Fran Hoepfner will be reading at Difficult to Name on Saturday, August 12
I've been a big fan of your writing for years and it's such a treat to have you at the reading series. Why is Chicago better than New York?
First of all, thank you so much for having me. More importantly: Chicago is a genuinely livable city situated next to a gigantic lake and all of the food is designed to make and keep you chubby. It's paradise!
You write a really fantastic classical music column for The Awl. Kind of a dumb question, but how did you first get interested in classical music?
I started playing piano when I was six, and then eventually learned to play several different percussion instruments, and I played both of these instruments regularly until I was about 22 years old. I took everything very seriously as a child, and as a music student, I felt like the more I knew about everything I was playing, the better I'd be at it. So all I ever listened to for about a decade of my life was classical music. There are countless 90s and early 2000s pop music references I have no basis for because I was busy listening to, like, Shostakovich. So I spent almost all of high school in music extracurriculars (seriously: marching band, jazz band, orchestra, symphonic band, you name it) before realizing a little too late that what I really wanted to do was write, and it wasn't until this past year that I finally found an ideal outlet for both of these interests.
What can people expect from your reading/performance?
Something very new and that (oddly) has nothing to do with me.