The Lightning Room With Henry Hoke

In our latest queer issue, Henry Hoke took us deep down the river with “Bottomless Pit.” He talks with us, below, about reinvention, tangled creeks, and wishing for more wishes with coins that never hit the ground.

1. I love how this piece mingles and conflates characters and events from Tom Sawyer with the tumult of adolescent love. What caused you to choose these characters to tell this story?

When we were little my younger brother and I were lying in the back seat of my dad’s car near the end of a fourteen hour drive. We were road-drunk and sleep-deprived and we “became” Tom and Huck. We spoke in accents more Southern than our regular ones and talked about what we saw out the moon roof as if we were floating down the mighty Mississippi. I addressed him as Huck and he addressed me as Tom, and we kept this up, loudly, for the rest of the trip, recounting our adventures and plotting new ones. I think we’d only read the abridged versions of Twain books at that point, but these two were already our icons of boyhood and mischief. The boys in my story simply took on these identities earlier, before they were born and before they had chewed on a long piece of straw.

2. This piece inhabits a place of nebulous identity- its two characters can change their names, histories, and plots as much as their imagination allows. When do these things solidify?

Honesty and a denial of certainty tend to run neck-in-neck in all of my work. I feel like this approach calcifies when we hear Huck’s real names and Tom’s refusal to let go of his alias. That and the “What if” that opens the piece.

3. What’s your favorite setpiece from when you were a kid?

We called it the”bamboo forest,” a thin, densely-wooded creek that ran behind my neighbor’s yard and down to Pizza Hut. It rarely had much water in it so each day for over a year we neighborhood boys would try, and fail, to trudge its whole length, to run away. It was less than a half-mile long but we’d inevitably turn back, defeated by hunger or nightfall. Finally, on the day of my second grade graduation, my best friend and I went the farthest we’d ever gone, branch-scratches be damned, and with the red roof of Pizza Hut as a beacon we persevered. This will remain one of the great journeys, and great achievements, of my life. We pumped quarters into Street Fighter 2 until our folks came to pick us up.

4. The tone of this piece is amazing, how it bounces back and forth between pure exuberance and something older and wiser. The trust between Tom and Huck in this piece- is there anything quite like it?

Thank you. You’ve perfectly described how I think love operates.

5. What did you do to your siblings or close friends? Did their pain surpass yours? Did you wish for more wishes?

To answer this question I’d need a bottomless pit, or, what would an inverted bottomless pit be like, one you stacked? It would take a lot for me to believe that a wish I made could actually come true. The coin I dropped would have to never hit the ground.

6. What other meta-fiction experiments are you embarking on/have you embarked on?

My strategy for creating characters is to name them, and treat them, as if they already have an iconic fictional identity and inherent resonance. Some of these names come directly from life, some names I invent. This story is the one time I’ve taken the shortcut of stealing names from another writer. I enjoyed it. Someday soon I may take Tom and Huck a little further down the river.