Ben Hoffman’s story, “Kudu,” appears in the spring 2019 issue of The Southern Review. Here, Hoffman sheds light on resisting his protagonist’s desires to privilege her own inward journey, curbing his own initial desires for the story, and mining energy from the tension between grief and levity.
Rhiannon Thorne: As this is a story about metamorphosis, can you walk us through that process for crafting “Kudu” itself? Who came first, the girl or the kudu? Did you know immediately that this would be a story set in suburbia?
Ben Hoffman: I actually started with the idea of a man who, as a service to parents, temporarily turns misbehaving children into animals. Wow, that’s a ridiculous sentence to type. I didn’t know much about this travelling salesman of sorts, though, and soon honed in on the girl being changed. This was late 2013, and I’d just learned about kudus, and, like the girl, was quite fond of them.
And yes, suburbia, with its mix of secrets and gossip and mores, its tension between solitude and proximity, always felt like the most natural terrain for this story. A girl turned into a kudu in a rural setting, where there’s less risk of discovery, seems less compelling, while the city presents logistical challenges for housing a kudu (though now I’m imagining one of those viral videos of New Yorkers not even batting an eye at a kudu riding the F Train). She needs a backyard, a fenced one, to keep her, and to offer the façade of privacy.
RT: In a previous interview you mentioned that you prefer to listen to your character’s needs and “weird urges” over your own writerly curiosity. What did you have to resist as you wrote “Kudu”? Where did you let the girl lead? What was it like letting the girl lead?
BH: I wanted to let the girl lead, and to get her voice down, to have it all be her peculiar view of the world. (I think the very first sentence, before we settle deeply into her interiority, is perhaps the only place the story’s narrative intelligence—or knowledge—is beyond hers.) But I was also aware that “quirky intelligent child whose interior imagination outstrips dreary reality” is (something of) an archetype, so I wanted to avoid playing into that too much.
I tried to embrace her quirks and obsessions, without giving her what she truly wants. So as far as resisting: well, the girl (obviously) wants to get out of the backyard, but I didn’t want the whole thing to become a quirky kid-adventure jaunt through the neighborhood, which might privilege the reactions of those she encounters, rather than her own processing. I once heard the writer Steve Almond say that if characters can’t move forward, they’re forced to turn inward. So I had to keep her in the backyard awhile, and let her feel what she feels there.
RT: For me, the wants and needs of the parents are pretty clear—what parent, after all, doesn’t want a well-mannered child?—and the girl’s drive to follow her own desires fuels the story. What can you reveal to us about the mysterious, laughing shadow man whose truck can carry anything he wants?
BH: I’m tempted to make a snarky comment about capitalism—where a demand for a service exists, some entrepreneur will provide said service . . . In truth I think he likes what he does, is in awe of the peculiarity of his service. This is, I think, a story about damage—not that I had this notion while writing it—and our desire not to face up to the hurt we cause. Through this framework, the shadow man is more of a narrative mechanism, almost less interesting as a character, because he’s only hurting strangers, which makes the damage he wreaks more impersonal. Everyone else is hurting people they love.
RT: “Kudu” might be described as an anti-fable, wherein the child is set up to learn a lesson meant to civilize her but the lesson goes awry. How do you see the acts of being complicit and belonging relating to morality in this story?
BH: You know, in an earlier draft, the girl remains much more bound in her parents’ love, and on the final page sets out determined to save them. Elizabeth Tallent, who I was fortunate to have as a teacher, pointed out that it’s unusual for children to react to unjust punishment with an immediate, voluntary enlargement of empathy, either for their punishers or in general.
She noted, too, that the move toward greater empathy and lesson-learning can be a false movement of narrative. It’s something I’ve thought about more these past few years: we have this notion that a character will change. But if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that no one changes, no one admits they were wrong. People mostly carry on in their ways. And these are adults I’m talking about. If they don’t change, why (in the short-term) should children?
So, yes, the lesson goes awry, as it must. I love what you said, anti-fable. Many of the old fables were just about restricting women—as the girl notes, if you were a boy adults didn’t punish you, they encouraged you. But she never loses those desires—to be complicit, to belong, to be part of something. Nor should she!
When I was playing around with endings, I had an idea in my head where she gallops right into Cindy, who has come to the house to try to find—to confront? to plead with?—the girl’s father. I had the idea they’d share a moment. It wasn’t right for the story—among other things, it felt too Wes Anderson-y, or at least too cinematic in general—but I do think fondly about that instinct, the two of them, both of whom have, I think, wronged and been wronged by the parents, desperate for some connection, for someone to just say, even silently: I’m sorry or it’s okay.
RT: While this story deals with some pretty heavy themes, including child abuse, it’s also quite funny. This tension between uncomfortable moments and humor is a hallmark of your work as much as strangeness is. Can you speak to us a little about how “Kudu” fits in with your other work?
BH: It’s funny (or, you know, perhaps not)—no one has ever before used the word “abuse” in reference to this story, and I’ve never thought about it explicitly as such. What abuse? I wondered for a second when I read your question. Oh, right—the whole story, the entire premise.
Anyway! Sometimes I’ll read student drafts—or published stories—that portray grief or loss or heartbreak as a constant, immutable thing that can never be overridden, not even for a second. Not to impose my own grieving process on everyone else, of course, but a sentence like, say, “she hadn’t smiled for a year” often feels false to me. I read it as a “character sad” signpost, rather than something striving to portray how grief works and how we live our lives, how our emotions butt up against each other in strange and unexpected ways. Which is too bad, because there’s enormous amount of energy to be wrought from such a friction. When humor rubs shoulders with darkness or grief, it feels at once wonderfully familiar (because it’s like life) and wonderfully unfamiliar (because we’re sometimes unaccustomed to seeing it in art). So yes, I’m totally aiming for this tension in most of my work, mostly because it’s what I like to feel when I’m reading work by others.
RT: Are there any forthcoming stories or other projects we should watch out for?
BH: Not many of my own! I had some flash fiction come out in January in The Sun. But I’m excited about two great works I first encountered in workshop: Ruchika Tomar’s novel A Prayer for Travelers comes out in July, and Aamina Ahmad’s short story “Zarina” will be in your summer issue.
Ben Hoffman’s fiction has won the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award and the Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Contest. His work also appears in The Gettysburg Review, Granta, and The Missouri Review. The recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin’s Institute of Creative Writing and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Rhiannon Thorne was the 2018-19 editorial assistant for The Southern Review. Additionally, she is the managing editor of cahoodaloodaling, an associate editor for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and President of Tandem Reader Awards. Her poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Manchester Review, and Midwest Quarterly, among others. She holds an MFA from Louisiana State University.
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