Introduction
The author, teacher, and musician Max Hipp is a creature of the South, which becomes immediately clear in the first sentence of new debut short story collection—and every sentence after that. What Doesn’t Kill You Opens Your Heart (Cool Dog Sound 2024) is an honest, brutal, and necessary dive into the heart of the American South. In this collection, every character struggles. The question is, what will they do with that struggle? The answers range from hilarious to heartbreaking. Empathetic characters and happy endings are hard to find, but the grain of truth that reigns supreme will make you view the world with a little more understanding and, hopefully, more love.
Max Hipp’s work has appeared in, among others, Southern Humanities Review, Cheap Pop, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Black Warrior Review. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Mississippi.
Over Zoom, I spoke with Hipp about this collection, why Taco Bell is an inspiration, how music helps him write, and more.
Interview
Denise S. Robbins: In your head, do your characters live in the same world? Would they recognize each other on the street?
Max Hipp
Max Hipp: To me, they live in the same world. I’ve invented some of the town names and have towns in my head they’re modeled after, in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, etc. I use details of the region I’m most familiar with: the southeastern United States. Grounding the story in a specific region is one of the things that made this collection cohesive for me when I was choosing which stories to put in and which to leave out. Place has a specific effect on character, but I don’t know that any of these folks would recognize each other on the street.
DSR: There are a lot of similarities between some of your main characters. Is that because they’re all impacted by the same place?
MH: Yes, because of the place and its history, and the effect of living in a historically conservative state inundated with a specific type of Christianity. Growing up in and remaining in a rural place or small town for most of their lives, some of these characters have narrower ideas and models about who you are and who you can be. Ideas about gender, sexuality, and spirituality, about guns, violence, and alcoholism—that’s all related to place. Then there are economic circumstances influencing characters’ feelings and actions. Characters can develop the good and bad habits of a place. There’s stress and emotional pain in the stories, drunkenness, people trying to self-medicate and check out. These are symptoms of the loneliness and isolation of a place.
Talking this way about it makes it sound like I wrote a deadly serious short story collection, which I have not done! There’s a lot of comedy to it.
DSR: How does the physical reality of the towns you wrote in the Mississippi and otherwise create those conditions you just spoke about?
MH: I like it when writers know a town so well that they’re mapping it out for you as you read, and you can feel how well they know a place. When I’m writing, I’m envisioning highways and cul-de-sacs. Some of the stories are from thirty years ago, some from twenty years ago, and some are from present day. During that thirty-year stretch, Mississippi (where I live and where most of the stories are set) has changed. But for a lot of its history, it’s been pretty isolated, and it has self-isolated too, especially during Jim Crow and the KKK terrorism and violence that led to de-segregation and the Voting Rights Act. Until high-speed internet came along, it was still isolated from many social ideas too. You can drive to places in this state and feel like you’re traveling into the past. Abject poverty and lack of local resources. I’m not quite sure this answers the question, but maybe.
DSR: I really loved the story called “Cliff Burton Rules” about a fictional fast-food restaurant named “Taco Hell.” It made me think about that literary journal called Taco Bell Quarterly, a kind of punk and experimental online journal that a lot of people love. What do you think it is about Taco Bell that people are so fascinated by?
MH: Let me just first say that Taco Bell Quarterly rejected that story.
DSR: No!
MH: It’s the most Taco Bell story I could possibly write. But I can’t speak to the literary fascination with Taco Bell. It’s still cheap? It’s open late? That’s probably it.
DSR: Why do you care about Taco Bell?
MH: It was my first minimum-wage job. People’s first jobs are ripe for writing about. Dealing with people who don’t know who the hell you are beyond your function in the assembly line at a fast-food restaurant is a brand-new feeling. Grown people will come in and scream at teenagers because the drive-thru messed something up. They’re screaming about tacos, and you’re witnessing the thin layer between civilization and chaos. Somebody’s tacos are wrong and they’re going to come in and start throwing trays in the dining room.
Denise Robbins
DSR: Did that happen? Were you inspired by particular people and events in these stories?
MH: I think fiction writers tend to write on a spectrum with “totally happened” on one end; “all made up” on the other. Some write based on their own lives, and some are as far from that as possible, setting us on planet Xenoviak. I’m somewhere in the middle. I’ll base stories on my experiences, like with a job or relationship experience or a particular feeling of longing and heartbreak. My characters could be composites of friends I’ve known, family members, exaggerated bits of myself, or they could be completely made up. I get interesting effects taking the perspective of people I don’t agree with, their ideas and worldviews. The culture around me, I don’t agree with it generally. I’m inspired by the friction of writing about people I don’t understand so I might see where they’re coming from.
DSR: Does writing it help you understand? And do you hope readers will understand these perspectives better?
MH: It helps me, sure. I don’t set out with that goal, but that’s how some of these characters develop. Some writers will write characters that come across as deranged in their beliefs, but for me, one of the goals of writing fiction, or one of the things to aim for possibly, is to build empathy between people who might not otherwise communicate, or even know the other exists as a real human being. We see folks we disagree with depicted without understanding or nuance all the time, misrepresented like clowns to hate and rail against—Fox News is the worst offender, but you could watch any twenty-four-hour-news network for examples. I’d like to capture our common humanity by portraying these characters as accurately as I can. I want to portray them as full humans, these people around me. We’re not so different really—we all want to be loved, admired, acknowledged, and respected. We want food, good health, dignity, a job that pays the bills, and a decent place to live. Mainly, I’m talking about people who are acting in good faith and believe they’re doing the best they can in the world.
DSR: What else inspired you in writing these stories—any authors or books serve as touchstones?
MH: Certain writers always inspire me to write more. Denis Johnson, George Saunders, Lucia Berlin, and Lydia Davis. I like Charles Portis because he’s so damn funny. I’m lucky: where I’m from, there’s a tradition of writers going back a hundred years. I live in the town where Faulkner lived and wrote. There are other writers who were based here or from the area, like Larry Brown, who grew up out in the county, and Barry Hannah, who lived here for decades and was writer-in-residence at the university. A lot of the ones I’ve just mentioned are descendants of Flannery O’Connor. There’s a whole lineage.
DSR: How long ago did you write the first story in this? How much time has passed between the first one and the most recent one?
MH: The oldest story, the novella and title story, was started twenty years ago. I didn’t know how to finish it. At one point I turned it into a novel, but I pared it down to about 18,000 words for this collection. The newest story is probably “Last Year’s Man,” started in 2019. But nothing in the collection was finished until 2024. Getting this book together, everything was still open for edits and revision, didn’t matter if it had been published before or not.
DSR: And what was it like going back to the old one?
MH: Well, I don’t want to give the impression I worked on it constantly. I kept teaching classes, teaching myself to write, writing more stories, and writing songs while the story “What Doesn’t Kill You Opens Your Heart” was mostly sitting around. Going back to it was instructive because I became a different writer in those twenty years. I taught myself enough that I could go back and see it new, see what was working and what wasn’t, and use what I’d learned to revise it. As you write, you get more ideas on the things you can change, and sometimes good readers have ideas about how to change them. In the last five years or so I’ve learned how to revise myself better, something no one can teach you.
DSR: I know you’re also a teacher. Do you ever break your own rules that you teach to your students about writing fiction?
MH: I teach a beginning fiction workshop, which means I’m giving students tools that they can use to get started. Mainly, these tools, or rules, are to help new writers see not just the individual parts of a short story and how they work together but also to notice the words they’re using and make better choices. I needed guidelines when I started to make myself pay more attention to the language I was using. For example, a rule against using adverbs makes you look again at the adverbs you’re using and notice their function in the sentence. Maybe there’s no function and they need to be cut? Another example is “show don’t tell.” That’s a rule I’ve come to violate because sometimes you need to tell something to keep the story moving through time. Depends on what you’re trying to do.
DSR: Do any of your students ever push back on you? And do you feel like you learn from your students?
MH: All that matters to me is that you do your best work, try to write your best story. And if what you’ve written works, it works. I’m not interested in marking everything up with a red pen. I want to be thrilled, same as any reader or editor. I would be happy if my students, in the service of doing their best work, completely disregarded my advice because their story demanded it.
DSR: You’re also a musician. What are the similarities and differences between writing fiction and writing music?
MH: Lyrics are similar to poetry in that you don’t have a lot of word space. Luckily, you have music supporting the lyric to help imply an emotion or mood. It’s different from storytelling, because with storytelling, the music is in the words you’re using, your narrative voice is your instrument. With song lyrics, you’re depending on the listener to make more connections.
When writing, I think about the way things sound, the vowel sounds and consonants. I speak out loud as I’m revising, trying to get it to sound right while telling the story. There’s a balance. Sometimes worrying too much about sound gets in the way of the story. If every sentence is precious and beautiful, then nothing is. Variation is where it’s at. I love a beautiful sentence, but if writing “Bill opened the car door” serves the story better, then the pretty line will get cut. Again, depends on your intent.
DSR: Speaking of variation, I love the stories in this collection where you play with reality. Like “Stump Girl” about a mysterious girl who may or may not exist, and, well, I won’t spoil the ending of “Cliff Burton Rules.” But on the other hand, your stories feel very realist. How do you handle reality versus irreality?
MH: There’s a thin line between reality and irreality, especially when dealing with a perspective that’s unreliable or somehow altered. There’s room to play with that in a way that feels natural. It’s a sort of magic. Fiction is magic. I thought about sticking to just realism when choosing what to put in the book, taking out all the things that made it strange or surreal, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun for the reader. It made the collection stronger to keep them in there.
DSR: A lot of characters in your collection suffer. I was taken by a line in “Stump Girl”: “At the end of class, everybody bows and smiles. Sara’s face is shiny, pink, happy. It’s like they’ve been through something awful but the struggle is worth it. I ask myself if the factory and living out the shards of life is worth it, the leaf blowers howling emptiness through my soul.” These characters struggle in different ways but in this story, the protagonist seems awed by the fact that his ex—Sara—seeks out struggle. So do you think struggle is an important aspect of stories and of writing?
MH: I think it’s an important aspect of humanness and truly living. We’re all desiring and being thwarted in our desires, and then we have self-doubt on top of that. It makes sense to me that characters would also suffer and struggle. Someone suffering from their desires, and for their desires, is part of what makes a story compelling. In that instance, in “Stump Girl,” the character desires his ex and sees that she doesn’t really need him. She’s chosen another path, a more difficult one maybe, but a path that belongs to her alone. So yeah, I’m pro-suffering, apparently!
DSR: In one of the stories, the protagonist writes that he hates happy endings. But your stories featuring younger narrators feel a lot more hopeful. What’s your take on hope and happy endings?
MH: I’m generally against happy endings, too, but it makes sense when writing from a younger perspective because the path forward seems wide open when you’re young. I like writing younger narrators and I like reading them. It’s beautiful to read a narrator who is hopeful and experiencing life for the first time. It’s hard not to be on that character’s side.
DSR: Your characters also tend to hold on to the past. Yet the stories you tell are very much in the present, moment to moment, without much jumping in chronology. Was that intentional?
MH: The past is present in their lives but remote at the same time. There’s constant forward motion, and glances backward are quick and pointed, a pacing choice that’s a feature in the stories. A story that jumps around in time would feel out of place in this book. But I realized when I was revising these that my writing has changed.
DSR: How has your writing changed?
MH: The collection feels like a younger person’s stories. Many of the narrators are younger. I’ve become interested in retrospective narrators with more life experience. Experience and the passage of time have an interesting effect on perspective. I like an older narrator looking back on herself as a younger character. Maybe no one else would notice a difference.
DSR: What are you working on now?
MH: I’ve written a bunch of drafts for a noir novel, which is unlike any of these stories. Then I’ve got tons of stories that need to be finished. There’s always something to work on.
DSR: Any last words?
MH: Sounds like a threat, like “Say your prayers!” Are you calling in an airstrike on me?
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