Helen bio

I'm Helen Hooper, a TA in this class. I'm a Stegner fellow in fiction, just winding up two fabulous years at Stanford. I arrived with the intention of completing a short story collection but for the last 9 months or so I've been writing a novel. It's set in northern Alabama, where I was born, from the late civil rights era to around 2010.

Writing fiction is a second career for me; I spent three decades as an environmental policy analyst and lobbyist in DC. I worked for several NGOS on land and water conservation and also did a stint with the House Natural Resources Committee. But I had majored in English (at Johns Hopkins) and so I also wrote and took writing classes as time permitted. Working nights and weekends I got an MFA 4 years ago and started sending my work out and publishing in literary journals.

 For me and every other writer I know, writing comes from reading. Books beget books. Before I started writing, reading was a refuge. Work -- office work, the regular jobs with staff meetings and agendas and talking points and power points not written by Jennifer Egan but by policy wonks -- can be deadening even when it is challenging and important. Reading Nabokov or Bellow was a tonic that revived a brain numb from analyzing, say, the Forest Service budget. But when I began to write I began to read more analytically. How did this story or book work? Why was it that I responded, found it beautiful or sublime or authentic? I wanted to understand the elements, techniques, choices so I could write my own stories. I'm looking forward to examining some of these questions with you.