Cara Hoffman’s RUIN and the Art of Looking Closely

Inter­view by Linda Mahal

Cover photo by Con­stance Faulk

Stonecoast Faculty Member Cara Hoffman is the author of Running, a New York Times Edi­tor’s Choice, an Esquire Mag­a­zine Best Book of the Year, and an Autostrad­dle Best Queer and Fem­i­nist Book of the Year. She first received nation­al atten­tion in 2011 with the pub­li­ca­tion of the fem­i­nist classic So Much Pretty, which sparked a nation­al dia­logue on vio­lence and ret­ri­bu­tion and was named a Best Novel of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. Her second novel, Be Safe I Love You, was nom­i­nat­ed for a Folio Prize, and named one of the Five Best Modern War Novels. A Mac­Dow­ell Fellow and an Edward Albee Fellow, she has written for the New York Times, The Paris Review, Book­fo­rum, Ben­ning­ton Review, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue and NPR. She has been a vis­it­ing lec­tur­er at St. John’s, Goddard College and Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, and is a found­ing editor of The Anar­chist Review of Books.

Well-known for her trans­gres­sive lit­er­a­ture sem­i­nars and exper­i­men­tal work­shops at Stonecoast, in which writers work with ink, wite-out, and fire, Hoffman co-founded the new print-only mag­a­zine The Anar­chist Review of Books with Mat­til­da Bern­stein Sycamore in 2020. ARB invites readers “to dream, to debate, to see, to plot and ulti­mate­ly to act.” Pro­duced by a global col­lec­tive of artists, philoso­phers, and social critics, ARB is avail­able by sub­scrip­tion and at inde­pen­dent book­stores across the United States and is pro­vid­ed at no cost to people who are incarcerated.

From her home in Athens, Greece, Hoffman granted Stonecoast MFA the fol­low­ing inter­view cen­tered on her new fiction col­lec­tion RUIN, forth­com­ing from PM Press in April 2022. Nick Mamatas (The People’s Repub­lic of Every­thing) observes, “If there is such a thing as ‘anar­chist fiction,’ it must be fiction that breaks all the rules of time and space, of realism and the fan­tas­tic, of fact and feel­ings. RUIN is true, excit­ing, anar­chist fiction.”

Hoffman’s “Dechellis,” a short story from RUIN, appears in the current issue of Ben­ning­ton Review.

“In time they’d come to eat flour made from insects, replace their failing hearts with the hearts of pigs. They would huddle in cool towers around their devices, watch­ing aerial footage of vine­yards on fire, orange as a forge, forests reduced to charcoal.

They said no one could have pre­dict­ed the disease that fol­lowed the disease.”

- Cara Hoffman, “History Lesson,” from RUIN

RUIN feels like the book that’s been writing itself in the minds, or the col­lec­tive mind, of those who have respond­ed to the unfold­ing of the 21^st century with both horror and hope. RUIN feels like an answer to a prayer. You’ve taken our fear, rage, despair and love and made story of the sense­less­ness, index­ing so much of what we’ve wit­nessed, but trans­fig­ur­ing it. 

CH: Thank you, that’s very kind.

What was it like to write this book, at this time? Was it exhil­a­rat­ing, or a heavy lift, or some of both?

CH: It was a plea­sure to work on RUIN. It’s always a plea­sure to write, even if it’s painful­ly clar­i­fy­ing some­times. I enjoyed research­ing and think­ing about animal and insect life, and about art and about the history of mass casu­al­ty events, and about various forms of escape, and about sol­diers and bee­keep­ers, and doll­house col­lec­tors, and talking animals. It was good to inter­view people and some of the stories are taken from life.

Can you tell us about your process?

CH: My process is some­thing like this: I found a picture of my son’s father when he was nine years old, wearing many rubber bracelets that went nearly up to his elbows, and he looked feral and proud. When I asked him about the bracelets, he told me they were mortar casings. He’d found the mortars by the gate of his town—where there were often muni­tions dumps—especially in the 80s. He’d spent part of fifth grade living in an air raid shelter with a group of other chil­dren and it was good to talk with him about what kinds of games they played down there, and about nav­i­gat­ing glow-in-the-dark markers during black­outs, and learn­ing to assem­ble guns blind­fold­ed, and eating lunch under pic­tures of Stalin. And I thought a great deal about the power of his imag­i­na­tion living in those cir­cum­stances, the life of his mind, his fashion, his drive, his auton­o­my. It’s been twenty-three years since I first saw that pho­to­graph. I have known him since we were teenagers. I wrote the story Strike Any­where once before, but I finally figured out how to prop­er­ly tell it this year.

These fic­tion­al stories seem to tra­verse a land­scape so close to our present-day world that the line between fact and fiction is blurred. This dis­ori­en­ta­tion between what is fab­ri­cat­ed and what feels like impres­sion­is­tic reportage sim­u­lates the cog­ni­tive dis­lo­ca­tion of living in this time, and the neces­si­ty of nav­i­gat­ing the deluge of infor­ma­tion over­load, dis­in­for­ma­tion, rapid change and endemic uncertainty.

Do we need a new epis­te­mol­o­gy to under­stand the veering of history that seems to be taking place now, and the art that it is giving birth to? Or are there par­a­digms for under­stand­ing these con­di­tions already out there, par­a­digms that perhaps have been sup­pressed or forgotten?

CH: Wouldn’t that be won­der­ful? A new theory of knowl­edge? I do think there are older models for under­stand­ing, that have been buried. People inter­est­ed in the sup­pres­sion of intel­lec­tu­al and the­o­ret­i­cal models could read Jacques LeCarriere’s The Gnos­tics—it’s a beau­ti­ful book. But I gen­er­al­ly think most things are clear if you look closely. I grew up in a place that was already wrecked. A flood destroyed the town, and the place never fully recov­ered; there was no more indus­try, a dwin­dling pop­u­la­tion. And like most places in the U.S. it had been built over the site of mas­sacres and then named after the com­mu­ni­ties of people who were mur­dered there. One could describe the land­scape of this town in detail—and all of that infor­ma­tion would be clear from the street names, the kinds of build­ings, the sur­round­ing woods, the meth labs, the gutted down­town, the way the people look and dress and speak. And the beauty, the sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty, would be there too—in nature and also in people. Nothing is really hidden. There’s nothing to add or explain. I think the cat­a­stro­phe of America, and the strug­gles of those who live there, is playing out in plain sight.

The fol­low­ing excerpt from your story “History Lesson” is one of the many pow­er­ful pas­sages that I keep re-reading:

“Those last years in the city, when people would pay for a human voice to put them to sleep at night, when people would pay for a human voice to tell them how to breathe, I was dying for a silence that was no longer pos­si­ble. And not even the ghost of the land­scape, the ghost of the neigh­bor­hood remained. We were not watch­ing things care­ful­ly in those last years, we were keeping our heads down and pre­tend­ing there was a future. We were amass­ing the resources we’d need to break the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull. No one antic­i­pates how fast change happens.”

Are we in the “last years” now? What is the role of the writer in this moment?

CH: I think about this, living in the center of Athens, seeing modern build­ings beside 2,500-year-old ruins. I don’t think these are ‘last years’ for our species—which is so resilient. My biggest fear though is that the world will be inher­it­ed by tech-bil­lion­aires in their bunkers. This isn’t a fear based in fiction—wealthy Amer­i­cans are buying luxury condos in repur­posed nuclear missile silos fifteen stories under­ground. I hope that there will be work made today that can survive a new dark age, and that it won’t be made by rich Amer­i­cans eating hydro­pon­ic veg­eta­bles and lab-grown meat while watch­ing sur­veil­lance feeds of a burning land­scape from inside her­met­i­cal­ly sealed luxury. But after seeing the cave paint­ings in Pech Merle and Altami­ra, I’m pretty opti­mistic that humans will be able to make work even if they are sharing a cave with a bear during an ice age. The role of the writer is to write. I don’t think it’s dif­fer­ent now than at any other time in history.

How would you guide writers who want to write about cat­a­clysmic or mon­u­men­tal events such as Sep­tem­ber 11 or the pan­dem­ic? What makes for good writing in response to these events, and how can one avoid the banal or the melodramatic?

CH:  This ques­tion makes me think of Kevin Carter— the pho­tog­ra­ph­er famous for his work on the famine in Sudan. He won a Pulitzer for a pho­to­graph he took of a starv­ing child being stalked by a vulture, which was pub­lished in the New York Times in 1993 and appeared direct­ly next to an ad for Tiffany’s—an image of a 2 ¼ inch high ster­ling silver circus ele­phant selling for $1,050. Carter said he chased the vulture away after taking the picture, and that minutes later he boarded a plane. What he didn’t do was take the child to the UN food center. In 1994 he killed himself.

As a jour­nal­ist and as a nov­el­ist I’ve written about some hor­ri­ble things and I have serious ques­tions about what it means to aes­theti­cize pain, and who is doing it, and why. I think impor­tant ques­tions to ask before writing about tragedies are: why am I the one to tell this story? Why am I com­pelled, what are my inten­tions? Who am I doing this for? Where will it appear?

I think I answered the craft part of this ques­tion above when I talked about detail and looking closely.

What gives you hope? 

CH:  I’m opti­mistic about thought and art and lan­guage, and about the number of new projects I see that exist offline. I have read some won­der­ful books lately. Morgan Talty [Fiction ’19] has a col­lec­tion of linked stories coming out from Tin House called Night of the Living Rez, which I was lucky enough to read when he was working on it for his thesis at Stonecoast. The expe­ri­ence of diving into that work was like first picking up a novel by Mar­guerite Duras, or like reading Denis Johnson’s Jesus Son. The prose is mas­ter­ful. It’s brutal and funny and smart and has a genuine warmth that’s rare, espe­cial­ly in con­tem­po­rary com­mer­cial fiction. Morgan’s book has done a lot to restore my faith in the future of literature.

What are you working on now, or next?

CH: I have three books forth­com­ing: a col­lec­tion of essays; a non-fiction book about Exarchia, and a new novel. Each project is at a dif­fer­ent stage of com­ple­tion. I’m also fin­ish­ing the edits for the Greek trans­la­tion of Running, which will be out in spring 2022, around the same time as RUIN comes out in the U.S. And I’m working with the edi­to­r­i­al col­lec­tive of The Anar­chist Review of Books on our winter issue. And I’m reading and study­ing Greek.

This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on the Stonecoast MFA website in Sep­tem­ber 2021. To learn more about Cara Hoffman and her work, please see her Stonecoast MFA faculty bio and her author website. RUIN is cur­rent­ly avail­able for purchase.