Interview: Dustin M. Hoffman
Common descriptors from readers of working-class literature tend to devolve into one of two fields. The first, with words like “gruff,” “gritty,” and “crass,” tend to simply describe the economically depressed settings and the hardscrabble lives of the characters that call these spaces home. The reader glimpses the struggle and perseverance needed to haul a tired and breaking body to the factory or the field or the warehouse or the mine or the… The drive to read comes from seeing how “tough” the life is but how much tougher the characters must be to succeed. The second field typically describes the prose itself. Characters speak plainly, maybe with a cut gerund here or a dash of cussing there to provide flare. Descriptions of the settings are clear, stark even. Taken together, it’s easy to whittle working-class literature into something digestible. To do this, however, is to miss how lyrically engaged a working-class author is, how attuned they are to the voices of each character, how measured they are in pushing these characters toward their desires, and how precise they are in showing their readers the worlds their characters call home. Stripped down, this is character, dialogue, plot, and setting, everything needed for fiction, no matter the genre.
In his newest collection of short stories, Such a Good Man, Dustin M. Hoffman is at a new height of mastery in capturing the lives of working people. Yes, his characters cuss and smoke and work their battered bodies daily, but they are more than extensions of the machines dictating their work. Hoffman presents his readers with layered characters, forced by economic circumstances into situations where any choice they make seems like a bad one. As a fellow working-class writer, it was a pleasure to talk shop with Hoffman.
—RS Deeren
RS Deeren: Like much of your previous work, these stories are rooted in the working class. Characters are either tied to wage labor, reeling from unemployment, or engaged in some kind of gig economy (either legal or otherwise). How has your experience as a laborer, a former housepainter, informed the characters in Such a Good Man?
Dustin M. Hoffman: I started painting houses as a teenager for side money, but it was no teenager job. I was working full time, busting out long, crushing days. I still remember my first full day of paint scraping. I came home, collapsed into bed, and when I woke for dinner, my hands were cramped into painful fists. I couldn’t open them. It was a frightening initiation into labor—trying to jam a fork into my clenched fist to shovel spaghetti into my battered body. Experiences like that have proven essential—the corporeal effect of labor on the body. And, of course, the more you do a trade, the more the body adapts, like a machine. Your hands stop seizing up. You grow skilled—and that’s a new kind of terror, this evidence of your body becoming a more efficient machine. I worked with a variety of folks on these jobs, a variety of machines at different stages of wear and tear. These jobs can break you. I worked with this career carpet installer, who’d done the job for thirty years, but his knees were blown out from kicking carpet, so he had to retire from that job. There was no worker’s compensation waiting, no insurance, no 401(k), because he was working as an independent contractor like the vast majority of the folks I knew. He retired from carpet installing to become a housepainter—to convert his body into a new machine. This seemed the fate for most of us, to just keep bullying the body along until it broke completely.
What I’m getting at here is my experience in the trades for a decade taught me how connected the body is to work, to survival. I learned the anxiety of living paycheck to paycheck—as so many of us learn quickly in this country. While the terror of your body failing and you not earning enough hours to make rent is a terrible injustice to working people in this country, it’s a crucial character-driven tension to a story writer. Here’s where my experience working the trades taught me some of these universals about working-class characters on the job. Of course, there’s so much more to a person, and I worked with fascinating people, whose backgrounds and voices and quirks (right down to the way they hug a cut bucket while lighting a smoke at the top of an extension ladder) inform my characterization. We shared our lives up there, clinging to the top rungs of twenty-foot extension ladders. You end up sharing everything, every memory and secret, with that person grinding their body through ten-hour days alongside you.
RSD: In terms of craft, many of these stories have characters with clear goals, which helps for a clear cause-and-effect plot progression. However, these stories never feel predictable. Much of this comes from the diligent character work you’ve given readers. How does character development—both in terms of the drafting process and in terms of character growth within the story—inform your work with plot?
DMH: I’m a fiction writer who constantly struggles with plot, so I like to think of a story in terms of what a character most desperately wants. Janet Burroway says that danger plus desire equals drama, and I’ve always loved that. So, I often start with a character’s desire being threatened, and so often, in these stories, that happens on the job, as it does in life. We’re all working for a reason, and I like to find the day where my characters’ need for work is pushed up against a wall, where livelihood, safety, identity, connection to loved ones, is reaching a breaking point. From there, I get to know my characters through how they’ll react at their most desperate point. That helps a great deal with plotting. So, what happens when the bouncy house attendant is blamed for losing a kid at the carnival, when the parents and the cops and their boss are breathing down their neck? They have to make desperate choices, and their mettle being tested will show me who they are while also informing the plot. One of the earliest assignments I give my own creative writing students is to begin drafting a story by giving a character something crucial they want and then let them make a mistake in trying to get it. This is a formula that works so well for me in drafting plot and learning about my characters.
RSD: There is a sense of magic in this book, particularly in stories like “Bicuspid”—where two ex-lovers literally replace their own teeth with the other’s—and more subtly in pieces like “The Night the Stars Fell”—where characters deal with a fire while under the threat of a darkening sky. Though still very much a book of realism, what role does magic play in Such a Good Man?
DMH: Realism feels like the right fit for working-class fiction, from the traditions of Kmart realism, your Raymond Carvers and Bobbie Ann Masons—a tradition and writers I adore. But I also find that mimetic representation and pure authenticity can fall short, especially when telling stories of struggle. Toni Morrison showed us the way that realistic details and deeply complex characters are crucial, but the truest story often can’t be told without magic that challenges our daily lives. Magic might be especially a crucial way to talk about pain, trauma, and terror, as Morrison shows us. With “Bicuspid,” I aimed to write a story about the worst possible thing that could happen to parents, the death of a child. As a parent, I can hardly imagine it, but I must. We must, as writers, imagine the worst. Magic can be the entrance point for empathetic curiosity. “Bicuspid” begged me to imagine a concrete reaction to grief, one that attempted to grapple with the horror of losing a child. What emerged was grotesque and brutal magic.
RSD: You’ve hung up your paint scraper and brush and have been a writing professor for some time now. However, class is more than just the job one has; it’s deeply cultural and the cultural representations of class are always needed. What are some common misunderstandings people have of the working class? How do the characters of Such a Good Man play to and also against these misunderstandings?
DMH: I’ve been thinking about class misunderstandings my whole artistic career, and I know you have with your work as well. I mean, I’ll call myself out right from the outset and say one of my blind spots, perhaps, is that I’m obsessed with the work, and it shapes most of my stories and my characters. The culture of the job is difficult to escape, especially for those who must spend a disproportionate amount of time working. When working construction, for example, the aches on the body follow one on the weekends, nag at every breath. And then, of course, there’s the stress of money that seems unceasing. When do we ever get to stop worrying about that when we have to “make a living?” These feel like working-class constants, but if this is the whole story, then it’s only getting at a fragmented portrait, since, of course, people are more than the pain caused by work and capitalism.
I still remember being in a workshop when a smart colleague of mine asked how a working-class character would have knowledge about the histories of Russian gulags that I gave one of my characters. And I know it wasn’t meant to be a critique of working-class intelligence, but the stereotype about working-class people being uneducated is pervasive. It can be true that working-class folks don’t have the access and privilege to education, but I’ve also found that the people I worked with in construction had such diverse and impressive forms of specialized intelligence. It didn’t seem odd to me to write a working-class character who went home and read obsessively about history. My brother-in-law, who’s a CNC specialist, is listening to audiobooks all shift long, absorbing more of the canon than I have time for even in my academic life. So, I want to break that stereotype of intelligence, while also acknowledging the injustice of access to education.
Another stereotype is the way toxic masculinity can permeate manual labor. There’s truth to that, certainly, and yet I also want to show how that facade can crumble quickly, like with “The Whites,” where a new member of the painting crew is hazed, or in “The First Woman” where a collective of tradesmen are obsessed with leering at the rare woman employed on an excavation crew. I aim to portray the stereotype so I can confront and complicate it, just as gendered performances appear on the job but crumble in the pressure-cooker of the twelve-hour shift where livelihood is on the line. Stereotype gives way to messy, terrible, beautiful humanity.
Or even just the swearing and the smoking—these are some tropes that I employ that I often worry might play into stereotypes. But then my challenge as an artist and as a human is to deepen the smoking, to interrogate the complex motivation behind it, or to create lyricism from the colorful diction of the most beautiful and poetic cussers. It comes back to language and detail—if we, as writers, dig in enough, if we practice being the type of person “upon whom nothing is lost,” as Henry James suggested, then we have to see more in each person.
My constant worry is that as a country and culture, in these bipartisan political times, we’re creating monoliths out of every cultural group, boxing classes of people into political parties with a singular set of values. Art destroys that oversimplification, just as getting to know the individual puffs this away like a cloud of secondhand smoke blown into the wind.
RSD: Humor plays a large role in these pieces. In particular, “Too Bad for Marcel Ronk” and “Eat Fire” have a rough bluntness to their voice that had me chuckling. Humor, too, is cultural, and the working-class is typically stereotyped as being gruff. In what ways do you think humor in Such a Good Man plays against this stereotype? Also, how does humor help to highlight the more serious moments of your characters’ lives?
DMH: Humor is so important to me as a writer. I need to make myself laugh to keep moving through the sentences, as I do in life. I’m the type of weirdo who needs to laugh at the horrors of life, for the alternative is collapsing into my woes. I think that’s a part of why gruff humor is important to working-class culture. We have to laugh at what scares us most. It fools us into believing we’re tough enough to survive. In “Eat Fire,” for example, that narrator is trapped in a comic near-future scene of absurdity. The world is literally catching fire in front of him, but everyone seems more worried about their silk kimonos and water bills and getting their trash picked up on time. What more can a worker do in a world like that but hold on for dear life through the comically nightmarish carnival ride?
Sometimes I don’t realize I’m being funny. I’ve had stories picked up by journals where the editors tell me they loved all the humor, and I think, This is a super sad story about a lonely animatronic sculptor at a president-themed amusement park. It’s funny? Well, yeah, Dustin. And I think this speaks to how humor will be my initial motivation as a writer—an amusingly absurd premise will fuel those hardest early days of drafting where the temptation to quit sneaks up at every sentence. But as I keep going with a story, the humor drops away into something deeper. The humor persists, obviously, but also the more complex parts of the story.
Perhaps the gruffest story I’ve ever written is in Such a Good Man. It’s called “Bicuspid,” which you referenced earlier. It’s about parents lashing out in cruelty due to grief, and ripping out their teeth. I read this at an event a while back, and the crowd was laughing quite a bit, and, once again, I was surprised. I was thinking, Oh, this is going to be a bummer for them later. But maybe not. I often tell my students that humor is a gateway emotion. Early writers often lean toward dark emotions initially, asking a reader to grieve a fictional death or pity a depressed character. But we have so much death and sadness already in our own lives. That’s a tall order for our reader, from the jump. However, if a writer can make me laugh first, it opens a willingness in me. Humor connects. Humor is empathy at its finest. And once the humor lands, most readers will be willing to go just about anywhere emotionally. So to with working-class culture, I think. You crack a joke with your coworker and lighten the burden of their day, and the bonds of camaraderie tighten. The danger, of course, is that humor is so subjective. There’s a lot of risk of failure, of a joke offending or falling flat, and that also is what makes humor so thrilling in fiction.
RSD: I was lucky enough to hear you speak at the 2025 Zone 3 Writers’ Festival about being “detailed obsessed” when it comes to writing. What do you mean by that and how did it help you with writing Such a Good Man?
DMH: In Donald Barthelme’s brilliant essay “Not Knowing,” he suggests, when we don’t know what to do with all our “messy” material gathered from life and its absurdity, that “one proceeds by way of particulars.” It’s easy to get lost in the big-picture plotting and theme and social commentary, but none of that really helps get the writing done. What always helps me are the details. They stave off the anxiety and paralysis of the daunting writing process, especially drafting. Heck, some writers might try and avoid detail until later drafts, but I say luxuriate in them. Dump them all in. You can always cut them later, and if they serve to spark any inspiration, they’ve more than done their job, even if they get deleted.
So, I’ll use two stories as examples from the collection where details especially guided me, and these were stories that relied upon outrageously exact numbers. “Every Number Albert Knows” is a story about a house measurer whose calculations are used for appraisal of selling a home. Though the character’s job is to just give the numbers, the details of a life spill through in every room and every closet measured. Numbers are an inspiring source of detail obsession for me. They promise to calculate an exactness, but, of course, they can’t tell the full human story. The human story in “Every Number Albert Knows” becomes found in the stuff a family stashes into every corner of the square footage they live inside. And with that story, I let those kinds of details guide me to explore both the family living inside and soon leaving this home, as well as how Albert, in his occupational measuring, reflects on his own life. I faced this a lot in my decade working as a housepainter. We’re touching every single board foot inside a room being repainted, and the job is to pretend you don’t see the human lives, the stuff, the inventoried evidence of existence, but of course we see it. Who ends up knowing a life better than those who explore the details of every inch of your life? So, too, goes the fiction writer, hunting for each meaningful detail.
Another story in the collection, “Orville Killen: Lifetime Stats,” is told in the form of baseball card backs. Every card collector can appreciate the attempt to sum up a lifetime in stat lines crammed onto the back of a 2.5” by 3.5” scrap of cardboard. Of course, what’s left off, what’s implied in the subtext of the stats, is the human life—the emotional struggle of achieving those stats, of falling short, of accruing totals. In my story, I invented stats for off seasons, as well, and this had me summing sexual encounters and the accuracy of hunting excursions and the weight of burned firewood and even the minutia of hairs on a fox tail that became a family heirloom. While I’m obsessed with details—which I think we’re all curious about—I also like to write around the absurd premise that we can ever tell a human story with numbers alone. But if we start there and interrogate deep enough, a story always exists to be plucked from calculated precision.
RSD: You’ve now published three full-length short story collections: One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), No Good for Digging (Word West Press, 2019), and now Such a Good Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). What about this genre keeps you coming back to it? For your readers, how is reading a short story similar yet different to reading a novel?
DMH: I’m always telling my students that the short story is the perfect art form. Like a poem, not a single word can be wasted. You can’t hide even a weak sentence in a short story. That idea of Poe’s “single effect” demands itself on the form. And, speaking of details, the short story demands culling, demands only what serves the story, so every detail will matter in the hands of a good storyteller.
They’re so dang hard to write, short stories, because each one requires a different approach of form and technique, so this requirement to work such different artistic muscles each time is exciting. And maybe this challenge is a draw. I love difficult video games, punishing ones, especially roguelikes, where failure is guaranteed. This probably explains something about why I love the short story, too, that the learning curve is so high, that I’m going to fail more often than I succeed, but it’s in the failure that one finds the satisfaction of finally discovering an approach that works.
For the reader, reading a short story is vastly different than reading a novel. Sure, there’s the narrative elements that are shared. Both genres usually require character, plot, tension, all that jazz. But short stories have a unique reading experience in that the ending is imminent from the first lines. You approach a story with an awareness that this thing is going to finish in five, ten, twenty pages. Don’t we all flip to see how long a story is before we even start? So, there’s this added sense of tension to the whole experience, as we wonder how the hell a writer is going to pull off a complex human story in such a short amount of space. Failure seems so likely. These lives, this narrative, it’s going to drop off a cliff. With a novel, you have a mountain to climb first. The writer has all this time, and that’s a splendid experience, too. But the short form demands such immediacy in its propulsion to the ending. And I love endings. Maybe that’s a simplistic answer, but short stories are for those who love the constant thrill of endings, which short stories writers do best. We must become experts of the constant and inevitable end.
RS DEEREN’s debut collection of short stories, Enough to Lose, was named a 2024 Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan. It was also a finalist for the Midwest Book Award. Deeren’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in periodicals including the Great Lakes Review, Joyland, Midwestern Gothic, and more. Before leaving the rural Thumb Region of Michigan, he worked as a line cook, landscaper, lumberjack, and bank teller. He received his MFA from Columbia College, Chicago and his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Deeren is the Co-Coordinator and an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. Find him on Instagram @rsdeeren.
DUSTIN M. HOFFMAN writes stories about working people. His newest story collection, Such a Good Man, is out with University of Wisconsin Press. He’s also the author of the story collection No Good for Digging and the fiction chapbook Secrets of the Wild (Word West Press). His first book One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press) won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He’s published more than one hundred stories in journals including Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Masters Review, Witness, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and One Story. Before getting his MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and his PhD in creative writing from Western Michigan University, he spent ten years painting houses in Michigan. Now he teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Find him on Instagram @dustin_m_hoffman.
