Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Joe Bond is a writer from eastern Kentucky, now living in New Orleans. His debut novel Hope House released from Hub City Press on May 26th. The book follows a group of adolescent boys in a state-run home for juvenile delinquents in 1980s Kentucky, and a scrappy young counselor trying to teach them all he knows. Bond’s father ran homes like these all throughout his childhood, and the boys his father tried to help were a big part of his life. He’s written about those real life experiences for The Paris Review.
Enjoy our conversation about group-home and small-town relations, changes in the juvenile justice system, and Bond’s father’s reactions to the book, below.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Yonder: Can we start with a little bit of biography? Can you tell me about yourself, where you’re from, what you do?
Joe Bond: I grew up in a small town in eastern Kentucky called Cannonsburg, right in the corner where Ohio and West Virginia and Kentucky all come together. Most of my friends’ dads worked at a steel mill, or at a coke plant, a refinery. Those were the typical jobs. But my dad ran a boys’ home, so he was a little bit different. [I] grew up around the home and the teenagers there. That part of Eastern Kentucky was pretty homogenous. It was lower-to-middle class and almost everyone was white. My dad’s boys came from around Cincinnati and Louisville and Lexington, but also from the mountains. We had a pretty diverse group of teenagers who had been committed through the state and there were some pretty interesting kids. They came from broken homes. They’d been in trouble, sold drugs, stole cars. I grew up with one foot in a “normal” world (for Eastern Kentucky), and simultaneously around my dad’s boys, which was a different experience.
DY: It’s interesting having read the book to know that that’s the perspective you have on this whole world. How much, as a kid, did you feel like one of the members of the Hope House equivalent that existed in real life?
JB: My dad had worked in homes since before I was born, so there was never a point where it wasn’t part of my life. I remember being five or six, going to work with him at a group home. He would go to counseling with the boys and I would play in his office.
Joe Bond’s debut novel Hope House released from Hub City Press on May 26th. The book follows a group of adolescent boys in a state-run home for juvenile delinquents in 1980s Kentucky.
I remember having some toy cars and I was just sitting there playing and the door got kicked open and a kid came in who had lost control of himself. He was screaming and the childcare workers were trying to calm him down. I remember scooting my cars back because he was on the floor fighting. I just kept playing. It never entered my mind that this was weird or extreme. It was just life – these things happened. We took our family vacations with the boys to the beach one time. My sister, my mom and I went too. I just jumped in the van. My dad took his boys everywhere. A lot of the big camps and juvenile detention centers back then and even now, it’s all incarceration. You lock the kids up and keep them there. But my dad had a totally different point of view. His idea was to take the kids back out in the world. Some of the boys had never been out of Louisville. They’d never seen the ocean. He would take them to the movies. He would take them to baseball games, take them hiking and fishing and camping, let them see the world. I tagged along and listened to their stories. They’d talk about where they were from and what had gone wrong in their lives, who they had back home. I got to see the world through their eyes.
DY: One thing that I wanted to hear you talk about a little bit more is, you’re telling a very small piece of the history of bureaucratization in juvenile detention and foster care systems, and of the death of this more informal, creative, almost haphazard kind of group home. I think there are several allusions to this shift throughout the book, where the boys say things like, “Places like this don’t really exist anymore.” Can you expand a little on that history as far as you know it?
JB: There were a lot of bad places where kids were abused or even killed. One reaction to that was more oversight and intervention, to put in protections for the kids, which had to be done. But over time, some of the changes and the bureaucracy that followed and the distrust made it harder to really reach a kid. You can make it safer for kids in care, but you can also make it to where they’re never allowed to leave the facility. You can do harm in different ways.
One of our counselors had a swimming pool at his house and wanted to take his boys swimming. He was told, “No, you can’t take them to your house. No way.” If the end goal is for these kids to be back out in the world, you have to let them out some. If you isolate them from the world that they’re going back into, you’re really doing them a disservice. At one home, licensing wouldn’t let our kids have jobs. They weren’t allowed to work at the local McDonald’s. To me, that is really short-sighted. I mean, the boys might make mistakes when they go out in the world. They might screw things up, but eventually life outside is going to resume.
DY: I think the way that you handled place in the book was fascinating because I think you really give a sense of that mission on the part of Hope House, for the boys to be out in the world, as you say. And also I thought that you really maintained the sort of distance that these kids in the novel feel from the town that they live in. Can you talk about how you were thinking about their relationship to this town that you depict?
JB: They’re outsiders. That was something I observed in real life.
Most of our kids went to an alternative school. But a few did get to go to public school, and I went to school with them. A lot of our boys played sports, which was pretty controversial in the community. Some people understood the big picture, that these were kids who’ve come from super difficult environments and they didn’t have families and this was their only chance. They supported our boys being in public school with their own children. Others did not support it.
It was real life. Our boys had been through a lot, and whatever changes they’d made for the better, they were still pretty prone to making mistakes. We had kids get in fights. They stole cars. People in the community did not want their cars to be stolen. That’s the risk. You work with kids and let them back out in the world, and sometimes they make mistakes. If you’re from Louisville, and you’ve been sent off for selling drugs and that’s the only world you’ve known, then all of a sudden you’re in a public high school in Eastern Kentucky in the year 1990, it can be pretty tough, even if you’re a great basketball player. You’re going to be surrounded by kids that have lived different lives than you. Some of the people in the community were great. They had good hearts. Other people did not. We had incidents where our boys got jumped. Four or five of our kids who wanted to go to public school and live a normal life, just vastly outnumbered. I remember my dad talking to the high school principal, who refused to punish anyone for beating up our kids. He told my dad that sometimes you just have to take a beating.
DY: Is your dad still around? Has he read the book?
JB: Yes. I sent him an early chapter and he didn’t respond. I called my mom and she said, “He’s back in the bedroom, crying.” He was a great reader. I would send him a chapter at a time and he would call me and tell me who my characters really were.
DY: What was his best edit?
JB: He was great with Karvel McLemore, who is the most sophisticated kid in the book. Karvel is this really street smart kid who understands how trapped he is in life. The world he walks into back home, there’s almost no real way for him to legally survive it. He can be a very successful drug dealer or a very unsuccessful cook at the McDonald’s He’s smart enough to know his situation. In the book, he battles with his counselor, Mr. Watts, about that. My dad’s insight was that it was all happening too quickly on the page, that in real life, you could not turn a kid in a couple of months. I had to go back and revise that timeline. I knew kids like that too. Their trust issues were earned. They had been through other places and when they walk in the door, nothing you say is going to make them believe that you’re different from the people they’ve already met and the people they’ve already had to deal with. It just takes time and you’ve got to build a relationship with the kid. Mr. Watts is based on my dad. I thought I’d made that character too young, but Dad reminded me that he was even younger when he ran his first group home.
DY: I’ve asked you a lot about the real life stuff that helped you write this book. I want to know a little bit now about the more writerly side. Is this a novel you’ve been working on forever? How did it come about?
Joe Bond is a writer from eastern Kentucky, now living in New Orleans. (Photo courtesy of Joe Bond)
JB: I spent years writing about the wrong stuff. Never even thought about writing about the boys I knew and grew up around. I don’t know for sure why I started, but the context was that I became a father. I had a son, and I remember him being about two years old and I had no time to write. I would take him to playgrounds all over Atlanta, where I was living, and the only thing I had time to write was poems. I’d written a poem about a kid who had eaten a lightbulb, which really happened. I just remember writing lines here and there, when I had time. But the kids were pretty complicated, and to write about them in a human way, I needed more context.
I took one poem and turned it into a story. That one was about Damico. It won an award, and by then I had six or seven kids I was writing about and I could see them coming together as a group.That was around 2018 or 2019. At that point I realized, “Okay, I think I have enough material for a novel.” I drafted it over a few years and wrote way too much. I ended up cutting 50,000 words. But over time and over several years, the group came together and I figured out how the boys cared about each other. The timeline was tricky because in real life, kids come and go. That happens in the book some, but I needed a lot of material with them together. The timeline was the trickiest thing to figure out.
DY: Did you have a day job? Do you now?
JB: I’ve done all kinds of stuff. For a while, in high school and in college, I worked in homes. I worked night shift. I worked days, directly with the kids. I coached the softball team. I took the boys on home visits and saw what they’d come from. I went back to get them. I worked in journalism for a long time, writing and editing. I did landscaping. I was a security guard. I worked at a psychiatric hospital. I was a librarian when I lived in New York City. I worked at a law firm in Times Square and did research. That was a good job because I could read books in my downtime. That’s when I was figuring out that I wanted to be a writer. I finished this novel, and now I’m trying to write another one while raising two children.
DY: That’s plenty. What’s the other book about?
JB: Friendship. If you took two kids who could have been in Hope House and put them in their twenties and thirties without actually growing them up, those are my characters. Two friends who need each other.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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