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. Continue reading →