To her credit, and I think a reason for a large part of her success, Alyson Hagy has never been averse to taking risks in her work. In my opinion, she understands that any writer of fiction is one who traffics in the world of the imagaination, respectfully so, with a knowledge of past authors and their works about certain topics, but without the limits of excessive political correctness or any need to follow current popular trends and attitudes. I think she'd agree with me in saying that as a fiction writer, she does her best to challenge the range of her imagaination.
This is her first book, the short story collection, Madonna On Her Back, published in 1986.
She was interviewed in 2023, after contributing a short story, "Broken Crow,” to This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West, the second volume in an anthology series that, according to its promotional copy, attempts to “capture the newness, vastness, territoriality, and sense of transience alive in the American West.”
Speaking to students at the Brigham Young University College Of Humanities as part of its 2023 Reading Series, she explained, that “Broken Crow” takes after a real experience in which Hagy developed a relationship with an injured crow in her neighborhood. The short story captures the experience of a fictional woman living in the West who develops a similar relationship with a local crow. She communicates with the crow and begins to learn more about its world and purpose, eventually assisting the crow as it carries out one final act in its short life.
Hagy recounted that writing the short story challenged her for many reasons, one being its unfamiliar genre. Reflecting on her experience writing “Broken Crow” and other works outside of her comfort zone, she said, “I think in order to make your work honest and true, you’ve got to go toward the things that give you great joy and happiness, but also the things that create fear and despair in you.”
On this latter point, I couldn't agree more. In any allegedly open society, authors, no matter their backgrounds, should be able to write about characters from any racial, ethnic or regligious group. The arts should transcend any point of view that arouses the use of such dangerously fascistic labels as cultural appropriation. The very idea is absurd. Women should be able to write about men, and vice versa. Humans should be able to write about animals. And I don't mean only in the realm of fantasy or science fiction.
Alyson, I think, believes this too. She writes, without fear, exceptionally well about men, parituclarly the kind of men who are often reduced to stereotypes in popular films. She fights the narrative, too often seen, that all men of Irish descent are drunks, all white sheriffs and cops in North America are corrupt and racist, as are all male white cowboys, firemen, loggers, farmers and Republicans. This is the lie in the mainstream narrative meant to keep us divided and suspicious of one another. True artists such as Alyson don't accept it. They labor to show, through their work, the shared elements of our humanity, and to transcend these oversold and overstated notions regarding our differences.
This is her second story collection, Hardware River, published in 1991.
As part of her 2023 BYU presentation, Alyson answered questions from audience members and discussed her personal writing process and journey as an author. She offered meaningful encouragement to fellow authors, stating, “This is a great time to be a storyteller. The narrative arcs are stronger than they’ve ever been, not only in American culture, but internationally.”
Again, I agree. May artists in all genres be bold and seek to transcend the current tide of viewing all through the confining prism of race and gender. These have become sometimes absurd limitations. Imagine James Baldwin not being able to write about hipster Jewish intellectuals in 1960s New York City, the whole Greenwich Village scene at that time. Or Richard Yates not being able to write about 50s-era women suffering in the suburbs in his short stories, or his novels such as The Easter Parade, or Revolutionary Road. Even more popular novelists in past eras wrote to challenge themselves, taking risks, not following fads or political trends. For example, the pulp novelist James M. Cain writing Mildred Pierce, or the Jewish novelist Seymour Epstien writing Leah, or the Canadian Brian Moore in The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne, or the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson crossing generation of fathers and sons in her masterful novel Gilead.
Graveyard Of The Atlantic is a collection of stories published by Graywolf in 2000.
Alyson Hagy’s stories have grit and the tang of seawater—and they sound like no one else’s. They are about men and women who live alongside great bodies of water and who are in the grip of great forces of nature, transfixed by them. These stories pulse and burn, like a rope traveling rapidly through your hands.
Charles Baxter, author of The Feast Of Love, First Light, and Saul And Patsy.
Here is the publisher link to Keeneland, her first novel, from Simon & Schuster in 2002
And here is Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News, on Keeneland:
Hagy’s character Kerry is one of the most psychologically complex and realistic women in recent American literature. Increasingly hardened by experience, locked into a destructive pattern of wrong choices, and expecting little of others or herself, she gets out of the tough corners with an obdurate persistence that translates as survival, not only in the rough racetrack milieu but in contemporary American life and mores. Hagy is a writer on her way.
Snow, Ashes, a novel, was published in 2007.
In Ghosts Of Wyoming, published in 2010, Alyson returns to the short story form.
Sharp, mournful tales and dead-on yarns. Hagy knows Wyoming well, her stern weathers and defiant beauty and patient ruthlessness. She knows too how this land fashions and tests her ghosts, both living and long gone.
Joy Williams, author of The Quick And The Dead, and Breaking And Entering.
Boleto, a novel, was published in 2012.
Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948, and White Crosses, had this to say about Boleto:
To produce a novel as stirring and austerely beautiful as Boleto, a writer must be fluent in the languages of horses, of men, and of the American West. Alyson Hagy has command of all three, and she uses them to masterful effect in these pages.
This is a link to a 2017 interview in which Alyson talks about writing Boleto. The interviewer is Gary Garth MacCann for the Late Last Night Books program:
Scribe was published in 2018
It received the following accolades:
Belletrist Book of the Month for October, 2018
IndieNext #1 Pick for November, 2018
IndieNext Winter Book Club Pick
Finalist for the Southern Book Prize
NPR Best Books of 2018
BBC.com 10 Best Books of 2018
Bookmarks Best Reviewed Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2018
FSG Work in Progress Favorite Books of the Year
Entropy Magazine Best Fiction of 2018
Alyson Hagy grew up with on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is a graduate of Williams College (’82) where she twice won the Benjamin Wainwright Prize for her fiction and completed an Honors thesis under the direction of Richard Ford. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan (’85) working with George Garrett, Alan Cheuse, and Janet Kauffman. While at Michigan, she was awarded a Hopwood Prize in Short Fiction and a Roy Cowden Fellowship. Early stories were published in Sewanee Review, Crescent Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. In 1986, Stuart Wright published her first collection of fiction, Madonna On Her Back.
Hagy taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and the Stonecoast Writers Conference before moving to the Rocky Mountains and joining the faculty at the University of Wyoming in 1996. She is the author of eight works of fiction, including Hardware River (Poseidon Press, 1991), Keeneland (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Graveyard of the Atlantic (Graywolf Press, 2000), Snow, Ashes (Graywolf Press, 2007), Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf Press, 2010), Boleto (Graywolf Press, 2012), and Scribe (Graywolf Press, 2018). She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Prize, the High Plains Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Award, the Syndicated Fiction Award, and been included in Best American Short Stories. Recent fiction has appeared in Drunken Boat, The Idaho Review, Kenyon Review, INCH, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
Hagy has been represented by Gail Hochman of Brandt & Hochman since the 1980s. Fiona McCrae and Katie Dublinski at Graywolf Press have been her publisher and editor since the late 1990s. Abiding interests and transgressions include hiking, fishing, tennis, cohabitating with Labrador Retrievers, college athletics, and making artist’s books. She lives in Laramie, Wyoming with her husband Robert Southard. They have one son, Connor.
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