Author

Interviewer: Can we begin by talking about your background — where you grew up and the things that you did?

Hogan: My family is from Oklahoma, near Ardmore. My father had a job driving a woman to Denver and he ended up staying there. He met my mother and they got married and I was born in Denver. At that time my father was a carpenter. He later went into the military to feed us, so we did some travelling around.

“The house is crying,” I said to her as steam ran down the walls. The cooking stove heated the house. Windows were frozen over with white feathers and ferns. It was a long week of cooking, and there was no music.

That autumn when the young man came to town, there was a deep blue sky. On their way to the fair, the wagons creaked into town. One buckboard, driven by cloudy white horses, carried a grunting pig inside its wooden slates. Another had cages of chickens. In the heat, the chickens did not flap their wings. They sounded tired and old, and their shoulders drooped like old men.