David Hicks on Writing that is "Wrought"
In the age of AI and TikTok, we crave books that are antidotes to the flimsy distractions that threaten to dominate our days.
Greetings, friends!
Today I welcome novelist David Hicks, whose new book, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO DANNY, was published this month by Vine Leaves Press.
David is the author of the novel WHITE PLAINS (Bower House Books), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and Westword’s #1 book by Colorado authors; and THE MAGIC TICKET (Fulcrum Books), an autobiographical children’s book. An award-winning professor and recipient of two Fulbright scholarships (Czech Republic 2020 and 2022), David is the founding director of the Regis University MFA in Creative Writing and current director of the nationally ranked Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He and his wife Cynthia are the founders of Electric City Writers in Scranton, PA, where they live with their demonically charming dog Louie.
David and I met years ago at AWP, a conference once described by poet Liam Rector as “ten thousand introverts trying to act like extroverts.” Our lasting connection is proof that even a cave dweller like me can happen upon meaningful conversation in the vortex of social overwhelm. This, of course, was entirely thanks to David’s easy grace and generosity of spirit—qualities he shares with his character, Danny.
“Writing like a motormouth Philip Roth, Hicks deftly and defiantly explores how we chart our own individual destinies, as well as how we’re each shaped by the shareable dreams of marriage and parenthood, family and country.” ~ Matt Bell, author of APPLESEED
In the following interview, David explores process, craft, and the challenges and opportunities of writing in today’s climate. Please comment, heart, share and subscribe!
Yours at the well,
Tess
What was the seed image (visual, auditory, conceptual) that gave rise to your new novel, The Gospel According to Danny?
Many years ago I was hiking solo up a mountain in Patagonia and I stood on a cliff, the wind blowing furiously against me. I was in a bad place—I had divorced my wife, was missing my kids, and in a relationship that I knew wasn’t working—and as I leaned out over the precipice, looking out over a barren-but-beautiful landscape 2,000 feet below me, thinking of the comfort death would bring, the wind suddenly paused and I pitched forward like a ski jumper—a certain death—only to be pushed back upright by the renewal of the wind. I stumbled back, stunned, and sat there for a while, watching some enormous condors navigate the thermals. Later, I thought, that’s either the end or the beginning of a story.
Spanning 15 years, the novel explores private landscapes of marriage, parenthood, and grief, as well as collective issues of race, class, violence, and shifting American politics. Can you talk about what drew you to one or more of these themes? Did you set out to write about them or did they emerge spontaneously through the characters?
I definitely set out to write about what’s happened to our country, beginning with a momentous year and a half—from the Columbine Massacre to 9/11—that began the acceleration of the horrible divisiveness we’re suffering through now. Even at the time, I felt that the Bush/Gore election, seemingly as ugly and corrupt as some third-world country elections, would change the tone of America and the world, given that Gore was focused on addressing climate change while Bush was sure to favor business interests and corporate greed. I wanted to see if I could depict how the ensuing fifteen years—the rise of the Tea Party crazies and the disappearance of true conservatism, the rapid increase of school shootings, the killing of so many unarmed Black men, the funneling of money from the middle class to the rich, and the 2015 nomination of Donald Trump—manifested themselves in the life of an American everyman.
The Gospel According to Danny implicitly asks what it means to live life as an act of performance verses an act of devotion. Where does this inquiry come from in you and why do you find it vital?
My son took a class in college from the writer/professor Janna L. Goodwin, and in it she challenged her students to see how almost everything we do is a performance of some kind—and I realized that this is a distinctly American trait. When I was young, I was certainly a performer –at my job (as a professor) and (sadly) in my marriage, and I was rewarded for it; but I felt rather hollow. I had to bottom out (which I write about in my first novel, White Plains) in order to empty myself of those performative selves and construct my current, more authentic self. But it took a lot of devastation for that to happen. Hence the prominence of that theme in my novel.
Your characters’ names are often multivalent, such as “Gospel,” “Justis,” and the morphing of “Dante” into “Danny.” Can you talk about your approach to names and the work they do in the story?
I’m a scholar of 19th Century American literature, and so I’ve read far too many symbolists not to engage in some fun symbolism myself. (Lia’s real name, Ulalia Susan Adams, with the initials USA, is meant to convey her distinct American-ness, as is the Americanization of the Latino names in Danny’s family: his mother Margarita is called Daisy, Miguel is called Miggy, Josefina is called Josi, and Dante is called Danny.) But they’re not what I call “one-to-one” (i.e. rose = love) representations. For example, Terrance Justis may represent justice for Lia (in that she ends up finally getting what she deserves in him) while representing injustice to Danny, as does the court case involving them later in the book. I played around with names to indicate that being American sometimes means embodying what W.E.B DuBois (speaking of Black Americans) called a “double consciousness,” suggesting the near- impossibility of any American (even, or especially, Natives) to simultaneously retain one’s original identity while assimilating into (White European) “American” culture.
You are a first-generation college grad (as am I) and went on to get your PhD. Your character Danny struggles to finish college and dreams of going to graduate school. Are there any autobiographical elements to his character? How do you see yourself in him?
I both see myself in Danny and depict him in a “what if” manner, as in “What if I had to withdraw from those classes I was taking when I helped my father out at the deli?” I probably would have fallen back on waiting tables, which I had been doing for a decade by that point, and then I would have been in Danny’s situation, the years slipping by. Careers or “life paths” that seem solid are in fact quite tenuous—all it takes sometimes is a burb, a crack, an unexpected event—and you end up in a completely different socioeconomic situation than you thought you’d be in.
I was also a lot like Danny in that, when I was young, I was foolish enough to think that if I worked hard enough I could provide for my family, without realizing that by that point, America was changing into a place where social mobility had become much more difficult.
You write, “It was windy up here, and try as he might, [Danny] couldn’t slow his breathing. But there was a yawning stillness behind the wind.” Can you talk about your experience of “yawning stillness”? Does that stillness fuel your writing?
That’s a damned good question that, I suspect, is informed by your own intimate understanding of that yawning stillness that I feel in your writing. To put it simply, yes, it does fuel my writing, but it would be hard to define or explain it to anyone who doesn’t feel it.
I suppose I can say that what makes our lives meaningful may very well be our conscious attempt to make sense of, even while simultaneously inviting and staving off, the grand and glorious nothingness that haunts even our happiest moments.
Why did you make the choice to open The Gospel According to Danny with a flashforward? What is the desired effect upon the reader?
I’m still not sure it works, but without it, you’re reading a story that begins with a young guy getting married—there’s not a lot of external tension to drive the plot forward. But planting something disturbing in the beginning, I hope, sets into the reader’s unconscious that even when things are going well for Danny, something sinister lies in the offing—a reason to keep reading. (Also, I’m a big fan of foreshadowing.) In the first draft, I opened with a flashforward of a scene from a school shooting—but that made the book too much “about” school shootings, and a friend suggested I start with something else, something more character-based, so that’s what I did.
“Beautifully and honestly wrought, White Plains by David Hicks is a stunning portrayal of one man’s journey to redemption and transformation. Woven through many voices, and tragedies both personal and global, this is ultimately a story of kindness and forgiveness despite the misfirings of our ever-yearning human hearts. A gorgeous and unforgettable debut.” ~ Kathy Fish, author of WILD LIFE
You’ve said that you feel most at home in Italy, where your mother is from. You have twice been a Fulbright Scholar in the Czech Republic. Can you talk about your connection to landscape and the particular places fill or drain your writing well?
Landscapes really do a number on me—and that includes seascapes, like that of your beloved Cape Cod. It’s funny, but I feel most at home and happy either in an isolated landscape like a mountain town or a remote Irish village or the island of Ischia, or in a cityscape like Naples, Manhattan, or Prague. I find no inspiration at all in a shopping center or a suburban street—unless I can write about the underbelly of such a place, David Lynch-style.
Too, I find that by paying attention to landscape in my writing I can bring truth and resonance to my character. In fact, I quite deliberately avoid telling the reader how my character feels; instead I usually have him look around. There’s more emotionally truth in the landscape than there is in a stomach lurching or a heart pounding.
You are the Director of Creative Writing at Wilkes University. How do you balance teaching and writing?
I don’t! One takes over my life, and then I scramble to fit in the other. But it’s a sweet way to make a living, helping working adults to fulfill their dream of being a writer or poet. I get great satisfaction from it. At the same time, I have to keep in mind always that I’m a role model to them—I have to practice what I preach.
You’ve said that you enjoy writing with others. (Me, too!) With your wife Cynthia, you founded a group called Electric City Writers. What do you feel is the value of this practice?
I love it. In fact, I’m on a mini (two days, one night) writing retreat right now in the Rockies with the four members of my critique group, which otherwise meets online.
There’s something about the energy of writers in one place, working hard, when otherwise we would all be taking care of others (whether at work or at home), and then being present for one another, writing for hours longer than we normally would just to keep one another company—it’s the best feeling in the world.
So when Cynthia and I moved to Scranton and left our writing community in Colorado (where we had lived for twenty years), the first thing we did was to establish a monthly writing meetup at our local brewery—just to gather over a delicious beer and write quietly together. As a result, we quickly established a writing community in Scranton, which has helped us to feel at home in a new place.
Why did you choose the tri-state area in the early 21st-century as the setting for this particular story?
First, it’s the area I know best, having grown up there. But second, I needed a gritty place for our working-class main character, and south Yonkers (just blocks away from the Bronx) fit the bill. There is a street in Yonkers that in 1992 was written up in the New York Times as the most segregated street in America (with white residents on one side, Black residents on the other, and neither side talking to the other). It seemed like a fitting place for my hero to grow up in.
In prescient ways, your novel touches upon the looming threat of oligarchy. How do current political shifts impact your future artistic vision? What are you working on now?
We’ve been an oligarchy for many years now—it’s only when the richest men in the world were front and center at the President’s inauguration, and when the richest man in the world was working side-by-side with our president, that it became too obvious to ignore. So I needed to make that a part of my novel—or at least to show how that impacts a representative American’s sense of self. As for how it impacts my future writing, I don’t know yet. The two books I’m working on now are set elsewhere (Prague and Naples), so perhaps that means I put it all out there in this novel and can move on to different topics in the immediate future. But it’s something I feel quite strongly about, so I doubt I’ll be avoiding it for long.
What would you like readers to know about The Gospel According to Danny that might not be obvious from the jacket copy?
That even though it’s a pretty devastating book, it’s also a love story, written with tenderness and humor. Not a typical love story between the main characters, perhaps, but certainly between Danny and his daughters, between Lia and Terrence, and, in a manner of speaking, between Danny and himself.
There are no villains here, in other words. (Lia may seem like one at first glance, but she isn’t. She’s doing what she can to make things work.) Almost every difficult thing that happens in the book may be attributed to Danny’s lack of love for himself—and his recognition of that, by way of the landscape, brings him, and us, hope.
Is there anything you’d like to share that these questions did not touch upon?
I’d like to share something that you know quite well, but a lot of readers may not—that books like ours take time and work, persistence and integrity. That while some books are written lightly and formulaically, Danny and Dawnland are more wrought than written, aiming not to entertain so much as to get at the truth of human existence. I know that sounds lofty, but I think, in the age of AI and TikTok, we find ourselves craving such books (and films, and art) as antidotes to the flimsy distractions that are always threatening to dominate our days.
Find out more about David’s work at: https://david-hicks.com/. Follow him on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Amazon.
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Great interview. Love the inward glance at everything. Thank you both. Support while wringing towards wrought matters. I look forward to reading the book.