Interview with Hannah Feustle
Questions by Derek Ellis, Interview Editor
DE: Hi Hannah, I’m so glad to have this chance to interview you. To begin, I absolutely loved your featured piece, “Bigfoot at The Zoo,” and wanted to ask about your use of arguably the most famous cryptid: Bigfoot. As someone who has also watched many Monsterquest episodes, I was drawn to this particular choice, especially with how much your use of Bigfoot as analogue is able to hold within the story regarding Bigfoot’s mirroring of the speaker. How did you arrive at the decision to utilize the figure of Bigfoot in this way, and were there drafts that were Bigfoot-less?
HF: Thank you—I’m so excited to be published alongside so many amazing writers (and to hear from another Monsterquest viewer)!
There were no Bigfoot-less drafts—Bigfoot came a little bit before the speaker, who formed around her. The first draft started with a generative prompt during a fiction workshop, where the exercise was to write a scene with a few words the group selected randomly, including “giraffe” and “telephone.” I struggle with prompts like that, and started writing about a zoo, before getting totally stuck on the word “telephone”, and the idea of why a phone call would be the most interesting thing happening in this zoo, or what someone would have to see to call someone immediately. For that to make sense logically to me, it would have to be something that didn’t belong at a zoo, or maybe something that was totally unexpected anywhere—like Bigfoot.
And the speaker formed after that—what kind of person would see Bigfoot at the zoo and need to make a phone call, and why, and who would she need to call so urgently? The speaker’s phone call to her dad from the zoo didn’t make it to the final draft, but the speaker formed around those questions, of who would see a cryptid in a place it didn’t belong, and be moved by whatever moment of connection they had.
DE: As a follow-up to my previous question, there is a moment in the story where the speaker tells us that they are “teaching Comp and ask my students to free write,” with the goal of constructing a response to whether the captured Bigfoot should be left alone or if they should avoid the zoo altogether. Only two students write with enthusiasm, while others look at their other course’s homework or ask to leave the room. For the most part, the students seem apathetic regarding the sublime that Bigfoot represents versus their professor’s awe and slight disappointment once that veil is ultimately lifted. Here, the story feels interested in the tension between observing something and understanding it completely. Do you see a similar tension in the act of writing in any way, and has your experience as a teacher yourself influenced your own relationship to approaching the act of writing?
HF: To start with the second question—yes, my teaching has definitely influenced how I approach writing, or, at least, made me think about why I do things that I do. When I first started teaching, I was startled by how many of my students really disliked writing of any kind, and would freeze up at any kind of prompt, including my favorite writing advice, which is to just start writing, even if the first words are a grocery list or something else entirely unrelated to the piece. Before I started teaching, I wasn’t sure why it worked for me, but after taking pedagogy classes and learning about ungrading practices, I think part of the reason it works is because it lowers the pressure around whatever I’m working on.
I’ve tried to take that to my teaching—last semester, I asked students to start some in-class work time by writing the worst resume bullets they could think of. The students were laughing when they shared responses, and went into the rest of their work time with bullet points that they could revise without the pressure of a blank document. When I’m stuck on something I’m writing now, I think of that, and try to lower the pressure by writing the next sentence badly enough to make myself laugh, and find that it’s easier to go forward from there, which I’m not sure I would have pinned down as useful without teaching.
On observing vs. understanding—I went back and forth on the composition class part in this story. I almost took it out, and I think an early reader suggested that it might be taken as mean-spirited. I tried and failed to cram in some explanation of how the speaker does know all the logical things that should make her understanding when it comes to the students (that the students are people with full lives, that they have other stressors, that they’ve had bad writing experiences, that they just aren’t as passionate about Bigfoot as their teacher). But none of those things felt exactly right for the speaker. She’s mostly observing her students, and being observed/receiving feedback by them, with moments when she’s almost able to understand/connect, or where the students are trying to share something with her in writing but can’t quite get it to come out the right way.
DE: I want to shift and ask you about your piece, “Drafting a Eulogy,” that was published in The Normal School. I find the piece contains a similar interrogation about the inability to fully know, or render the human experience or emotion into language. What does this limitation of language mean to you, and can fiction or other various forms of writing ever fully capture an experience? Or is the gap between experience and expression—that sublime aspect that begs for what we sometimes call “Negative Capability”—part of what makes the act of writing a kind of alchemy?
HF: It’s possible that’s a recurring idea in my writing because it’s one of the things I struggle with as a person—I have a lot of trouble translating a feeling into anything more specific than good or bad, unless I have some reference or comparison to something else and can say it’s like this, or it’s most similar to this, and different in X or Y way. Usually that something is some piece of writing (books, stories, poems, yes, but I also have endless memes, Tumblr posts, tweets, and Bob’s Burgers quotes ready to reference at a moment’s notice).
For me, I feel like language and writing is the only way I can figure out what experiences mean, or what specifically to call the emotions that come with them. “Drafting a Eulogy” came from a visit to an animal hospital—I was having a great day, and the jarring and brief stop in a place where there were a lot of people having horrible days was startling, though the best I could really say was well, it was an unpleasant feeling, and I didn’t like it. I started thinking about how a character who deals with that all the time would explain the feeling of all of those different lives happening in the same place at the same time. The character has connections/references/other things that all give her some way to compare/conceptualize/organize/understand the feelings of working in that place—but because she’s a character (and she has to suffer for the sake of the story!), she can’t use the comparisons that make things make sense to her in the eulogy she’s writing.
DE: As someone who also enjoys movies/film, I often turn to it as a medium when I find myself lacking inspiration or creative drive. What media, film, music, books, etc, have been inspiring you creatively lately?
HF: Recently I’ve read Voyage of the Damned by Frances White, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss, and The Correspondent by Virginia Evans! While that’s something of a strange mix of books, all of them do interesting things with time within the story, and/or the way they reveal parts of a character’s backstory, and all of them have characters with very strong voices. (And Monsterquest season 5 is out after a 16 year hiatus—I’ve been looking forward to that!)
DE: Lastly, I’d love to hear about another piece in the latest issue of Harpur Palate, in any genre, that resonated with you and why?
HF: “The Husband’s Head” by Betty Martin! I love how this story explains the strange conceit right from the start (even from the title)) and how the extremely realistic parts make the situation seem almost normal for whole paragraphs at a time (a couple stopping at a motel, and snipping at each other in the car, and visiting places along a road trip) before the story reminds you with a jolt that things aren’t normal or okay. The abrupt shifts and reminders make me think of how grief feels when it pops up from seemingly nowhere (though in this story, we can see how it is always there).
Hannah Feustle is a writer and teacher living in Ann Arbor, MI. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and an MFA in fiction from the University of Memphis. Her work is forthcoming or published in The Normal School, The South Carolina Review, The Worcester Review, the minnesota review, Bayou Magazine, Chautauqua, and others.