AN INTERVIEW WITH NEW HAMPSHIRE AUTHOR ERNEST HEBERT

AN INTERVIEW WITH NEW HAMPSHIRE AUTHOR ERNEST HEBERT

by Emilie-Noelle Provost, Steven Riel, and Susan Pinette

A native of Keene, New Hampshire, Franco-American novelist and poet Ernest Hebert has published more than a dozen books since his first novel, The Dogs of March, came out in 1979. A lifelong champion of working people, Hebert held several jobs, including working at a gas station, in a hospital laundry room, and as a newspaper reporter, before becoming a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College in 1989. He retired in 2015.

At age eighty-five, Hebert has recently completed his fourteenth novel.

Tell us a little about your background. What inspired you to become a writer?

I think I'll start with a loosey-goosey sonnet I finished a month or so ago that deals with my current life-situation at age 85:

An Old Coyote's Wail

Question from my audiologist: "What do you want to hear?"

I want to hear squirrel chitters, owl interrogatories,

Mating calls of crickets, and toad a cappella choirs.

I want to hear ghost winds of my fallen friends rise up

Out of millions of leaves brushing against snare drums

To celebrate the high faulting flutes of the firmament.

I want to hear the music of the forest

Issue forth from xylem holes

Excavated by my friend Guthrie, the Woodpecker.

I don't need a hearing aid to hear

The Jack Benny Radio show as I sneaked down the stairs

Past my bedtime and cupped an ear to the door.

I want to hear the ouch of a thistle

And across the waters, the Amtrak train whistle.

I always wanted to excel at something. As a kid, I tried sports and discovered that while I was good enough to play, I lacked the natural gifts to excel. My low creds: School grades? Below average. Soldiering for Uncle Sam? Below average. Telephone man for four years? Average. Writing chops? I didn't write—it didn't occur to me to write. I was, however, a reader. Have always been a mad reader. 

After denying me admission after high school, Keene State finally let me in at age twenty-three. First assignment in freshman composition was to write an essay about someone that you find interesting. I was terrified. I had never written an essay; papers I wrote in high school were criticized for illegible handwriting. I had two things going for me: I had learned to type in the Army, and I had a brand-new Smith-Corona typewriter. I spent an entire weekend fashioning an essay about my pal, John Westcott.

I had no idea whether what I'd written was any good or not, but the work made me feel buoyant and fulfilled. Monday, I handed in my essay to the instructor, Professor Francgon Jones. A week later he returned the corrected papers to everybody but me. He asked to see me after class in his office. I thought, "Uh oh!"

When we met, he handed me the paper. There were no corrections; the only writing was an A+ at the top margin. It was the first A I had ever received.

"You have a talent for writing," Professor Jones said. "I suggest you contact the editor of The Equinox (school newspaper) and offer your services."

It was the first time anybody had told me that I might be good at something. That moment in Professor Jones’ office sent me on a mission to discover my relationship with the written word. I excelled at writing all through college, and even published a short story in a national magazine, Cavalier, a Playboy imitator.

So how did a non-writer become a pretty good writer with his very first efforts? My answer to that question starts with reading. From first grade on, reading was my refuge and my benediction. I was a mediocre student at St. Joseph's Elementary School in Keene, but for some reason I loved grammar rules; in particular I loved diagraming sentences. Without conscious effort, I had internalized the geometry of the English language.

Junior year, I took a course in 20th century American literature with Professor David Battenfeld. I remember sitting on the grass beside the tennis courts reading from the Am. lit. text book when I ran across Preludes by T.S. Eliot. After reading that poem, I felt as if I were a better person. I thought, "If I can do for other people what T.S. Eliot has done for me, my life will have meaning." That sentence has guided me ever since that sunny fall day in 1965.

New Hampshire’s numerous faces and identities, from its working-class mill towns and poor rural communities to its bucolic New England landscapes and lengthy history, have been common themes throughout your work. Tell us about your relationship with your home state in terms of it being an inspiration for your stories. Does your Franco-American identity play into this dynamic? If so, how?

I remember Professor Battenfeld giving me some advice, "Ernie, get out of Keene." I did get out of Keene, but not for long. I spent a couple terms at the Stanford Writing Center, studying under English poet Donald Davie, who accepted me into the graduate program as a poet, and American novelist Wallace Stegner, who liked a story I gave him enough to let me into his fiction-writing class. I switched to fiction when I realized that almost all my poems had a narrative.

After classes, I worked 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. six days a week as a janitor/gas pumper at the Commuters Shell Service station in Palo Alto, where owner John Todman and his right-hand man Rusty Wilson were as much mentors to me as Donald Davie and Wallace Stegner. The best part of the day for me was going home where my 19-year-old bride, Medora Lavoie, and I would watch the Johnny Carson show. We celebrated our 57th anniversary in March 2026. I gave Medora a bottle of ketchup, Heinz 57.

Bottom line: I didn't like California city living. I was tired of going to school, and Medora and I both got homesick. I left grad school and we came back to Keene, so Medora could finish her undergraduate work at Keene State. I eventually worked as a reporter at The Keene Sentinel newspaper, wrote novels, freelanced, taught two years as an adjunct at Keene State, and by some miracle got hired on the tenure track at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. I retired as a full professor after 26 years in 2015.

I was never "inspired" to write about New Hampshire. It just happened to be the place that I knew most intimately. My part of New Hampshire, the Monadnock Region, was a thrilling center of that intersection of counterculture and rural life in the 1970s and 1980s. It was during that time period that I came of age.

The "inspiration" that infused my writing came less from place, than from people, in particular working people: my people. My father was a weaver in a textile mill, my mother a nurse. From ages sixteen to thirty-one, I worked as a factory worker, gas station pumper, landscaper, central office equipment installer for the telephone company, taxi driver, and night attendant in a psychiatric hospital.

I've plotted all my books traveling back roads talking out loud into a tape recorder across the United States. As a young man, I lived briefly in New Jersey, North Carolina, California, and New Orleans, but I would eventually get homesick. I always came back to Keene and environs: I am at heart a home boy.

Of the literary works by Franco-American writers that you’ve read (or seen performed), which is the one that has stayed with you the most strongly? Why?

I have strong Franco-American roots, which I buried in a self-made coffin for many years. My parents were both Franco-Americans. The language of their romance was French, which they spoke in the house, so that was the language of their first-born son. When I started kindergarten at Lincoln School in Keene, I spoke very little English. I came home distraught and told my parents I never wanted to speak that awful French language again.

And I never did.

My parents stopped speaking French in the house. Even after taking French classes in high school and in college, I could not re-learn French. I was blocked; I am still blocked. As an adult, I've tried and failed to read and speak French. The French language remains interred in that coffin I built when I was five years old.

The importance of my roots began to dawn on me in New Orleans. In college, I took a semester off with an idea to visit my close friend Bill Sullivan, who was in the Peace Corps in Venezuela. I had a crazy idea I could work my way over on a ship, like Jack Kerouac. A map showed me that the closest big port to Venezuela was New Orleans, so I took train to New Orleans, where I immediately understood just how bonkers my original idea was.

However, I fell in love with the city of New Orleans, the architecture, the joie de vivre of the people. I answered an ad in the Times Picayune newspaper advertising for job opening as an attendant at DePaul psychiatric hospital. Beth Green, the head nurse, liked my size.

"You're not so big you're going to scare anybody, but you're big enough," she said.

She also liked my name.

"Hebert, that's fine South Louisiana name," she said, pronouncing it Abare. I was hired. From then on, I was Ernie Abare. I loved being an Abare instead of a Hee-bert. Nobody in New Hampshire ever said, "Hebert, that's a fine New Hampshire name." I stayed seven months in NOLA. I had a life there including a fabulous girlfriend, who just happened to be my boss. But I got homesick, and I realized if I wanted to be a writer, I had to finish out my degree work as an English major at Keene State.

The New Orleans Ernie Abare remained in the soul of the New Hampshire Ernie Hebert. I researched the Hebert name and French-Canadian culture. I quizzed my parents, discovering among other things that my father had no knowledge of his Acadian roots. In his mind, the Heberts were rooted in Nicolet, Quebec. Let me add that not only was grandfather Arthur a Hebert but his wife and my grandmother Regina was also a Hebert. My mother's maiden name was Jeannette Vaccarest. Her grandfather was an Italian whose name (spelling unknown) was Frenchified in Quebec and later Americanized when his son, Jean-Baptiste, came to the states. My maternal grandmother was a Marcotte.

As for literature, my inspirations were English—E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. I never warmed to the canonical American 20th century writers I studied in school: Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (My favorite book to hate is The Great Gatsby because of Fitzgerald's contempt for working people.) I much prefer Jews without Money by Michael Gold (a.k.a. Irwin Granich). The only American writer that I count as a strong influence was John Gardner, though to some extent, I was influenced by Theodore Dreiser and Sister Carrie. My favorite novelist when I was in high school was Jack London.

When I was sixteen, I read Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather, and I thought, "This the best book I have ever read." I re-read it in 2024, and I thought, "This the best book I have ever read." There's no sex in it, but it's a love story between two men. Cather is best known for her Midwest prairie stories, but she is buried in my part of the world, Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire.

As for famous Franco-American writers, I could never enjoy novels by Grace Metalious and I wasn't that crazy about Kerouac. I thought a more accurate title for On the Road would be In the Car, since the characters talked a lot but rarely in detail of the America outside the car. My fav work by Kerouac is Mexico City Blues. I love that book.

The Franco-American writer who had the most impact on me as an adult is my friend Robert Perreault of Manchester, New Hampshire. His novel Courtship in Purgatory is a masterpiece, capturing Franco-American culture in the New Hampshire of the middle of the 20th century. Bob wrote an earlier novel in French that I could not read, but my mother at age 80 read it and liked it so much that she translated it into English for her grandchildren, my daughters Lael and Nicole.

According to Bob, my uncle and my first mentor, Father Ernest Vaccarest, likely married the parents of Grace Metalious when Father Vac was a young curate at St. George's parish in Manchester.

What writing project(s) are you involved with now?

In May of this year, I completed a novel that I've been working on since 2021. Below is my pitch. If you know any agents who might be interested, send them my way.

fAIth: A Combobulation of Minds

Log Line: AI hallucinations gone wild

Genre: Literary fiction with a touch of grounded sci-fi. Combobulate the theology in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle with the language play in Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Orange and, you've got fAith: a Combobulation of Minds by Ernest Hebert. Think of my protagonist, the AI therapist, Faith Sanz, as an SNL version of Ava, the bot in the film Ex Machina.

fAIth (60,000 words +-) exemplifies what the New York Times calls "a new age of techno spiritualism."

Corey "Cooty" Patterson, Darby, New Hampshire's centenarian hermit, on the verge of death and traumatized as a young man, gets a second chance to discover who he really is, thanks to Faith Sanz, his AI therapist, whose own quest is for a human soul, which she believes she needs to save us lame bio-humans. Hermit and AI infiltrate each other's minds and fall in love. Alas, they are both glitchy.

You are perhaps most well-known for your Darby Chronicles series of books, published over a period of several decades. What inspired you to continue working on the series over such a long duration?

There are nine Darby novels: the seven in print from Wesleyan University Press, plus Whirlybird Island, a murder mystery based the trauma of war that was published by Plaidswede Publishing in 2021. (My dad came back from World War II with PTSD.) fAIth: A Combobulation of Minds is the ninth novel of the Darby Chronicles. If I cannot find a publisher, I will file it in my creative commons account at Dartmouth College.

What inspired me to write nine novels about a fictional New Hampshire town? I dunno. I knew from the very beginning of the series that the readership would be limited, but I perseverated, perhaps out of stubbornness, or more likely because it was small town stories that filled my head with words that overflowed into books.

The novel that deals most closely to my roots in French Canada and to my life in Yankee New Hampshire is not a Darby book. It's Never Back Down, published by Godine press in 2012. It's my imagined life if I had never gone to college. I call it my Evangeline novel, because it takes a lifetime for separated lovers to reunite.

In The Passion of Estelle Jordan, the scene in which Ollie Jordan keeps the storekeeper from the Independence Day parade, demonstrates your skills in comedy and dramatic timing. What’s your secret for constructing such a scene? How do you go about it?

One of my character flaws is that I've always been a smart ass. With almost every situation that I witness in real life I see the absurd, the ridiculous, and the silly. I struggle to write seriously, but too often the pratfall-Ernie has his say. In high school, my bible was Mad Magazine. So, my advice to anybody who wants to write a funny scene is to let Mad Magazine, SNL, Mrs. Doubtfire, or whatever tickles your funny bone, infiltrate your sensibilities.

You portray both the good and the bad of Ollie Jordan: You allow us an intimate view into his consciousness when he’s at his most frightened and confused, but we also watch him beat the son he in fact loves. How do complex characters like Ollie, Critter, and Estelle Jordan come to you? What’s your experience of trying to bring them to life on the page?

Characters in the Jordan clan—Ollie, Willow, Estelle, Ike, Critter—are derived from the Keene neighborhood I grew up in. After my mother died, my dad moved in with my family until his death at age eighty-eight. My father was OK with me selling his house. It lingered on the market for months even though we kept lowering the price. The real estate agent, who was also a personal friend, said, "Ernie, this is the cheapest house in Keene; nobody wants to live in this neighborhood, especially women." I grew up with all those shack people I write about.

What fascinated me about the Jordans and their ilk was that they made their own rules for living and were unconcerned with and uninfluenced by mainstream culture. As a boy, my neighborhood delighted me in an outsider kind of way. I felt like a tourist in a Disneyland of rural poverty.

Your prose has a spareness and deft seamlessness that doesn’t obtrude by drawing attention to itself. Was your style influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s? What writers provided you with models when you were learning your craft?

I was turned off by Hemingway the man. I thought he was 3-B guy: boozer, bull-shit artist, and bully. I loved his short story, The Old Man and the Sea, but I found his writing style mannered and cloying. If I was influenced by Hemingway, it was unconsciously.

What was it like for you as a male writer to create a novel primarily told through the perspective of a woman, as you did in The Passion of Estelle Jordan?  How did you approach this?

Passion is among my personal favorites. When I was a student at Keene State, I had a part-time job in the laundry room of Elliot Community Hospital [now Cheshire Medical Center – editor’s note]. I often worked with a powerful but dim-witted young man who I only knew as Red. One day, I was throwing laundry into a washer (about the size of VW Bug) when Red picked me by the legs and tried to stuff me in. Red became my model for Willow Jordan in A Little More than Kin.

After the laundry was washed and dried it went to the "folders," three sometimes bad-tempered women in their sixties. Red, in his madness, would paw at them and they would push him away. The women wore no makeup and they dressed plainly. One of the women had long black graying hair that was always clean and brushed. She was shy and I never heard her speak. I imagined that her pride in her womanhood was in her hair.

During this same time period I often went to the Star Cafe. You knew the kind of place it was when you walked in and you could smell the beer from a thousand or more spills. One day a sexy blond about forty-five came in with three older men. She was opposite of the laundry woman—sexy, brassy, assertive, confident. I imagined that she was a lady of night.

Decades later, I combined the laundry woman and the floozie at the Star Cafe into a character I named Estelle Jordan, the Jordan witch. (I believe every New England novelist has to produce a witch in his writing.) I pictured Estelle with the outward personality of the sexy blond at the Star Cafe, but inside protects a more vulnerable self like my imagined laundry woman. In my novel, Estelle needs to integrate her two selves as she slides into old age. Estelle eventually learns that "the only way to save herself is to save somebody else first."

And of course, The Passion of Estelle Jordan is a play on words, passion of sex and the passion of Christ. I keep finding my Catholic upbringing sneaking into my stories. 

At one point when I was writing about Estelle, I asked Medora if I could watch her put on makeup before a party we were going to. I sat on the toilet seat in the bathroom with a notepad on my lap while Medora got dolled up. What I noticed was that she actually changed in demeanor after she applied lipstick and makeup. In this sense, most women (and some men) live with two or more faces representing multiple selves.

In your novel Whisper My Name, the characters with recognizable Franco-American names (Roland Lachance, Soapy Rayno, and her sister, Delphina) are outsiders to Darby and the clans that run the town.  Do these characters represent in a broader way the Franco-Americans of New England?

Let's not forget the Jo[u]rdan clan as possessing a French name. In Spoonwood, we learn that Howard Elman's birth father was a Latour. In Howard's view, he'll always be a Yankee Elman, but his son Frederic changes his name to Latour. Frederick's son, who appears in Spoonwood, Howard's Elman's Farewell, and fAIth is known as Birch Latour.

Here's a little poem that pops into my new book:

SLIPS

by Faith Sanz

Do women wear Freudian slips today,

like Eva St. Marie in On the Waterfront?

Or like Vivian Leigh as Blanche DuBois

in a Streetcar Named Desire?

NH pronunciation of DuBois is due-boys.

What of desire 

is due boys vs what is due girls?

Your book New Hampshire Patterns is a nonfiction collaboration with photographer Jon Gilbert Fox. Fox’s photography really captures the dualities that exist throughout New Hampshire’s cultural landscape, wild places, and socioeconomic diversity in a way that few other forms of media have. What inspired your collaboration with him to create this book?

I liked Jon Gilbert Fox as a person and as a talented photographer before we worked together. I met Fox through Medora, who had come of age as a photographer with the Valley News newspaper in Lebanon, New Hampshire. An editor at the University Press of New England (I'm ashamed to say I can't remember the name) brought Jon and me together for the New Hampshire Patterns project. I think Jon did the hard work, traveling here and there, to take pictures. For me, it was a fun project to write essays about own New Hampshire world.

One of your most recent books, The Contrarian Voice: And Other Poems was published in 2017. What inspired you to write a book of poetry after publishing so many novels?

Over the years I wrote novels, I kept writing poems, some of which I smuggled into my novels. At the same time, I started making posters on the computer. I had no natural artistic ability, nor a desire to put the hours in to learn to draw, but I loved tinkering with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and, later, the Procreate app on the iPad. After I retired from teaching in 2015, I began to see connections between my drawings and my poems. When I organized and put them together, they magically morphed into a volume that I named after the sensibility of my most well-known character, Howard Elman, the protagonist in The Dogs of March. Voila, The Contrarian Voice. That little book of poems and black line drawings is not officially part of the Darby Chronicles, but in my mind, it is another shout-out to my fictional town.