Eric McHenry

Hugo House: Soon you will debut a brand-new piece at Hugo House; could you tell us a little bit about it?

Eric McHenry: It's still rather inchoate at this point, but I'm pretty sure it will involve Pascal's Wager, Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" and Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer."

HH: Most writers we invite to create a new piece of writing on an assigned theme say no. Why did you say yes?

EM: I think of some of my favorite essay collections--Charles Simic's "The Unemployed Fortune Teller," Derek Walcott's "What the Twilight Says." Many, if not most, of those pieces were commissioned and would never have been written without that assignment, those parameters, that deadline. I think Joan Didion even mentions in her great essay "On Morality" that she's meditating on morality because The American Scholar asked her to. I doubt I can deliver anything that good, but I'm hopeful that this assignment will shake something interesting out of me.

HH: Could you tell us a little bit about your process--how you approach writing something new?

EM: A vague notion, a metaphor, a phrase, a rhyme, will come to me while I'm cleaning the kitchen late at night. I'll run upstairs and type it into a Word document called "Scraps." Later, when I've got some writing time, I'll open that document and see which scrap seems most promising. Six months later I may have a poem.

HH: What childhood game conjures the most vivid memories for you? Why?

EM: Probably hide-and-seek, which I've been playing a lot lately with my son and daughter. Trying to make myself small. Trying not to giggle.