BreakBread Spotlight with Jameson Hudalla
Jameson Hudalla’s nonfiction story “The Hot Tub Kingdom” appeared in Issue 3 of BreakBread Magazine. Hudalla first heard of BreakBread in a class for her Master of Fine Arts program at Hollins University. As part of our ongoing series featuring discussions with our contributors about their work and craft, we interviewed Hudalla.
“The Hot Tub Kingdom” is both a title and a setting. Hudalla said, “the hot tub is used as a container to help structure the story” on the one hand. It also allows her “to reflect the confined nature of the environment.” The structure of the story is very character-focused. Characters include the Fire King, President Dirk, Neighbor Boy Dylan, and others like Hudalla herself who is the driver of the action.
These people are old acquaintances of the author and are characterized by their maldaptedness to the surrounding area. Largely, this story demonstrates the homogenizing effects of growing up that are made more pronounced by feeling far from where you ought to be. Some people sell insurance down the road from where they grew up; some write books miles and miles away. We forget how these people all start at the same spot.
Hudalla’s work, in her view, is midwestern gothic: a glimpse of Wisconsin where she grew up and where she spent time. As in many other rural areas, Hudalla found the “inhospitable nature of the environment—such as the weather and the lack of things to do—did often lead to alcohol.” This is the unhealthy way the characters cope. But, the drinking also brings them together into this kingdom led by the Fire King.
Reflecting on the urge to drink and, if nothing else, not exist in her current time and place led Hudalla to this piece’s most captivating quality. The freedom of the hot tub represented a place where “we got to think and share more intimate thoughts rather than function on autopilot, which I consider the first stirrings of wanting to break out of that mold.”
Hudalla mentioned that there was difficulty on her part in creating Fire King while respecting the fact that he was a real man still walking around. “I started with a first-person singular perspective and shifted to using plural more often when I realized it was less about me and more about the group identity we’d formed with the Fire King as our leader,” said Hudalla. “I wanted to make him mythic, larger than life, because that’s how it felt when we were young.”
But, a few years separation shows the wisdom we all come to know. This is why, according to Hudalla, she included the scene of the Fire King running into the snow but not making it all that far.
“There’s also a resistance to growing up reflected in the desire to relive the same Friday night over and over, and one of the only moments this pseudo Peter-Pan existence is punctured is when the Fire King gets injured running through the snow. It represents our future realities and the end of our teenage invincibility.”
Read Hudalla’s piece “The Hot Tub Kingdom” here.
Written by Clayton Tomlinson