“I’m constantly mining my own journals,” Bruce Hopkins says in this On the Fly interview recorded in November 2010. Hopkins was in Iowa City to read from When Foxes Wore Red Vests at Prairie Lights.
In addition to being a writer, Hopkins is an environmental educator and historian. He has a doctorate from Iowa State University and his teaching and administrative career has included time in Iowa as well as in New York and Nebraska.
In addition to discussing the personal and professional importance of his journals (and his tendency to draw leaves in them), Hopkins discusses the importance of bookstores, his habit of writing in the very early morning, and the “edge” he’d like to include in his writing.
Hopkins also reflects on the desire to get closer to writers he reveres. “There’s a spiritual dimension,” he says, “to every writer I have known.”
