♪♪ -In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ -A New Hampshire native originally from Keene, Ernest Hebert teaches creative writing at Dartmouth.

He's the author of nine novels and two works of nonfiction, including the acclaimed Darby series, which was launched in 1979 with The Dogs of March.

And he's written The Old American, an historical novel, which was named best work of fiction by the New Hampshire Writers Project.

Among his other honors, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, the New England Booksellers Association award for fiction, author of the year, and the Independent Publishers IPPY Prize for Best Regional Novel, for Spoonwood.

Critics compare his territory the fictional town of Darby, New Hampshire, and its surrounds to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

His work has been described in places like The New York Times and The Boston Globe as deeply felt, funny, compassionate, scruffy and unsentimental, absorbing, ablaze and brilliant.

Jody Pico says his novels don't just capture New England, they've become part of it.

Ernie Hebert, welcome to the New Hampshire author's series.

[applause] -Thanks Becky, it’s, it’s pleasant to be here, especially with you you're the best.

-Did you get that on tape?

[laughter] Well, I thought a couple of warm up questions.

Things that I was curious about.

You have an iPad?

-I do.

-I always thought you wrote by hand on parchment.

-I do write by hand but I also have an iPad.

Actually, I write by hand, my hand on the iPad.

-See, this amazes me.

I didn't know you could do that.

- Yeah!

- So, so this is the technology that you've been incorporating?

-Yeah you know, you, the iPad is, it's a it's a gizmo, but it's a gizmo that has a lot of things to it and for, for writers, I mean writers are always looking for tools, you know whether it's a pencil or a or a computer or a pen.

And the iPad allows you to write big and then it appears small you can cut and paste, you can write a whole book on your iPad.

-I like it.

I like it.

And the other question is, would you talk about your tattoo and would you show it to us?

-Oh, this is my tattoo.

I got it in 1998, in Trinidad.

I wanted to surprise my wife.

[laughter] Actually, she wasn't surprised, because I've been wanting to get a tattoo all my life I just wanted to get something had meaning for me, and, besides, writing, I also like to, I do a lot of, I do a lot of painting of artwork, and I do a little some sculpture work and one of the sculptures I do is I take a, I take sticks and I cut them this long, and I put them in the dishwasher to soften the bark, take the bark off and finish it so it’s real pretty.

Then I take a string tie, tie the string around the top and hang it up on my wall.

I have hundreds of sticks, because I think they're beautiful.

So this is a stick, with a string around it, and it symbolizes my identity as a maker of things.

Make a novel, make a poem, make a painting, make a stick.

And, you know, you make things with your hands, so its got to go on your hand so, there you go.

-There it is.

So I was in a workshop once, and I wanted just to run this by you.

And the workshop leader said, write about this.

I come from a people who.

And when I heard that question, it really got me thinking.

It stopped me in my tracks, who, who are my people?

What are they like?

What does that mean for me?

How, you know, who am I based on the all the generations back?

And I see some of that in your work as well and I imagine you must have thought about that.

-Well, I have I thought about it a lot.

I, I'm, I'm sort of, I think half, New England Yankee and half, Franco-American, in myself and, I, I sort of denied my, my French-Canadian background, for a long time.

In fact I think if you read The Dogs of March, I don’t think, there's very few French names in there.

By the, by, by book six, Howard Elman’s real name is, Claude DeRepentigny you know who, which, by the way, was, I probably pronounced that name wrong, but was Grace Metalious’s maiden name so I gave my, my, I gave Howard Elman his real name.

I decided that she should be, he should be related to Grace Metalious in some influential way.

- In your imagination.

- In my imagination yeah.

- Yeah.

-But it was a guy named Bob Perreault who, who made me aware of my, my roots.

He's a Manchester guy - He was here.

- And he kicked my ass [laughter] -Thank you Bob, thank you Bob.

Well, I've heard you talk over the years about your writing process, and you're so articulate about it, about how you how you make a novel, how you write a story.

And I've tried to write novels, and I've figured out that I can no more write a novel than I could build a barn.

I just wouldn't know where to start.

It's too big and there's too much heavy lifting.

When I read your detailed descriptions of characters, I mean, you go so deeply into character.

There's a scene with Howard Elman at town meeting where you get into from dogs of, The Dogs of March, where you get into everything he's feeling as he's in that room with all his, you know, friends and enemies and he's just boiling, just boiling and it goes on for pages.

But it's wonder... you just, - Well, I'm really inter, I’m... - you get into him.

-I'm interested in what's inside of people, and I've got a little kind of explanation here of my, my philosophy of fiction writing and the I, the ideas not mine I got this idea from a student, her name is, Freseen Mahmood, and, just imagine, you know, that this is your life here, right?

This piece of paper, this right here is your day to day life.

Well, something happens, something happens, and all of a sudden you get, your day to day life gets disrupted in some way.

Could be good, could be bad.

It could be traumatic.

Yet all of a sudden, something makes you, changes you, but eventually you go back to your regular life.

So there’s your regular life, and, and your, your the, the, this thing that happened to you, it's still there, but it's hidden.

And, what I want to do is avoid this.

I want to open it up and put the hidden parts out there.

Now, you asked me before about my method, right?

-Yeah.

-Well, I don't begin with a story.

I begin with, a character, usually who's going to be the protagonist.

And, I try to, I tell my students, and I try to begin with, something that's been on my mind a lot.

Something over the years.

Something that keeps nagging at you.

Nagging at you.

That's unfinished business.

So that's a starting point.

Unfinished business.

- Unfinished business?

-Yeah, so you write that and you write it, and as action, you know, you don't write it like an essay, you write it as something happening.

And from there, you're still not writing a novel you're, from there you want to develop the character.

Well, I write a day in the life of the character, and sometimes it might take me a year, in which I write, usually in longhand, a long, so I get to learn who the character is.

You know, their habits, their, their, their strengths, their vices, and their loved ones, their backstory, and I... but I try to write everything in action oriented, not as essay, action.

And a lot of that will find itself into the book eventually.

-So it's what the character's doing?

-What the character's doing, and have them talk to people, their friends.

So I build, in effect, a big database of information about the character that I know.

And then as I'm writing, I get ideas for what the story should be.

So that, but that's the first part, the day in the life.

The second part, is the plot.

That's the hardest thing a writer does is writing a plot.

I think there are so many, so called postmodern, books today that don't screw around with plot because it's just a smart way to dodge around the whole idea of plot.

-Right.

-So to write a plot, what I do is, I mean, I get all this information in my head.

I've got ideas.

I have to put it together in a sequence.

Oh, that's what a plot is, a sequence of things that happen.

So I do, do it by taking a road trip.

I've done this for almost all of my books.

Including the one I'm, including well, literally all of them.

And, so I get in the car alone, with a yellow legal notepad.

Now, I use a, I can use the iPad, and a tape recorder, and I drive and I say, well, you know, he does this, and she does that, and this happens, and this happens because, you know, when you drive, you tend to scheme.

That's what driving driving alone is all about.

Scheming.

And that's what plotting is, is scheming things form around in your head, you know?

Oh, this happened, you know, I scheme do you scheme?

-I just mostly try not to hit anything, - What?

- I try not to hit anything.

[laughter] -Well, that's not, so you... so you're actually thinking about your driving when you?

-I do, yeah.

[laughter] -Really?

I, I, I have never had a thought about it, see I drove a taxi and you drive taxi, you have to watch... you learn not to think, [laughter] because people get out of the way of the taxi.

Because they know they know... they know the driver doesn't own the cab.

[laughter] -This is again, good training for you.

-So but so I live in New Hampshire I start, I go south, and eventually, when I get to New Mexico, I have a plot.

I turn around, I come home.

[faint laughter] -Do you stay in hotels?

-Campgrounds and, and cheap motels.

-Yeah, yeah, and you get that solitude that the write... a writer needs I think?

-Well you know, when you're fraternizing with all these imaginary people, you never really feel alone.

-It's true, it’s true.

Well, anyway, so, so once I have the plot, then I put it on an outline form, and I write the... write the book -Yeah.

-That's the second stage.

And of course, you always make changes, you know, and things never quite follow the plot the way you schemed it.

And then the third draft is all about language.

That's the part that is the most pleasurable for me.

And I think that, language, you know, does two things first of all, it's just the pleasure of crafting sentences, which I love to do.

But also, I think, I think, language tests the truth of your vision.

If you find that the language isn't coming up to your standards, whatever those standards might be, it means there's something else wrong.

That's your muse telling you, Ernie, you're being a phony here or something like that.

-Yeah.

-You know?

So basically, it's, it's three different sections.

-It seems to me that a lot of books are published that have really good stories and plots, but the language hasn't had the attention paid to it that it needs to be.

-Well, a lot of, I notice that a lot of young writers write like the old Dick and Jane, books.

He did this, and she did that, and he touched this, then he touched the snow.

I like, a lot of different sentence models.

I want some graft...

I like playing the computer’s grafted sentences by, from freshmen at Dartmouth, and compare them to sentences in, professional writers.

And the professional writers had a lot of different length sentences.

Even Hemingway supposed to be, has a lot of very long sentences.

They only have little short ones.

So and if you draft them, they look like, they're kind of jagged.

College freshmen usually have maybe two sentence models, so they're all like, there’s the medium sentence model then there’s the medium large sentence model and then maybe a medium small sentence model, you graph that, it’s very da da da da, which makes for a da da da kind of reading.

-It's the drama of those... that change.

- That's right.

- From the long sentence to the really short one or the one sentence paragraph that were never... -That's right, it just comes at the right time.

-It comes at the right time, -Yeah.

-This was very helpful I read this, that you had made three rules for yourself.

Do you remember these?

Do not move on until the page is as good as I can make it.

- Right.

-Each page should contain at least one arresting image, metaphor, insight or action, and follow the protagonist's inner life with the same care and intensity of his outer life.

-Did I say that?

- You did.

- I believe it.

-It’s quite wise.

[laughter] -I thought it was very wise.

I think if I if I followed those rules, I might be able to build a barn.

I'm going to work on it.

I'm going to work on it.

Your new book... - It's called Never Back Down.

- And I've read it.

I got the Jpeg.

Thank you.

And it follows someone who works really hard... oh, we were going to read the dedication to Never Back Down, because that tells really what you're, What that book is all about.

-Yeah, I want to write a book about a working man.

I was a working man myself.

My father worked in a textile mill 55 hours a week.

One week, days one week, nights for 45 years.

And, he never once complained.

I just have a tremendous admiration for, my dad.

I tell you, I never could have written this book when my parents were alive because it would have hurt their feelings that there's so much of this book is autobiographical.

But I wanted to dedicate it to working people so I think if I read the dedication, it's the, it's the only autobiographical book I've ever written you know, and it's about two thirds of it I just took basically, I, I, it's my life if I hadn't gone to college, you know?

I don't think I've got it here.

Oh, God bless you.

[laughter] -It's called paper.

-It's called paper.

-You print things on it.

[chuckling] -This is, I refer to a magazine here, the magazine I refer to is The New Yorker, which I read every week.

Recently, I read a piece in a quality magazine about an artist who was quoted describing one of his portraits of characters as, quote, a kind of lowlife, the one who parks your car.

This kind of casual slander against working people is so common it's hardly noticed.

I've heard my students at Dartmouth College who would never use sexist or racist language, refer to people who work at McDonald's as, quote, losers and working people as trailer trash.

You who park the cars, cook and serve the burgers, mop the floors, pick up the trash, plow the roads, stock the shelves, make change at the checkout counter, drive truck logs of pine, catch the cod, pound the nails and pour the concrete.

Walk high steel, wipe the asses and empty the bedpans.

People like my father, Elphage Hebert, who worked without complaint for more than four decades, 55 hours a week in a textile mill.

People like Harold Archer, a telephone man who inspired me with his work ethic and skill wiring number five crossbar days.

People like Alfonse Pierre, a man of color who worked by day teaching schoolchildren by night as an attendant at DePaul Hospital in New Orleans to provide for his family.

A guy I worked with.

People, nearly all of them women, like the ones who labored in nursing homes to care for my parents in their last years.

You, the lowlifes, the losers, the trailer trash.

My book is dedicated to you.

The unsung heroes of America.

-Wonderful, that's wonderful.

So in this book, your protagonist, does a lot of different jobs.

Works really, really hard.

-He took all my jobs are in that book.

[laughter] -And you know, and you didn't make any of that up.

-Yeah, yeah, I, every single job that, his name is Jack Landry, which is a, name that comes out of my family.

I've worked all those jobs.

- Wow.

And as I was reading it, which you haven't, which I have, I just thought how... well, I can't even talk about it.

It's got a really good ending.

I'll just say that.

How do you pull it all...

I mean, that's part of the novel, is it... how do you pull it all together in the end?

And I think the best novels, sometimes the reader gets in the middle two thirds through, say, he’s never going to pull it off.

And then you do.

- I hope so.

- I think so.

I think so.

- Yeah it’s a, it’s, it’s funny I, I know John Irving a little bit, you know, and he, he, he likes to write his ending.

- Yeah.

-And then he, he writes the book to get to the ending.

- Yeah.

- I'm the opposite.

- Yeah.

- I don't want to know the ending I want to be surprised the same way the reader is but I feel that the more I know as I'm typing and writing, the more the more appropriate the ending will be.

It doesn't always work, but that's that's my philosophy.

-Well, Jack Landry in, in your new book, Never Back Down, watches his mother and father die.

Taking their secrets with them and that's a big part of the plot.

When you accepted the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, you said that your mother and father taught you not only how to live, but how to die.

And would you talk about that in, in terms of this novel, or in terms of just what what did you learn there?

And then I know you have a poem to read to us.

- Yeah well, I, I, in their old age, I took care of my parents, and I don't think I ever really get to know them until they were old, you know, my father, my mother was sick for a long time.

But her, her illness was physical, it was was, wasn't, wasn't mental so we could talk.

So I talked to her a lot.

And then after she died, my father moved in with us.

My, my wife and me, and then after he died, my wife's father moved in with us.

Leo lavoie.

So I got to, I got to know these old people, and, I discovered a lot of interesting things, like, you know, a lot of old people are actually quite happy.

My father was happy as a very old guy.

He was doing he was, collecting, all this, stuff from, you know, Reader's Digest, all this crap we'd get then so some, somebody told me well he's probably depressed.

So I took him to have his head examined by my, therapist, and she said, he's not depressed, he's quite cheerfull he just has poor judgment.

[laughter] So, anyway, I guess what I learned about being old is that, it's, for some people, they can they can be happy old, not everybody but... - Not everybody.

-No.

-Not everybody.

So that was a we're all headed there.

-We're all headed there and I love writing about old people I because I know a lot about them now you know, it's great to write about, The Old American If I hadn't, you know, my father lived with us, and then my father in law, I mean, I put all of what I knew about them into that book.

-Do you know that book The Old American?

It’s a wond... it's a historical novel that you said, was inspired by was it one, one little sentence on a gravestone?

-Yeah, yeah, it was, on a, in Keene there's a monument, a little small monument, and it says, Nathan Blake, built the first log house on this spot.

Blake was captured by Indians in 1740... 6, and then ransomed by his wife, Elizabeth Gray, in 1749.

So he was with the Indians for three years and and then it says six generations of Blakes lived on this lot, and Nathan lived to be, two months short of 100.

So he was quite a guy and I want to write that story.

But, I ended up writing about, the protagonist ended up being not Nathan, but his captor, who he described as an older man.

And, I could invent the captor I couldn’t invent Nathan because he was a real person.

-Caucus Meteor.

-Caucus Meteor is his name.

Caucus, Caucus is a name that comes from the Algonquin.

We don't have many names in the English language that come from, Native American Northeast people, but Caucus is one of them.

It means a gathering of people, which is what it means anyway, right?

- In English, yeah.

- Yeah.

- Back to the names.

- Yeah.

-Well, would you read this?

We want to end with this.

- I will.

-Ernie and I talked about how to end this interview, and it's it's a poem.

- Well I start, started my, my career as a writer, as a poet and I still occasionally write poems and this is one I wrote in, last year.

It's called My Mother's Donuts.

On your deathbed, you told me the stems of the flowers I picked for you when I was a boy were too short to put in a vase.

I didn't have the heart to tell you, you said.

I remembered you made donuts.

The aroma, the heavenly taste when the donut is still hot from the boiling oil, I remember the smell of the sun on my clothes that you hung on the line on a hot summer day, and in the winter the smell of the air from the clothes steaming off the radiators.

You remembered how happy you were with a new electric dryer in those days, people didn't tie their dogs, you said.

Oh yeah, they came from miles around, drawn by the smell of your donuts.

You always made the mistakes of throwing them the holes.

I couldn't help myself, you said.

I laughed.

You were too weak to laugh.

And in the spring, when dad burned the dead grasses that smell and the color of the new grass growing through the black burn scar after the rain, the brightest green in the new season.

Mom, do you remember?

There's no waiting for an answer.

You've shut your eyes.

I go back in time, see myself picking flowers.

A boy’s pure love for his mother.

So brief.

-Thank you, Ernie.

And I think that concludes this portion of our discussion.

Thank you very much.

And now it's your turn to ask Ernie questions.

-What do you think it is that makes, someone that the sort of difference that someone who loves to read loves literature and ought... and thinks they ought to be able to write what is it about it?

I know my daughter has stories that just go in her head all day long.

Is that what happens to you?

-I think a, the place to start any kind of writing is something that's been bothering you.

Because that's unfinished business and, and if you, if you try to, to, to write that not not as a, like a, not as, like an essay, but, in an action sequence, you know, where you have dialogue and you, you try to make a story out of it.

I think you'll find that you'll you'll expand it and you'll begin to, to crack open that nut that's been back there.

So that that's, that's my advice for a prospective writer.

-I have a question about voice and when you, get, when you start to tell the story, I've read enough of your works you've got lots of different voices.

Sometimes it's third person, sometimes it's second person.

I mean, something you really take a lot of chances, and I'm wondering, what, do you work hard at finding the voice, or does it happen?

What's your process?

Or do you have one for how am I going to tell this story?

-You know, I, I think that question is the the big question for a writer.

It's, that a voice is such an X factor.

I think the voice you're really trying to find, it's not the voice of the character's day to day experience you know, it's the, the voice inside the that never actually speaks that, that somehow in your in the, in your language as an author, that you try to find the language that the character would have if he had your language.

That's, that's that's the tricky part that's the part that I try to do -Well this has been a fantastic interview, note the segue.

Thank you very much, Ernie Hebert, for being with us on the New Hampshire Authors series.

-Thank you, Rebecca, for having me.

[applause] ♪♪