Validation is the Curse: an Interview with Christopher Hebert
by Scott Hutchins
“I was more interested in it as a book exploring characters just going about their lives. For me that’s the part of the Rust Belt narrative not often told.”
Scott Hutchins is a former Truman Capote fellow in the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. His work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Catamaran, Five Chapters, The Owls, The Rumpus, The New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, and Esquire, and has been set to improvisational jazz. His novel A Working Theory of Love was a San Francisco Chronicle and Salon Best Book of 2012 and has been translated into nine languages. He lives in San Francisco.
“I was more interested in it as a book exploring characters just going about their lives. For me that’s the part of the Rust Belt narrative not often told.”
“The stories I love most are the ones that feel novelistic in scope, where you can feel the writer pouring absolutely everything [they have] into the story, until there’s nothing left in them and they have to try to imagine an entirely new world.”