All Faculty Profiles

K Hank Jost

by Samantha Dunne

If you spend any amount of time with K Hank Jost, you’ll know reading and writing are his favorite things in the world.

It’s a love that colors everything he’s done—as a Gotham Fiction Writing teacher, a novelist, a founder of a literary journal, and even as a bartender.

“A piece of advice I have for anyone coming out of a writing program is just bartend for two years,” he says. “You’ll learn more about people serving them idiot juice than you will in any late-night conversation.”

But before that, he got a glimpse into different worlds and walks of life through books.

“The minute I could read, it became a thing that I was interested in,” he says. “And then I started writing. I feel like I’ve always had a thing where, if I consume something, I want to know how to make it as well.”

Growing up in a religious household in the South, reading was the one form of entertainment his Lutheran parents didn’t regulate. He wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies at sleepovers, but he could tear through the pages of Stephen King’s Cujo (much less scary).

“Reading had this sort of ‘this is where the truth is at’ mythos around it in my family,” Hank says. “This idea that bound between these covers is something that is other than the world. There’s something magical about that. It allows you to experience what you haven’t experienced.”

And while he doesn't adhere to Lutheranism himself (he’s a practicing Quaker—think nonviolent, nonconformist, nonhierarchical theology), he’s held onto the belief that a good book contains “something unseen, unheard, and inexplicable” between its covers.

It’s something he seeks out in submissions to A Common Well Journal, a language-forward project he runs with his publisher. They analyze each entry, giving customized feedback that makes even a rejection worthwhile.

“I think what's great about that project is that we get resubmissions and we build critical relationships with people,” Hank says. “We want to be the people that when (writers) write something that they've impressed themselves with… we’re the ones they send it to, because they know that we'll take care of it and spend the time on it.”

Hank says he favors literary over commercial fiction, stories that don’t demand the reader’s attention by way of spectacle or salacity, but the sanctity of the text itself. Because parsing through the labyrinth of language to uncover nuance and meaning is the essence of the art.

“It is a sacred thing,” he says. “To put one’s mind on a page and then share it with another mind is wild. You are responsible for the imagination of someone else so long as your words are in front of them.”

Hank’s own short stories and novels—MadStone, Deselections, “Dead Man Brilliant”, and “Tutelar”, to name a few—reflect that, inviting readers to partake in the messiness and brutality of the everyday. His characters aren’t cliched, cloying geniuses, but composites of real people with “their own brilliances and stupidities and follies and victories.”

Hank has worked his fair share of odd jobs to put his craft at the center of his life, and now, he says, getting to teach at Gotham Writers Workshop is an affirmation he made the right call.

“This is a huge opportunity, not only in legitimizing my practice, but also feeding my soul in a different way,” he says.

In the classroom, Hank is all about unpacking the writing process and helping students hit ever-moving milestones—because he loves nothing more than watching them get better.

“The work of the students will always be treated like the work of a potential genius. Everything we do in my classes, to that end, is figuring out the student’s individual brilliance and trying to guide toward that,” he says. “I am very serious about (writing) but this is no fun if you don’t feel like you’re getting better.”