An Interview with H.S. Cross
conducted by Amande Green in Brooklyn, 28 July 2008
You don’t have an English accent. Where are you from?
I grew up in Michigan and moved to New York when I was seventeen.
But you lived in England, right?
No.
Did you do a lot of research in working on Riding?
It was never formal, but I suffered a growing interest in the time and place over many years and many contexts.
Riding is a long book. Volume one alone comes in close to five hundred pages. How long is volume two?
About the same.
Why did you write such a long book?
It wasn’t on purpose. I wanted it to be shorter, but the story didn’t oblige.
It’s a fairly quick read, though.
I hope it isn’t ponderous. My taste runs to the Victorian novel, and I have a hard time caring about the svelte novel of today, mostly because in lots of them you don’t get to spend enough time with the characters for them to earn the change.
What do you mean by earning the change?
Well, for example, I remember reading Charlotte Bronte’s second novel, Shirley. It’s a typically grim book, and for hundreds of pages it seems that nothing is really happening. You keep reading because the writing is good and for some reason you can’t put it down, but then, at the end, when the characters finally come around, there’s a sense of true, living change—you as the reader have lived with these people long enough that the change feels real, and is real. To me, that kind of investment in reading (both time and, back then, money) is something that repays itself. That’s the kind of book I would hope to write.
How long did it take you to write Riding?
Longer than I’m willing to admit.
What was your own education like? Do you have personal experience with “the greenhouse of the great”?
I was educated at a Montessori school, a large public high school, and a small Quaker high school. I got my AB at Harvard, which certainly thought of itself as that kind of greenhouse.
Were you always writing when you were small?
I always had stories I told myself when going to sleep. I had slow handwriting, though, and was an appalling speller, so writing was arduous. I didn’t get going seriously until after college.
What other jobs have you had?
For ten years I taught at a Quaker school in the heart of Manhattan. I’ve also done a stint teaching history at an all-boys boarding school.
Ha! Like Mr. Grieves?
Not even remotely!
What’s your most memorable literary experience?
Having Bleak House read aloud to me, in its entirety.
Wow. How long did that take?
About six months. Dickens is one of those writers, though, who is best read aloud.
There’s a lot about the theater in Riding. What’s your most memorable theater experience?
Tough call. Probably seeing The Sound of Music (Broadway tour) when I was five, my first trip to the theater. After that I’d rank seeing the RSC Nicholas Nickleby in 1985 (all eight hours in one day), then in 2005 seeing His Dark Materials at the National Theatre (also in one day).
And we begin to see why you like the long plot.
Mea culpa.
There’s a bit of the playwright manqué about your writing, don’t you think?
Probably. I grew up in the theater. There was a children’s theater in my town, and I was in three or four shows every year from the age of five. I also got into commercials, and for three years I was on a weekly television show. At sixteen I started directing, which I continued in college.
Was theater your major?
Harvard didn’t have a theater major, or a theater department; but it did have a massive extracurricular theater program. The undergraduates did about forty shows every semester, all extracurricular. It was a wonderful kind of benign neglect. I directed fifteen plays there, one of which I wrote.
Was it set in England?
It was set in Detroit. It was the thinly veiled autobio-graphical piece that everyone has to get out of the way so they can start writing properly.
Is Riding autobiographical?
No.
What else have you written?
As an undergraduate, I wrote for Let’s Go: Britain and Ireland. For the theater, I’ve written a couple of other short plays, and for middle school students I wrote two textbooks. I’ve also got an unpublished novel and a short story or two.
What are you working on now?
Two books: a prequel to Riding called Wilberforce.
Ooh! About the Great Wilberforce?
Of course. And an adventure novel set in Peru.
When will we see the second volume of Riding?
By the end of September, hopefully.
Ask the author
To submit questions for the next interview, please email Amande Green.