Rhoda Huffey is the author of the novels 31 Paradiso and The Hallelujah Side. Her fiction has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Zyzzyva, and Tin House. She lives in Venice Beach with her husband, Bill McDonald, and their animals.
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Meredith: What is the difference, for the creator, between being honest and emotional honesty?
RHODA: I think emotional honesty goes deeper into the psyche, is more mysterious and often unresolved, and involves paradoxes and opposites that both seem to be true. It’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s confusing territory, and sometimes painful. You can feel as if you’re standing there without your clothes. You can’t protect your righteousness or reputation in the world, because you have to be willing to try to see what is. And you discover yourself. And appreciate yourself. And forgive yourself. And are moved by yourself. And when I say self, I think I’m always talking, in fiction, about a character, because we only write about the truths and feelings and revelations we experience, and that’s personal.
The other kind of honesty, sometimes called “cash register honesty,” is the kind I grew up understanding. We aspired to it. “I don’t like a liar,” was a saying in our family. I’ve since come to think that, while I respect it, there are other qualities I value more than never fibbing: compassion, courage, generosity. When I was a teenager, if a boy called my house and I didn’t want to talk to him, I would tell my mother to tell him I wasn’t home. She wouldn’t do it unless I stood outside on the North Porch, door completely closed, not home, her version of honesty. What the Bible, which we valued, calls the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. At the same time, in our family, we couldn’t ever talk about terrible things that happened.
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Meredith: Does inspiration come to you in words, images, a sensation, a sound? Was it always this way for you or has it changed over the years? How about mid-project?
RHODA: Inspiration often comes to me in the faces of other people. When, a young woman, I moved to Venice Beach from Orange County, I obsessively hated my chin, or lack of it. I had a chin, but it didn’t indent back to my neck in a clean line, no ninety-degree angle between jaw and neck. All my life I spent hours using two mirrors and making the indent with my index finger. In company I tried not to show my profile, so every time another person moved, I had to adjust my body. Needless to say, I thought of myself constantly. So. In my new Venice life, I always walked my dog on the boardwalk. Every day we passed a certain homeless woman, sitting on the ground in her full skirt, face awash in deep wrinkled, old, but every day, as I passed with my dog Hank, she looked up with the burning eyes of a prophet. She extended her index finger and pointed directly at me.
“You got no chin, you got no character!” she shouted. That index finger never wavered. “That’s what they tell me!”
Somehow she saw me. Was she a witch? A psychiatrist? It brings to mind the population of the disenfranchised, and how they observe the people around them, and notice things that the upwardly mobile population has no time for. Her force and power over the young woman I was then suggest a story. Where did the prophetess come from? Why did these two lock eyes? I haven’t written it yet, but I haven’t forgotten it, and this was years and years ago.
By the middle of the project, I hope to have inhabited the characters enough that their gifts or fears, or both, will drive the situation. If that doesn’t happen, I can’t power through, but have to go back and get to know them. Which means create them. But feel that they really exist in a parallel universe. I read that J.D. Salinger in his later years used to go around talking to the Glass Family after Raise High the Roof Beam was published. I understand that.
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Meredith: I was trained as a therapist and as a result was trained to strike a delicate balance of letting the client guide the session but also encouraging growth and change. There are, however, times when the therapist, in order to help the client move forward (or deeper), must raise issues to keep the process from stagnating. How do you see this playing out for the creator/writer? For you?
RHODA: In fiction, I tend to write about my life, and things that really happened to me, until, at some point, being faithful to experience doesn’t serve a purpose. My first teacher, the great Oakley Hall, talked a lot about “objective correlative,” a term I later found out came from E.M. Forster. If I understand it, it means that things that matter in your mind, not yet stories, have to take on flesh, or become concrete, or even, you might say, dummy down into the ordinary. I think it’s extremely hard to do. It demands excruciating hard work, and luck, which is a wild card. I love the books Fat City by Leonard Gardner, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins, and Tapping the Source, by Kem Nunn. These are books where what happens kind of says it all, and reverberates the more you think about it. There’s not a lot of explanation, but you can’t forget the situation. Maybe you can’t even say why you can’t forget it. Nabokov said when he had a good idea he wrote it down and tired to understand it later. The nose knows.
All this is to say that my life isn’t that interesting. I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking. So when the process stalls, I have to remember what concerns I have and give them some situation, some tension, that shows out in the physical world. I don’t think it can be successful unless it corresponds to something in my own character that needs to be addressed, that takes courage. Then, if my own issue underlies some fictional action, writing it is as daunting as if I were actually living it.
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Meredith: How do you keep the faith—or whatever you call it personally—when acceptance doesn’t seem to be coming? And by acceptance, I mean self-acceptance.
RHODA: I’m not very good at this. In order to keep the faith, I have to give up my obsession with the things I’ve failed at, and there are many. For years I tried to remember nice things people said to me, things I tended to forget. I even wrote them in a notebook. I belonged to a support ground that suggested that at the end of each day we write down the things we did well.
Didwell!
I almost jumped out of my seat and looked around the room to see if Nancy, the other writer, was going to steal it. She didn’t. It became the name of the family of origin in my second novel, 31 Paradiso. The controlling parents, who led brilliant lives, have now retired, and their glory seems to be faded. They no longer wield the power they wielded. Their grown children see, or don’t see, a door to freedom.
That experience made me feel that everything can be harvested, and you don’t know which things are good or bad. I only found the fictional family name because I “wrote my didwells,” every night and I only wrote them because I had a lifetime of remembering my failures. At present, I’m trying to think less about my shortcomings, and think less about my gifts, and appreciate the moment I’m inhabiting. Sometimes I can. Right now, I’m sitting on the bed with my cat, and we like each other. That’s precious.
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Meredith: James Baldwin said: “Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.” Can this be said of the process of writing or, in particular, yours? What happens to both the writer and their work—you and your work?
RHODA: T. S. Eliot explored a similar idea in his long poem, Four Quartets, and I always loved it but felt puzzled. The first four lines of the very last section follow:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
I came from the Pentecostal Church, two preachers for parents, and we were “holiness” Christians: no makeup, no sleeveless dresses, no movies, no rock ‘n roll, no capris or jeans of any kind but dresses only. The list went on. While that world was kind of fabulous, and while I feel lucky to be born into it, I also wanted desperately to sin. I was extremely sheltered, and really afraid someone would find out I was a dork. I worked to learn about the world, and widen my horizons, and wear clothes, and to fit in with what I perceived to be the cutting edge of society. Well, try to.
Lately, though, I’ve been writing about my youth. I’ve been unable to do it until now, when I’m old. That tenderness and innocence about everything is terrifying to expose, probably because it’s who I really am at heart, those vulnerable vulnerable places that have no armor. It’s a character who has not learned to protect herself, and it’s the best version. You went out, you saw the world, the world was great, you came home.
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[Thank you, Rhoda.]
Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash