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STORY MIKE TURNER | PHOTOS LETICIA HUEDA
The Writing Life
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lan Heathcock, world traveler, Whiting Award winner, fellowship lecturer, and Chicago native, calls Boise his home. His first book, Volt, earned praise for its portrayal of lives bent but not broken, by grim circumstances. It was named a“ Best Book” in 2011 by the Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, GQ Magazine, and others. In the years since winning the prestigious Whiting Award and fellowships at the Tin House and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, he’ s taught in Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Ireland, but he always returns to Boise, the city he’ s called home for 16 years.
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Heathcock grew up in Chicago, and despite his affection for the city and its people, he admits,“ I wanted out. I was ready to be somewhere different, but I didn’ t know where that would be.” A college friend, writer Anthony Doerr, had recently moved to Boise and suggested Heathcock come out west.“ It seemed like a good idea,” Heathcock says.“ They had just started a new writing program at Boise State. I thought I’ d just be out here a couple of years, but now it’ s home and I completely love it here.”
Early Inspiration
Heathcock’ s fiction takes an unflinching view of tragic circumstances, inspired early on by a need to make sense of his own world. During high school he lost a friend to suicide, and while struggling to make sense of the tragedy, his English teacher made a suggestion which changed Heathcock’ s life and shaped his writing career. The suggestion was to read the short story“ Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway.“ In that story, a boy and his father, who’ s a doctor, take a boat to an island where a woman is in distress,” Heathcock says.“ Her husband gets so bereaved that he kills himself. In the story, the boy asks his father if many men kill themselves, and they have this conversation. It’ s one of those stories that, in a very powerful way, made me feel like I was not alone with these feelings. Finally, someone was saying something about it, but it was on the page.”
It wasn’ t until years later that Heathcock realized he wanted to tell stories that would touch people in the same way. The inspiration came after a difficult day at work driving around Iowa in the summer heat and humidity, where he had just been cursed out by a customer who was having a bad day. His escape was to go to a local park and read short stories by Joy Williams, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates.“ They were all intense stories that spoke to the frustration I had with the world,” Heathcock says.“ I knew that with as powerful an experience as I had with these stories and the truth they told, that’ s what I wanted to do. The next day I started researching MFA programs and planning my escape route out of the job world and into the writing world.”
The Writer’ s Toolbox Empathy is an essential trait for a writer to possess, according to Heathcock.“ As an artist, your job is to inhabit the lives of people who are not you,” he says.“ The premier trait of a fiction writer is that you have to be an empathetic human.”
Heathcock taught fiction writing for many years at Boise State University, where he refined his list of the necessary skills and
GREENBELT MAGAZINE | JAN- FEB 2017