SmokeLong Quarterly

Truly extraordinary ending. Wow! Wow! Is this a typical Hampel ending?

I would say that the story itself—driven by the conversation and the characters who are normal people that anyone can relate to—is a typical story of mine, the ending is one thing I can never control when I’m writing. I may have an idea of where the story is going but that doesn’t mean it’ll end up there. I don’t fight it, though, I let the story go where it wants to.

I think of that mom breaking down and that toilet he’s staring at and I think, man, you really nailed that moment. Was it hard to capture that scene in which a son finds out about a parent’s death?

It was after I heard that an old friend’s brother had passed away in a car accident, and my girlfriend and I were in a Mexican restaurant, that I thought about how I have never had anyone close to me die before. I wondered what it was like to get the sudden news that a loved one had died and how I would react. No matter how much I thought about it, I just had no idea. I wrote what I felt it would be like, hearing the news and coming to grips with what it meant. It wasn’t hard at all to write the scene, and capturing the moment in a way that anyone could relate to was just pure luck.

How do we do it? How do we get to a point when the “effects of these deaths are lost” and we become people “hungry for Mexican food”?

Time is the ultimate healer. With time comes acceptance and forgiveness; having never been through any major loss, though, I can only guess how we get to that point.

Hey, Josh. How about you?—are you okay, Babe?

Things could always be worse, huh?

What’s up in Wichita, Kansas. Go Jayhawks?

I was told to say: “Yeah, go Jayhawks,” as well as, “Hell no, go Shockers,” but honestly I don’t follow soccer so I really wouldn’t know which one to cheer for.