Joyce Hinnefeld is the author of the new story collection The Beauty of Their Youth. Her other books include the novels In Hovering Flight and Stranger Here Below. She is a professor of English at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the founder and
director of the Moravian College Writers’ Conference.
Q: Over how long a period of time did you write the
stories in The Beauty of Their Youth, and how did you decide on the order in
which they would appear in the collection?
A: The earliest of the stories in the collection,
“Everglades City,” was published in a literary magazine in 2000—which means
that I was working on that story back in the late 1990s. And I do remember
stopping in to a gun store here in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania—where we moved in
1997—to ask some questions about that story, so the late ‘90s seems right.
Which I guess means that I’ve been working on the
stories for more than 20 years! The most recent is the title story, and I’ve
been tinkering with that one for probably the last 3-4 years.
These aren’t the only stories I’ve worked on for the
last 20 years, of course; they’re the ones Joe Chaney and his team at Wolfson
Press settled on for this next book in their American Storytellers series.
For this they wanted roughly 30,000 words, so I sent a
bunch of stories (assuming they’d go for more recent ones—when in fact they
liked two of the oldest ones I sent, “Everglades City” and “A Better Law of
Gravity” better than some of the newer ones), and they made their choices.
They also determined the order; Joe recognized a clear
thread—having to do with the transformation of memory—from the first story,
“Polymorphous,” to the final anchor/title story, “The Beauty of Their Youth.”
And that thread made so much sense to me! It was a wonderful collaborative
moment.
Q: How was the book's title--also the title of the
last story in the collection--chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The original title of that story was “Things You
Didn’t Post.” I still like that title for a lot of reasons, but also agree with
Joe and his crew that it wouldn’t make for a particularly compelling, or
memorable, title for the collection. And we were in agreement, pretty much from
the outset I think, that this would be the collection’s concluding and title
story.
So we had quite a lot of back and forth about title
ideas, and finally settled on this phrase, “the beauty of their youth,” from
the museum-plate text that opens the story.
That title signifies all kinds of things for me. It
also drips with irony for me, as I hope it will for readers by the time they
finish the title story.
Fran, the central character in the story, is up
against a lot of realizations—about her past, about a certain blindness
(particularly to the lives of others she knew) in her younger self, about her
college-age daughter’s more expansive understanding of ancient Greece and of
Europe in general.
So the title is meant to call up all those
realizations of middle age, I suppose, but also all kinds of questions about
notions of beauty, and art, and aging. Also social media. And colonialism!
Honestly, all those things were in my head as I worked on that story, and my
hope is that the title somehow touches on all of them.
Q: What themes do you see running through the
collection?
A: Joe Chaney described the collection as being about
“the way memory is transformed by further experience,” and I like that way of
summarizing (and clarifying) these stories’ themes.
Certainly there’s a sense of reaching a certain age
and revisiting, and rethinking, one’s sense of oneself as a younger person (in
several of the stories that has to do with reaching middle age, though in “A
Better Law of Gravity” F.J. is an 18-year-old recognizing things about herself
as a young adolescent, and in “Everglades City” Inge is a young woman who’s
questioning her sense of herself as carefree and adventurous).
Motherhood, and characters’ relationships with their
mothers, are themes in several of the stories; I hope that comes through
particularly in “Benedicta,” a story about a male artist who’s looking at
motherhood straight on, in a way he never has before.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Well, mostly I hope readers will feel that they’ve
had a pleasurable reading experience! But I guess I also hope they’ll hold on
to certain moments and certain places in these stories and, maybe, see their
own lives reflected in certain ways.
Things like the feminine hygiene aisle in a
supermarket when you’re shopping with your elderly neighbor. Your college
campus and the ways it did, or maybe didn’t, live up to your dreams and
expectations. The recognition that people in your family of origin are
flawed—as are you. The myths and the realities of places like the Florida
Everglades and the Greek islands.
The memory of a pre-internet life (photos taken using
film, no need to curate everything you post on social media)—and the naivete of
thinking that was a simpler, purer, or better time.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’ve been dipping in and out of a novel manuscript
for a while now—one that addresses rural despair and gun violence in the
Midwest, along with endangered bird species (specifically whooping cranes) and
other happy things!
I’m also working on a series of interconnected stories
that draw on modernist poets and art collectors, Chicago and Philadelphia in
the early 20th century and today, and—once again—Americans abroad.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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