PROFILE: Hebert writes what he knows -- this region
As published on page one of the June 4, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.
WESTMORELAND -- Ernest Hebert's ninth novel will be published in September. Titled "Never Back Down" and set in Keene, it chronicles 40 years in the life of a French-Canadian member of southern New Hampshire's working class.
"It's my life if I hadn't gone to college," Hebert says.
Hebert, who turned 70 in May, is a tenured professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, where he heads the creative writing program. But his road to the Ivy League was long -- and it ran almost entirely through the Monadnock Region.
"The Dogs of March," Hebert's first novel, was published when he was in his 30s and working as a reporter for The Sentinel.
The protagonist is, in Hebert's words, a "tough but tender" worker in a Keene textile mill. Howard Elman lives in the fictional town of Darby, situated on the Connecticut River 10 miles out of Keene.
Darby is largely based on Westmoreland, Hebert says, with sections of Sullivan and Dublin mixed in to supply the class tension that features in many of his stories. The people of Darby went on to star in five more of Hebert's published books and he has finished a seventh Darby novel, though he hasn't yet sent it to a publisher.
In addition to the Darby novels, Hebert has written one 1993 "cyber punk road book" and a 2000 historical novel, "The Old American," set in the mid-1700s and based on the true story of early Keene settler Nathan Blake.
A plaque set in a lump of granite on the lawn of the modern-day Blake House, on the corner of Main and Winchester streets on the Keene State College campus, commemorates the years Blake spent as a captive of Native Americans.
"The idea of Indians raiding Keene was really exciting to me as a little kid," Hebert says.
Hebert's stories are subtly funny, character-driven dramas of New England life. The plot of one Darby book -- according to its dust jacket -- revolves around a special town meeting on a proposal to build a shopping mall.
But if the stories are mundane, the themes are as lofty as they come.
"Religion, race and class -- what else is there, really?" Hebert asks.
Hebert grew up on Oak Street in Keene and applied to Keene State in high school. But his test scores were so bad, he says, he didn't get in. He worked for the phone company for several years before reapplying to Keene State, where he studied history and English in his late 20s.
Asked who he writes for, Herbert seems to dismiss the idea anyone would read his books.
"I write about working people, but I write in a literary style," he says. "If I thought about audience I wouldn't have written the books that I did, or I wouldn't have written at all."
But Hebert's old friend and editor, fellow Keene writer Terry Pindell, gives a different response to a similar question.
"I know Ernie wanted the world at large to know the humanity of people who live in shacks and people who live outside the mainstream society," he says. "He just wants to open their eyes."
Pindell believes Hebert has "found his niche" at Dartmouth, where he has taught creative writing since the early 1980s.
This spring he supervised the thesis projects of three undergraduate creative writing students.
Describing his students' work, Hebert talks with the familiarity he shows for the Darby series, but with a pride you don't hear when he talks about his own books.
Student Ariela Anhalt says Hebert may be the best teacher she's ever had. He "has probably a billion stories filed away in his head," she says, but his own talent doesn't get in the way of his teaching.
"He has kind of a unique workshop style -- he doesn't say very much in class," she says. "You never feel like he's trying to push his style on you, but he inspires his students' enthusiasm and creativity."
The stories Hebert tells about people who helped him learn to write reflect his own teaching philosophy. There was the freshman composition teacher at Keene State who told him he had potential ("It was the first time that a teacher ever said anything kind about my work"), and the Sentinel sports editor ("A real old newspaper man") who gave him free rein to experiment.
Later, about a year before he finished "The Dogs of March," Hebert sent one of his stories to writer John Gardner ("a grand poobah") at Middlebury (Vt.) College's prestigious Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Hebert says the critique was one of the worst experiences of his writing life.
Gardner hadn't read the story, according to Hebert.
"He pointed to a spot about a third of the way down the first page and said, 'no real writer would write a sentence like that,' " he says.
Today, Hebert says he's "grateful for the trauma" of that encounter. Not only did it give him the perspective he needed to write his first book, he says, he learned something about helping beginning writers.
"I treat everyone differently," he says. "Some people need their asses kicked, some people need a little bit of line-by-line, some just need encouragement. What I needed at the time was to be held underwater for six minutes."
In 2009, Hebert and his wife, photographer Medora Hebert, moved back to Westmoreland from the Upper Valley. Medora worked with an architect to design their house, modeled after an artist's studio that burned down during the years when they lived on the same road in the 1970s.
Returning to Westmoreland was "a real homecoming," Hebert says. "People said 'Ernie and Medora have come home.' They treated us like we never left."
But he seems happy to continue driving to Dartmouth.
"I love going to work and talking to young people. The older I get, the better I like it, and I have no desire to retire," he says. "I love my job."
tagged with: Dartmouth College, Ernie Hebert, profile
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