LATELY THESE IMAGES (As Told to Me by My Father)

“He said he came upon a traffic accident to find a young woman, a girl really, seventeen years old, thrown face down in the middle of the street.”

My father has held many jobs in his life, he trained police dogs in the Air Force, broke wild horses in Texas, and was a carpenter, police officer, teacher, labor commissioner, school board member, police chaplain, and Deacon in the Catholic Church (to name a few). But for as long as I can remember, he has always been a writer. Some of my earliest memories are of him sitting alone at the dining room table tapping away on his little white and brown typewriter. Amazing, when I think about it now, that he could actually get his thoughts onto paper that way, surrounded by a house full of noisy children (my parents raised nine of us, four girls and five boys). Maybe it was the constant clackity-clack-clack-clackity-clack of that tenacious little typewriter with its intermittent ding-and-zipp of the carriage sliding home again that helped to drown us out.

His first creations were shorts, ghost stories mainly, then he began his first novel, a historical romance set during the American Revolution that probably took ten years to finish. Now he has well over a dozen novels published, most of them romances taking place during the 1700’s, but also several westerns, and one set in the 1920’s. He’s not one for self-promotion (he really needs an author page), but he does have a large and loyal group of readers that grab up his titles as soon as they become available.

Many people have asked my father, myself included, why none of his stories are about his experiences as a police officer, but he just smiles and shrugs away the suggestion. My guess is that most of those stories, even after all these years, may still be too difficult to share. He did share one of them with us one evening last summer. Before going to bed, I wrote it down.

Lately These Images (As told to me by Wayne M. Hoy)

Tonight, Dad described a memory from when he was a policeman. He said he came upon a traffic accident to find a young woman, a girl really, seventeen years old, thrown face down in the middle of the street. She was wearing a metallic green pants suit, something fashionable at the time. He remembers her hair, long, red, spread out against the asphalt as if someone had neatly brushed it that way. Not until he drew closer and viewed her from the other side did he see that part of her head was torn open, half missing.

“She was a beautiful girl,” he said. Then maybe considering what he’d just described, added, “I could see from the photo on her driver’s license.”

She had veered into the other lane and was struck by an oncoming semi, the trailer tearing through the side of her car.

Why had she gone over into the other lane at that deadly moment. “You ask yourself, you know, the who, what, when, where, why, and how … I could see how it happened, but why?”

“It was a narrow, two lane road. Avenue 54 where it began to curve as it came around the base of the mountain coming from La Quinta. I could see that she had veered to the right and her front tire had gone off the road, had hit the dirt, and then she must have overcorrected and thrown herself back into the oncoming lane and the path of the semi. But why? What had caused her to suddenly veer like that?”

“I had to know. I even drove it myself, matching her speed. I remember nearing the spot of the collision, with the curve just up ahead, seeing a truck suddenly coming toward me in what for just a moment appeared to be my lane. I tensed, ready to swerve to the right, then realized that the truck was not in my lane, but that the curve of the road had only made it appear that way. The same thing must have happened to the young woman, only she had swerved.”

“Lately, memories like these have been coming to me, vividly, these kinds of images, just as I’m falling to sleep. I thought I’d put them away, left them in their box, but now, after so many years, they’ve returned.”

June 26, 2019

Find most of my Dad’s books here: Books by Wayne M. Hoy.

Oh, and by the way… while my father may not have written about his law enforcement career, his wife certainly has. My mother, a dedicated diarist and letter writer pulled from her daily journals to publish this a few years ago: A Good and Faithful Servant by Judy Hoy. Where she found the time and space to write on a daily basis while raising all of us is the true mystery and miracle of our family.

I’M BACK… and Oh, Have I Been Busy

You know when you go so long without talking to certain people how it seems to get harder and harder to reestablish those connections? And sometimes you never really do. Often though, it just takes getting past a few awkward exchanges — Hey, so how’ve you been? Are you still with so-and so? Still working at such-and such? — and then it’s like no time has passed at all.

Well, my friend, how about we just skip all the awkward catching up and ditch the many (however valid, but in the end irrelevant) excuses and cut to the chase … I’M BACK… and oh, have I been busy.

So, I spent much of this past summer finishing the third book in my Evelyn Hernandez series. Well, this fall I signed the publishing contract with Evernight Teen and I have a projected release date of January 2020. It will be titled EVELYN ILLUSTRATED and it picks up very close to where book two left off. Here’s the official blurb:

Around school, Evelyn Hernandez is known as the Revenge Artist, or la bruja, the witch. She’s the girl who out-bullied her bullies. The one with the long dark hair and blunt cut bangs who only wears dresses and is forever drawing in her mysterious black book. People say she can help you with your own bully problems … for a price.

Evelyn is content to ignore the gossip. Let people think what they want. She won’t be a thug for hire. But when a little girl is found running down the middle of the street late at night in only her nightgown, the police enlist Evelyn to sketch a mugshot of the child’s suspected abductor.

What happens next sends Evelyn into a downward spiral of self-doubt. She makes bad things happen by drawing them, but does it always have to be this way? Can she use her abilities to create and not destroy? Can she be a voice for the voiceless without losing herself in the process?

Without giving too much away, I can tell you Evelyn has a chance to really evolve as both a hero and a friend in this third story. In book one, The Revenge Artist, as a victim of bullying, her ability to make bad things happen by drawing them empowers her, sure, but does it make her a better person? And in book two, The Dream Diaries, when she tries to help other victims of bullying, avoiding her abilities only leads her to new and darker discoveries that actually endanger the lives of the people she is trying to help.

In book three, once again, the hero inside of her refuses to remain silent. Her instinct to protect an innocent and defenseless child leads her to fully embrace her dark talents, and when she does the results are immediate and irrevocable. The question all along, it seems, is whether her gifts, even when used for good, are still not more of a curse than a blessing. Can Evelyn separate her artistic talents from her artistic powers? Is there a difference between the two? And should she even try?

Besides all the superhero soul-searching, the book has plenty of other surprises. There are several new characters (some friends, some enemies) as well as a familiar ghost (of sorts) from the past. There’s more art, more literature, more violence, more magic, and I even manage to squeeze in a pep-rally, a swim meet, and a school dance!

Can't wait to share it with you!

All my best,

Philip Hoy

The Emotional Meat-Grinder of Our Teenage Years

When my students ask me what high school was like for me as a teenager, I think about my friends, the crazy fun we had, and the self-discoveries we made. I remember our fearlessness and the risks we took, all the stupid things we did, and all our humiliating mistakes. I recall the insecurities, the heartbreaks, the loneliness, the disappointments, and the regrets. And I turn to them with a lump in my throat, and the only thing I can manage to say is, “Well … we didn’t have cellphones.” 

I know this is not the response they are looking for; but in avoiding a direct answer, I’ve said something truthful all the same: The emotional meat-grinder of our teen years will inevitably be, to paraphrase Dickens, the best and worst of times. Although many of the trials and tribulations of growing up may not have changed all that much since I was a teen, the speed at which they occur has.

For one thing (although it didn’t feel like it at the time), life moved at a much slower pace when I was a teen. If someone said they would pick you up from school, you waited and hoped they remembered. If they forgot to get you and you needed to call someone, you found a pay phone that was working and wasn’t being used. If you didn’t have change, you had to ask the operator to make a collect call and pray your baby sister didn’t answer the phone and refuse the charges. If you called a girl you liked and she had permission to use the phone, you still had to listen carefully for any telltale clicks to alert you that someone, somewhere, in your house or hers, wasn’t listening in on your conversation.

Before smartphones, if you did something to embarrass yourself—believe me—it eventually got around. Not within seconds like today, but by the end of the week for sure. And although bullying tended to be more of the face-to-face kind, you never wanted to underestimate the devastating power of good old-fashioned gossip or a well-placed lie. Back then, if you said something you regretted, you could always deny it later. Witnesses might contradict you, but at least that left room for some shadow of a doubt among the jury of your peers. If you say something you might regret today, and by “say” I mean text … you can never, ever take it back. 

More and more of my students fail to distinguish the difference between these two actions: speaking and texting. “Do you talk to her?” I asked an emotionally distraught student the other day. “Yes, of course,” he assured me, “but lately she takes so long to return my texts.” It turns out they used to text a lot, but talk? Face to face? Not really. “Not even over the phone?” I asked. “C’mon, Mister…” he groaned, “texting’s just easier.” 

In my day, breaking up over the telephone was considered gacho, low class…you know, not cool. Today, I imagine that’s been downgraded to breaking up by text. Who knows, maybe in the future someone will be able to show up in the form of a hologram in her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend’s bedroom to deliver the bad news “in person”: “But we can still be virtual-friends, can’t we?” he will ask. “Sorry,” the hologram will say, “but I just don’t have time for you.” 

One of the challenges I found in writing a contemporary young adult novel was describing my characters’ use of technology in a way that was accurate, but not overly specific, especially when it came to cellphones. My greatest worry while working on the story, and especially while waiting to be published, was that there would be some drastic leap in the evolution of the cellphone and that by the time my book was released we’d all be using something else entirely to keep in constant contact with each other. This is not as paranoid as it might sound. Just think about how quickly you are able to date even recent films or television shows the moment a cell phone appears in someone’s hand. Luckily, no one has yet perfected a working model of the computer to brain interface (or CBI’s as they are referred to in that apocalyptic/dystopian story I’ve been working on), so I can breathe easy that, at least for now, my young adult novels correctly capture a day in the life of a typical teenager’s cellphone.

Eighteen: An Anthology of Student Poetry

All year long in my literature classroom, we consume the most delicious meals: short stories, novels, poems, and plays—and not just the classics, a diversity of dishes from a variety of places and times. And then, we try to figure out how each of them was made: naming the ingredients, describing the flavors, and arguing over the chef’s intentions.

But I want my students to see literature from both sides of the page: the reader’s experience and the author’s, from the dining room as well as the kitchen. So every once in a while I ask them to put down their recipe books, tie on their aprons, and go cook something up themselves.

Please enjoy this collection of poetry from my soon to be high school graduates.

DOWNLOAD THE BOOK!

FIND THE POEMS HERE: