In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Interview with Robin Hemley
  • Margaret von Steinen (bio)

“You can’t change the past. You can only change the way you feel about the past,” says Robin Hemley, director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, in his latest book Do-Over—and that’s the task he took on by revisiting and writing about ten embarrassing childhood experiences that continued to haunt him as an adult. Approaching the mid-century mark of his life, Hemley acknowledged he still carried a “passel of regrets” from his youth—a flubbed line in the second-grade school play, being the kid who was “always picked last for everything,” stepping down to bullies, being least cool in eighth grade, not asking the girl he had a crush on to senior prom, leaving Japan mid-year as a high school exchange student because he was homesick—and similar experiences that can be viewed as catastrophic by a child or teenager. He thought that if he did-over some of the major events of his youth that he had labeled “failures and mistakes,” he might gain new perspectives on the past. Over the course of a year, Hemley embarked on knocking off a Top 10 list of weeklong do-overs. Serious as it might sound, the book is often laugh-out-loud funny. As he “storms the halls of childhood,” reliving remembered experiences through his high school years, Hemley learns that classroom bullies are still on the make, papier-mâché projects are still part of the curriculum, and that the thought of asking a girl to the prom—the object of his senior-year crush, 30 years later—was still fraught with visions of rejection.

Do-Over, which Hemley labels as an “immersion memoir,” is his seventh book in a catalog of work that takes a walk around the library to collect. In the fiction section, from early on in a prolific career that began in the late 1980s, [End Page 135] are his novel The Last Studebaker and two story collections, The Big Ear and All You Can Eat. Nearby are his popular craft book Turning Life into Fiction, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection that has sold more than 50,000 copies, and Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists, the anthology of nonrealist and experimental stories coedited with Michael Martone. His first memoir, Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art and Madness, which won an Independent Press Book Award for Nonfiction, is shelved in the internal-medicine section. In 2003, Hemley expanded into the Asia section of the library with his investigation of an anthropological controversy, Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday.

Hemley’s insatiable curiosity and willingness to experiment in all literary genres was spurred by a rich literary upbringing—Hemley’s mother, Elaine Gottlieb Hemley, was a fiction writer, and his father, Cecil Hemley, was a poet and publisher. He learned early on to embrace the flexible boundaries of memory and truth in literary works, which lends to the relaxed tone of Do-Over as each chapter segues back and forth between remembered experience and relived experience. Hemley hoped to diminish the constant intrusion of life’s regrets from the past onto the present. As memoirist Patricia Hampl has observed, the result is “a touching mid-life memoir in which the heart of a child is soothed and liberated.”

I first met Hemley in July 2008 in Prague, where he was teaching a two-week creative nonfiction workshop for Western Michigan University’s Prague Summer Program and gave a hilarious reading from his kindergarten do-over. In December 2008, while he was on sabbatical in the Philippines, I caught up with him on Skype for an online conversation about his book and the ever-evolving genre of creative nonfiction.

Von Steinen:

This book extends the memoir from being a personal account of remembering significant events in one’s past to being an account of actually reliving remembered experiences and writing about both present and past experiences. How did you come up with the idea?

Hemley:

It came about in stages. I had been meeting for a while in Iowa City with students in our graduate...

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