John Hofsess: Man in Pieces • by Stephen Broomer 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters John Hofsess was born in 1938 in Hamilton, Ontario, the single child to his mother Gladys, and a largely absent father. He was born Canadian in the decades immediately preceding the nation’s centenary, an era when his people, still wrestling out from a colonial heritage, were awaiting self-definition. Canada was further inhibited by its nearness to America, that mythic nation to the south where independence had been captured rather than gifted. John Hofsess was born into a harsh and impoverished life with few prospects beyond its own brutal circulation. By Hofsess’s own telling, his early life was marked by poverty, abuse, and rebellion, but the facts of it, gathered out of articles and letters that he wrote between 1962 and 1991, give conflicting accounts of his family life and his social experiences. Hofsess learned early in his life to mythologize himself, to accentuate his trials, to show and to command empathy, in order to escape the difficulties of the life into which he was born.  [  >>>>>  FORWARD ]   [Distillate © HA&L + Stephen Broomer {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]