Carrie: [00:00:04] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode, we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Joe Bond. Joe's novel, "Hope House," was recently longlisted for the Center For Fiction's First Novel Prize. He began working on it after his story, "Damico" won the Masters Review Short Story Award. His writing has been published by The Paris Review, People, Lit Hub, New South, the New Ohio Review, and ESPN He grew up around group homes in Eastern Kentucky and lives now in New Orleans. Welcome, Joe, and thanks so much for joining us. Joe: Thank you so much for having me. Carrie: So as your bio mentions, [00:01:04] you grew up around group homes. Can you talk some about that experience and why you wanted to write about it? Joe: Sure. From my earliest memory, I was around the homes because my dad was a counselor. And later he, like, ran different homes and stuff, and he worked all the time, and he would take me to work with him. And I just remember always being around the boys, being on the van when they went to play basketball somewhere or went to the movies, the things they did. And they would tell their stories, what they called their past histories, and they would talk about where they were from and if they had family and if they had a mom or a dad, and the different mistakes they'd made in their life. And so I grew up listening to their stories. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Joe: And, you know, I think it helped that I was very young, and they probably didn't think I was listening or paying any attention, so they could go into detail. And, you know, it, from a very young age it really expanded my view of the world. 'Cause I, they [00:02:04] were, they were kids, teenagers from all over Kentucky, and they had been through a lot of different things, and they'd lived a lot more life than a lot of the people around me. So I heard those stories when I was very young and didn't really think to write about them for a long time. But when I finally did, that world came back to me really quickly. Carrie: Yeah, it sounds like from other things you've said and written that it just kind of came flooding back to you. Joe: It did. It did. The biggest thing was that I had a child, I had a son, and I started thinking about fatherhood. All the boys that I'd been around that didn't have a father, you know. And I worked in the homes when I got older, and like in college I would go back in the summers and work with the kids. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Joe: And I worked Sundays during visitation, and I would take them on home visits when they were, had been through the program for a while. And I was telling someone the other day, you know, [00:03:04] I never met a kid's father. Never. Carrie: Wow. Joe: I met some moms, and I met a lot of grandmothers when I would take these boys home. But I never met a kid's dad. And when I became a dad, I started thinking about some of those things, and then I wrote like a poem that became a story. And once I started doing that, I started imagining the other boys and remembering some of the kids I'd known, and it came flooding back. Carrie: Yeah, and I had read, I guess, an interview or something where you talked about writing the poems. And so I'm curious, as a poet myself, how did you sort of develop that into these longer pieces? I know you published a short story, and that sort of led you to writing the novel. Joe: Right. Carrie: Did that just happen... I don't know, just tell us about that process. Joe: Sure. Well, I'm not really a poet is my problem with my poems because they weren't, you know, they [00:04:04] weren't quite good enough. But they were really good places to start for me, 'cause I could start from, like, an image or a line. And with one, I knew I had two kids who had had some kind of embrace, like, in a home, which is not something I really saw. Like, the boys did not ... It was not their culture. These were pretty tough kids who'd been through a lot. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Joe: They weren't just gonna hug each other. That didn't happen. But I knew in my mind it happened somehow. And so I would, you know, I would write, like, a poem trying to get to that point, trying to figure out how they got to that point. And it became the first one called Damico about a kid named Damico Sears, became a story because I needed more context. I needed that background. And you can't really understand kids like this who've done some really difficult things, who've made some big mistakes in their lives if you don't understand where they came from and what set them up for that. Now, they've made some bad decisions, but they were in situations [00:05:04] where there weren't a lot of good decisions to be made. And so that's how a poem kind of expanded into a short story, which kind of expanded further into a novel, was me trying to provide more context, trying to weave all these different kids' lives together. Carrie: Yeah. And it also sounded like it helped you at a time when you didn't have a lot of time for writing. Joe: Yeah. Carrie: You were able to devote that much time- Joe: That's right ... Carrie: to it. Joe: Yeah. I was, you know, I was ... My son, I think, was probably about two years old at that time, and that was kinda my time to write, was at the playground when he would be running around, and I could just write down a line or a moment. And, you know, when I had a little bit of time at night, I would try to develop that a little bit. So I had moments like that where I knew two kids had embraced for some reason. And I had another moment where I knew a kid ate a light bulb, and I didn't know why he ate the light bulb. Why did he [00:06:04] do this? And so I wrote, that became the chapter in Hope House called Stay Gold, where I was trying to remember why this kid, trying to figure out why this kid ate a light bulb, which is something that had happened in real life. We had a kid, he'd done it for whatever reason, but I couldn't remember why. And it was, it was good that I couldn't remember why. 'Cause then I had to discover the kid's humanity to, to get there. Carrie: Did you ever, like did you ask your father if he remembered why the kid-- I'm just curious how they matched up? Joe: Sure. Yeah, no, he absolutely, he was great to chat with about the book. I would send him chapters and stuff and ... But we did not always remember things the same way. Because that character in the book is, his name is, Tony Malapeli. And loosely based on some stuff that had happened. We did have a kid that ate a light bulb. And the way I remembered it was my dad had got him out of the psych ward to, 'cause we had a basketball [00:07:04] tournament, and this kid was tall, and we wanted to win. And that wasn't the way Dad remembered it. I think he remembered it that he got him out of the psych ward because he was a kid in there with adults, and he wanted to get him out. Carrie: Yeah. Joe: You know? And- Carrie: Well, that's definitely a better reason ... [Laughter] Joe: that's a more valid reason. But, I think he kind of acknowledged that, yeah, he could get a lot of rebounds, too. [Laughter] Carrie: Yeah. That helped. That's funny. So, I mean, it kinda sounds like in some way these initial poems that you were starting were a kind of prompt for you. Joe: Yeah ... Carrie: Do you use prompts in that way still? Joe: Yeah ... Carrie: What's your experience with them? Joe: They, that's, those are my prompts really. I work from images and lines and moments. And, you know, I was, when I first moved to New Orleans a while back, I remember I [00:08:04] was over at Audubon Park, and just to give you an idea of kinda how my process is, and it was, I don't know, it was like 100 degrees. It was just brutally hot, and I saw two guys. I was at a playground, and there there were two other men who came up, and they had a little boy, and he was playing, and we were all just dying. It was so, it was so hot, and we were there with our children trying to give them a little bit of time to play. Joe: And I just, I said hi to these guys and just kinda watched them for a minute. And they, it was a Black man and a white man, and I don't know if they were friends or partners or whatever, but they were having a hard time in the heat like I was. And there was a moment where one of the guys just went back to his car, and he came back and sat down, and he had went and got a little fan, and he just started fanning his friend, his... You know? And it was, for me, that image was like I don't know anything about these guys, but- Carrie: [00:09:04] Yeah ... Joe: I wanna imagine it now. Like, I wanna know the story here. And so to me, that's how I find... Those are my prompts, what I see in the real world, you know? Carrie: Mm-hmm. Joe: And to take a moment or an image where someone's doing something for someone else and to try to imagine the backstory of it, that's kinda how my mind works, and that's kind of my process. Carrie: Yeah. It's funny because I think you're maybe the third guest in a row who has kind of had that same mode of working. How would you tell someone, you know, who maybe doesn't do that, how would you describe for them how they might go out into the world and start noticing those things? Joe: Sure. I would read poetry. I would, because that trains your mind to observe things. I'm not sure I saw the world quite like that until I started reading [00:10:04] more poems. To me, it makes the world way more interesting. Because then you really do start to notice things. And I did do writing prompts, like the just more sort of, more formal prompts, like when I was in college, and I liked them fine. I liked, you know, different ones. But seeing things in the world, my mind would start to... I found that much more curious. And so I, I would start from a place of reading poetry, which I didn't honestly read, when I grew up playing. I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, and we played baseball and basketball, and I really didn't fall in love with books. I felt like I was so late to the game until I was, like, in my 20s. It was, I was way later, I felt like, than other people. I didn't start reading poems until probably late 20s. And, but it was kinda cool, too, because then I'd lived enough life that it, when it exploded for me, I could go out and look at the world and see things really new. So I would read some stuff you haven't read before, things that [00:11:04] slow your mind down and can focus you on what's happening around you. And then just be curious, you know? Carrie: Do you have any particular poets that you would recommend? Joe: Sure. I love Ted Kooser, I love, I'm looking at my poems on the shelf here. I love Tony Hoagland. And Sharon Olds. Short stories and novels was how I first really started reading, and actually journalism. And kind of poems are something that I've always had, easily had time for. You can read them at the playground. They can kinda stick with you. And, you know, I've, like Jim Harrison would be another one that I've liked a lot. And to me that would, those are prompts too because, you know, if you start your day and you go on like your Instagram or whatever, you're kinda setting your mind up to work in this mode. And if instead of that you start your day with just read a poem, [00:12:04] or read a few pages of Emerson, I think Jim Harrison had recommended. That sets your mind down a different path. Or at least that's how it works with me. Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. And even, I mean, you mentioned that that is a prompt. You can also, I think, take that quite literally and use, you know, this is a popular prompt for poets. I don't know if fiction writers do this as well, but, you know, take a line from a poem and use it to start-your own poem. I, and I suppose you could do that for a story as well. Joe: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, like with Hope House, I, again, I worked from lines and moments, things I'd heard kids say in real life. I heard a kid say, in group counseling say, you know, "If my mom doesn't want me selling drugs, how come she takes the money?" And, you know, to try to get the full complication of that kid down on the page [00:13:04] is something, you gotta wrestle with that line. And if you really treat the characters with complexity, then it's gonna be challenging. You know, you could do something, you know, very cliche with that. But if you take something real, a line, an image, a moment, and try to let everyone involved in it be fully human, then you're gonna have enough material there to work with. Carrie: Yeah. Absolutely. So you mentioned that you didn't write about these boys for a long time, and I think from other things that I have read or listened to, you didn't feel like your writing was good until you found that subject matter. So I'm curious, for people who maybe haven't found what they're supposed to be writing about yet, what advice would you give to them? Joe: Yeah. You know, I felt like my writing wasn't good enough. I will say this: I think it's okay [00:14:04] to struggle in the wrong direction for a while. I do, because I felt like even though my end product wasn't good enough for several years, I learned a lot through my mistakes. You know, I learned how to keep pushing through rejection. I learned without much feedback. One thing I learned was to get more feedback when you c- you know, if you can find a writing group, if you can... If you have a mentor, someone you can get feedback from. It did feel different when I started writing the boys' home stories. It, you know, immediately felt like I had a world that had not really been covered very well, and I felt like I found a voice pretty quickly. And so my advice would be get feedback, find people that are smart and care about your writing. That made a huge difference when my first boys' home story got published and I ended up signing with an agent. And, [00:15:04] 'cause I'd gone for years kind of just alone. To have someone actually believe in the project was just a game changer for me to have that sort of feedback. And so I guess my advice would be, you gotta keep with it till you get to that point, you know? That, I think Kent Haruf, who's one of my all-time favorite writers, had- Carrie: Oh, I love him. Joe: Oh, he's amazing. Yes. So he'd said, you know, like, one of the biggest, I think it was an old NPR interview or something, but he'd said one of the biggest obstacles writers face is they quit too soon. They quit. They quit before they get to that point where they start getting the feedback and they start getting what they need to get over the hump. And I saw him say that, and it was you know, before I'd ever might've been before I'd ever published a story, and I thought, "Well, I won't do that. I'll just keep with it until I've given this a fair shake." Carrie: Yeah. Joe: So I would urge people to stick with it until they get enough feedback to really help 'em out. Carrie: Yeah. [00:16:04] That's a great suggestion. Well, do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners? Joe: No. I would say, you know, the times when I really struggled, hit some walls with this book, I would go back and read, for instance, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Because he... I would see, I have a lot of characters in this book, and it's not about war, but the more I read... I'd read that book, you know, I don't know how many times already, but the more I went back to it, I saw how he could deal with groups of characters, how he could tell a story and come back and tell it again in a different way. You know, The Things They Carried is really about storytelling. And there's a lot of overlap with Hope House. And so when I would, when I would get stuck, I would read that book, scenes and moments, and see how he dealt with characters. I would watch films. There's an old French film called The 400 Blows that I would recommend to everyone. It's an old black and white movie, [00:17:04] but it's amazing. And other art was how I would kinda find my way forward whenever I got stuck, whether it was film or books. That would, that was what would unglue me. Carrie: Yeah. Just you talking about The Things They Carried, it's been a long time since I've read it, but that's a book that I've read a lot. And the sort of collective- Joe: Yeah ... Carrie: in that novel, I can see how that would be really helpful to turn to in- Joe: For sure ... Carrie: your own writing. Well, thank you so much, Joe, for joining us. We really appreciate it. Joe: Thank you so much for having me. Carrie: To hear more from Joe Bond about his book, Hope House, listen to episode 119 of the Books and Bites podcast, available on November 6th. We also welcome you to join the Jessamine County Public Library's in-person book club discussion of Hope House on November 16th at 6:30 PM. Registration is [00:18:04] required. Thank you for listening to Prompt to Page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit jesspublib.org. Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning at carnegiecenterlex.org. Our music is by Archipelago, an all-instrumental musical collaboration between three Lexington-based university professors. Find out more about Archipelago: Songs from Quarantine Volumes 1 and 2 at the links on our podcast website.