How Henry Hoke Cut His Own Path to Literary Acclaim

There may be no end to the kinds of work one might include in a writing sample in an application to CalArts, but Henry Hoke’s application to the Creative Writing MFA included some of the weirdest in memory. 

As he recently described, part of his application included facetious prose poems about a fictionalized conflict in his apartment building. He’d begun posting the passive-aggressive notes in the common areas of his building. “People had been posting signs in my stairwell,” he explained, recounting the journey that brought him to CalArts, “and so I started making my own. They kept getting taken down, but I kept putting them in the hallway.” 

This project was a harbinger of the interdisciplinary work Hoke would come to make. After graduating from the CalArts MFA Creative Writing program in 2011, Hoke has gone on to author five books; they’ve been cataloged in genres ranging from short stories (”Genevieves,” Subito, 2017) to memoir (Sticker, Bloomsbury, 2022) to novels (The Groundhog Forever, WTAW, 2021 and Open Throat, Macmillan, 2023), though each work represents a refusal to work strictly within the confines of any one set of literary conventions. In addition to these publications, Hoke is also the co-creator (alongside Marco Franco Di Domenico, CalArts MFA 11) of Enter>text, a series of immersive literary events, and the humor editor at The Offing Magazine. Hoke traces this multi-genre approach back to his time at CalArts: “It just became really exciting for me to keep separate projects going all at once,” he explains, “because that’s what was encouraged in each professor’s course.” 

Even more than fostering this diversity of practices, Hoke says his time in the School of Critical Studies helped him hone in on his personal style. While at CalArts, Hoke created a thesis project which, he explains, “was one true story about my mother and her friend. It was a non-fiction book, but told through poetic, formally experimental gestures.” Each page was a brand new form, from a poem to a letter to an invitation. However, towards the end of his time in the program, Hoke made the difficult decision not to pursue publication for his project after his mother’s friend expressed her hesitations about making the work public. Still, Hoke says he would write it again if given the opportunity to do things over: “I learned a lot of things about how I feel about expression and nonfiction. Doing something so straightforwardly dramatic and powerful as a nonfiction work allowed me right after that to explode into fiction and representation and abstraction. I realized I could tell these stories and process these things without it necessarily having to be the thing.” 

This approach is wildly apparent in Hoke’s most recent novel, Open Throat, which is told from the perspective of a genderqueer and lonely mountain lion living in Griffith Park. The novel is loosely inspired by P-22, the mountain lion discovered to be living in Griffith Park in 2012 and later euthanized in 2022. Hoke’s incisive and sparse narrative is a sizzling indictment of humanity, and manages to be poetic and humorous in turn. Open Throat has already been named as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. 

“I always knew I was outside a certain scene,” Hoke admits of his writing, explaining how this sentiment greatly informed Open Throat’s feline narrator. Still, he says, in CalArts he found a community of classmates and faculty members who made him feel seen. “I couldn’t have found a better match,” he reflects. The strength of the bonds he built while at CalArts kept Hoke in Los Angeles after he graduated; he says he doubts he ever could have written Open Throat living anywhere else. “P-22 and I were contemporaries in the Los Feliz neighborhood,” he recalls of that time, “and I was sort of consistently witnessing an apocalyptic landscape. There was egregious wealth inequality, climate grief, political grief, all the intensity we felt leading up to the Trump era, then all the wildfires, floods, droughts, and not being able to breathe the air for days.” 

That’s a lot for any writer to tackle. But Hoke has his time spent working in multiple genres while at CalArts to thank for his ability to approach it all. “I think this idea that there has to be some sort of consensus or approval ruins art, especially on the front end. Especially when people are like, ‘Okay, I have to make something that is unimpeachable, that somehow stacks up against other art.’ I never really value stuff like that, I need something that’s flawed and ridiculous.”