On a recent afternoon in May, authors Hermione Hoby, Barrett Swanson, and Pardeep Toor gathered for The American Dream, Revised, a reading and conversation at Lighthouse about American stories, American citizenship, and the very weird, very persistent narratives this country keeps asking people to align with and fit inside.
Hermione Hoby kicked things off, reading a vacation scene from Virtue, her novel published a couple of years back. The passage displayed so much of what the larger novel captures: beauty, discomfort, privilege, desire, and the awful little moral negotiations people make when they want to belong to a life that isn’t theirs. The scene cued up perfectly her later comments about citizenship. Hoby recently became an American citizen, a zinger of an announcement these days. She spoke about the strange mix of feelings that comes with entering a national story while also knowing exactly how unstable, violent, and ridiculous that story can be.
The question wasn’t just what it means to write about America. It was what it means to belong to it, to be claimed by it, to claim it back. Certainly these days many feel deeply unsure or conflicted about the whole arrangement.
Barrett Swanson (Lost in Summerland) read from his Harper’s essay “The Anxiety of Influencers,” a subject ranging from TikTok and content creation to young people trying to turn themselves into marketable products. The excerpt was very funny, and for a few minutes the room got to laugh at the ridiculous, exhausting machinery of online attention. If I remember correctly, he mentioned an essay in which he spent six hours buried alive at the disaster training zone, and that those six hours were not nearly as unnerving as the time he spent at the influencer mansion.
Finally, Pardeep Toor closed the lineup, lamenting having to follow Swanson’s funny, sardonic selection with his own sober piece, telling the audience they were done with laughter for the night. He was mostly right. Toor read from “Gatsby,” the opening story in his debut collection, Hands. The story follows young immigrants trying to make sense of American adolescence, aspiration, and spectacle, including a scene with professional wrestling and Gorgeous George.
That moment led, unexpectedly and wonderfully, to Hoby pronouncing “kayfabe” for the first time in public. She’d looked it up beforehand, she mentioned, and she got it right. It was a small moment, but it opened up something bigger.
The night kept coming back to performance: the performance of Americanness, the performance of success, the performance of goodness, the performance of belief. Kayfabe, wrestling’s old code of maintaining the fiction, turned out to be a pretty useful way to think about the American dream itself. What happens when everyone knows the story is staged, but the injuries are real?
All three writers predictably resisted the idea of one clean American narrative. If the night offered any kind of consensus, it was around the idea of multiplicity: more stories, more angles, more witnesses, more ways of refusing the flattened version of what this country says about itself.
The American dream is a contested field of stories. For some people, it promises reinvention. For others, it becomes a trap. For many, it does both at the same time.
That tension ran through all three readings. Swanson’s work looks closely at the rituals, delusions, and systems that shape contemporary American life. Hoby’s fiction considers desire, privilege, moral compromise, and what it means to want to be good in a compromised world. And Toor’s stories ask what happens when work, migration, endurance, and sacrifice don’t lead to the clean redemption narrative America demands.
As poet Maggie Smith has said, “I consider myself a ‘recovering pessimist.’” But for me, hope, optimism, whatever insufficient label you affix to it, doesn’t mean seeing the good in everything or having a positive outlook. It means seeing the world and each other for what they actually are and choosing to love them anyway. The simple act of staying for one more day is often the most radical form of hope anyone can offer.
The panel didn’t pretend America is easy to believe in right now. It didn’t pretend citizenship is simple, or that storytelling fixes everything, or that the dream hasn’t always depended on someone else being forced to pay for it. But it also didn’t give up on connection. Community, like hope, kept coming back, not as sentiment, but as something people have to practice to survive.
By the end of the evening, The American Dream, Revised felt less like a conversation about whether the dream still exists, or ever did, than about who gets to tell the truth about it. The answer, thankfully, wasn’t singular. It was more in the form of articulating the question: Swanson, Hoby, and Toor, each did so, working in different forms, each troubling the national myth from a different angle, each insisting that the story isn’t finished just because it failed so many people. It was an exceptional talk: funny until it wasn’t, bleak until it wasn’t. And hopeful, in spite of everything, grown from the act of gathering, reading, listening, and making room for stories that don’t resolve cleanly.
Despite the cynical nature of the topic, the conversation returned, again and again, to hope. Not shiplap hope. Not decorative hope. Not the kind of hope that shows up in the last paragraph to make everyone feel tidy and resolved. The hope in the room was more inexplicable than that, and more constructive. This is hope through disillusionment, not around it.
Reading List From the speakers:
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Pardeep Toor: Hands
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Hermonie Hoby: Virtue
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Barrett Swanson: Lost in Summerland
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Discussed by the speakers:
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Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game
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Sylvia Townsend Warner - The Corner That Held Them
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Kenneth Burke - “Literature as Equipment for Living” (essay)
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Bobby Fever - Former Colorado Poet Laureate. Discussed by an audience member.
Meet the Author
Jenny Catlin has seen much success as a Pushcart Prize winner, a notable mention for Best American Essays, and as a writer for The Athletic, The Gettysburg Review, Willow Springs, and Horror-Sleaze-Trash, among other publications. As an educator, she has taught incarcerated people, college freshmen, and adults with intellectual disabilities. Jenny has ghostwritten thousands of pages of bureaucratic policy documents.
