Robin Hemley

My friend Robin Hemley has a long association with Charlotte. Robin served as a creative writing professor at UNC Charlotte from 1987 to 1994.  In the years since he left Charlotte, Robin has taught at universities all over the world, including a six-year stint as the director of the Writing Program at Yale-NUS in Singapore. However, he occasionally returns to Charlotte to give readings and to teach writing classes.

Both Robin’s class and his talk relate to his new memoir titled How to Change History: A Salvage Project, which the University of Nebraska Press published a few months ago. In commenting on this memoir, author Brenda Miller, wrote, “Reading How to Change History is akin to sitting with an intimate friend, going through old photos and scrapbooks, conversing deep into the night about what connects us to the past and what might endure into the future.”

I contacted Robin and asked him for more information about his new memoir.  Here is what he sent to me:

My latest book, How to Change History: A Salvage Project, can be described variously as a collection of linked essays or a memoir-in-essays, a tricky form no matter what you call it. I say it’s tricky because it implies (though doesn’t quite admit) that the essays were written separately as stand-alones rather than written with the intentionality of a book. That’s not to say that the essays were slapped together randomly, but that the intentionality of the book proceeded the writing of the contents. That’s certainly true in my case and I’d wager, in the cases of most such books. Still, it’s important for such a book to have the cohesion of a book that was intended from the start as something large and of a piece.

Why is that important? I’m not saying such cohesion is important to me when I read some random collection of essays or random collection of stories. In fact, I love hodge-podge collections that show an author’s stylistic and thematic range and roving interests. But editors and perhaps most other readers want something that builds, that leads somewhere.

If I tell you the range of subjects in the book, you’ll be forgiven (well, maybe not. I’m sensitive) for clapping back, “Well, that’s just a hodge podge after all, with a fancy title slapped on it.” My subject matter includes photography, travelogues, TV shows, real estate come-ons, washed up rock stars, incontinent dachshunds, stalkers, war memorials, skeletons in the closet, scrapbooks, pre-cancerous moles, murder, the Philippine-American War, Sherwood Anderson, James Agee, curses, divorce and skinny dipping.

I’d argue that all these subjects are as one, first because they all sprang from my mind, but also because they reflect my obsession with memory and erasure. I am at once attracted and repelled by gestures of memorializing. I want not only to be remembered but to remember others, and I know that this is a losing battle.

And so, I write about a memorial plaque to a former colleague who died of a heart attack during my time at UNC Charlotte. The English Department made a little memorial plaque for him and hung it on the spot where he used to hang out in the hallway, smoking (in the days when people smoked indoors) and chatting with anyone he could collar. Jim’s Corner, it was called. But not long after, the department moved to a new building and Jim’s Corner was no more, the plaque likely thrown away or lost in the move. I had since moved across the country, so I did not know of its removal until a couple of years later.

Another essay features a scrapbook I bought at an estate sale in Virginia, of a woman who had meticulously collected the ephemera of her life over a four-year period during WWII. The scrapbook was amazing to me, and I bought it despite a hefty $75 price tag. Among its treasures were the pair of nylon stockings she wore throughout the war, theater tickets, a performance review (rather mixed) of her job as a volunteer on the psych ward of Walter Reid Memorial Hospital, a menu from Antoine’s in New Orleans, her birth certificate (we share the same birthday, though many years apart), dental x-rays, you name it. This was her own memorial to herself, but a memorial with little context. How to piece it together into a life, a remembrance from scraps?

If you read the book, and I hope you will, far from a hodgepodge, I’m confident that you will see that these are indeed linked essays. This is a memoir-in-essays. But it took me years – 25 years to be exact – to see what now seems obvious. For years, I wanted to collect my essays into a book, and I tried various configurations and titles. It took me so many years because it took me that long to finally see what held these essays together. I don’t remember all the titles I tried out, thankfully, but one that stays with me is A Handbook for Haunting. Not a bad title, actually. But not the right title for my book. Once I understood that the best title for my book was How to Change History, I understood everything about my book that previously had been obscured. That’s the only way I can frame it – it was like all my essays were poured into a funnel and out the other end came that title. Suddenly, I knew which essay would anchor the book and which one would end it, and that has never changed.

Readers who want to know more about Robin should check out his Substack Turning Life into Fiction https://robinhemley.substack.com/ as well as his writing retreat and editing venture, https://authorsatlarge.com/

I plan to attend Robin and Judy’s joint talk on September 26, and I am looking forward to reconnecting with Robin and hearing about his latest book.  Robin truly is a world traveler, but he will always have a place in Storied Charlotte, and he will always be my friend wherever he goes.