Interviewed by Christine Maul Rice
Sadie Hoagland’s short story collection American Grief In Four Stages (West Virginia University Press) excavates the terrain of our culture’s failure to care for and understand the bereaved, the traumatized, the mentally ill. Hoagland’s lyricism dazzles, her subject matter devastates: She presents characters at their most vulnerable, offering up grief’s soft underbelly for us to poke and prod while at the same time handling her characters with such nuance, kindness, and fearlessness that you can’t help but more fully understand the complexities of loss.
CR: I loved the risks you took on the page. I found your imagery thrilling and admired how you used metaphor to do the heavy lifting—when the act of talking about grief wasn’t an option for many of your characters. For example, in the last story of the collection, “Time Just Isn’t That Simple,” you write:
“The fathers were all half-fathers because they stopped at the waist, either because they had no legs like my dad, had legs too wounded to use, or had gotten too large, their thighs like baby whales. So they had chairs or motorized carts or crutches and this was because of the things fathers did back then, which was go to war, have industrial accidents, or get disability for inadvertent largeness.”
A great deal of what is being published today is exasperatingly safe, devoid of playfulness, and maybe most importantly here, assumes that your reader won’t ‘get it.’ Can you talk about the creative risks you took on the page? The fun of it? The challenge of it? The ways in which they pay off or can go terribly wrong?
SH: In this particular project, I was interested in the limits of language, so taking creative risks was crucial to my larger goal. It is fun to write in a way the surprises even you, and because this book tackled grief and trauma as specifically “unspeakable,” it was important to me that as a writer, I also had moments of “Oh, can I say that?” and then a moment later, well I guess I just did, so I guess I can. I think one challenge is that these kinds of risks, and some of the extreme language posturing that I use, always requires a certain amount of buy-in from the reader. If a reader doesn’t read carefully to sense the vulnerability behind the boldness, it can come off wrong so in that sense it requires a certain amount of trust from your reader, and I have to trust her as well. I have had a few readers who don’t buy in, and it seemed like a bad first date, but for me I just know that that person is not my reader. The story you quoted, “Time Just Isn’t That Simple,” is something that must be read metaphorically. What looks like physical disability should actually be read as something else, something more like failed masculinity for the story to be fully understood. It comes last in the collection in part to help the reader learn from the other stories how to read it.
CR: Which story or moment most surprised you? Or were you surprised from moment to moment?
SH: I am surprised, I guess, by the moment to moment thrill of a story revealing itself to me. I didn’t know that “Cavalier Presentations of Heartbreaking News” would also be about the narrator’s communication as much as the mother’s until I wrote those last lines. I didn’t know that music would save the parents in “July Flags Are Everywhere” until I wrote that scene. But there were also times when I was surprised by the freedom the subject matter ironically allowed: no one talks about grief, we police it into silence so by writing about this subject I already felt like I was breaking the rules, so why not break more? There’s a certain badge of rebellion gained when discussing taboo subjects, I think.
CR: There’s so much to love about this collection: the lyricism, the precision with which you expose your characters’ grief, the vicious humor, the dreamy reality. And those endings. Damn. They’re devastating. Two of my favorite endings: “Cavalier Presentations of Heartbreaking News” and “Frog Prince.”
When I speak to writing students, they often ask me about endings. “How do you know how to end a story?” or “How do you know when a story is finished?”
For me, it’s a jumping off point (like…it could be the beginning of an entirely different story but this is where it’s going to end for now). There’s also something about rhythm, the sound and beat of the ending.
SH: Oh, ending stories is so hard. I don’t ever end a story the day I start it. I usually write about two-thirds of it, and then let it simmer until I see what keeps coming to the top. What themes, phrases, images are most salient and need to be returned to in my ending? I have come to realize that perhaps a part of the story that seemed playful at first is actually carrying a hidden weight it wants to import to the story, and I have also come to realize that the part of the story where I was writing out of my depth, floundering the most, is in fact the secret heart of the story. I do write a lot by rhythm and sound, so a lyrical ending is important to me. I like what you say about endings as beginnings, I also like endings to be just as much openings as closings. I like them to reveal a way in which to read everything that has come before, but also remind us of the nature of the short story as a glimpse into something larger.
CR: That’s so interesting too: The part that seems playful at first might actually carry a ‘hidden weight.’ I find that when I approach the work with lightness, vulnerability, it does carry that weight more effortlessly. “The secret heart of the story,” is so apt.
In ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, you begin by mentioning a number of lit journals that published your fiction and the support of your community—writers, friends, family. We’ve all read about first-time novelists scoring huge advances (especially lately) without developing a network outside of their MFA programs.
Has the experience of working with dozens of editors influenced your approach or writing practice? If so, in what ways?
SH: I think both editors and my mentors in academia helped shape these stories if not directly, then certainly through the way I thought about the reader and the work in a larger sense. One of my great shocks coming into the writing life is how little editors actually edit. That being said, a line edit can be really eye-opening. In my creative writing classes in graduate schools, a lot of teachers helped me think about the reader with more tenderness, and to double down on the care and time I put it into my own work. For me, an external authority source telling me my work was worth my time and effort was really important when I was just starting out.
CR: Can you talk about how you have evolved as a writer? When did you start writing? Who has influenced your writing?
SH: I wrote my first “book” at eight. It was about a dog kidnapping written on stationary with pictures of kittens. I always loved writing, but I needed a lot of support from my teachers to finally feel I could pursue it as a career, so I didn’t feel ready to call myself a “writer” until I had left college. My writing has always been focused on the lyrical, and the writers I turn to again and again are those whose writing is poetic and manages a certain attention to the word even in a larger narrative. I’ve been profoundly influenced by writers like Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Noy Holland, Angela Carter, and Melanie Rae Thon. These writers manage to tell brilliant stories, but their sentence-level writing also has me reading with a pen, underlining stunning phrases I want to remember.
CR: Oh! Noy Holland was the visiting writer at Vermont Studio Center when I was there last fall. She read a few pages of my latest novel and I felt as if a gifted surgeon had sliced it open to help me see what needed fixing.
SH: I love her work; her book Bird is one of my all-time favorites.
CR: You employ a number of different forms in this collection. Do you choose the form or does the story choose it for you? And do you teach different forms to your writing students?
SH: The story almost always chooses the form for me. I found sometimes with these pieces, and their heavy subject matter, that a regular water glass just would not hold. I had to rethink the glass, or get okay with it spilling, to get it to carry the burden of trauma in a piece like American Grief in Four Stages. The exception to this is “The Crossword,” which started as an exercise in playing with form and turned into a story. And this is an exercise I do a lot with my students: I ask them to take a form not usually associated with literature and turn it into a narrative. My students have been so clever, I’ve read Yelp Reviews turned into a murder mystery, and a series of horoscopes that reveal an obsessive lover.
CR: What’s something you would like to discuss?
SH: I have been thinking a lot about the draw of writing fiction, the way the writer inhabits the other as the very nature of fiction, as an exercise in empathy and trying to understand a wide variety of experiences. There is so much talk these days about who has the right to write about what, and I find myself uncomfortable. On one hand, I completely understand the dangers of appropriation, and the problems of representing marginalized groups from outside those groups. On the other hand, I fear some of the hysterics surrounding these questions, and find the impulse toward silencing writers as equally problematic. I don’t have a solution here, but I’d love to talk about it and hear what you and your students and readers think.
CR: Are you referring to American Dirt? There’s so much to think and read and consider. For those who haven’t heard about the controversy, I’ve included a few pieces—old and new—for context:
Here’s a piece by Donna Miscolta in Seattle Review of Books (with a link to Myriam Gurba’s review that was killed by Ms.).
Here’s a piece in Lit Reactor by Gabino Iglesias.
Here’s a piece by Alexander Chee in Vulture.
Here’s a piece in The Guardian.
The problem includes the issue of cultural appropriation but also includes an industry unwilling or unable to embrace and publish the authentic work of people of color, instead opting to publish Disney-esque, sanitized novels that they intuit a white audience will accept.
In the end, I think that whatever we write—whether or not it reflects our own experience, must be done thoughtfully, carefully, and well.
SH: American Dirt is certainly a high-profile example of this conversation, and I think a significant turning point where the publishing world is suddenly now having to reckon with a conversation that we writers have been having amongst ourselves and in classrooms for a long time. What concerns me is that even before American Dirt, I have had students who want to talk about this, who need good advice for their own writing but also students who are, in the last few years, so afraid to take on any experience not their own for fear of social media shaming. This fear, and the desire of people to police each other, makes me just as nervous, perhaps even more nervous than problematic literature (which certainly needs addressing but has been around a long time, unfortunately, and will hopefully continue to evolve in the right direction). I think we need to move the conversation forward in a more pedagogical spirit. I really like Anna Deavere Smith, a playwright who famously embodies others, and one question she asks in her book Fires in the Mirror, is if a refusal to write the other is a refusal to see the other? I think there’s something there. But yes, it’s delicate territory and we need to be conscious of it in both our writing and teaching. And as for the publishing industry, I hope American Dirt is the wake-up call they need.
