When I arrive at the home of novelist Ernest Hebert in late fall, he’s outside splitting next winter’s firewood, holding up a chunk still bleeding sap for me to sniff before he even says hello. “It smells like wintergreen,” I say. “Black birch,” he answers, and leads me to his office in the garage, behind the woodpile.

Inside, there’s wood dust on the floor, and the walls and ceiling are made of wood. There’s a new computer and his late uncle’s Depression-era Underwood typewriter and a row of sticks just below the ceiling all around the room, hung from string fashioned into what looks like miniature nooses. I wonder if these are part of the research from Hebert’s latest novel, “Spoonwood,” in which a character whittles spoons out of New Hampshire hardwoods.

But no. They are just Hebert’s “stick sculptures,” born of his love for the visual arts, and he’s been making them for more than five years—from river driftwood, a pear tree, lilac branches. He started making them before he started writing “Spoonwood,” his eighth novel and the sixth and perhaps the last of the Darby series, a group of stories that chronicle life in a fictional New Hampshire town. His books have been lauded by the New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, among others. Hebert was also awarded the prestigious Sarah Josepha Hale Award in 2002.
And he’s a professor of English at Dartmouth College who, without apparent irony, describes himself as “not that smart.” Hebert writes, he says, to find out what he knows. At 64, he’s been married to the same woman for 36 years, splits wood for exercise, and drops the f-bomb more than once in an hour-long conversation.

“These days I write what I fucking please,” Hebert says, referring to various efforts he’s made in the past to write a bestseller. Not only did those efforts produce bad writing, he says, but he made himself miserable in the process. Now, he’s stopped trying to hit the writing jackpot. He does, however, struggle with the occasional bout of self-pity, or, as he puts it, “vaingloriousness.”

“Rejections make me angry,” Hebert says, admitting he still gets his fair share, as well as occasional not-so-glowing reviews. His strategy is to allow himself a full day of feeling bad, then move on. But the older he gets, the less it bothers him.

Born in 1941, Hebert grew up in Keene, in the southwest corner of New Hampshire. His Oak Street neighborhood was poor and crowded, and boyhood was exhilarating, dangerous—“It was normal to be constantly bleeding,” he says. The woods were two streets away, and that’s where he spent a lot of his time. His other refuge was the Keene library.

His first novel, “The Dogs of March,” was published in 1979. From then until “Live Free Or Die” was published in 1990, he wrote five books about the imagined town of Darby, N.H. After that, he wrote two non-Darby books; the modern Huck Finn road tale “Mad Boys,” which won a New Hampshire Writers’ Project Literary Award in 1993, and a well-received historical novel, “The Old American,” published in 2000.

Hebert’s writing has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Richard Russo, among others. The Darby series explores American class struggles, family tensions and changes in society over a period of three decades, seen through the prism a single northern town that’s drawn with an almost tactile sense of place and populated by flawed but sympathetic characters. Five years ago, though, it seemed unlikely that Hebert would write another Darby story. When “The Old American,” was published, he told interviewers that, as an Ivy League professor, he had become disconnected from the rural poor, whose lives and energy had driven the series. That’s still true, says Hebert—but “Spoonwood,” he points out, is “not about the rural poor.” The main character, Fred Elman, is from a poor family, but he’s college-educated.

With “Spoonwood,” returning to Darby after a hiatus of nearly 15 years “ wasn’t surprising, it was necessary,” Hebert says, adding, “I wanted to end on a high note after ‘Live Free or Die’ … I had to wait almost 15 years to start it. I have been waiting for a long time to write that book. It was kind of an existential act. It was the book I had to write.”

“Spoonwood” is told from the point of view of Birch, the now-teenaged son of Fred Elman, an educated son of a trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, a trust-fund daughter of local old money. In “Live Free Or Die,” Lilith dies giving birth to Birch on a mountain ledge. Fred arrives in time to save the boy and to reassure Lilith before she dies. The haunting image of Fred and his infant son coming down off that mountain, says Hebert, was one of the inspirations for “Spoonwood.”

Hebert was also inspired when he encountered Dan Dustin’s handmade wooden spoons at the annual League of N.H. Craftsmen Fair in Sunapee several years ago. “I could see, in those spoons, a metaphor for the northern woods,” he says, but it wasn’t until he started writing the book that the image of the spoonmaker united with the image of the father and son. “Spoonwood” was also influenced by an observation by Sigmund Freud, who described the phenomenon of total recall as a sign of hysteria. As the novel begins, Birch is telling his life story—beginning with his infancy—to his dead mother as he’s slowly freezing to death in a snowbank.

Told from such odd points of view, the narrative in “Spoonwood” might bend reality, but readers won’t feel as if they’re on alien terrain. Hebert’s trademark attention to character, plot and especially setting make “Spoonwood” elegantly readable, and his love of the northern forest is clear. “Certainly, in ‘Spoonwood,’ I’m celebrating the forest as a marvelous place,” he says, describing how things have changed since his own childhood, when the Environmental Protection Agency did not yet exist, and the local flora and fauna were suffering from environmental degradation.

But Hebert’s love of the natural world hasn’t inspired him to take overt political action. He says, “I don’t have the courage to be an activist. Being a fiction writer takes all the effort I can muster; it takes all my emotional energy.”

And bring a fiction writer hasn’t come easily. In order to consider himself a “bona fide novelist,” he had to publish five books. In his mind, publishing a single novel could be dismissed as “a fluke.”  Now that’s he’s got eight novels to his credit, he feels like a moderate success. “I consider myself a New Hampshire writer,” he says with the pride of a native, but feels that such regionality may limit his readership. Yet, he’s never considered living in or writing about other places. “All my stories are here,” he says.

But Hebert regrets—mildly, comically—that two of his Darby books, “A Little More Than Kin” and “The Passion of Estelle Jordan,” are sold bound together as “The Kinship,” while a third, “Whisper My Name,” is out of print. He likes the idea of six Darby novels making up “a Darby six-pack,” and this ruins his fantasy of a reader walking out of a store with a six-pack of beer in one hand and a six-pack of Darby stories in the other. As to whether the six-pack is the perfect size for a series, Hebert isn’t sure. “Right now I don’t feel like writing any more Darby books,” he says, but allows that since the series is about a town, and a town is forever changing, “I can’t say the story is ever complete.”

Back in his office, Hebert switches from desk to typewriter to computer as he now labors over what can only be described as memoir, a genre he’s never before attempted. He’s supplying autobiographical text for a forthcoming book of N.H. photographs by Jon Fox. He says, “Here I am, in my 60s, finally writing about myself. There’s a huge amount of material. Whether readers will care (remains to be seen).”

As he says good-bye, Hebert indicates a tattoo on his right hand—a long, dark mark that, up close, turns out to be an image of a stick sculpture, just like the ones inside his office. He designed the tattoo himself, he says, later explaining, “It represents my identity as a maker of things: I make a poem, I make a novel, I make a stick sculpture, I make a poster using Adobe Illustrator, I make this e-mail. I-make is who I am.”

Ernest Hebert on writing, typing and drinking

Novelist and Dartmouth College professor Ernest Hebert has a few unorthodox tips to pass on to aspiring writers. The first, he says, “is a dangerous idea. Most ideas are dangerous.” Here’s his advice: if you are over 21 years old, take a shot of whiskey before you write. Maybe a shot and a half. Definitely no more than two. “I’m not advocating heavy drinking,” he says—and truly, the alcoholic character Fred Elman in his latest novel “Spoonwood” shows the ugly side of drunkenness—but “alcohol, in small quantities, can provoke the creative center inside you.”

On a more technical level, Hebert has developed an unusual system of quality control for his own writing. Before the advent of computers, he would write a scene in longhand, type the page on his old Underwood typewriter, pull the page out, pencil-edit it, and retype it until he was satisfied. Then he’d go on to the next page. “I would not finish a chapter until it was solid, solid,” he says. But once he got a job as a newspaperman, he began to use word processing programs, which got him into trouble. “My writing was not as good,” he says. His solution these days is to write a scene in longhand, then type it into the computer in a graphics program called Adobe Illustrator. That keeps individual pages intact. Then, he prints the page out, pencil-edits it, and translates the changes to the screen. In this way, he builds the novel one page at a time. And when he gets stuck, he turns to the typewriter, the same Depression-era Underwood he inherited from his uncle in 1951. “I use it every day, at least for a paragraph or two,” Hebert says, “A typewriter makes you go forward. You can’t backspace. It creates tension, and tension can force you to do something neat.”

Along with moderate alcohol and typewriter use, Hebert thinks living in this neck of the woods is good for writers. The northeast produces some of the finest writers in America, he says, naming E. Annie Proulx, John Irving, even Stephen King—whom he refers to as a “genius” on par with Shakespeare and Picasso.

Hebert attributes the region’s literary fertility in part to the abundance of school and town libraries. “It’s not that way in the rest of the country,” he says, adding, “There’s a literary tradition here. If you have a sensitivity to writing, you will find it here.”