A “mountain story” inspired by morel-hunting on Cold Mountain in North Carolina, for a mountain journal, out of Appalachian State, in Boone:

Clare looks at the slant of the rusty tin roof and the white paint that peels in strips from the siding. The house is the same sort of place that usually sits at the edge of somebody’s grandparents’ land, about to fall back into scrap, jammed, from the scarred pine floor to the 12-foot ceilings, with stored bales of hay: the old place. Whenever there is a newer one, it’s a ranch-style set a little farther back from the road or backed up to a cowpond. Propane tank tethered close; the well out front turned into a planter. They drove past half a dozen like that just on the way here.

Pubs, Spring 2016 Edition

April 11, 2016 / klhester

The new issue of Shenandoah, which includes my story “The Fossil Record,” has just gone live.

The working title for “The Fossil Record” was “The Nanny’s Tale,” and I guess that just about covers it:

The Davenport’s beautiful house is filled with beautiful art. Art Molly loves to look on. So for a while, the stage before this stage, she supposes, she tried to convince herself that was reason enough to stay with the job, reason enough to be happy — the slant of light on the gleaming wooden floors and the quiet, and the milky bubble at the corner of Odette’s mouth whenever she falls asleep clutching a bottle. Which she is not supposed to do, or Molly to allow, because it’ll be bad for the teeth Odette doesn’t actually have yet. The fact is that there are bold still-lifes hung everywhere, even the kitchen, oil paint on canvas, such an orgy of art that Molly can hardly comprehend it. She begins to run a sponge over the marble countertop. How much longer can she rationalize what she’s doing? She needs to go back to school, so she can get her education certificate, so she can teach art to preschoolers, at least until the next downturn, when such positions will once again be cut.

Apropos of the First Day of School…

August 6, 2015 / klhester

Stepping Off

Always, in the big woods, when you leave familiar ground

and step off alone into a new place there will be,

along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement

a little nagging of dread.

It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and

it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.

What you are doing is exploring.

You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place,

but of yourself in that place.

It is an experience of our essential loneliness;

for nobody can discover the world for anybody else.

It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that

it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and

we cease to be alone.

-Wendell Berry

The One-Inch Journey

Because It Never Hurts to Remind Oneself…

June 1, 2015 / klhester

Stay in the room. It needn’t be an actual room. You can be alone in a busy cafe. I’ve gotten some of my best ideas while walking, or riding the Paris Metro (I recommend Line 8). I’ve never gotten a good idea while checking Twitter or shopping.

You need to be blank, and even a little bit bored, for your brain to feed you ideas. The poet Wendell Berry wrote that in solitude, “one’s inner voices become audible.” Figure out your clearest, most productive time of day to work, and guard this time carefully.

Always carry a pen, a paper notebook and something good to read. A lot of life consists of the dead time in between events. Don’t fill these interstitial moments with pornography and cat videos. Fill them with things that feed your work and your soul.

From “How to Find Your Place in the World after Graduation,” Pamela Druckerman, The New York Times.

News, of the End of the Year Variety

December 10, 2014 / klhester / 2 Comments

Many thanks to Front Porch Journal, which has nominated my story “Bubble” for this year’s Pushcart Prize.

You can check out the story, which appeared in Issue 27 of Front Porch Journal, here.

The V Word: or More on Value

November 5, 2014November 5, 2014 / klhester

Now I’m 79. I’ve written many hundreds of essays, 10 times that number of misbegotten drafts both early and late, and I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

— Lewis H. Lapham, “Old Masters,” New York Times Magazine.

Five of Five (Good Things)

November 3, 2014November 5, 2014 / klhester

From an interview with poet August Kleinzahler:

INTERVIEWER

Recently Poetry posed a question about the social utility of poetry. Does that interest you?

KLEINZAHLER

No. I agree with Auden that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Nothing else needs to be said about it.

INTERVIEWER

One more: some argue that the only value of a work of art is the value others derive from it. Do you agree?

KLEINZAHLER

I don’t think of such imponderables as “the value of art.” I do think, however, no matter how difficult or opaque the work, the making of art is a profoundly social activity, even if it’s one-on-one with some sort of ideal reader who doesn’t exist.