Justin Hocking’s memoir A Field Guide to the Subterranean digs into both memory and history—of Hocking’s life and of the minerals and profit extraction in the places he’s lived. It’s an “unearthing,” he says, of both the natural world and the sense of self.
The work is a collage narrative of past events, some of which happened decades before he was born, which inarguably impacted the landscape that formed him. Deeply researched accounts introduce Hocking’s reminiscences, inviting readers to connect his critiques of greed, social hierarchy, and exploitation with his reflections on abuse, gender ideology, and masculinity as a tool of oppression.
Hocking has said he’s inspired by the late Oregon nature writer Barry Lopez, who he sees as “a trusted guide who would place his hand on the small of the reader’s back and lead them gently towards the hard parts.” In this spirit, A Field Guide extends patience for those hoping to explore life’s darker caves, holding for them a bright enough light to find their way out.
Hocking’s first full-length memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, won the 2015 Oregon Book Award for creative nonfiction, and now his second is in competition for the 2026 prize. The Mercury caught up with the author and Portland State University instructor prior to Literary Arts’ announcement of the winners on April 20.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
PORTLAND MERCURY: Periodically, the novel takes brief excursions into researched work—offering historical or scientific tidbits. How do these sections support the unguarded personal narratives throughout the book?
JUSTIN HOCKING: Something I’m always fascinated by is the question of how far can we expand beyond ourselves in a memoir, which has traditionally been limited by the first person retelling of one story. As a memoirist, I want to do more than that. I try to create this wide embrace of the world that gives me a license to do some of the deep, personal unearthing, and creates a rhythm, ideally, where the reader knows they’re going to confront some hard material, but they’re also going to have some room to breathe.
A Field Guide to the Subterranean’s fragmented narrative feels like it’s mimicking memory—in that you can’t remember every last thing. What are your thoughts on using that device?
My memories don’t work in a linear way. Memories around a traumatic event are necessarily fragmented. Fragmentation as a mode of working allows a person, a survivor, to approach the material in these small pieces that won’t necessarily overwhelm us.
I am trying to seek universality, and a lot of the book is thinking about the concept of exploitation in a more expansive way. Thinking about exploitation on a more personal level, it’s related to capitalist ideology—an extractive ideology and extractive forms of masculinity, which I think are ascendant and dominant in our culture, unfortunately.
You write that one of the many flaws of the early men’s rights movement was “positioning feminism as the enemy, rather than the source of elegant solutions to man made catastrophes.” Now decades later, hypermasculinity and gender essentialism have gained power in the political world. How does the book try to challenge that?
One of my biggest missteps in my life was not having the critical faculty when I was a younger person to see that I was wrapped up in a movement that wasn’t beneficial for me, and certainly wasn’t beneficial for the way that we think about masculinity and about feminism. The men’s movement now is so insidious. People in charge have this fully extractive mindset, this drive to dominate in all ways, to exploit other people, to exploit vulnerable people. I wanted to tell my story like, here’s how I was wrapped up in this, and here’s how I eventually learned to move on to something that was better for me, and that I think is better for culture and for men in general—to critically examine the way that we’re inhabiting gender.
What do you wish you knew then that you have discovered now?
I lived so much of my young life feeling like I was constantly under threat. I went to high school in San Diego—super conservative—and I was struggling with attraction to members of the same gender. What does that mean? Does that mean I’m queer? That was terrifying to me at that time. I wish I could go back and be like, ‘it’s okay, you don’t even have to make a decision, you don’t have to come out. You can just be who you are and be okay with things being ambiguous. That’s how I live now, and it just feels so liberating.
A hard thing to understand when you’re young, and it’s the ’80s.
I didn’t have a lot of queer role models to look up to. Or maybe I did, but they weren’t out. So many young people have less rigid notions of gender and sexuality, and I love that for them. But there’s also millions of kids stuck in these really repressive situations, households where there’s terrible bigotry and even violence. I hope that they’re able to find the people that they need, the books that they need. Stories are powerful. It’s a scary time when there’s so much state repression and censorship, but kids are good at finding stories.
The book references the Gnostic Gospels: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” A theme of the book is to dig into and situate these challenging things in your life. You decided to bring it with you, yeah?
Barry Lopez was a mentor figure to me. Later in life he started writing about being assaulted as a child repeatedly, enmeshed in this pedophile’s web. What I appreciate about his approach was that he was bringing attention to this issue, and to his trauma, but he was also careful to do it in a way that speaks to other people. He was always upfront about, four out of every five women have been assaulted or dealt with some unwanted advance. I wanted to be careful about that as a man writing about this subject. The statistics for men are startlingly high too.
It isn’t something we talk about. You’re not supposed to be vulnerable.
A huge part of the project of fascism and part of the ideology of fascism is this hyper-masculine ideal. This goes back to [Italian futurist poet and Manifesto of Futurism author Filippo] Tommaso. His whole ethos was about speed and violence and hatred of women. That informed Mussolini, and that’s one of the origin points of fascism as we know it today. You see that manifesting in our current leaders, and it’s really frightening. I think we need to keep talking about gender and maybe move beyond the conversation about toxic masculinity. I think it’s important, but to me the term ‘extractive masculinity’ is one that feels equally appropriate or maybe more specific. That’s a huge part of what I was trying to do with this book. Part of the reason I put it out there was a critique—holding up my experience as a map into a different way to hold gender in our bodies, a way to hold it with less rigidity, especially masculinity.
A Field Guide to the Subterraneanis a finalist in the Oregon Books Awards, which will be held at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th, 7:30 pm, $15-$65, Arts for All tickets available, literary-arts.org, all ages.