David Hoppe

David Hoppe is available
for freelance writing and editing assignments; and consulting with commercial and nonprofit cultural organizations. Resume and references available upon request.

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:: Fiction

After Paul McCartney (pdf)

Excerpts from a larger collage about friendship, inspiration, the wages of personal creativity in a celebrity culture and the mystery behind the most important artistic collaboration of the 20th century. After Paul McCartney has also been adapted into a cycle of poems and a performance piece that is now in the early stages of production, directed by John Green and starring Robert K. Johansen.

Cubs: A Sentimental Fable (pdf)

This is the opening from a novel about a certain kind of Chicago baseball. It imagines a championship season for the Chicago Cubs and considers the role of circumstances beyond our control, or luck, in the lives we lead. Begun in San Anselmo, California. I lived near the ocean but missed Lake Michigan.

My Experiences During the First Days of Alligators (pdf)

This novella was written during the winter in Sheridan Beach on the outskirts of Michigan City, Indiana. We lived in a small blue house overlooking Lake Michigan. In those parts, in those days, the beach was considered the wrong side of town. Now it's a haven for rich Chicagoans.

These stories are set in and around Indiana Dunes country, the deeply conflicted, barely known and extraordinarily beautiful stretch along the base of Lake Michigan. They were written in the mid 1980s, but the terrain covered is still pretty much the same.

Blue Car

Father to the Man (pdf)

Get It (pdf)

Making it Safe (pdf)

Praise for David Hoppe's fiction

"David Hoppe has staked a claim on a specific American location - Lakeshore territory - and has populated his work with unique and indigenous characters, but these are timeless stories told with equal parts of rigorous discipline and compassion. "
-- Mary Robison, author of An Amateur's Guide to the Night and Days

"David Hoppe's stories in Local History catch the exuberance of being one's own man inside our social straight jackets: a father and son juggling opposite hopes, a Cadillac-sized boast that turns into a love affair, the habits and habitats of loud neighbors, and other of his fictive situations all are recognizable and left, by writer and reader, with empathy, and care. a tender story teller of stories that are often fun to read."
-- Richard Elman, author of An Education in Blood and The Poorhouse State

"David Hoppe's skein of short stories is a tautly woven, tightly patterned achievement - a firstrate debut. His characters drift through the dunes and everywhere the glint of menace, gleam of love irradiates the landscape. A tone-perfect ear and a noticing eye help Hoppe act as guide; may many readers follow where he leads."
--Nicholas Delbanco, author of the Sherbrookes trilogy and About My Table and Other Stories

"David Hoppe's short story collection Local History is not just filled with the rich specifics of place and the piquant individuality of characters, but with a governing sensibility that creates its own territorial claims: here is a small part of the world seen thoughtfully and thoroughly, observed with humor and rue, and transmitted to the reader with calibrated intensity and steady urgency. All the stories are engrossing: many are mesmerizing. Local History is a remarkable debut."
-- William O'Rourke, author of Idle Hands and The Meekness of Issac