Hope House, Joe Bond’s debut novel, dares to wish for more than the world can offer to the “troubled boys” at its center. The boys – AWOL who runs away, Karvel who’s in charge, and Damico who just had a child – are limping towards adulthood and the five phases needed to graduate from their treatment home in 1980s Kentucky. Together their interweaving narratives paint a picture of a home that is on the verge of closing, a father who would sacrifice everything for his court-ordered sons, and a world where hope can be written on the nametag of a fast food uniform.
Joe Bond grew up in these places and gives them an earnestness that no other writer could. He can make a story turn in one five-letter sentence, revealing a morsel of information that demolishes what you previously thought about a character, a situation, a worldview.
Luke Sullivan: Tell us a little bit about your background? How did you come to be a writer?
Joe Bond: In college I was a psychology major because I had grown up around boys’ homes. My dad ran one and that’s what I was planning to do, run a little home and be a counselor and work with kids. In college I started writing about other things, and then during the summer I would work with my dad. Boys’ homes were always in some state of closing, it was difficult and even though I’d grown up around it and loved being around the boys, I started to discover that I wanted to do something else.
I stuck with psychology and finished my degree. I was in Kentucky and my wife was in nursing school. One of the homes wasn’t open so I couldn’t do that, and I was starting to make some money writing, covering sports. And I was doing enough to kind of get by, but also couldn’t go anywhere because she was in school, so I started taking some English classes and journalism too.
I really had not been a huge reader growing up. I came to everything later. I was in public school in eastern Kentucky, and I had some teachers who really cared about books. But I found those teachers very late, and so when I started really getting into literature I was taking community college classes. Discovering these writers when I was 23, 24 years old I thought everyone else had already discovered them. I felt like I was so far behind. But it was actually a good thing because I read all the time. I felt like I had to catch up. I fell in love with it and pursued that route.
LS: Do you think that your background in psychology helped you as a writer? What about as a reader?
JB: I loved psychology. Brain and behavior was one of my favorite classes because I loved the neuroscience of it. I also love social psychology. It taught me a lot about how people think and respond to pressures in a group. I learned a lot from my dad too, growing up watching him around the boys. He was the kind of person who would always ask questions, but he would never tell you the answers. You were constantly put in a position of having to figure things out.
I was around these kids from different backgrounds and who had so many things going on in their lives. Teenagers that I would hear their stories and it would immediately expand my worldview. Being in eastern Kentucky, it sounds like just a small, narrow world but these kids were from Louisville and Cincinnati and Lexington and their lives were so different.
So I had that background worldview, and when I was starting to get into books and literature. I had an American Lit survey course with Tom Marksbury who had us read just tons and tons of writers, and I loved his class. Also, Kim Edwards was one of my creative writing teachers. She wrote The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which was a huge bestseller and she was a great teacher too. They recommended Richard Ford, Richard Yates, I love those stories, Denis Johnson. I remember going into the public library, because again, I didn’t read a lot when I grew up, I read pro wrestling magazines and things like that, sometimes the newspaper, and I remember seeing John Cheever on the shelf. Here were all of these people that I had started to hear about, all the books, it was like being at a buffet. I just felt like you could check out these books and read them. I think maybe this is something that happens to a lot of writers when they are younger but for me it was at 23 or 24.
LS: I think that is a very relatable moment for a lot of writers. How did you get started writing Hope House in particular? Did you immediately start writing about those experiences or was it more winding?
JB: In hindsight this feels like what I should have been working on all along, but I never had plans to write it. I worked in the home until about my sophomore year of college or so and then I was done with that world, I just kind of forgot about it. I probably spent 10 or 15 years writing about the wrong stuff. I was making a lot of mistakes and getting tons of rejections. And not a lot of feedback, so what I was learning was that these stories I was writing are not being accepted. I don’t know why I started writing about the kids I had grown up around, except for that I had a kid. I had a child, he was probably around two when I started writing these poems. I didn’t have much time to write. I was in Atlanta at the time and I would be standing there at the playground, watching him run around, and I could start to write some lines.
I would write about some of the kids I knew, and imagining different things. I never planned on it. The first person poem I wrote was about a kid who ate a light bulb and that became Tony in Hope House. I couldn’t remember really why he ate that light bulb, so I was writing to try and figure it out, to give him some complication, not just a goofy thing that he did. I wished I figured it out sooner, that was what I wanted to write about, but probably I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I needed those years to get better.
LS: Okay, so you have Tony with the light bulb. Where do you go from there?
JB: Right, so none of these poems were ever really finished, but that’s the early form they were taking. I could write moments, like I’m standing around watching my son and I had a moment where he was hugging a kid, like embracing him, I knew something had happened and I thought that it would be a powerful moment. And so I had to go back and figure out, well, why is this other kid, like what’s the origin of the embrace, and that became a story, the first story, the Damico that won the Masters Review contest.
I really wrote backward from that moment. I knew that this kid was going to take care of this other kid, and I figured out, well, he’s got a kid, he’s got a son even though he’s 16 years old, but he has no access to the kid but still cares about him. I would find those moments and then work backward and discover the things they said, the things they did.
LS: What was the feeling like when you won the Masters Review prize for that story? Were you excited?
JB: Yes, it was. I was honestly, I was stunned. I had gone years with rejections, and I had just started to finally get some stories published. I had this setup where I would submit the story then forget about it, go on with something else. When I wrote that story the whole thing was really starting to come together so I just went on to the next kid and the next story I wanted to write. I had a setup where I would not check emails or anything because I didn’t want to see any rejections. I was like, “just stay out, I have some momentum so just stay out of my face with the rejections.” And so I didn’t get the email that I was a finalist and I didn’t even see it for days. So then I saw it, and they wrote, “is this story still available?” And I was like, “oh my god, yeah, it’s still available.” It was enormous for me because I didn’t have much of a network and I was really mostly working in isolation for years. There was agency review for the winner so then I heard from a couple of agents and ended up signing with one of them who really stuck with me through the whole book, Sarah Fuentes at UTA. To have other people come in and believe in you all of a sudden was just enormous for me.
LS: To me, so much of this book rests on these small moments that change everything for the characters. The psychology is so rich. How did you think about crafting these? I especially loved the moment with Karvel.
JB: I think it just depended on the chapter or the story. I had feedback from editors that I could cut stuff of the imagined backstories. Sometimes I would run into the kids, like when I was in college I ran into one of them at Walmart. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around and it was one of our boys that I’d worked with. He was working fast food and getting by, which was great. But I also knew other kids, other situations, the whole idea is that you’ve changed them or they’ve changed themselves but especially in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s all these supposed changes would happen and then they would go right back to the same situation. It’s really setting them up for failure. It’s the situation that they couldn’t escape in the first place. I would take the kids on home visits, when they graduated I would take them home. I would probably include too many details and then have to revise. In the best case scenario you already know where you’re going so you just have to get there.
LS: What was it like as a child growing up in those homes when you were so young? Did it feel normal to you? Was it ever frightening?
JB: Because it happened from my earliest memory, it just always was. I spent an enormous amount of time around my dad’s boys. There was no real separation between his work and my family’s life. Even when we took family vacations we were all getting in a van with the boys. I think the earliest memory of my life was sort of total chaos. I would take toy cars to my dad’s work, I was five or so, and I remember I would sit in his office playing with the cars, and one day the door kind of kicked open and a kid came in and he was fighting. The staff were trying to calm him down, so they had to hold him down, and I remember just scooting my cars around and playing. Now when I look back at that, it didn’t scare me. I must’ve gotten used to it already because I was just kind of irritated.
As I got older I was separate from that world, because I had my own friends and my own life, but I was always around and always there. Like I played on the basketball team and when I was young I would play softball with them, and they would do car washes to raise money and I would go do the car washes. Later some of the boys went to public school, the same school as I did and I was in class with them. When I was in 7th grade, one of the boys totally got in a fight with a kid I couldn’t stand and I was cheering for him. In high school things got a little trickier because that’s when I really saw a lot of the conflict with the community happen, and they would be a little more curious as to who my allegiance was with.
But it was cool. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. We did so many things with my dad’s boys. We’d go cave exploring and go to baseball games. They were just really neat kids, they had a lot of things going on in their lives. They were complicated. They were, they were interesting.
LS: It sounds like that was a really great perspective to have. I wanted to ask you some more specific questions if that’s alright. Who’s your favorite of all the boys you wrote about?
JB: I have some feeling for Bobby Church because he is a mixture of some of the kids I knew that my dad had and just some of the kids that I grew up with in eastern Kentucky. I had a friend who went through a lot of the same stuff that he did, so I definitely feel a lot for Bobby. I like Carvel so much because I feel like he was the most sophisticated kid, but he was also the most trapped. I knew a lot of kids like that, if you could somehow put him in a different situation he could make it. He’s just up against so much and he’s aware of everything that he’s up against.
LS: I wanted to ask you about the structure. How did you think about the meta structure of the book following the program? When did the parts come to you?
JB: That came through revision, because early drafts I had to cut thousands of words. There was a draft that was 50,000 words longer that moved past graduation. I remember sending it to my agent, and her sending it back and saying, “let’s stay in the home, we don’t really have to go beyond that.” I had to cut characters, which is heartbreaking, but you can create composites a little bit. There were already a lot of characters in the book so we had to shrink it down.
LS: Do you like revising? What part of the writing process was most enjoyable to you?
JB: Starting is when I believe in it the most, when you don’t have that inner critic in your head that’s being very critical. I like that feeling of possibility, that this is all going to come together and you really believe it. And then it feels like the next however-long phase where you need that critic. At least I need it. I like the feeling of cutting things down and getting closer and closer. With that said it took years, so there were these moments where I had to take a deep breath and it felt like I was starting over again. You have to believe that this is always getting a little bit better.
LS: What does that process look like for you? How and when do you work?
JB: Mornings are when I’m best and I go as long as I can in the morning. I get my son off to school and do that and then the rest of life intervenes, so if I can get a few hours in, in the morning it’s great. But at different times it changes. When I was first drafting the book I had so much momentum I could write at night. I remember writing part of a story at the Cheesecake Factory when my wife took our son to the bathroom. I can’t write in chaos. I need total quiet. In terms of revising, once it got to Hub City, the publisher, we were still revising and we decided there needed to be a little bit more of a central narrative, like a plot. And you know, the possibility of the home close is always there.
LS: Is that where you decided AWOL would be the narrator?
JB: So the voice with AWOL came first. It wasn’t there in the poems, but it kind of was there in that first story about Damico. When I was writing I would send my dad drafts, stories and stuff, and he would always have in his mind who he thought AWOL was, and he would always relate it back to the boys he knew, and he would be like, “it’s that kid.” Totally try to tell me who my narrator was.
That was one of the big problem areas honestly, trying to figure out, who is this kid? How much to reveal about him. I remember my dad saying, “That’s Antonio, I know that’s Antonio,” and thinking in my head I felt like it was more me. There were drafts were I tried to develop his story more but it never worked.
LS: Do you see the house as a character in the book?
JB: Oh, for sure, there were different homes that I grew up around. But one in particular, I would spend a ton of time there. I don’t remember, for instance, the boys carving names into the table. I thought I imagined it, but that actually happened. The boys spend so much time there. I wanted it to feel lived in.
LS: What about Cujo the dog, was he real or a fabulation?
JB: We did have a dog, we didn’t call him Cujo, but he sat beside the kitchen door and he would try to shake your hand. He would paw at you. His name was Bingo and he would sit there by the door, and you’d go through the kitchen and smell the food. It was the first thing you experienced.
In the day room. I remember kids on visitation on Sundays, which was always difficult, when no one would come to see them, they would blow up, and you’re just sitting there waiting for it to happen.
LS: I wanted to ask about Watts because he is my favorite character. Do you think Watts is a byproduct of his time? Is he specifically 1980s to you? Could Watts exist in 2026?
JB: My dad was obviously a big influence on that character, and yes I think he is of that period. You could be as aggressive as he was. I don’t think you could do that now. It’s just how it was, and it worked because he had such good relationships with the kids, he really understood them. But he also understood boundaries, like you can’t let a kid smack your glasses off your face. If you don’t have their respect, then you aren’t going to be able to help them. There were times where he would live at the house, he would sleep there and get up the next morning. In some ways, in the broader community, he is also an outsider too. I think people have been trying to fix that since the 80s, and now there is a lot more community-based interventions.
I think Mr. Watts in particular, he was savvy, really smart, but I think he would have difficulty dealing with the community and dealing with the fact that you can’t be as aggressive, but that aggression comes from a place of love, of wanting them to do better for themselves. He understands them. He’s pretty much one of them.
LS: Do you think this book is hopeful? How do you see the arc of it?
JB: I think it’s a hopeful book, but I also think it’s realistic. I wanted it to be real because I wanted it to be the world that I knew then. The kids do have some agency, they do have some say in what’s going to happen in their lives. I tried to capture the full complication of everything they’re going through and all of the forces that are acting on them. The idea that you can save the kids is far-fetched but you don’t give up.
Everything they’re up against, the odds are long, but you hope that they are going to get through this. Sometimes we had kids call us as their one phone call from jail, or read about them in the newspaper after they’d been shot. I wanted to give them humanity, and if you are giving them humanity you are giving them a chance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hope House is Joe Bond‘s first novel. He began working on it after his story “Damico” won The Masters Review Short Story Award. His writing has been published by The Paris Review, People, New South, The New Ohio Review and ESPN. He grew up around group homes in eastern Kentucky and lives now in New Orleans.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Luke Sullivan is a New York City-based writer and teacher. He is an mfa student in creative non-fiction at City College of New York, and a third-grade and creative writing teacher in the city. You can find him on Substack.