Henry Hoke writes short books where character and absurdity make strange harmony together. Whether it’s in his short stories, memoir, or longer-form pieces— notably the novel Open Throat, finalist for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction— voice is the thread that holds it all together and brings the reader into the depths of his texts. Hoke sat down with Kate McCully of Desperate Literature to talk about how he inhabits these voices, how an idea becomes a story, and what haunting has to do with it all.
Kate McCully: Told from the perspective of a ravenous but conscientious mountain lion living in the drought-blighted park beneath the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, California, Open Throat is a hilarious, and wholly unique book. It’s very touching. I read it a bit before the latest wildfires that ripped through the area, and so every time I looked at the news during that period I saw what was happening through this narrator’s perspective. I had, in fact, your narrator’s L.A. in my head. Can you talk a little bit about this novel?
Henry Hoke: Of course, yeah, I spent a long period of my life in Los Angeles and I’ve been very much connected to all my loved ones there. It’s been sort of a wild moment to not be there and to be experiencing a lot of loss from afar. And I think that the presence of loss, the presence of precarity, just the apocalyptic quality of Los Angeles has inspired a lot of art and definitely stayed with me after my time there, when I’d returned to the East Coast where I’m from. At a certain point, very shortly after I’d left L.A., this story came to me because I was catching up with the real mountain lion, P-22, who was an L.A. celebrity. There was a Nick Cave song where he talks about a cougar in the Hollywood Hills, and that just sparked something in me.
I was like, oh, right, P-22! I should check back up on the mountain lion and see what’s going on but I was sort of nervous to do it, you know? P-22 and I were contemporaries in the same general area. But I was always fascinated by the mountain lion and felt very close in proximity to it and its span. I felt kind of displaced and strange in Los Angeles the whole time. So in this moment where I heard this Nick Cave song— Nick Cave genders the cat female which I found really cool, too because I think there was a lot of gendering and giving a sexuality to P-22— and I loved that take on it, so I was like, okay, let me work from there.
Instead of actually looking in on the cat I decided to just take a couple months and inhabit the fictional headspace of the cat and do a monologue of my experience of L.A., but as a mountain lion. I think that all my books are kind of dares to myself; anything I write has to be a little bit of a launching pad where I’m like, Can I do this? Let’s try it. Otherwise, it’s boring to me.
KM: And so what exactly happens in the writing of a voice driven story?
HH: Voice driven is exciting to me right now. I’ve always felt like I had a voice, and maybe that was all I really knew I had. I like stories. I like characters. It’s not like I know how to create them, but they do emerge when I’m working, through hard work and through focus. But voice is something I always trust. Usually it’s my own voice I’m following, whether it’s memoir or fiction. In the book, I’m inhabiting a different species, although I didn’t have to think that much, and I think that’s what was exciting, that I didn’t have to stray very far from myself to do this. The alienation, the outsiderness … there were so many things that I felt connected to. Making sense of so much, for instance late capitalism in Los Angeles, I could only really do through the cat’s voice. Otherwise, it kind of would have felt inauthentic to myself because I do feel outside of it. I think we all do, even though we’re participating in it. I think that’s a big arc of the story: Where do we act? What is our agency in this world that’s falling apart?
So basically, just as a practice, I write from breakfast till lunch and take a late lunch, so I’d be kind of hungry by the end. That helped with the voice a lot. It wasn’t like I was intentionally doing that, but I have to eat almost constantly, so I deprived myself until lunchtime. Going without a snack is not really an act of endurance for most people, but for me it kind of was, and I would get to this point where I’d feel this helping because I’m feeling really strung out and starving.
I did a silent meditation, and I would place myself in the space where the cat would be that day. The book is in these fragmentary sections, almost like poems, formally, even though it’s advancing a narrative. Each time I was like, Well, I’m in the cave today. So I wake up in the cave. Here I am. Now I’m going to the thicket. Now I’m under a house. And then that was how I portioned each section. I knew where a lot of the major plot points were; a lot of them were taken from the life of P-22. I obviously imbued them with my own fictional backstory and thought process. But that was each day, getting the voice by inhabiting the space.
KM: I think that’s also what’s thrilling about reading this voice is that it’s easy to recognize your voice in another human character, but when you recognize your own voice and your own desires in a non-human character, you have to really wonder about why you want things and why anyone wants anything. When it comes to short stories, especially in the stories from your collection Genevieves, we find markers of different genres. Is it fair to say that your own writing crosses a lot of genre boundaries? There’s fiction, there’s horror, there are a lot of fantastical elements. We have a mountain lion who speaks English for no reason but we have to believe it. There’s a lot of memoir as well. Can you tell us a little bit about the freedom in that?
HH: Of course. I’ve always written across genres, since I was young. I started with short stories and poetry as a very little kid, comics, too. I was never settled, because I’d consumed all these genres. I think everyone, even people who are just like, “I’m a fiction writer and I write novels, 350 page novels for Riverhead,” they’re watching movies, they’re listening to music, they’re bringing it all in.
I went to film school and I was a film producer, and it was just such an uphill climb to actually do the art, at least on a level you were expected to. We had video cameras, obviously, I’m not that old, but we were expected to make film and finance it, and all this in New York, where I went to school. It was kind of a nightmare. All the barriers made me think I want to work on the page. It’s not just about control; it’s actually more about freedom.
Something I cultivated at Cal Arts during my MFA was my excitement about different genres in my work. I knew that I would never just stay with one thing, even within the same piece. In my thesis book, every page was a completely different form, as simple as a poem, and as complicated as an invitation to a party or a maze. That was a true story. In memoir, the anchor of the story wasn’t fantastical. It was very realistic and sort of hard and dark, but the form was going to be playful and strange on every page. That freed me, to know that I never had to let go of any of the things that I was excited about as a writer or an artist. I never had to say, okay, there’s no songs in this. So sustaining one approach in a book is relatively new to me instead of changing it up a lot in a collection.
When you’re switching between the pieces, each short story can be very different. I love Genevieves because every short story is completely different. There’s horror, there’s the experimental story within a story, there’s one straightforward fiction story, there’s a play in there. I love doing that.
KM: In architecting all these different approaches, I think it’s interesting that you bring up playfulness, but also horror. That’s a fun juxtaposition: a playful form that couches more serious, sometimes even very horrifying subject matter. Two years ago, we did an interview with Mariana Enriquez who was our judge then and is our judge again this year, and a lot of her writing also falls into multiple categories. She writes both short stories and massive novels and has been classified as literary fiction, horror, and sometimes even fantasy. In this interview, she talked with Terry Craven, our prize coordinator, about how horror, the absurd, and ghosts and ghostly presences actually help her help the reader approach the truth of reality, which can be very horrifying and difficult to comprehend reasonably. Do you have any thoughts about how horror is depicted on the page?
HH: I think that so much literary fiction, with or without genre influences, is inhabited by the haunted. I think writers feel haunted.
Something like Beloved is a haunted book in a very specific way, but I don’t think anybody thinks it’s a horror book, and I think it’s because the structure is different from this structure of genre fiction we’ve come to expect. I guess I feel like I’m more of a ghost story writer than a horror writer. There’s definitely a haunting or a presence, either literal or in the approach, like the narrative voice is a kind of spirit, or like there’s this sense that something is gone but still hanging around. Hecate, my mountain lion, is very much a haunting observer. I wanted my smattering of L.A. characters to always feel a little off, like they sense that there’s something right next to them.
KM: And at the same time, it’s a very funny book, so the haunting is not necessarily a terrifying haunting, right?
HH: In horror, I do think there’s a gesture towards frightening an audience. Certainly I’ve been very edge-of-my-seat frightened reading so many non-horror books, but I think that I go to a horror movie because I know it will be to some degree either psychologically or viscerally like a thrill ride. I think it’s there that I distinguish structural genre from like thematic genre.
KM: When we talk about genre, we often are talking about legitimacy, and with short stories do you think they’re on the rise as a legitimate form of literature or more to the contrary, do you think they’re becoming a territory of the more experimental or marginal?
HH: I can’t speak to trends. It feels like stocks and I deal with that anyway in life. I guess what I’m excited about is that I feel like short form work is finding a new vitality. I think short stories have had this place as the building block of the literary career. And some people loved that building block and stayed there, thrived there. There are very lauded, established short story writers who maybe ended up doing a novel, but if the short story is their form, that really means something. The short story can be a building block of a career, a space for a certain kind of academic in The New Yorker. My dad is an incredibly literary person. He was an English professor and has read just everything and there were so many books of short stories, and so studying chiefly short story writers was really interesting to me, to see how they built their voice across all these different restarts with whole different characters with no relation to each other. Or maybe a relation to each other! More and more linked short story collections become a way to make a novel as a short story writer. Basically you’re writing a novel but it has a little more punchiness. I love re-entering a structural space with the same characters over and over. That’s how I write my slightly longer books: I just keep restarting.
As far as where it stands now, I think people are reading more short stories because they can get through them and have that visceral, connected experience to them without having to make the giant time investment or buy a $35 book. I think compilations of short stories are harder and harder to sell and market because it is a form that maybe people just want to have one of at a time. A record, an album, is usually like that. But again, we have more and more concept albums, albums with a through-line. They’re coming back. People want the piece of art to be its own thing. So what I see more and more is really short books. Certainly people can drag me and say Open Throat is a short story, but no, it’s a book.
I’m interested in creating books that are very short, and I’ve seen it happening globally for a long time, from Clarice Lispector and people I admire from South America, from Japan, from Korea, and more and more they’re finding their moment in America because people do want a short book. They want a really concentrated, no-bullshit experience of something that sticks with them. Something they can read, that they can toss to their friend, have their friend read in a day and talk about the next day. That’s what I’m excited about making, and that’s where I see the short story expanding, into books, not just being one of many in a collection.
Remember that we all have our attention completely bombarded, constantly. No one’s going to regret if your thing was short. Sure, some people still want to get lost in a book for a thousand pages, and there’s books for that. There’s always going to be books for that, and there are writers like that.
KM: I’m a huge fan of the short book, the short novel. Sometimes we’ll call it a novella. But in the end, it’s just a book. If you put it between a first page and a last page, it’s a book.
HH: That’s helpful because then I don’t even have to say it’s text. It doesn’t have to be text. It can be anything. It can be or not be on paper. It can be an e-book. It can be an audio book.
KM: So you are going to be judging the 2025 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, which is very short stories, under 2,000 words. What do you love in the very short form? Is something you look for when you’re reading a short story?
HH: The other day I saw a Bluesky— is that what we’re calling it?– I saw one of those that said, “I’m writing a novella (novel for girls).” And I was like, yeah, that’s what I write. Girl everything. Girl math. Girl dinner. Everything is for girls now, it’s very fun. And I write novels for girls.
I really love flash work. I was in this book Tiny Crimes, this really great series of flash genre anthologies. Tiny Crimes was crime stories, Tiny Nightmares was a horror book. They did a sci-fi one, and it was very interesting to see how quickly people could world-build. Seeing flash sci-fi was really fascinating. I was just blown away by what’s possible with constraint. I think constraint is our greatest gift as writers.
I have some admiration for some of these sprawling tomes, but when you have to reign it in, that’s when you find your focus. You have to narrow that hallway that you’re walking down as a writer, and that’s where the really magical things happen. I would like to see someone do their thousand-page novel in just two pages, you know, like just try that. I’d like to see what’s essential there. I think constraint allows voice to emerge.
What is urgent to the writer? What moment was most important to feature here and what themes emerged and what stayed with me? That’s all really exciting to me in judging. I’m very excited to see the distillation, like I’m at a tasting and I’m trying these little morsels. I’m a small plates person. I like a little concentrated bite of something.
KM: Do you have any advice that you would give to writers approaching the very short form?
HH: I want to be young every time. I want to start fresh every time. I’m a new conglomeration of cells and experiences that weren’t with me the last time I sat down to write. So, I guess that’s part of what I think is that you shouldn’t feel the baggage of what you’ve created before. This is coming from someone who didn’t expect to have the commercial success and the readership I’ve gotten with Open Throat, which was exponentially larger than for anything I’ve published before. I treasure all my books just as much, like they’re all my babies. But especially now, I have to pretend none of this happened, like I don’t have an audience and that I’m just back in my mad science lab. So I think thinking about it fresh is the answer even though you’re always carrying what you feel, what you’ve encountered, what has hurt you, what has lasted, what has stuck with you, and what you want to express. You’re always carrying them. They don’t go away; you sit down and you are those things, but what you carry with you is what somebody said in a workshop or what you published before and how you want to build your career, all this bullshit. And even if it’s real, it’s not at the heart of what you’re about to create. You can be fresh. You can be new, you can reinvent and experiment.
Do something that throws you off, take a chance, take a dare. Even if it’s robotic at first, or the opposite, like fully, viscerally organic and strange and doesn’t really land, but you find the music in it, that’s what’s exciting about writing. I mean, I started my first book with just literal profanity. Something had really hurt me and I was in Mexico on a beach and I just like started writing cuss words, and it became the first thing that I ever published. I had to push through something that didn’t feel like writing and certainly didn’t feel like something a person with an MFA would write.
KM: I’m going to ask you just a couple more questions. Do you have a favorite short book? And what are one or two things that you’ve read recently that have really blown your mind?
HH: Sure, I mostly read short books. Gosh, a favorite? It’s hard to pick.
In terms of things I’m excited about, there’s a short book coming out soon called State Champ by Hilary Plum, it’s urgent and it’s voice driven. It’s about a former runner who’s doing a radical active protest at the abortion provider where she works when they’re shutting down because of all these horrific state mandates. It’s just fierce and I enjoy that about it.
Another one I like is a much longer sprawling, complicated book: Lincoln Michel’s Metallic Realms. It’s at the same time a bunch of short stories by a sci-fi collective that are creating their own fictional world, but the whole book is narrated and archived by their hanger-on who lives in the apartment where they meet and is obsessed with their fictional universe.
I like reading global literature in translation. I just started Hunger by Choi Jin-Young, which isn’t out in English yet.
KM: I feel like there are a lot of books called “hunger” or something similar, especially recently. We’re in a moment of being ravenous.
HH: Yes, I know, and I’m just devouring this book because it just keeps moving and it doesn’t waste any words.
I’ll throw my Open Throat lodestones in too: one called Machine by Susan Steinberg, a real killer of a book, and also Ultraluminous by Katherine Faw. I wanted to be really ferocious, but I can’t be ferocious like those two authors. They just have a different thing than me. But that’s why I decided on a mountain lion. I was like, oh I can do it if I do the mountain lion. And they’re all the ones that I think anyone could really blaze through.
The 2025 Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction is open for submissions until April 30th. The aim of the prize is both to celebrate the best of new short fiction and to give winners the most visibility possible for their writing. Prizes include cash offerings, writing retreats, publication in multiple print and online journals, editorial services, and more. You can enter here.
Kate McCully is a coordinator of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize and a bookseller in Paris, France.
Henry Hoke is the author of five books, most recently the memoir Sticker and the novel Open Throat, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. His work has appeared in Fence, Triangle House, Electric Literature, and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes. He co-created the performance series Enter>text in Los Angeles, and edits humor at The Offing.
minor literature[s] 