Beauty! Art! Poetry! Vaudeville! Joyce's Hinnefeld's The Dime Museum
"I think there are pieces of me, and of people I’ve known, in all of my characters. I feel a sense of kinship with all of them."
Virginia Quarterly Review is open for poetry and nonfiction submissions through Friday, August 15. Submittable portal here.
The Academy of American Poets First Book Award (48-100 pp - single spaced) is open through September 1 for submissions. The prize includes $5,000 and publication.
Iowa Short Fiction Award and John Simmons Short Fiction Award for short story collections (min. of 150 double-spaced pp) is open through September 30 for submissions. Prizes awarded to two collections - the recipients must not yet have published a book-length work of fiction.
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Today’s feature is an interview with novelist and short fiction writer Joyce Hinnefeld, Her new book, The Dime Museum, is officially out tomorrow, August 12, from Unbridled Books. I loved this novel-in-stories’ vivid canvas and characters, its peregrinations back and forth in time and place, and its wealth of visual art and poetry, which Hinnefeld writes about with insight and deep reverence. There’s also humor, family strife, and characters who pine and suffer and love.
Christine/Bookish: The Dime Museum moves back and forth in time and place (Venice, Philadelphia, Chicago, Prague) from 1965 to 2021, and it also features several POV characters. Did the book change significantly as you wrote it or did you know from the outset it would be a novel in stories?
Joyce Hinnefeld: The book changed significantly over the long process (many years honestly) of writing it. Initially I thought I was going to write a work that imagined the lives of the overlooked spouses of Albert Barnes and Wallace Stevens, Laura Leggett Barnes and Elsie Kachel Stevens.
Then, in my quest to understand the world of twentieth-century titans of art and literature, I picked up the thread of Ezra Pound, and specifically the unnamed vaudevillian actress who spent two separate nights in Pound’s rooms in Crawfordsville, Indiana when he was teaching at Wabash College. That’s when Maude and her so-called grandson Tom came to life.
I still assumed I’d somehow incorporate the lives of Laura and Elsie, but when I tried writing in their voices what I produced was pretty stilted and seemed out of place. Charlie and Min had been significant characters for a while, and at some point this came to me: have their poetry professor, Mary Stinson, be a scholar who’s preoccupied with these women’s lives and—in Mary Stinson’s opinion—their oppression and silencing.
So what I was doing, I guess, was creating a character, a kind of silly and sad but deeply devoted character, who was loosely based on me. I should stress, though, that my life is quite different from Mary Stinson’s! I have an academic husband, but thankfully not an embittered one who thought it was my job to raise the kids.
CS: Poetry is a notable element in many of these stories. Main characters study and argue about it, and it's taught by the aforementioned Mary Stinson. Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Elsie Kachel Stevens (likewise mentioned above), and Philip Levine haunt the book. Pound's turn toward fascism is referenced too. What drew you to these poets in particular?
JH: If you studied literature in college in mid- to late-twentieth century America, as I did, you were bound to learn to look on poets like Pound, Stevens, and T.S. Eliot with awe. I kind of want to hate them all because they were such dreadful people, but lines from their poems still float through my head, because I read their work when I was young and enchanted by their language.
This is why I love Terrance Hayes’s poem “Snow for Wallace Stevens,” which I excerpt as one of The Dime Museum’s epigrams (“This song is for my foe, / the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron / of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness / blue as a body made of snow”). That poem also includes these lines: “ . . . I too, having lost faith / in language, have placed my faith in language.”
That’s it exactly with these guys: you can find them maddening, consider them your foe—and yet be exhilarated by their work and long to emulate it.
These days I read mostly contemporary poetry. So besides Whitman and Eliot and Stevens and Pound, the reader will also find references to Louise Bogan, Adrienne Rich, Naomi Shihab Nye, and, yes, Philip Levine. I’ve loved Levine’s work for years. I love how his words evoke the lives of working people in Detroit and elsewhere, and I felt that his poem “Smoke,” one of my favorites, was one that Charlie and Min would both appreciate. Remembering that poem near the book’s end helps to bring Min to a softer place in relation to Charlie.
CS: I loved how much your narrators and their stories differ from each other, but they're all nonetheless entwined so skillfully, among them, Charlie and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Minerva (“Min”); Charlie's mother Nina; Stefan, a Czech musician, Charlie meets in Venice; Tom, a Vietnam veteran, and his grandmother Maude. Was there a character you especially identified with?
JH: Interestingly, I identify strongly with Maude, though my life couldn’t be more different from hers. But I share her world-weariness, and her sense that even in the face of disappointments and despair one must carry on, taking solace in reading a book of poetry beside an open window.
But you know, I identify with Charlie too, and with Tom. Even Stefan, at moments. I like what Muriel Spark’s narrator, the novelist Fleur Talbot, says early in Sparks’s novel Loitering with Intent: “The process by which I created my characters was instinctive, the sum of my whole experience of others and of my own potential self; and so it always has been.” (Of course, in Loitering with Intent Fleur Talbot is actually spinning out her own puzzles and rationalizations about characters, fiction, and autobiography.)
In other words, I think there are pieces of me, and of people I’ve known, in all of my characters. So I feel a sense of kinship with all of them.
CS: Visual art and the Barnes Collection in particular in Philadelphia form part of the core of The Dime Museum. Would you comment on your interest in art (it’s clear to me that it’s keen and informed).
JH: I appreciate your saying that my interest in art is keen and informed! I’m a big fan of art museums; I have visited the Art Institute of Chicago since I was a high school student in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, I backpacked around Europe as a college student and visited tons of museums.
Certain works seem to linger in my mind after a museum visit—like Modigliani’s Redheaded Girl in Evening Dress at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Denys Puech sculpture Winged Siren Seizing an Adolescent at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon—both of which figure prominently in the story/chapter named for that Puech sculpture.
The Barnes collection is fascinating, and really worth a trip to the (relatively) new museum in Philadelphia. Albert Barnes was a complicated, and by all accounts, difficult man, but he compiled an incredible collection of art and artifacts during his lifetime, and the idiosyncratic ways in which he chose to display these works are fascinating, if exhausting. There’s a lot to take in.
I did see the collection in its original home, the mansion Barnes shared with Laura Leggett Barnes, at some point in the 1990s, and somehow Barnes’s arrangements made more sense there, at least to me—though I’m glad those arrangements have been maintained in the building in center city Philadelphia that opened in 2012. You can learn more about Barnes and his collection in Blake Gopnik’s terrific new book The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream.
CS: Dime museums are a unique part of American cultural history (which I hadn't known much about before reading your book). What kind of research did you do for the title chapter, narrated by Maude, a former dime museum worker?
JH: I believe it was my rabbit-hole research into vaudevillian male impersonators that led me to the dime museums; that’s also where I got Maude’s stage name at the Gem (an actual Chicago theatre): “the Bogus Man.” Other off-shoots of that Chicago research rabbit hole: the hoboes camped out at Bughouse Square, a nickname for Washington Square Park in Chicago; the Anarchist Book Shop; the early years of Poetry magazine—all of which show up, in one way or another, in The Dime Museum.
I lived in Chicago in the mid-1980s, and I feel about that city as I feel about New York: that when you walk the city blocks (as I’ve done a lot, in both cities), you feel the history of those streets and those blocks below your feet, and in your body.
Maude’s life as a child and then as a performer (even in the town of Wabash, Indiana—where I have been! I grew up in Indiana and attended a friend’s wedding on the campus of Wabash College) felt as vivid and real to me as the smell of cheap cuts of meat cooking on the Bughouse Square hoboes’ fires.
I can’t explain it, except to say that imagination, coupled with research, is a wonderful thing. Also, at some point you have to stop researching and reading (one of my absolute favorite things to do; really, I love it too much) and just write the damn thing!📗
Opening to The Dime Museum:
