Tipping Point
In every struggle there is a moment that is afterward recognized as the point when the tide began to turn, when success became sure. Those who have struggled, over the past two decades especially, to bring the reality of children’s widespread sexual exploitation to light, can only hope that the present attention to the assault […]
Midnight Oil Magazine Interview
Instructive Delight: an interview with Richard Hoffman – Midnight Oil magazine Midnight Oil: You write in three genres; how do you know which genre is best suited to an idea? Richard Hoffman: Poems seem to come to me as phrases and rhythms to be developed, essays as ideas, and fiction as characters. For me, writing […]
Lifeboat Magazine Interview
Lifeboat magazine’s interview with Richard Hoffman by Amy Biancolli AB: Let’s start with the big, loaded question. Please define memoir. Is it synonymous with autobiography — and while we’re at it, what’s autobiography, anyway? RH: Well, it’s funny, memoir is one of those forms that I think that everytime you try to define it, it […]
Keynote on Child Abuse
Keynote: Current THinking / New Directions Conference, Friday 18 June 2004, Sheraton Hyannis Resort, sponsored by Children’s Cove: Cape Cod Child Advocacy Center and Michael O’Keefe, Barnstable County District Attorney. It is a great honor to address you this morning, to be included in this program with Lucy Berliner, with Dr. Goldberg, with Jim McLaughlin […]
Sugar
We’re in the check-out line and I’m putting the groceries on the counter. This is the hardest part of shopping with a two-year-old. Jeffrey’s apple, healthful consolation for all the things I have refused him, is down to the core, and he’s working himself up to a crescendo of desire. “Daddy, I want a… a… […]
From this Distance, At this Speed
Early morning. Beside the Interstate, westbound, on the way to my father’s house, two men stand on a wooden scaffold before a blank white billboard. The billboard is new: the bottom a green enamel trellis, the sign-space perfect white, not painted over and with two floodlamps on long pipes that hook over the top. One […]
Trust the Experts
Recent articles in the press have discussed the case of an Air Force policeman, Paul Busa, who has come forward to bring charges against the Rev. Paul Shanley. After viewing TV coverage of other allegations against the notorious self-professed proponent of sex with children, Mr. Busa says he broke down and cried, recognizing his own […]
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs, Secure. It was difficult to sing in face Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves Or else avert the object. – Wallace Stevens, “Credences of Summer” Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, How I Learned to Drive, the latest American play to move from the […]
The Hatred of Innocence
(An edited version of this essay appeared as an op-ed under the title “Changing the language of sex-crimes against children,” Boston Globe, 11/23/98.) My ten-year-old daughter brought us the news. She told of a little boy across town who had been kidnapped, raped, and killed. She insisted I turn on the TV to find out […]
Backtalk: Notes Toward an Essay on Memoir
“To employ a textual structure which cracks wide open the whole literary convention of an age seems in more than one case to be the only means by which truth and literature can be reconciled.” — Richard Coe When the Grass Was Taller, p.85 The act of remembering one’s life and examining it for meaning […]
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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