Creators on Creating: Patrick Hueller

Poetose is thrilled to publish Falling, in Love with Teaching! How did this book of narrative poems come to be?

The collection began with a single poem. A fight between two girls broke out in the middle of my 9th grade English class while we were reading Romeo & Juliet. I ended up stepping in the middle of the two girls. Afterward, everyone who cared about me kept asking if I was okay or if I needed anything. The only thing I needed was for these teenage girls to give this play about emotionally-charged teens another look. When I sat down to write about the incident, I was shocked to discover it came out as a poem. For the next year and a half, classroom experiences kept coming out the same way.

Your poems are packed full of humor, and I imagine you bring that same energy to the classroom. Do you feel that your teacher self is very different from your writing self?

I feel a little weird talking about being funny. Have you ever read a novel where the characters are described as laughing at another's character's joke? More often than not, I didn't find what the character said funny, so the laughter feels forced. It's like the novel's version of a laugh track. Don't get me wrong: I hope the poems ARE funny; thank you for the compliment! The things my students do and say often crack me up and I hope they do the same for the reader. At my best — which I'm definitely not always at — I want my writing voice to feel similar to my "real" voice, in the classroom and anywhere else.

We rarely hear the innermost thoughts of our educators. To many of us, encountering a teacher outside the classroom is rather a shock when it dawns on us they are real human beings with ongoing lives, too. In writing, were you ever self-conscious about letting readers, which includes students and other teachers, into the world of Mr. Hueller? 

I think the only self-consciousness I felt was on behalf of my students. I never want to be the cause of their embarrassment. It's kind of like years ago, when I did open mic standup comedy: I don't mind talking with total honesty and self-deprecation about my own life, but my family wasn't always so sure they wanted to be the punchline. I'm never trying to put anyone on blast. For that reason, I've obviously changed names and slightly altered situations whenever I think I should. 

One of your poems, "Here's Your Prompt," brings up a perennial question in literature: "In order to endure, must human beings sacrifice a portion of their humanity? You conclude that absolutely not: "We must restore it." Did you feel like in writing you were seeking to impart some lessons? Speak directly to educators? Do you have any advice for young educators who perhaps find the classroom more challenging than they expected?

Young educators, if they're anything like me, will find the classroom more challenging than they expected. I've been at this a while now, and I still frequently find it more challenging than expected. I think the goal is to figure out which challenges are the ones worth embracing. I try not to get wrapped up in the bureaucratic challenges (which is obviously easier said than done). Some teachers are whizzes at deliberating over every syllable of this or that standard, or at filling out all the required paperwork. And honestly, God bless them for it. I'm just not wired that way, and I guess I want to tell people that, if you're not either, you can still make a career out of this crazy profession. You and I can spend our time going back to the fundamental questions: Why teach? Why read? Why write? What does the subject matter have to offer us and the other human beings packed in our classrooms? For me, those questions remain both endlessly unanswerable and endlessly worth asking.

How does being a father and husband impact your writing life?

Writing time gets... interrupted more than it used to. As it should.

You address some challenging issues in the classroom these days, such as AI and phone usage. How do you decide how to approach these kinds of topics in your poems?

I'm definitely guilty in other outlets of my life of getting preachy. My soap box is well-worn. But the truth is, I've never really trusted lectures about how the world should or shouldn't work. Not from others, and not even from myself. I trust stories. I trust art. These things, when done well, allow for complexity and contradiction and nuance. For years, I'd been brainstorming something of a teaching manifesto. Instead, I wrote these poems. I hope they feel as real and honest to other teachers about the issues we face in our society and schools as they did to me when I wrote them. 

Do you keep a journal of what's happening in the classroom? In life? 

This is gonna sound pat, but it's true: for over a year, the first drafts of these poems were my journal.

How do you decide whether something will take the form of fiction or poetry? 

It's hard to answer this one without sounding gaggingly pretentious, but... I don't really decide. I'm just trying to let the words out in whatever way they want to come out. If I'd read my last statement when I was a high schooler, I would have rolled my eyes SO HARD. But it's true!

Who are some of the writers and books you hold most dear?

Like just about everyone reading this, I'm sure, my list of favorite authors and books is too long to list to post here. In general, I suppose the ones I hold most dear are the ones who, for whatever reason, get me back to my own work. I go back most often to study and learn from short story writers. Antonya Nelson's short fiction is amazing, as is Tobias Wolff's. And Charles Baxter's. ZZ Packer's collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is always close at hand. My favorite poet is and will likely always be Louis Jenkins. He wrote prose poems, a genre which can come off as pretentious but with him was the opposite. Just a guy telling you plainly and perfectly how weird and messed up and hilarious life can be. In my twenties I basically stalked him once. I was visiting my sister in Duluth and remembered he lived there, so I looked him up in the phonebook. I couldn't believe it: his name was right there. I drove to his house and saw what I took to be his shadow in the lit window; then I raced away, heart thumping. A couple years later he visited my grad program, and I fessed up. He was amused, even sent me a free copy of his latest collection. One thing I've always loved about the writing community is its generosity. The other is how — at a time when our culture is less interested in literature — a reader can think of an author as their own personal celebrity. 

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Patrick Hueller lives, writes, and teaches in Minnesota. He is the author of several books, many of them aimed at getting kids pumped about reading. These books have been selected for the American Library Association Rainbow Award and School Library Journal’s “Accessible Reads for Struggling and Reluctant Readers.” He has a forthcoming collection of short stories, Fake Tattoos (Cornerstone Press).

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