Great Profiles

It’s rare to find people who are able to make a living doing what they love.  Everybody tries, everybody has a dream of what they want to be when they’re young: a fireman, doctor, rock n’ roll star.  But as we get older we somehow stray away from those dreams, not necessarily by choice, but because of certain circumstances and compromises we must make.  Before we know it, we’re working at some business, selling products we’ve never heard of or waking up at five every morning to dig holes and lay bricks and basically, be unhappy.  We didn’t make it, were not doing what we want or what were good at.  It’s because we made one too many compromises or waited too long to do anything about our life and got stuck in these roles we never would have pictured ourselves in.

Greg Hill Jr. is 32.  He sits in an empty classroom at the University of Montana’s Liberal Arts building.  He looks stressed, comfortably stressed, like he’s been feeling this way for a while.  He’s a writer.  He sits on a small wooden desk.  He wears a dark goatee and has thick black hair that seems pasted to his forehead.  Thinly framed glasses border his eyes, which are constantly making eye contact.  He looks Italian and personable.  Hill teaches ENEX 101, a writing course required for most majors at UM.  When he’s not instructing English, he’s studying and writing poetry.

Hill was born in Winnfield, Ill.  His parents divorced when he was four.  He and his mother moved to Detroit.

“I was raised in a very religious environment.  Both my parents are Catholic and it was pushed upon me my whole childhood.  When I was about 13, I started to ask all these questions about this religion and people would look at me like ‘How could you ask that?’ like I was supposed to know.  I wasn’t content with the answers I got, I just saw through it,” said Hill.  “I was the kid who everyone was praying for.”

The only child of his mother and father, Hill does have two stepsisters and a stepbrother from his dad, all of whom he gets along with well.  Hill’s mother resents her ex-husband in many respects.  Maybe it’s because of the kids, maybe its old unresolved issues, but she constantly talks down about him, said Hill.

Watching Hill talk about his past and his family, he looks a little uncomfortable, like there are a lot of hatchets that were never buried.  He seems brief and confused when talking about his mother, like he wants to resolve some things, but knows that this effort would just create more problems, so he moves on.

“I played guitar throughout high school, had a band called Stickman and we’d play this bullshit-of-the-day kind of music.  When I went to college in Eastern Michigan I was an undergraduate studying classical guitar,” said Hill. “When I was 18 I got my 17-year-old girlfriend pregnant.  We got married and ended up having a stillbirth.”

“I wasn’t really equipped for that, I was upset for about a year.  It was awful.  I felt like I couldn’t show her how I felt and eventually I became angry.  I’m from this very religious family so they weren’t too happy with these decisions that I made.  One day my mom said, ‘God won’t give you something you don’t want.’  That made me really upset,” said Hill.

Hill and his wife were married for ten years.  In 2004 they were divorced.

“She was so young, I was so young, and we fell into these roles.  We both came from these religious families and so it was our way to go against that.  Eventually, everything fell apart.  The catalyst is that she cheated on me and I didn’t want to be with her anymore.  I was constantly taking care of her and wasn’t really taking care of myself.  So, I moved to Chicago for three years.”

Hill got his master’s degree from DePaul in English and has had quite a few jobs teaching English at universities.  He taught at Purdue, as well as Columbia and Robert Morris in Chicago.

“At the time I was really into teaching and I had a real job at Robert Morris, but what ended up making me leave is that it started to feel unethical.  I felt I was working at a profit-driven institution.  I would have four classes with forty kids in each class; it takes me about thirty minutes to an hour to comment on each paper.  That’s just too many kids.  And the university started pressuring me not to fail students.  Now I don’t like to fail kids, but I mean…” said Hill.

In 2006 Hill came to Missoula to get his Master of Fine Arts in poetry and teach.  When talking about Missoula and the past year and a half of his life, he’s much more relaxed.  He talks about life in Missoula and seems very confident about the decisions he’s been making and what the future holds in store for him.

“I’d been studying English for all these years and it became apparent that there was a way of talking about English that I became very good at, but it meant absolutely nothing to me, I felt like a fraud,” said Hill.  “I started writing poetry and felt much different.  What the poem and art for that matter does is give you access to the abyss, what you can’t know, the limits of knowledge; this seemed like an ethical act.  What you’re doing when writing poetry or making art is contributing to a community.  With this interaction, we become more fully human.”

Hill’s hands move a lot when he talks.  He’s conveying things that intrigue him so much, like the unknown and art that it’s hard for him not to get excited and twist and turn his wrist and point and wave while he’s talking, especially about poetry.

“I’m infolded in my poetry, there’s no way around it.  I’ve lived in a lot of places and the way life has turned out is peculiar to me.  Landscapes are uncanny.  The most concrete things stand in for emotional scapes in my poems, philosophical problems, how to save things.  Portrayal is usually involved.  I embrace chance a lot in my poetry.  Whatever comes out of my conscious is something that should be taken into account, and I’ll trust tangents sometimes.  This is a way to interface with the world.  I’m perfectly happy not being published.  It’s active creation,” said Hill.  “Humor is important in poems, it reveals a gap in knowledge.  The poem seeks to discover.  When we tell jokes, it shows there’s a problem in how we know something; we laugh because we don’t know something.”

Hill shares a piece of his work, “There is Poetry”:

Last winter, sea lions
beat me for my blubber
and bevy of ambiguous questions.
Mostly, I was in love.
In love with my blubber
and magic eight-ball, in love
with their limbless statues
and windows of indecent exposures.
I called them Poem.

Hill has been published, not a lot, but a few poems and essays.  It doesn’t matter to him, and it’s all about the “active creation.”  Everything else is just passive.  He wants to have his soul speak in the moment and that’s it.

“Right now is a pretty great time for the art world,” he says.  “One problem is that people don’t know where to look for it.  There’s tons of small presses, small studios, small labels and this is where the good art is waiting.  It’s becoming harder and harder to make things mainstream.  I’m distrusting towards people who make a living out of art.  There’s something that just seems false about it, but everyone is responding to America at the end of an empire.  Capitalism is going to implode, people are selling reproductions as truth.  Lots of changes are sure to come, but good art is around, you just need to look in the right places,” said Hill.  His eyes no longer look at me. They’re practically in the back of his head.  He’s looking for the right words.  He’s looking in his subconscious.

Hill seems very excited about all of this, but at the same time he knows that he doesn’t have much time and needs to decide what he wants to do.  He doesn’t seem to want to be a teacher much anymore.  He’s been doing it a while and likes it, but it leaves him little time for his art, but then what should he do?  Become a poet, live in the French countryside?  This makes him happy, but will he ever do it or just talk about it?

“Right now I’m staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, with the Department of Treasury pulling the trigger…my student loans.  That scares me,” said Hill.  “I do have a real clear sense right now, about what I want to do.  I usually don’t care if I fail or not.  You need to come face to face with the fact that you can fail.  This makes it possible to not fear.”

He’s ready and he knows its time.  He doesn’t have much time and will have to make a decision soon, but he understands that he doesn’t want to be doing something that makes him miserable five years down the road.

“If I had to give myself advice, this moment,” said Hill.  “It would be ‘figure out what you want and just don’t compromise’.”