Donovan Hohn is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. His first book, Moby-Duck (2011), was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism, and runner-up for both the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. A former features editor of GQ and contributing editor of Harper’s, Hohn now teaches creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he has begun work on a second book.
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Harper's MagazineJanuary 2005From"Romance of Rust: Nostalgia, Progress, and the Meaning of Tools"
I've lurked in chat rooms with discussion threads devoted to such subjects as “A previously unknown Albert Goodell brace found in the wild.” One sweltering summer morning, on the Jay County fairgrounds in the farming village of Portland, Indiana, I walked among fabulous machines as small as schnauzers and as huge as elephants, all gleaming in the August sun. Drive belts whirred, flywheels revolved, pistons fired, and a forest of smokestacks piped foul smoke and rude music into the otherwise cloudless sky. Mostly, I have ridden a Midwestern circuit of flea markets and farm auctions in the passenger seat of an emerald green Toyota pickup truck piloted by a fifty-five-year-old botanist with a ponytail, spectacles like windowpanes, and a beard verging on the Whitmanesque.
Harper's Magazine:January 2005- Print Books
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Harper's MagazineApril 2008From"Falling: Confessions of a Lapsed Forest Christian"
In the depths of the Great Depression, the peak had become home to the largest cross on Earth, a 103-foot-tall monstrosity of concrete and steel. Some 50,000 San Franciscans had gathered for the dedication ceremony, held March 24, 1934, at the summit. Far away in Washington, D.C., at precisely 7:30 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, President Roosevelt depressed the golden key of his executive telegraph, an electric signal leapt the continent, and atop Mount Davidson the cross, lit from below by twelve 1,000-watt lamps, blazed into the night sky like a flaming sword. It would continue to glow, a lunar presence on the San Francisco skyline, off and on for the next forty-two years, until 1976, when—except for a few days at Christmas and Easter—the national energy crisis extinguished it.
Harper's Magazine:April 2008- Print Books
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“Hohn moves easily between the micro and the macro, weaving personal histories into science and industry as he roams . . . [He] seems to have it all: deep intelligence, a strikingly original voice, humility and a hunger to suss out everything a yellow duck may literally or metaphorically touch. ” —Elizabeth Royte, The New York Times Book Review [on Moby-Duck]
“Moby-Duck is highly readable and, importantly, alive with a sense of intellectual curiosity. Beyond just reporting the facts, Hohn engages with them philosophically. It’s a comprehensive account of everything connected to the spill of those toys. Indeed, what Melville did for whaling, Hohn has done for plastic bath toys lost at sea.” —The Boston Globe
“Hohn navigates the complicated fields of oceanography, environmentalism, globalization and maritime shipping with surprising humor and ease, raising pressing questions about these topics without giving any clear answers to them—because there aren’t any. Hohn cleverly uses the deceptively whimsical premise of chasing a little plastic duck to provoke a massively complicated and thought-provoking conversation. Who knew spilled bath toys could be so important?” —Chicago Sun-Times [on Moby-Duck]
Selected Works
