Poured Over: Henry Hoke and Jackson Howard on Open Throat

By Jenna Seery / June 29, 2023 at 6:00 am

“I didn’t want to get sick of my work … let’s write something that I’m going to enjoy.”

Open Throat by Henry Hoke is a novel unlike any other. This propulsive and vulnerable story reflects humanity from the perspective of a queer mountain lion living under the Hollywood sign. Hoke and his editor, Jackson Howard, join to talk about the process of writing this book, the canon of queer literature, the setting of LA and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.    

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.     

Featured Books (Episode):
Open Throat by Henry Hoke
100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell
Let the Record Show by Sarah Schulman
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and Open Throat, some of you may have heard about this novel and some of you definitely have not heard about this novel and I am laughing. And you’re going to hear all of the reasons why mostly because I’m also making fun of myself for not immediately, immediately saying to everyone in the world, oh, yeah, this one, and I’m gonna explain that comment in a second. Henry Hoke is the author of this dynamic, amazing, miraculous, tiny novella, that is so voice driven, and if you are the kind of person who needs a narrator that you can hold on to and just follow, this is the book for you. And it’s tiny and we are going to get into the language and the structure. We are staying away from spoilers. And Jackson Howard is the editor for Open Throat, Jackson, what is your title at McD?

Jackson Howard
I’m an editor.

MM
I didn’t know if you had a fancy, you know, I I’m not good with titles. Anyway, we’re going to talk about this wild little novella. And I guess technically, I’m supposed to call it a novel, but it feels like a novella to me. So Henry novel, novella, do you care?

Henry Hoke
It’s a book, the book. It’s got a story so that’s all I care about.

All right. It is beautiful. This book is the voice is I left a note actually, I’m the queen of post its. So I stuck a post it on the front and dropped a copy off with someone I work with. And all I said was It’s the voice. Jackson, Why’d you buy this book? Henry wrote it, but you brought it into the world. And we’re gonna start there for a second.

Well, Henry’s agent sent me an email and the subject line was, queer mountain lion? Question mark. You know, I’m from LA and this novel is set under the Hollywood sign, mountain lion is queer. Anyway, everything about this book, it was almost as if it was like an AI pitch bot sent it specifically to me, I just couldn’t have found a more me sounding book. I read it in one sitting, which I don’t think I’ve done with any other book on my list. It’s a short book as it stands, voice driven, you kind of get it from the jump, and it’s a premise that has the potential to become saccharin, or, you know, kind of corny and it just it never tipped over to there. And I kept waiting as I was reading and enjoying this book, to see if this was going to become no pun intended, you know, hokey. Sorry, but that’s it, that was the only word I have for that. So I just needed to buy it right away. I was like, this pitch sells itself. And I basically have been using that email subject line with the book ever since.

Henry, you’re not an Angeleno. I know you lived in Los Angeles for a little bit.

Yeah, I spent 11 years in Los Angeles. In a way my big cat is not exactly an Angeleno either. It crosses the freeways and has this slightly outsider perspective on everything. And I think that was key to finding that the perspective that the voice would, you know, play with, I feel both enamored and confused and overwhelmed by the city pretty much the whole time.

I think Angelenos, we still sometimes feel that way as well. Not always but sometimes. But did you start writing it when you came back to the East Coast? I mean, where does this fit into— you had to leave LA to write this book, right? This feels like you need the distance, it feels like you need the space. It feels like you need to remember how it felt for you to land.

That was very true. Yeah, of how it came about. I had come back to New York and it was right before the pandemic. So New York was not as dynamic as I was anticipating. It was a whole different thing, just really trying to process that time I spent in Los Angeles, which felt perpetual and dreamy, and strange, and wild and full of, you know, pseudo apocalyptic experiences, and a lot of hunger, a hunger for various things. And a lot of sort of disconnect from, from other people. For various reasons. I knew I wanted a vehicle, a voice to process that time, that wasn’t just like, a third person narrative or something of a scene or of an era like all those things just didn’t, didn’t jump out at me. And I was like, but but I had this urge probably to write about that time. It really was. Yeah, when I when I heard a song by Nick Cave that mentions the Cougar in the Hollywood Hills. And I was like, right P-22. My old friend that I would always check up on and was just up the hill for me in his house for a while, under a house. And I thought well, that’s the voice. And it was the most organic writing experience I’ve ever had. I just every morning I was just ready and excited to write it. It didn’t take any, I don’t know, I didn’t have to distance myself from it. I just went right into that big cat feeling and it flowed from there.

Yeah, when you say flow, that’s exactly the word. I mean, your prose just swings really hard on the page, there might be some people who are like, well, this is a little bit like poetry and it kind of sort of it is very much its own form now, right and you are playing with language in ways. I was so impressed as I was reading and the way you play with the idea of whether or not our narrator knows what language is and what it can do. And clearly, I keep calling him our narrator because I bought in entirely to having a novel now narrated by a mountain lion and you know, Jackson knows this, his publisher knows this. Animal narrators and I are just not usually what people think of when they’re sending me something and pitching me something. I’m like, Huh? And yeah, I say that I’m either— I loved Stuart Little as a kid, right. But I think I got to Narnia and I was like Aslan, really like, this is a little heavy handed, like, I’m good. Thanks. This works. The outsider structure works, the whole hunger metaphor, like everything you do here works, and I’m raising an eyebrow only because it’s a little bit of that, how’d you do it? And I really do want to talk about craft because it could have as Jackson was just saying a second ago, it could have veered off into territory that I don’t think any of us would have loved as much as we love this book now. So let’s talk about process for a second. Because we’ve set up sort of the idea of the thing, right, but yeah, you do some stuff in this book, man.

Thank you. Yeah, it’s really funny to talk about, my process was really just concentrated. I pretty much just started writing. From that inspiration moment, I was pitching my memoir that has, you know, came out last year, and that I wrote for Bloomsbury for their object lesson series. And so I was sort of waiting to you know, that we were talking a little bit and I was sort of conceiving of some ideas that I knew that would be very, like, research heavy going back into my, you know, memories and my experiences of the youth in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, which is, that’s where I’m, you know, it’s where I grew up. And all that that was, so I sort of had this like, book that I was gonna cook, when they signed me to write it, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. So I was like, okay, but I would love to write something. I was just like, I just want to need to get something out. And I didn’t, I’m not really like a short form writer. I’m a very short form writer in my approach, but I don’t think too much about like, short stories, or like, just putting little morsels out, unless I’m sort of writing nonfiction for, for magazines, or whatever. So I was really like, Okay, well, this is gonna be a book, no matter what form that takes, I’m like, it has to be a book, because I thought, this voice is going to want that kind of space. Because if it was short, I think, you know, I mean, it is short, but if it was intended to be a short story, or anthologized, or a poem or a series of them, I was just like, this isn’t— I want to get this lion, amd really honor it, honor the voice to give it a lot of space to spread out and to go on a real journey and sort of have a have a large scale adventure in a way, you know. But I felt like that would be the tribute to the real lion, and then also just to how much I wanted to express about Los Angeles. But really the form was, I wrote it in sequence. But what would come to me it would be these little, like you say, like lines and linguistic moments and play, and just some of the lines that you know, I still love to read even though you know, I wrote it, and I’m not sick of it because it’s a fun book, which is great. That’s also part of why I did it was I didn’t want to get sick of my work. And I was like, well, let’s write something that I’m going to enjoy. That was, which is not always the case. But here, I thought, yeah, every day I would write maybe I would hit that first line that came to me. And I would just go from there to the next one that I knew the next moment that was linguistic. It wasn’t so much plot points I was thinking about as like, the way that Hekate is, you know, what I call my lion that that Hekate would process and then make linguistic speak that line that moment, right? So it’s like, okay, like, like something like I’m old because I’m not dead. I’m like, Okay, well, I want to get to that expression. And it’s going to be this observation of an older, you know, old couple of humans and like, how Hackett thinks about age, so I was like, Okay, well, that’ll just be an observation. But then other moments that were like larger, like plot point moments, like something like fires the only future or something that’s going to be a dramatic moment, a turning point in the narrative that will get me to that line. So sort of writing toward the line, which is just sort of how things come to me. I have these little fragments, I’ll journal on my phone or whatever. Yeah, like a poet, I guess. But then I’m building them into these larger structures.

You’re not the first writer who told me they were drafting their book— Qian Julie Wang actually drafted Beautiful Country on her phone. And she dropped her memoir on her phone as she was commuting to a job that you know, ultimately was not the job she stayed in. But, you know, you hear the stories and I’m like, we walk around with super computers in our pockets. This is pretty great. But Jackson, I want to talk to you about editing because, I mean, you don’t want to take away what Henry’s done. But the reality is everyone needs an editor, like every, I don’t care who you are, you need someone to look at the thing and make sure that you haven’t just decided to embrace all of the things. You know, we all get attached to, I certainly get attached to pieces of copy, and my editor will come to me and be like, you can’t have that. You just can’t have I honestly, I let her take it out. Because I mean, I know there’s always something in there where it’s like, yeah, okay, that sounded great. The first time I say, Yeah, let’s just let it go. But you don’t want to lose the shape of the thing, right? You don’t want to lose the form. You don’t want to lose the narrative momentum, because that’s one of the things Henry you do in this book. It never stops. And it’s wild to me how much okay, now it’s my turn to apologize for kind of how much ground you cover in this tiny, tiny book right with with Hekate, walking around doing Hackett’s things, and heck, it has some adventures that we’re not going to get too deep into, but you cover a lot of territory, and not all of it is Griffith Park.

True, some surprises.

Yeah, Jackson talk about editing this thing, because again, you don’t, you don’t want to mess it up. But you do want to put a little edge to it, right.

I mean, you know, as an editor, when I sign a book, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I have to make sure that not only that the author and I are on the same page for my vision, but that already, there’s the potential of trust, not that it’s assumed, but there’s potential of trust to the point that as we develop our relationship, and I asked to do things, whether that’s sometimes changed the title, sometimes this kill the character, you know, all the classic enemies, that this author is going to trust me. And in the case of this book, I mean, it is such a delicate book, it holds itself up in so many ways. And I knew, when I read it, that it was not going to be a heavy lift, because as you were saying, Miwa, it keeps going, that doesn’t stop and a book this sensitive and kind of original and a place to storytelling, it easily could just be very navel gazing, and we never leave. And the way I actually pitched it to my boss, I was like, Yes, this is narrated by a mountain lion, and there was no punctuation. But you have to understand that within this is actually a very cinematic, familiar universal story of you know, coming of age, and community and loss and all these things. And so, once I feel like I had a grasp on the actual meat of the book, which is those kinds of elements I was saying, the more universal aspects, I knew that we just had to fit the rest of the book around that. So I really didn’t, we only did I think one round on this on this book. Henry’s approach is so intentional with his language. And that was the other thing I really wanted to make sure for myself, it was just like, I almost had to put on gloves before editing this book. Because as an editor, I’m never trying to turn a book into something that it already isn’t, especially fiction. This book in particular, I was like, let me not muck up this beautiful canvas. And I, I think, you know, hear and there, there was maybe a line or two, I felt you know, whether it was repetitive, or we didn’t, it felt extra, but I actually didn’t really cull anything outside of, we added a couple pages before the ending, just to kind of give us a breather and a lot of ways and cut some other stuff.

I actually understand exactly where you are in the book, when you saying I know the pages, you’re talking about.

Before the climax, it kind of slowed down and there were one edit, I felt kind of self conscious about giving Henry which is that there’s so many of these lines, that are one liners that people could probably and will get tattooed like on their body. Yeah,

I actually think there’s going to be a whole run of Open Throat tattoos. Without a doubt, without a doubt, I absolutely think that’s going to happen.

And it’ll be next to another hilarious line that observes something about therapists or, or sex or you know, whatever. But there are these lines that kind of knocked me sideways and funky. And I just remember asking Henry, like, Hey, if you could slip in, you know, a couple other one liners that kind of encompass the like, the feeling of being a human in the universe, and something that we can all relate to. That’s really instantly memorable, that will be awesome. And I just remember thinking to myself, like you can’t like force magic to happen like that. But I think Henry took the edit. Well, yeah, I didn’t have to do basically anything with this with this book. It came basically perfect.

You’ve written plays, right? So I mean, dialogue and movement like that is something that’s sort of innate to your piece of the craft, right. I know you said you always knew this was going to be a book. You always knew Open Throat was going to be a book but like there’s stuff you know, from the other bits of your life as a writer that I think translate here in a way that actually made me trust you even more. I think because I was like, okay, here we go. And I read Open Throat in a single sitting on a flight. And it was just kind of the perfect reading experience, because you’re just you can focus, focus, focus, and the rewards are all there. Like, I think I’ve marked up every single Yeah, actually, I have marked up. This is my now destroyed galley because why not? Yeah, right. I mean, so here’s the thing writing is an act of communion readings, an act of communion, like putting all of this stuff on the page, you’re trusting your editor, your editors trusting you like, they’re all of these human moments, to making a book. Right? Yeah, all the stuff that you can’t really necessarily control, you kind of hope you get the right team.

No. And I absolutely got the right team. I mean, I think what was so magical about working with Jackson was with as you say, like, this book is like the propulsive quality of this book. And that it keeps going and going. And that was really how I wrote it with this fluidity and this momentum, you know, just to keep, because every day I was getting up, you know, every like, weekday or whatever, I would get up and write for three hours. And, you know, very slowly in a way, but really getting the pages and getting the moments and the lines, because I always wanted to end, I ended every writing session with something I was like, like, Yeah, like that, I get to sort of target you know, that cut, you know, like that, that’s, that’s done, I hit that beat that makes me feel satisfied and ready for the next day. But then I would leave it on all these cliffhangers. But what Jackson really helped me do in editing and, you know, really, as because like, delicate notes, the thoughtful like, aware of like my syntax, and like what meant a lot to me in a story, but was letting me take a breath, build more space around it, step away for a moment step outside of, you know, not outside of the voice, but outside of this, the very visceral moments that the cat is experiencing. And that was amazing and helped a lot with especially, I can’t wait, I’m gonna read the scene this week at the Center for fiction, but we’re shuffling, like, a little bit of, you know, reverie and flashback into the current moment and how those moments would work. We did a lot of work with those for pacing. And I think that was all stuff that I you know, I couldn’t see in the, in the full, you know, ongoing flow. But that was just beautiful to work on in the drafting for the publication. Yeah, I’ve worked in film, I wrote films and made films, I’ve written theater, because I really am a book writer now. Like, that’s just what I want to do. And you know, we’ll see, we’ll see what I need to do for you know, financial needs, but and what opportunities come, which is all exciting, but I really love to write books, because I can bring all these other elements of what I’ve done in the past into this, and I don’t, I’m not, I’m not writing plays or movies, like I haven’t for a very long time, I’ve just focused on books. And so especially with the dialogue I really loved, like giving those that just like completely idiosyncratic, Los Angeles, like characters and voices, just giving them these like rich moments. And that’s all you get. You get them hiking by once and I was like, yeah, there’s a whole, there’s a whole play and just these two characters that I show for two pages, like I wanted to have that fullness with what Hackett’s encountering so that like, the cat has a lot to chew on from humans. It’s like, well, wow, there’s like a lot going on in that relationship that the tech, it’s just witnessed. But we don’t get to see it all we get a speculation. But we get that concentrated dialogue. I always wanted that that really overheard, strangeness that you would get in a play, where you just dropped in and you keep living with those characters, but I would shortcut them just so it is everything right? Yeah, that was sort of my crafting there.

It’s really intimate what you do. And it’s intimate in a way that if your characters knew how they were being eavesdropped upon, I think they would be mortified. But of course, for us, it’s very much fun. It’s great. It is so great. But I want to talk about influences for a second because both of you are coming into books, it’s much easier, right? To find queer writers, it’s much easier to be part of a queer community. It is much easier, you know, when I was first coming up through but we had sort of the same things you always had kind of thing, right? Like it was a very small set of writers and books and whatnot. And it’s just it’s so exciting to see like this entire new generation flourishing and being like, well, I can pull from whatever I feel like pulling from, maybe it’s sci fi, maybe it’s, you know, romance, whatever. I don’t care just write all of the things. But I do want to talk about some of your literary influences both Jackson as an editor and a reader, and Henry both as a writer and a reader because they’re not always the same, right? Like, they’re not always you look to different writers for different things. And maybe they’re not all queer, but you guys are part of this up-and-coming new generation, I sort of want to put some guardrails out there for folks who maybe aren’t immediately part of this conversation. Who’s going to start?

Taste is such an intangible, weird thing, it’s something, I’m always growing and learning and my taste changes as a reader, as an editor constantly, you know, when I came out of college, as a bright eyed bushy tailed English major, I was like, I just gotta like, be amongst words all the time. And then you realize, you know, you have to learn how to bring those words to people, and hopefully get people paid for those words. And all that to say is, you know, threading the needle between the market and what readers are looking for, versus elevating the voices that you think deserves to be out there and then finding the audiences for those new types of voices. It’s, it’s what makes my job so engaging, and challenging and fun. And in terms of, you know, queer literature, it’s, it’s a huge part of my list. It’s a huge part of my life as an editor, the books that, you know, if I have to describe my authors in one word, I really like to say uncompromising, and specifically with my queer writers, and you look at somebody like Brontez, I’m super close to him. He did 100 Boyfriends and that book is uncompromising in its depiction of Black, gay life in Oakland. And it’s funny, and it’s raunchy, and it’s sexy, and it is so complex. And I can also look at Sarah Shulman’s history of act up, which I published, and she was like, this book needs to be 750 pages. I said, okay, it does, because that’s the story that hadn’t been told before. And so I think, that is what really excites me about Henry’s book, which is, like, as I said, it’s, it was never going to be anything that it wasn’t already. And so look at some of the writers I admire, like Andrea Lawlor, for example, or, you know, an Alex Chee, and these are the queer writers I look up to whose taste again is, you can’t influence it, its always gonna be unapologetically what it is. And especially for a generation above me queer writers. Like you were saying to me, there weren’t many. And a lot of the reason also for cis gay male writers is many of them got sick and died. And so in a way, we’re actually getting to repopulate canon with these newer, uncompromised voices and it’s just awesome. And I a book that Andrea and I read, which I gave to everybody called Such Times by Christopher Coe, and Andrea and I have kind of been reading these out of print queer books together, because Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, which in my opinion, is the most uncompromising, queer novel, this book by Christopher Coe, it broke my heart because it, it had blurbs refuse it was the prose was out of this world. And it was wiped off the face of the earth, because a year after it came out, he died of AIDS. And it was just gone. And so all this to say is that we’re writers have been doing this. And now we’re in a position where, in theory, you know, it’s a slightly better world in some ways, and just in the sense that I also feel like straight readers or non queer readers are way more open to reading other experiences. And that to me, makes me really happy that my queer books first and foremost, I want those readers to be seen, but it’s so cool to me when a book like Detransition, Baby, which I love is such an amazing book is being read in a book group of you know, straight cis moms like that is like, that is awesome. So to have that crossover while still keeping it 100% gay as hell that is I feel like the dream and the promise of like, what decades of queer literature is like bringing us to

Okay, I need someone to bring back Essex Hemphill’s, poems, though. They’re out of print, we’ll talk about that. Someone needs to fix that, please, I need I need those back. Because I very foolishly loaned a copy to someone and it has, of course, ever come back. No. And and no, usually I’m okay about lending stuff. It’s just that’s the one where I’m like, Really, I had to learn that way.

My original copy of Nevada is under lock and key. Okay. You cannot find it for that reason.

No, I’m so grateful for Jackson and what Jackson does immediately just when we when we connected, you know, to talk about this book. I was like, Oh, I know, Brontez and I know the Shulman book and his incredible work archive, you know, and I think that just I was like, Oh, this is amazing. This is I can see their vision for what they’re bringing into the world. It was like, just sort of my privilege to be connected to queer lit was that I went to CalArts a little over a decade ago for my MFA. And it was sort of I ended up there because my partner went there for acting. And I was like, Oh, they have a really interesting creative writing program. It’s not like anything that I would think of applying to and I was like, I’m maybe I’ll be a book person because I’m so sick of being a film person. You know, I love queer cinema and I, you know, like grew up, you know, working in a video store and connecting to that in my hometown. My mentor was Matias Viegener, who’s an incredible writer. And, you know, and through Matias, like reading Kathy Acker, who you know, her manages her estate and her work and then Maggie Nelson, another professor of mine, and just connecting through them and people they would bring in meeting Eileen Myles you know, someone who I had heard about since I was listening to Hot Topic by Le Tigre, right, you know, and I was, like, you know, I’ve read so much of their poetry, but then just like getting to dialogue with them around when they put out in Furneaux. And then Michelle T came through just an incredible amount of amazing writers who, you know, now I feel like, I’m excited to be in community where they’re just sharing this work with especially thanks to you know, Jackson and and others to share my own work with. It just opened my eyes to more than I think sex is uncompromising, and the singularity of, you know, because I think there’s like, I’m a bisexual, and I’m genderqueer. And I sort of have this, this experience of like, I’m not part of like, I was never part of like a monolithic or specific, exact scene of writing or narrative, but I, you know, what, I love how how concentrated queer books are, because they’re so purposeful, and they’re depicting things that aren’t the norm. And they’re outside of that, to meet these people and to read their work and to have them talk about their work through CalArts. And through the, and also, just the Los Angeles community. And so the sort of things, the event series I built, was just a wonderful way to, to see the singularity of all these voices, and to see how much they were bringing to the table to dynamize, you know, can be a very, I think, very homogenous literary approach. I mean, you know, it no matter what, and even across, you know, voices, there’s often like a way to write a book or a way to craft fiction that I just never really felt was ever going to be me. I used to joke, I would never write a novel. And in a way, I don’t think I really have written like novels, like as you say, like, I write these other things that are—

Hey, it says novel on the cover.

No, it’s, I mean, I’d argue novel versus novella.

I mean, I love the word.

It’s a great word. But also, you know, novels can be lots of different lengths, just saying.

Well, the way the way I think about it is like, as I said, I wanted to like, I wanted to give this cat a book, like, I want to just catch me writing a book, you know, that, like, I am a cat writing a book, of course, and that’s part of what I navigate is, it’s never like a cat declaring their place. It’s, it’s finding something strange about identity. You know, they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know the expression. They don’t even know that it can speak, you know, they can’t, but the idea of like, yeah, a novel is like, yeah, this for a big cat— it’s a novel, it was a lot easier to express all this, like thinking about that voice and what that brings, I was I was out to dinner with just some friends and I was with a with Richard Hal, the musician and poet, now poet and memoirist. And he was like, I love how you kids get away with, you know, writing these slim books and to call it a novel. And I was like, Well, Richard, it’s your fault. Like, you did that to culture, like, you’ve brought punk into our lives. So like, we’re gonna call things novels that people don’t think or, you know—

well, and I mean, Kathy Acker is kind of one of the ultimate punk writers, right, like, because Pussy,King of the Pirates, when I think about it, and certainly, like, all of the early, early stuff, she just burned, everything to the ground and was like, Hi, I’m gonna do my own thing. And I mean, when she was good, she was great.

And I think that was really that’s, that’s my, that’s my hope for my, the lineage that I’m carrying is just people that were uninterested in trends are even form as a stuck or codified thing that you have to meet, especially in order to be like marketable or whatever. And that’s what I’m going to so grateful to Jackson as a general, you know, editor and acquirer books. And of course, specifically mine, of course, I’m very grateful. But just what Jackson chooses and elevates is, is absolutely not expected. And so much of it is people that I love and think are amazing, but maybe haven’t gotten the level of exposure that MCD and FSG can give. And I think giving that prestige to these really dynamic or unique voices, unexpected voices, is just it’s a calling and it’s something that you do amazingly, Jackson.

And I think I’ve probably told you, I mean, Ira Silverberg is definitely my blueprint for a lot of this and the books that he was responsible for Acker and Burroughs and Dennis Cooper and the way that but it was a different way, you know, Grove is an exceptional house, but he was working from the margins in in a lot of ways and working so hard and also, genuinely, probably not even caring that much if they made it to the middle in some ways, but his job as an editor was that he was able to stay uncompromising while still giving these people you know, attention and now I feel like that’s the spirit I’m trying to bring with me is how he used to do that. I’m still, I ask him questions all the time about how the hell he did it.

I think sometimes he knows, sometimes he knows and sometimes it was magic. But if you’re going to be uncompromising, you’ve got to have that voice, though. You’ve got it. There is no voice to hang this on. There’s no point in being uncompromised. And when you talk about the Eileen Myles and the Kathy Ackers, and the Dennis Coopers, and when there is a voice there, there is a point of view. They’re absolutely like the thing that hooks you in and you’re just like, I guess I’m going, okay, here I am. And that’s the kind of gorgeous beauty of the thing, right, like, literature should challenge us. Stories should challenge us, like, you know, when we’re little kids, and we’re learning to read, and it’s like, please read me the same picture book 97 times, preferably in one night, right? Like we’ve all I was that kid saying, Hi, can someone please read this one? And then once you learn to read, you’re like, boom, boom, boom or you’re rereading stuff. And I don’t have the luxury of rereading the way I used to, but at the same time, like, there’s so much joy, right? When you go back and you find something and you’re like, oh, right, I remember how great this was. And then there are other things where you’re like, Wow, this was of a time in other place, and I do not need to wow, I do not need to have this in my life again. And I just love that you can do this and see this right? Especially with what Henry is doing in Open Throat like, there’s a landscape of Los Angeles, right, that shouts out a little bit of Hubert Selby, right, even though he’s not like, I know, I’m talking about Brooklyn. But there’s a little bit of that lineage there, right? There’s a little bit of, like, all of these sort of gritty landscape people and you’re doing it. But I want to talk about place. I want to talk about this for a second. Because yeah, Los Angeles can be unwieldy and it can be unmanageable. And I sent so many copies of this galley to a bunch of booksellers, obviously, at our store at the Grove, because I’m just like, it’s P-22. Like, yeah, here you go. And it’s more than P-22. But, you know, it’s nice to be able to say you guys have all the people in the world, let’s start with you. And then we’ll, we’ll go from there. But LA is a metaphor, LA is a place, LA is the thing, right? Like, you map to city and what, what is this? 155 pages, and I don’t even know what the word count is? Because there’s lots of whitespace. So excuse me, 156 pages? Yeah, yeah. But how do you map a place? Right? How do you sit down and map the emotional terrain?

think that, um, it really was an inside out. Approach. You know, probably the most surprising thing about crafting this book, was how much I was able to cover about how things I feel in Los Angeles. And again, you know, with a concentrated quality, right, it’s, you know, with that finesse and that style of my way of writing, where I’m not exhaustive. I am very much not exhaustive. But in a way I was like, Well, part of it is that, even getting these small, ferocious bits of the cat’s experience, there were real flashpoints for connecting with things like inequality, things like encroaching urbanity on natural spaces, things like apocalyptic interruptions to life, from fire, to, you know, to earthquake to flood the things that, you know, I was experiencing, but imagining other people and especially animals, and you know, and unhoused people experiencing much more acutely, really, that’s sort of the beats of the book was to just to write toward each of these kind of just ruptures in sort of a daily life and in a complacent, confused, overwhelmed human life, these things don’t, they can just sort of be blips, but for the cat, it’s very, each one’s monumental and shifting and changes their whole psyche in some moments.

Yeah, but you also have a way of writing about money, not class, I’m not talking about the— I am talking literally about money, where suddenly you can see this entire world unfold, right, like, who has access to what and when and where we are physically in place, because it’s hard thing to do, right? Like, yes, you are covering, those who have housing and those who do not, but money is different. Money is different. And what there’s one line actually, where the cat is trying to figure out, someone has actually dropped cash on the ground. And he’s like, Well, I know that’s important. I know people want that. And I should go take it and it doesn’t look anything like what— I it’s just it’s what four lines five, pretty much. Yeah, it happens in about 30 seconds, depending on how fast you read. And it’s stuff like that pops up. And there’s a sort of young ish girl you know, late teens, early 20s, who pops into the story later, and she’s a big part of that whole money piece in the way you write about money and the access to that and whatnot. You really did need to step outside of humanity in order to be able to tell the story about us right. Like it just was not going to happen another way, like when I think of how you write about money and access and power and family and love and all of that, you just, you weren’t going to be able to do it unless you did, this, is what I’m thinking.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, I mean, I think place is incredibly important to me, in my books, like my memoir is, you know, about my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, and all the complexities of like, racial violence and the history of it. And also just like what it is to grow up and be connected to a hometown in that book, I do it through 20 stickers. Like, that’s it, I think, finding an absurd core, a kernel of the absurd in order to reflect it, observe it like, how do you sum up a book in a town and 20 stickers? How do you solve a childhood in 20 stickers? And then in this, like, ordering the world through human language, and through a lot of like, human both foibles and disasters. You know, that’s the way to see it. For me, that’s the way and to be without, making sense of money by saying, like, well, I’ve seen people drop it and get upset that they dropped it, you know, and like, so it has value, right? And like, I know that so you know, bringing it to the encampment of unhoused people like because, like, they’ll do something with us because it doesn’t taste like, it’s in my mouth, and I can’t taste it, I can’t eat it. This is nothing. Because this cat is learning about a human world, it can be reflected as absurd. Later on, I’ll just tease it. There’s a potential, it’s like a domestication situation. And that does, it shows the absurdity of space and of housing and you know, like, kind of the greenery even of Los Angeles for this wild animal. It’s like, this isn’t natural. Like, this doesn’t make sense. You know, and I think that I, you know, I certainly felt that all the time. You know, you feel the dryness, you feel the scarcity, which is, you know, two words as my cat hears it, “scare city” is the place honestly.

Yeah, that device works.

That meant something to me, because I was like, yeah, it’s a place that’s defined by, by lack and by a massive inequality of resources, you know, like, and I think, you know, living in my small apartment and, I’m a quite privileged person, especially like, in the scale of Los Angeles, you know, I’m, I’m living here but I’m not from there, but I’m living this small apartment and I’m driving to like my therapist and I’m driving through like Beverly Hills, you know, and I’m just like, this is bizarre like for anyone, especially someone like me to still feel like they’re these astronomical verticalities of wealth and then of what your world is because of your wealth I was like well this cat is going to be you know coming from a cave you know with very little to eat eating bats and then is going to be in P 22 was like living under a house in Los Feliz like an incredibly you know high income area like right by Griffith Park those houses and so I was like, Well, this is a this is a way to map this place. And to map the strange way I encountered it.

Jackson you grew up in LA I know you recognize this LA the minute you read this book, because I mean, you and I have sort of talked about this offline but you’re displaced Angeleno, you left, you’re here in New York. You miss it?

Yeah, I miss it. I am a third generation Angeleno all of my family’s there every person so it’s quite controversial that I’m not there amongst my family. I do miss it but I really think about Less Than Zero a lot, the Bret Easton Ellis, which has some of the types of vibes I grew up in and you know, he has that whole spiel about it’s almost like echoing Didion a little bit about the like, there is no center to LA like you drive around and around in circles and so more so than a place like New York that maybe it’s maybe embraces you maybe it slaps you around but you’re in it and LA you can visit and not know where the hell you are the whole time and so all that to say is I feel like at this stage in my creative and personal life, this is where I need to be but of course I really miss also the connection to nature and that’s something I love how you explore that in the book Henry too but we just it’s a different thing. Even on the beach with a million people you still feel like you’re part of something slightly wild and it’s hard to get that feeling for me here as much even when I see like a rat run across my shoe. You know it doesn’t feel as as wild as Big Sur.

I know you just mentioned Big Sur but that wildness to me that you know that’s San Diego is not wild right, now it’s Santa Monica Mountains and sort of that that in between Coast right before you get up to Ventura still pretty wild too. I have a center to my LA but it’s been very deliberate. Right? Like I have built a thing and like my LA is not the west side, right? It’s just My LA’s, is what it is, and I love it. And it is a huge part of how I see the world. But you have to, you have to build the thing, right?

Yeah. And so our lion is looking for that center. And that’s why it’s a fun device to use this lion to understand. Because, you know, it’s a case of wherever he goes, there he is, you know, and it’s, it’s hard to actually have a statement about anything in the city, except that there’s nothing to say at all. So I thought it in that way it captures the LA I know. And it made me a little wistful, but my mom has tried and failed enough to guilt me to come back and now I think she’s given up.

Have either of you ever done the hike up behind the Hollywood sign, you know, when you dip around the reservoir and head up through the back and then you sort of end up on the on the backside of the sign? Jackson, you need to do it, you need it because it’s a little vigorous and if you’re doing it, like in the middle of the day, you earn your workout, but I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to stop thinking about Open Throat every time. All right. You know, nevermind, the rattlesnakes. Nevermind. The other mountain lions is like, Oh, great. Now I’m walking around, thinking about my mountain lion having an existential crisis. Because you know, that’s what our art is supposed to do, right? Like, our art is supposed to make us think about the choices we make and how we approached the world. And Henry really made me care for so much about this mountain lion, because again, I got attached the voice. And I think that voice is just, I actually don’t want to know how you did it. I just want to sit with it. Because it’s so good. I don’t want to pick it apart. I don’t want to take it apart. I just want it to be.

Yeah, it just it really was it was just, I mean, it’s my voice. It is my voice. Like that’s what’s so interesting about it and talking about like finding like the center. And like, I was like, yeah, like I inhabited a similar space to P-22. Like, I just would walk out of my house and sort of I’m not you know, I have sort of a disability, so I don’t hike vigorously, but I push myself to reach a spot in the Franklin hills. Or to get up into Los Feliz. I can be at the observatory and you know, about 40 minutes from my door, walk straight and just walking up through the hills and on the staircases. And this was like my experience of wildness. And during that time, it was pretty much the same era, the P 22. had crossed the 405 and was there and I always was like, Okay, well, I’m not I’m not alone. There’s this like, big cat spirit here around me and potentially lurking and even on my visit to Los Angeles last year to launch the memoir. I heard that the cat had been spotted in Silver Lake where I was staying like so it was just a very I was like okay, this is the time that I’ll encounter it. But really my it really was just my bordering of space and my voice all I did was just like channel my old vicious house cat from when growing up and was like okay, what did she eat? You know, she like bats. She was blood thirsty. And that was one of Jackson’s like, hard check marks and edit was like— bat snacks, yes.

I give a lot of affirmation in my editing.

It’s a beautiful thing to do. Yeah, it was very special to have like— yes.

Well, I’m also just glad you weren’t Kiki. And you to know what I’m talking about when I say that you weren’t Kiki.

Yeah. Oh, poor Kiki. Yeah. And that happened for real. So when you when you see it? Yeah, just know that that was a that was an occurrence that I read about and, you know, so very conflicted about.

So, what’s next for the two of you? Are we going to see another Henry Hoke, Jackson Howard production?

I’m waiting. I don’t know what’s coming next. You got to ask the writer.

Well, I’m asking both of you.

Well, I’m working on something. It’s very, I’m very excited about it. I think, you know, it was a little bit again, I wrote my memoir under contract after I’d finished Open Throat. So it was sort of I had that wild journey of completely changing tack. That was a very hard book to write. I still had a lot of fun with it. And it’s very concentrated and, you know, succinct but it was a tough book to write with all the all the research and engagement was, you know, wild political times during the pandemic. I wrote it over the pandemic, essentially right after I’d finished Open Throat so I it took me a while to get back into a new voice. And I’ve found like, I found the voice. I have the story and I’m building it. I’m writing a Southern Gothic Book. So it’s exciting. So because it’s just time, I need to write my Southern Gothic expression.

Yeah, Mr. Hoke. It is time.

I’m very southern, you know, by my background and my upbringing, even deeper Southern than Virginia, but it’s an Alabama novel and it’s gonna be fun. Yeah, and Brontez is also doing an Alabama novel. So I’m very excited about that as well. Yeah. So I’m excited about that work. And I absolutely, of course want to share it with Jackson. I think that, you know, how could I not?

You actually have to so?

Yes. Give me five months. Um, let me let me let me come down from all this summer touring and I’m ready to get back into a voice and I think I found a really a really exciting voice to write in. It’s also a bit natural. So that’s fun. That’s just a teaser.

Okay, okay. We can be patient. That’s okay. We can just you know, we can reread Open Throat, it’s 156 pages.

Very, very fast. It’ll hold you over.

All right, Henry Hoke, Jackson Howard. Thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Open Throat is out now and yeah, you can just read it and reread it and keep going back.