KMWR: Well, Paul, everyone needs to know: did this story come to you in the shower?

PH: Ha! I think it just may have. I do seem to get a lot of ideas in the shower. Some good, some not so good. Some I’ll jot down after I’ve dried off. Others simply can’t wait and I’ll start scribbling while still dripping wet. I think “Ergo Ego” may have been among the latter.

KMWR: Your resume as a poet is impressive. In your experience, has a poem ever turned into a fiction piece or vice versa? Do you try to keep the mediums separate from each other, or do you find crossover inevitable?

PH: As the poet Thomas Lux told me years ago in a workshop, poetry IS fiction. It tells the emotional truths. And since I’m a hopelessly narrative poet, my poems are often like very short stories. With line breaks. Sometimes, though, I can’t get the line breaks to behave themselves, so I get rid of them altogether, and I end up with something that could be a prose poem or a piece of microfiction or flash fiction. I’m not sure what they are. I’m better at making them than knowing what they are.

KMWR: I love the repeated imagery of reflection in this piece, “the fogged-up mirror, which he wiped clean” and his wife’s pregnant belly “reflecting the salad bowl.” Even “his wet footprints evaporating” shows the reader that for this character everything becomes clear, a little too clear, so much so that he only seems to see himself and his ideas. The imagery is evocative of Narcissus without mentioning the word narcissism. How important is building each line with this imagery to make the theme of the piece stick?

PH: I love repetition, I love repetition. It has a way of putting me under its spell. Especially in the beginning, it can propel me forward, it can feel central to the movement and invention, the argument and rhythm. But sometimes when I return to it later on, the repetition has lost its magic, lost its fire, and it feels like returning to a bunch of empty beer cans and used condoms at a campsite, evidence that somebody had some fun here at some point in time recently, but there’s no fun now and in fact there’s a lot of cleaning up that needs to be done. There is much pleasure to be had in repetition. But doing something over and over, as good as it may feel, can also be bad for you, not to mention bad for your poem or story.

KMWR: Then as the character is blighted by the Medusa-glare of his wife, I can’t help but think of the influence of Greek mythology in this piece. Would you say that was the case for this story?

PH: The Medusa, not so much. Narcissus, quite possibly.

KMWR: The reader can confidently predict the baby is not named Ego—but were there any runners-up?

PH: Echo. 

KMWR: Can you describe how your writing life has evolved over your career?

PH: My writing life. Hm. It’s like the opposite of my love life. I only ever do it alone. I only ever try to please myself, to pleasure myself. And I can go for many hours at a time. A writer writes. So I must be a writer. Though most of the time I still feel like an imposter.

KMWR: What have you read recently that you would recommend? 

PH: Well, let’s see. I was on a Maggie O’Farrell kick for a while there. Read Hamnet, then went back and read it again, then read all ten of her books. Now I seem to be on a Niall Williams kick. Read History of the Rain, then readThis Is Happiness. And now I’m readingThis Is Happiness again. Because I like to reread books that I love. For the pure pleasure of it. And also to see how they did it.

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