a new essay about running and commitment and talent. And one of the things I write about in it is that I thought for a long time that as a runner at Haverford College, I’d been a failure. Because I was never an All-American, which I had somehow arbitrarily decided would be the thing that was my apotheosis. And then I could finally, as Emily Dickinson says, “put myself away as a completed man.” And of course, it’s just a piece of paper, right? And at some point I realized, “Oh, I’m just beating myself up for no reason.” And I would never in a million years say to one of my teammates who wasn’t an All-American, “Oh, so you were a failure.” Oh my God! Like, I don’t think that: that’s horrible! And yet I totally said it to myself.
Publishing a book is a complicated thing, partially because you have all these ideas of what it’s going to be like. And then it isn’t! And you know, there’s disappointments in that. Then you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t make this list and I didn’t make that list and I didn’t this and that and the other thing.” And like, I don’t know, there lies madness. I mean, I’m human. I feel that stuff. There are things I wish had happened for the book that haven’t—at least yet. But also, there’s all these people who have read it and loved it and had a real experience reading it. And wouldn’t it be just a terrible shame if I let attachment to whatever and that sense of urgency deprive me of feeling proud of this book that exists in the world and that is meaningful to people? There are people who are like, “I love that book,” and that means that to them, that book belongs to them. And that’s amazing.
One of the great blessings of this fall has been that it has been a great fall of teaching. My classes are absolutely wonderful. I love the work I’m doing with them. It’s super meaningful. I’ve got great students. And I don’t want it to stop. So do I want the book to explode in the zeitgeist and start selling like crazy? And would I love to see it on the New York Times best-seller list? Of course. That would be amazing. But I also don’t want to lose the thing that I have. And why this interview is really fun. Because I’m a teacher. I was a teacher before I was a writer. I love teaching high school. And I think you can hear it. Probably if we listened to this interview, we would hear that when my voice is most excited is when I’m talking about my students and my teaching. And I’m lucky that the teaching and the writing are—I’m clasping my hands together—because they’re one and the same, you know?
Hannah Felt Garner is a writer and teacher of prose living between Brooklyn and Paris. Her short stories and criticism can be found in Cleaver, Paris Lit Up, and Revue Profane. Besides teaching literature and composition, Hannah also contributes editing to Mother Tongue and Cleaver’s own interviews section. You can follow her writing on Instagram @hannahfeltgarner.
