SmokeLong Quarterly

The SmokeLong team is very excited that you’re joining our team as a Quarterly Guest Editor, reading for our Winter 2021 issue! To begin, I’d love to know how you’re doing. I feel as if we’re all experiencing whiplash with the pandemic — things get better only to get worse again. So how are you doing? What strategies have you learned to help you cope?

I’m a parent of kids too young to be eligible for the vaccine, so not much has changed for my family throughout this. There was a moment there, when my vaccine was fresh and shiny inside my arm that I felt a foreign sense of hope creeping in, but that must have just been a temporary side effect of my Pfizer shot. We keep wearing masks. We keep social distancing. We keep on doing what we’ve been doing to protect ourselves and most importantly to protect others. I should mention that my daughters have become best friends in all this time at home, and they never complain about their masks. They’re champions of the pandemic, and I wish more adults could be as strong and compassionate and adaptable as my girls.

As a writer, I’m anxious. But I’m always anxious, and long ago when I had to pause working construction to get my anxiety under control I learned coping strategies, and then later I learned how to channel some of this into art. This has probably helped me to be pretty productive during the pandemic. As much as I miss being out in the world and working in-person with my students, being cooped up in my home office (which is a closet) has given me more time to write. Giving myself a schedule has helped. When I’m too busy, I give myself a really achievable goal like writing at least 100 new words every day. Also, one of my favorite parts of the pandemic has been reconnecting with my former students and writer friends over Zoom. Heck, I even tracked down my pal Mark Derks, who I was always so envious of in undergrad workshops in 2006; SmokeLong published a great story of his in 2014 called “Photographs,” by the way.

Anyway, though this pandemic has been crushing in many ways, I’ve at least used it as an excuse to stay inside and force this screen life into a shape that promotes connection and art rather than isolation. Either way, I suppose, you end up with bleary red eyes.

You write about “working people.” Can you tell us more about this? Why is the work characters do important in your writing?

I’ve been writing about work since I started seriously writing, and this has a lot to do with the decade I spent working construction and building houses. Those years shaped me in useful and painful ways. I’m grateful for that experience, as hard as it was. It fed me so much material for my stories, and then writing about my own work made me hungry to learn about everyone else’s jobs. They’re all fascinating, if you can find your way behind the Employees Only door where the workers are telling stories and sneaking cigarettes.

I don’t think working people and their jobs show up enough in literature. I often share my favorite Orwell quote: “All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the more invisible they are.” I try to draw working-class identities out of the shadows. There’s often surprising beauty and wisdom in what might on the surface seem gruff and grotesque. I want to show working people and the value they pour into their jobs, the pride and the care. However, I have to avoid the urge to singularly romanticize, which can be just as insultingly simplistic as singularly criticizing. Both perspectives lead to harmful stereotypes too often perpetuated in film and political rhetoric and even in our literature. There’s beauty there, but also bigotry, violence, exploitation. I never want to ignore the brutality of labor, the physical and mental strains.

The short of it is I love writing about work because it shows people at their truest and rawest. Spend a ten-hour day painting a house, clinging to an extension ladder, and you’ll end up learning the deepest secrets from the person on the ladder next to yours. It spills out of us, when we’re at work, our shimmering sweat and grimiest dirt, the best and worst, and I want to capture the fullness of that messy complexity.

You’ll be teaching in our next online workshop (which has already sold out). Your module is about borrowed form and language, which is one of your favorite topics. What do you love about it?

I love transforming our everyday lives: the surrealists’ collages, John Cage composing with fragments and cacophony, Marcel Duchamp’s found objects. In writing, we get to play with the medium of voice, one of the trickiest areas of craft to pull off or even to clearly discuss in a classroom. But voice becomes so clear when you listen to an infomercial or read the back of a baseball card or instruction manual or political speech or obituary. We live in such a language-obsessed culture, where we’re bombarded by so much junk language, and it’s ripe for the picking, like Rauschenberg’s recycling of trash, or, better yet, check out my friend Sayaka Ganz’s reclaimed plastic animal sculptures. This kind of borrowing can free up some of the writer’s energy by not having to start from scratch. We get to scrounge for treasure in the landfill, and what’s more fun than that?

This also connects to writing about work. Think of all the scripted language in customer service or the jargon of a trade. This, too, is ripe for artmaking. I meet so many writers who don’t realize the work they’ve done in real life is this great gift of research they’ve already completed, just waiting for transformation.

As an editor, what will you be looking for when you read our submission queue? Are there certain topics or styles that immediately capture your interest? Are there any deal breakers for you?

I’ve been talking to editor friends lately about how refreshing humor can be, yet it shows up rarely in the submission queue. For me, humor is a gateway emotion. If a writer can make me laugh first, I’m willing to go just about anywhere else emotionally. I love the weird stuff, surrealism, fabulism, absurdism. But weird can fall flat easily if it ends up feeling like it only exists for its own sake. I suppose that goes for humor too, for most things. I should complicate all this by saying I’m a sucker for good, clean prose and gritty realism.

I’m probably not that much different from most readers. I read to be startled, to learn about complex lives and worlds and identities I haven’t experienced. But it all begins and ends with language, and I can’t wait to be wowed by new voices.

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Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collection One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His second collection No Good for Digging and chapbook Secrets of the Wild were published by Word West Press. He painted houses for ten years in Michigan and now teaches creative writing at Winthrop University in South Carolina. His stories have recently appeared in Faultline. Dustin is our guest editor for the winter issue 2021.