I and most other AP Lit students were surprised, to say the least, when our schedules abruptly switched from “Amodeo” to “Horan” right before school began. His name was nowhere in the staff directory, and no one knew what to expect. On the first day of class, he told us a little bit about his various experiences teaching, traveling, and writing. Immediately I knew that I had to interview him to find out more.
Casey Wetherbee ’17: Tell me a little about your early life.
Richard Horan: Okay, well, I grew up in a middle-class family in Fairfield County, CT. They had this sort of classic American Dream motivation and my sister and I were raised in a very affluent town, among students very much like those in Ithaca. The high school I went to, Darien High School, is probably very similar to IHS.
I did all the sports. I actually played football and baseball and decided that wasn’t a career opportunity for me. But I did go to Boston University and got into boxing; I had also been a boxer as a little kid; it had actually been my favorite sport, and so I boxed in the New York City Golden Gloves as a 17-year-old kid. My mother grew up with a famous fighter, a guy named Chico Vejar, who never won the title but fought five times for the welterweight/middleweight championship. He was beyond his fighting years but he liked running around our house, and then he taught me how to box. And then actually when I was in college I did a lot of boxing. And actually had six professional fights before I realized I had other options in life. So it remains probably the most important early experiences.
So at 22 I didn’t do any more sports. I was done. But after that, I had all these fun jobs. I worked in a hospital while I was at Boston University. Then I graduated college, and I took a year-and-a-half out of my life and I hitchhiked around the United States. And then I ran out of money. I made it as far as Seattle and then I ran out of money. I had a degree in English, so everyone would always laugh when I told them, because in the early 80s everyone was getting degrees in business and finance. I was pretty lost.
So I went on the road again, and I ended up in Milwaukee, WI, where I wrote a 700-page novel that will never be published, but I lived there by myself for two years. That was probably the most important experience of my life, living by myself; I didn’t know anyone. And it was there, ironically, that I worked in a mental hospital, because I had the experience working in a hospital so I ended up being a nurse’s aide. I sort of wrote the reverse story of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; I told it from the nurse’s aide’s point of view. For two years, I’m writing this long book about working in a hospital, but later on, after I got married, I wrote this book, which was initially entitled Notes from the Nuthouse, but the publisher thought it was a little condescending.
I met my wife there, and together we decided to move to Europe. My wife got a job as a singer, and so she was on the road for a year-and-a-half while I was still in Milwaukee, and then we moved to Italy and lived there for two years; I taught English and she sang. And then I got chased out; I didn’t have the right papers. I almost got arrested sitting in St. Mark’s Square in Venice. Some guy came up to me and started talking in Italian, so I talked to him and then realized that he was a cop.
And then [I] got married and went to grad school, and then did a lot more traveling and teaching and more writing. In all that time, in the back of my mind, I was writing that one book, Life in the Rainbow, and that was published in 1995. I was overseas teaching in Korea when that book was published. So, I’ve lived a very itinerant life, but I’ve got all this magical experience doing all sorts of crazy stuff. When I was about 27 or 28 and I got my Master’s degree, and I had kids and taught, I sort of settled down.
CW: So what motivated you to become a teacher?
RH: Teaching in Italy. When we went to Italy and lived there, my wife had work; I was hard-pressed to find work, but I quickly found work as an English teacher. I taught at first privately and then at the Wall St. Institute. It was funny; they never asked if I had working papers, and then thought I was British, so I guess that shows how terrible their English skills were. So I taught there and really liked it. I realized that I had some talent for teaching.
CW: How many books have you written and what are they?
RH: I have four published books. The first is Life in the Rainbow, which was really more of a memoir, but because I fooled around with the chronology—I also worked in a group home in graduate school, so some of the characters from the group home I peppered into some of the other story about the mental institution—they said it had to be a novel, but since then they’ve come out with this new genre called creative nonfiction, so I think the book would have done a lot better had it been published that way.
Then I wrote a book after coming back from Korea, where I found that the environment had been completely decimated, where it’s overpopulated, they’ve cut all the trees down, etc. So I was very motivated to get into the environmental movement. And then I moved back to Wisconsin and fell ass-backwards into the Ho-Chunk Nation, which used to be called the Winnebago people. I ended up writing a trickster myth novel, about Wakdjunkaga, who’s sort of their Jesus figure, but it’s sort of a black comedy too. Anyway, that was called Goose Music, and it did quite well; I won a lot of awards, but I’m still teaching. I’m not a famous writer but I’m a good one.
So after that, the fiction market kind of collapsed. You have the Harry Potter books and then a lot of vampire books, and lots of these rape books, like “the girl with the golden tattoo” or whatever it is…. And so literary fiction just was really hard. I ended up writing two nonfiction travelogues. The first one’s called Seeds. I went around the nation gathering seeds from the trees of my favorite authors’ childhood homes. So these were the trees that had literal physical contact with those people like Mark Twain and Henry Miller and Eudora Welty. Originally it was just supposed to be my heroes; a lot of athletic heroes, a lot of boxers and so on. Muhammad Ali’s house and the tree that was in his front yard are in this book. And so the publishers at HarperCollins really liked it and so while I was writing that they asked me to write another one, where I went around to all of the farms in the United States, small family farms, and participated in the harvests of famous American crops. And that was a really extraordinary journey for me. I used to really admire writers, but having been in that world for a long time, I realized that there are a lot of jerks, that most of the writers I meet, especially those that are famous, are not the nicest people. But farmers are really great people. So now I have a new hope and a new cohort of heroes.
CW: Finally, do you have any advice for young writers?
RH: I really have a tough time answering that question. Because it’s like all the arts. It’s a wonderful art, but it’s a terrible profession. The professional end of it, like getting published, getting agents, getting money, is really awful stuff that I still have no handle on. So, first thing is you have to give up control of all of that. Try and forget about it and just write your story. Like, I have two novels written and I’ve shown them to people, and usually what agents do is say “Oh yeah yeah, I’ll read them,” and then you’ll never hear from them again. And that’s how miserable it is, they won’t even respond. It’s a pretty lonely business.
So I guess my advice is that if you have some story to tell, just write it, finish it, and work on it until it’s really nice and clean. The only real advice I can give for the business end of it is that there’s someone you have to meet that will help you. It’s been my experience that there’s some sort of magic to books, and that eventually if there’s a reason for them to be published they will, and somebody’s going to come along. So if you’re really interested in trying to get published, you really have to meet people. But most of the people who write are really inspired by writers so they’ll meet a writer and those connections in the end are really good.
Mr. Horan currently teaches Honors English 9 and AP English Literature and Composition here at IHS.