An Interview with Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s Exploding Head is a haunting and intimate collection of prose poetry that explores the boundary between body and mind, memory and perception. Across surreal yet deeply grounded poems, Hoffman examines embodiment, vulnerability, and the uneasy experience of living within one’s own consciousness, where angels watch the wounds that still live, and the ordinary has its own spiritual and psychological weight. Through poems that move through OCD, childhood memory, and vivid natural imagery, the collection brings the reader into a world where the self is both the observer and the observed.

Raquel DeGrasse: Throughout Exploding Head, angels often appear, but they feel less like protectors and more like witnesses. The angels seem to observe, remember, or linger within the speaker. As the collection progresses, the angels begin to feel almost like extensions of awareness itself, holding the memory alongside the speaker. When writing these poems, were you thinking of the angels as external figures, internal presences, or something deliberately in between?

Cynthia Marie Hoffman: I love that you’re starting things off with the angel!

The angels appear in Exploding Head because there was one particular angel who stood in my bedroom from childhood to adulthood (until I started writing about him). The angel appeared when the lights went out and came with unspoken rules: if I moved in bed or stopped compulsively counting to four, or if I let the blankets slip away from covering my ears, he would walk across the room and whisper the secret of heaven.

Maybe that doesn’t sound all that terrifying, but I was terrified. As a child, I wanted no part of any supernatural being leaning over me in the dark and breathing secrets into my ear. As an adult, I came to understand that the angel, and his if/then rules, were a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But knowing that didn’t make his nightly presence any less chilling.

As I wrote the poems that became this book, I got a lot of questions about the angel, and I tried to answer them. I fictionalized the angel’s backstory. I researched angels and wove religious mythology into my poems. I re-envisioned him as a guardian angel rather than a figure of terror.

But here’s the thing. OCD infuses things with meaning that have no meaning at all. That’s how it was with the angel. His presence was no more profound or explicable than my belief that mentally tracing squares and X’s on windows kept my family safe from gun-wielding intruders.  

In the end, all those exercises in “thinking of the angels as” various meaning-making symbolism were cut from the book. More than anything, I wanted to stay true to my lived experience of OCD. And sometimes, an angel is nothing more than a wild misfiring of the brain.

That leaves the literary interpretations of the angel up to the reader. And I love that. I think all the ideas you suggested in your question are true.

RD: Throughout the collection, the body feels both intensely tangible and unfamiliar, as though the speaker is living inside it while simultaneously watching it. In poems like “You with the Getting Shot” and “Touched,” physical sensation becomes almost surreal or disorienting. How did you approach writing the body, and were you interested in exploring the tension between inhabiting the body and feeling estranged from it?

CMH: We so often think of OCD as a disorder of the mind. And it is. But it’s also experienced viscerally in the body. Confronted with a vivid intrusive thought (something I’m afraid of like getting shot or being in a car accident), the body flinches or tingles with adrenaline.

What if I acted on those sensations? What if I spent my days ducking from invisible bullets, or what if I jerked the steering wheel away from another car that was nowhere near my lane? That would not be, to say the least, socially acceptable. So, in addition to distrusting my brain’s thoughts, I have to deny my body’s fight or flight response. That’s a recipe for estrangement.

It was important for me to infuse the poems with that tension, though I can’t claim to have aways done so with conscious intention. In the poem “You with the Getting Shot,” I notice myself describing a physical sensation and then immediately writing its dismissal. For example, “A gun blows a hard kiss. You continue down the path” and “There are no bones left in your body that aren’t a clattering procession of bullets. You just need to rest for a bit by the lake.”

This isn’t the voice of a poet making craft choices as much as it is the person behind the poem directly reporting what goes on in her mind and body. Although, it took a long time for that person to start speaking up.

RD: I found myself feeling like the poems were trying to reach memories that don’t sit still or resolve easily, and that writing is part of recovering lost memory. Did working on Exploding Head change the way you relate to any of the experiences or memories that shaped the book? 

CMH: Writing Exploding Head changed my life. I don’t say that lightly. The only reason I’m talking about OCD today is because I wrote and published this book.

I’ve had OCD all my life, for as long as I can remember. I’ve known what it was since I was sixteen years old when Judith L. Rapoport’s 1991 book “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing” fell into my hands and I recognized myself in its pages. The first case study in the book features a man who couldn’t be certain he hadn’t hit someone with his car. I was a new driver and had been troubled by that same doubt, something I previously had had no idea could be a manifestation of the disorder, if I had heard of a disorder called OCD at all.

In the 80s, when I was growing up, OCD was rarely talked about, and when it was, it was portrayed as an excessive cleaning, handwashing (hence, Rapaport’s book title!), stove-checking disorder, but I experienced none of those symptoms. In fact, the range of OCD’s obsessional themes and compulsive behaviors is almost infinite. OCD can latch itself to anything. And because of that, any number of the 8.2 million adults in the US estimated to experience OCD in their lifetimes may not recognize it in themselves or each other.

Decades of inaccurate portrayals of OCD in the media, positioning OCD as the butt of jokes, are part of why I didn’t use the terms “obsessive-compulsive disorder” or “OCD” anywhere in the poems themselves. I wanted the reader to encounter my lived experience directly, without my having to battle through a reader’s preconceived notions in order to be seen.

And, frankly, though I was in my 40s by then, I was still anxious about saying out loud to strangers, “I have OCD.” I didn’t even say it out loud to my friends at age 36 when I started bringing to my poetry group these mysterious lyric paragraphs about an angel standing in my bedroom and about counting to four so I wouldn’t die. I told them, “I’m writing a new series of poems, but I don’t want to talk about what they’re about.” HA! But those poet friends created a sanctuary where I could practice telling my story at the pace at which I was comfortable.

Believe it or not, even in the final stages of getting the book ready for publication, I was still grappling with whether to write “OCD” in the description for the back cover. I was still that entrenched in my decades-long habits of shame and silence. The description ended up like this: “This collection of prose poems chronicles a woman’s childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).” I couldn’t even say it was my experience, or even the author’s experience. I had to say, “a woman’s.” My editor Gabriel Fried helped me find that language, which met me where I was at the time, and for that, I’m grateful.  

But once the book was in the world, bravery followed by necessity. I was terrified and mortified, but aren’t we all, in a way, when we’ve written a book? I just took a deep breath, and I went on the radio on publication day and talked for an hour about OCD. I did readings and podcasts and written interviews. The more I said, “I have OCD,” the more I couldn’t stop saying it. I was making up for lost time. And I was finally finding community.

So, if you’re out there right now fighting an invisible battle, hiding your weird thoughts that you think no one will understand or secretly tracing patterns in your mind seven times or seven-times-seven times: Hi. I see you. You’re not alone.

RD: So many of these poems return to the forest, birds, squirrels, and small encounters with animals. I am curious how you think about the natural world in your writing–does it feel like refuge, witness, interruption, or something else entirely? 

CMH: You know what’s not in the natural world? Squares and rectangles that I have to mentally draw patterns on. Shelves and stairs I have to count. Cars I envision crashing or buildings that might explode. So, I’d say it’s refuge and interruption.

Also, as a child, where the book begins, the times I got to be the most alone with myself were spent in the forest and creek behind my childhood home. Maybe that was the place where I most loved being me.

RD: Poetry is a way of reaching toward memories that feel lost or hard to hold. After writing Exploding Head and working in poetry for so long, what would you say to new writers or readers who are turning to poetry in hopes of understanding their own past more clearly?

CMH: I’ve always thought of poetry as a way of discovering what I think about the world. My first three poetry collections reached primarily outward, toward my ideas about things (like tourism, the history of birth and medicine, and the act of genealogical research). I was present on the page, but not in a particularly vulnerable way.

But Exploding Head changed all that because suddenly I was reaching inward toward self-discovery. I realized I couldn’t see myself clearly, perhaps I couldn’t write about myself at all, until I started writing through the lens of OCD. Maybe “lens” isn’t the right word. OCD was more like the door that shut off access to my true self completely.

Write the thing that opens that door. But remember that you’re in control of how wide to open it for readers.

RD: If Exploding Head existed as a physical landscape someone could walk through–a childhood bedroom, a dream, the woods–what would you hope a visitor would notice first, and what might they only understand after staying there a while?

CMH: First: the terrifying angel and the counting and the patterns and the stars and the squares—what an impediment all of that was to my being present in the world. And then, after staying a while: how those things were a key to unlocking the world and my place in it. And maybe: whatever feels like an impediment in your life might also be your key.

Thank you for these thoughtful questions, Raquel. And I want to offer a final note to readers that if you’re looking for resources related to OCD, the International OCD Foundation can be found here: https://iocdf.org/

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Cynthia Marie Hoffman is author of four poetry collections, most recently the OCD memoir in prose poems Exploding Head. Essays in TIME, The Sun, and Lit Hub. Poems in The Believer, Los Angeles Review, and Image. Former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the WI Institute for Creative Writing, Cynthia lives in Madison, WI. Find her online at www.cynthiamariehoffman.com 

Raquel Desiree DeGrasse is a writer and graduate student from Massachusetts pursuing her MA in English at Bridgewater State University. She writes about memory, family, and the way people carry their past with them. She’s drawn to stories that feel honest and emotionally vulnerable, and that find meaning in ordinary moments. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys baking and cake decorating, the first long warm spring day, and debriefing about life with her fiancé.