write on the river

Interview with a writer: Nick Hershenow

By Holly Thorpe

When Write on the River announced writing contest winners this spring, one name made the list twice: Nick Hershenow. Hershenow, an author based out of Twisp, Wash., won first place in both fiction and nonfiction categories with his stories “Sucesos” and “Little Chicken.”

“It was exciting to get a little recognition and validation,” Hershenow said. “I thought they were both good, I thought they both had a chance, but to get them both at once is pretty sweet.”

Both stories draw from Hershenow’s travel and work in South America. After working for the Forest Service in central Idaho, Hershenow moved to live with his family at an orphanage in Honduras and later worked on the back roads, backwoods villages and badlands of southern Ecuador.

“I started going to Latin America when I was 19. That was the beginning of my fascination with that part of the world.”

He met his wife in Costa Rica. As a nurse practitioner, she was able to travel broadly for work, and Heshenow traveled with her and their two children to live and work in Honduras.

“It was an extremely valuable and mindexpanding experience for all of us. I had a job where I tried to do research and tried to find their families or what remains of their families,” he said. “I got glimpses of a lot of different scenes and some pretty harrowing or grim situations.”

Later, he and his wife traveled to Ecuador for work. “My wife and I worked in Ecuador for a year and half and were back in the sticks, and we were privileged to get glimpses into people’s homes and lives,” he said.

He pulls these experiences into his work and the characters he creates.

“You are creating an illusion that you are occupying this character’s brain, when in fact you can’t do that,” he said. “It’s definitely an outside observer and not always intimate knowledge, but I try to keep that part real, and not act like I was more a part of it than I was.”

Hershenow published his first novel, “The Road Builder,” in 2000. The novel followed a young American couple traveling through central Africa for the first time.

It was well-received, appearing in book stores throughout the country. It was featured in The New Yorker, reviewed in The Seattle Times and The Denver Post and received the Western States Book Award. And then it disappeared from shelves, Hershenow said, ultimately garnering few readers. Since then, he’s been writing but not sharing or publishing work broadly.

Currently, Hershenow teaches preschool and spends his time working on his unpublished book, “I Followed Fire,” which has grown out of his life experiences.

“I started writing notes 20 years ago,” he said. “It started gestating and bubbling things around, I didn’t have a direction on a story, I had scenes and situations. And before that even, working for the forest service, some of the situations came to me then.”

Hershenow joined Write on the River for a Q&A about his writing processes:

How does being a preschool teacher inform or affect your writing?

“I’ve been asking myself the same question! It doesn’t inform it in any direct way, I hardly write down anything about my preschool experiences, though they do stimulate a lot of thought and emotion. But indirectly, yes, I’m sure there’s a big effect. To closely observe and to some extent occupy a world where perception is fresh and uncluttered and imagination operates freely and spontaneously and logic takes any number of surprising and often hilarious turns – surely all that is fuel for a writer’s brain. The constant exercises in empathy and understanding, in deciphering language and raw displays of emotion, must somehow spill over into the writing.

I’ve learned a lot from the kids, and from the books we read and stories we tell and make up, about the essence of storytelling, drama, comedy, not that jokes that work for little kids are likely to work for adults! Anyway, I read and tell a lot of stories to the kids and I’m always thinking about why they work and why they don’t work, both the ones that are simple and direct and stripped down to the bones and the opposite, stories embellished in any number of extravagant and ridiculous ways.

Also, it’s probably good for a writer, after spending so much time spinning around in interior spaces, to get out of his own head and fully engage with people operating joyfully in the moment and on a completely different plane.

But maybe the main thing is, being a preschool teacher has made me a better person, and I’m going to assume that makes me a better writer.”

How do you face the blank page?

“With terror of course! Maybe that’s why it’s taking me so long to finish my book – as long as I’m still working on it, I won’t have to face that dreaded white expanse. I was looking back in my files at some of my past attempts to explain myself or answer questions like these and I came upon the following, which could be an answer to how I dealt with the blank page question when I began “I Followed Fire”:

“There’s no single beginning point that I can distinguish, but more of a kind of primeval soup of situations, people, ideas, and images plucked from my life. Notebooks gradually fill with recollections, musings, rough and tentative outlines and sketches. No real story yet, just random juxtapositions, a few weak connections.

But at some point the primeval soup begins to bubble. The juxtapositions trigger mutations; weak connections strengthen and multiply, a fictional dream begins to take shape. Then I start living a double life. Half-living in the normal day-to-day world, but all the time quietly extracting things from it, observing and describing and converting it into a dream. And halfliving in that dream, which starts taking on its own life and no longer requires so many pieces of mine.

The primeval soup metaphor breaks down. Shift to the sculpture metaphor: I’ve got this unformed mass of material, I’m alternately carving at it and slapping new material on, trying to perceive a form, and work with it. It’s ugly and messy but nevertheless I work pieces of it down to finer and finer detail, in the hope that something of beauty will emerge and guide the way to the greater but still illusive form. Or maybe the intricate thing I’ve been working on will turn out to be some ungainly appendage or dead end I have no choice to get rid of it. Then it’s back to the unformed mass.

Forget the sculpture metaphor. This is more like an excavation. I start out digging shallow and wide, so that later I can go deeper and more focused. Descending into a pit, which has dark, unpleasant connotations for many but not for miners or archaeologists, or writers, for whom going into a pit always carries some hope of discovery and illumination.”

How do you approach the revision process? What are the steps of revision for you?

“It’s ongoing. I’m not sure about “steps.” Mostly I’m not working on an actual numbered draft (though there have been actual drafts) but just constantly going over the chapters, tweaking, pruning, sanding, polishing, finally starting to feel pretty pleased with the whole thing… but then something won’t polish satisfactorily and eventually I realize there is an underlying problem that maybe I didn’t see before. Or I saw it and tried to gloss over it but it’s not going to yield to minor or cosmetic fixes or fussing with the language. So, then I have to take a deeper dive, do a more literal revision. Re-vision. See it again, anew, imagine it altered in some fundamental way. Step back and harden my heart and read the thing as objectively as I can, with a skeptical and unsentimental eye and ear. Decouple from a lot of the emotional attachments and assumptions I have made. What really works and doesn’t work? Is that section I once thought was so great really saying anything or contributing in a meaningful way? What in here advances the story and illuminates the characters and what is just chaff, even beautiful chaff?

Then it’s a vivisection, I have to cut out things I really worked at, that I really loved. Okay, so maybe they aren’t as lovable as I thought. And then rebuild it, put it back together, with invisible seams.

Certainly, a part of my revision process with this novel has been having other people read it, especially in its earlier stages. Although the two things I want from that tend to work against one another: validation and encouragement on the one hand, and an honest, brutal critique on the other.”

What are your writing rituals? Do you write daily?

“I mostly get up between 5 and 6 and while the coffee is brewing, I usually get the blood flowing with a 10–15-minute exercise/stretching routine. Then I sit down in front of the computer and do my best to stay there and focus. Those first 1-3 hours in the morning are generally my most productive writing time. Much more than that is tough, at some point I need to get outside and move! I am not the dedicated ass-in-chair sort of writer, which must be what it takes to write very many books, or to finish them in a timely fashion. I do try to put in at least a little writing time every day. Mornings when I have to go to work early, I will often get up early and try to squeeze in at least a little time at the computer. Also, sometimes I am able to fire up my brain for an hour or two in the afternoons or evenings, though this is harder and may require an additional spark (marijuana works – up to a point – alcohol generally doesn’t).

One important writing ritual that doesn’t involve actual writing is messing about in the yard and garden or getting out in the hills on a solo walk, ski, or biking outing. That’s when some good free-range thinking can happen, and I am sometimes able to break through to solutions to impasses and conundrums. Whatever inspirations come to me I jot down in a notebook or record on my phone to be later refined (or, just as likely, tossed out) when I’m at the computer.

What advice do you have for new writers tackling their first big project?

Be persistent but also consider abandoning that first big project if it gets unmanageable and reveals too many fatal flaws. Then move on to something else, maybe the second big project. Console yourself with the thought that you might get back to the first someday or use it in some other way. Or just that you learned something.

Try your best to conceive and organize the project before you write much detail, so you don’t have to redo it or throw it all out when the concept and the organization become clearer and, inevitably, different. This seems obvious, I’m sure many writers are able to do it. But if you’re like me you will have to start writing with only a vague concept and organization, which will only begin to reveal themselves slowly, after much preliminary writing, most of which you may have to discard.

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