This article is from the fall 2025 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Virginia Kinnier | Photos by Courtney Mason
I’ve been keeping pocket notebooks since I was in college,” Roy Hoffman explains, as we sit down for lunch one hot July day in downtown Mobile. “I use them as a source of ideas, as well as a place for text that I am trying to work out. I find that writing by hand is very freeing — I let the cursive take me where it wants.”
And the cursive has taken him far and wide. Hoffman is the author of six books, as well as innumerable articles, essays, and book reviews housed in publication greats such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Garden & Gun. But today we are meeting to discuss his most recently published novel, The Promise of the Pelican, which takes place in Roy’s adopted home of Fairhope, its shorelines faintly visible from our perch 34 stories up at Dauphin’s, a restaurant overlooking Mobile Bay.
“When I was a kid growing up in Mobile, my dad would rent a house every August on the Bay in Fairhope or Point Clear,” Roy re- calls. “He had a boat, and my three sisters and I would go trawling and fishing, floundering and water skiing, and those were very rich summers. So from an early age, the Bay filled me with an immense sense of place; the weather, the water, it all influenced me a great deal and it’s very evident in this novel.”
For The Promise of the Pelican, Mobile Bay served as the perfect dynamic setting, a literary element Hoffman highly values and has given lectures on to aspiring writers.
“When you introduce a coastal setting into a novel, you’re really adding another character,” Roy explains. “This is not just a backdrop. If you look at Mobile Bay every day, you’ll know that it can be like the person you live with; it’s the same person each day, of course, but that person has moods and expressions and gestures. Everybody shifts, and the Bay is the same. It has moods, lights, clouds, colors, and so much more, and those shifts and changes really amplify the story.”
Aside from the water itself, Fairhope Pier is another fixture of the Bay that plays a major role in scene setting in The Promise of the Pelican. This landmark servs as an anchor that keeps multiple narratives bobbing at the surface at once, never too close to drown out individual voices but never too far apart that one story lost sight of another.
“I think of Fairhope Pier as the town square,” Roy says. “It’s really the only place where people go and commingle from all different walks and all different backgrounds. It also gave me something for the characters to do while they’re having these conversations. They can’t just stand there, a bunch of talking heads, you know? So it becomes men who are fishing, talking about life, and then they catch something. Everybody runs down to see what it is. And then a storm might roll in and carry the story somewhere else.”
In many ways, the Pier is a sanctuary for these men, who also face storms of their own that they carry with them alongside their fishing gear. Red-hot emotions and deep human experiences like grief, addiction, trauma, anger, resentment, and revenge are cradled by the rocking of waves and the swaying of feet on wood worn soft by the sun and the salty air. These complicated parts of life are made lighter with each release of a cast net and the buoyant hope of a catch.
“The setting of the Bay enabled me to create scenes that otherwise I couldn’t have come to,” Roy says. “The Bay gave me everything I needed: a dynamic environment that could provide both a sense of nurturing and healing for some of the characters and a mortal challenge to others. In one scene, a character is escaping on a skiff in the Bay during a storm, and of course I’ve been on the Bay on a boat in a storm myself, never to that extent, but I know the kind of tempestuousness of those surroundings firsthand, so I was able to place him there. I once followed along with a bar pilot for an article I wrote, so I know the eeriness of the fog in the morning and what the bell buoys sound like before you can even see them, so I was able to draw on those experiences to add more realistic elements to the story.”
A writer friend of Roy’s calls this leveraging of life experiences “body research,” and Roy employs it throughout The Promise of the Pelican, not only reaching into his coastal upbringing, which is easily accessible in descriptive lines like, “The leap of the mullet in a flash of silver, the shimmer of the sun in a cast net of gold, fishermen’s voices ascending like heat rising … ” but also drawing from his personal travel and professional experiences as a writer.
While on a tour of the old Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam, he picked up tragic remnants of Holocaust stories that he later folded into the story of his main character, Hank, who was a young Jewish child in Amsterdam when he escaped to America during World War II. On assignment for the Mobile Press Register in Honduras, Roy followed the trail of destruction left by Hurricane Mitch and later wove these details into the story of Julio, an immigrant from Honduras who escapes to America to flee the aftermath of poverty and violence that followed the storm. Roy even borrowed from the knowledge of his daughter, an immigration lawyer in Texas, to etch legally sound details into Julio’s storyline.
By giving these memories and experiences a second life within his novel, Roy creates a lens through which readers can observe a different life experience than their own, a different culture, a different perspective, and not only relate to it, but perhaps more importantly, empathize with it.
“What I have noticed in going to different book clubs and having readers of different political viewpoints, especially on the hot button issue of immigration, is that they have been able to enter into this story, de- spite their preconceived beliefs,” Roy says. “Because as Atticus once said to Scout, the goal is to know what it’s like to walk in an- other person’s shoes, right? So if those shoes are a young Honduran’s footwear or an old, retired refugee from Amsterdam’s or dirty fishing shoes on the Fairhope Pier, the goal is the same: to illuminate these sorts of pressures and sensibilities each person walks with in their life.”
Perhaps why Roy is so capable of constructing such a large framework within a small bayside town in Alabama is due to his family’s own storied history here.
“When my grandparents came from Eastern Europe, they eventually settled in Mobile and opened a store downtown on Dauphin Street, Hoffman Furniture,” Roy explains.
This summer, one hundred years and four generations later, the Hoffman family closed the doors of their furniture store one last time. Roy wrote the final words on the legacy of the family business in an article for The Washington Post that was published in July. In the article he reimagines his grandparents’ lives just mere blocks from where we sit for lunch today, two Romanian Jews who left everything and everyone and put all their hope and money in train tickets for passage from New York to a “small town, hot weather, good for family.” As the ticket agent told Roy’s grandfather, “That’ll take you to Mobile, Alabama.”
As I try to fathom their journey, I can’t help but think of the title of the work we are here to discuss today, The Promise of the Pelican, and the medieval legend behind it, that the pelican would pierce its own breast for blood to feed its starving chicks, a selfless vow of sacrifice and protection. I imagine Roy’s grandparents were greeted warmly by the pelicans over Mobile Bay when they arrived here so long ago in search of a better life for their family.
It’s ironic that we are meeting today a few blocks from the store that for 100 years represented the start of Roy’s family not just here in Mobile, Alabama, but in America. As we look out at the body of water that served as a setting for his childhood as well as his sixth published book, I can see all the dots connecting to form his life story. The presence of his past is so tangible, the sacrifice it was formed by so visible when his grandparents fled their home country and put all their hope in a Southern city on an unfamiliar coast, his presence here now, pen in hand, one of the legacies of what it took his family to get here.
When our lunch has ended and we head out to Dauphin Street, I wonder where the cursive will take Roy next, what his next story will be. Wherever it is, however it may unfold, I know he’ll take Mobile Bay with him.
