Our Conversation with Becky Hagenston
Becky Hagenston is the author of four award-winning story collections, most recently The Age of Discovery and Other Stories, which won The Journal’s Non/Fiction Prize and was published by The Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books in August 2021. The collection also won the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters prize in fiction.
Her third collection, Scavengers, was chosen by Benjamin Percy as the winner of the Permafrost Book Prize and was published in 2016 by the University of Alaska Press. Her second collection, Strange Weather, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was published in March 2010 by Press 53. Her first book, A Gram of Mars, won the Mary McCarthy Prize and was published by Sarabande Books.
She is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission fellowship in fiction. She has won a 2020 Pushcart Prize and two O. Henry Awards, as well as the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Reynolds Price Award in Short Fiction, and the Julia Peterkin Award. Her work has appeared in the Oxford American, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, New England Review, Subtropics, and many other journals.
She grew up in Maryland and received an MFA from the University of Arizona and an MA from New Mexico State University. She has received residencies to Yaddo and Ucross. She has also received scholarships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. Currently, she is a Professor of English at Mississippi State University and lives in Starkville, Mississippi with her husband.
This interview was conducted by Mia Fischel, and has been lightly edited for clarity.
INTERVIEWER
How did you get into writing?
HAGENSTON
My parents were big readers, so they were always reading to me, there were books throughout the house. For a while when I was young, my dad was a minister and so he was always typing. Like the sound of the typewriter would echo through the house and there were all these stacks of yellow paper—he typed everything out on yellow paper. Then every week he’d get up and tell his stories. I’d never thought about it until much later. But, every week he was composing something, and then telling it to people and then he’d start over and do a new one. So I think that kind of got into my system, because, I wanted to try to type on the typewriter. I wanted to write things on yellow paper. I wanted to do all of that. So yeah, it started when I was really young. I always knew there’s something important about writing things down. And then having an audience of people who want to hear it, that sunk in at an early age.
INTERVIEWER
Storytelling has always been with you. So where do you draw your inspiration from?
HAGENSTON
Everywhere. I carry a notebook with me everywhere I go; I get boxes of these little little notebooks and just write down random things. Most of it doesn’t end up anywhere, but I think it sort of helps me to pay attention. If I overhear things, you know, I’m a good eavesdropper. I give my students these notebooks and I’m like, ‘go eavesdrop on people.’ You don’t know what you’re gonna hear, but you’re gonna get something and a lot of times they do. I used to write a lot about things that were inspired by my family. Like when I first started writing stories, like I wrote about a minister and about a minister’s wife. So now I’ve known my husband for over 20 years, but now I use his family sometimes for inspiration. He’ll tell me this crazy story that happened when he was a teenager and I’m like, I’m writing this down. I’m putting that in the story. I’ve been getting some inspiration from his parents. We FaceTime every Sunday, and there’ll be stories that come out and I’m always like, ‘wait a minute, let me write this down.’ Like I said, I have notebooks everywhere stacked throughout the house and I just think there’s inspiration everywhere. But you know, I do a lot of asking questions also, like if I’m talking to a friend and they’ll tell me something and I’ll say, you know, ‘wait a minute. Let me write this down and I need to know more.’ I always get permission like, ‘can I write about this?’ and they say, ‘course!’ They’re used to it by now.
INTERVIEWER
I love eavesdropping as well.
HAGENSTON
Yes, people don’t realize that we can hear them! I’ve spent a lot of time in the Atlanta airport because if I travel anywhere we go from my regional airport to Atlanta—that’s the only place you can go from the regional airport—so I’ve been there a lot. And I once eavesdropped on a couple who were talking about eavesdropping on somebody else.
INTERVIEWER
That’s hilarious! I was actually going to ask about your story “Storage and Retrieval” that’s set in an airport. It comes in handy. So you said you draw a lot of inspiration from your family members and your husband’s family. When you write your observations in your notebook, what kind of details do you typically look for?
HAGENSTON
I write down exact dialogue. Like, if I’m overhearing something, I’ll put it in quotation marks and I’ll say, ‘overheard here.’ And some it’s just observation. Like I was on campus a couple days ago, and there was student orientation happening and it was a really humid day, and I just wrote down, ‘humid orientation day, mom’s in white jeans,’ because there were just a lot of moms in white jeans. I don’t think that will go anywhere, but it’s just like literally anything. Sometimes I do it just to keep in practice. I was talking to a student once over a student conference, and I was saying, if you feel stuck, just sit somewhere and write stuff down. And I said, ‘Look, there’s a turquoise porta potty over there next to a bulldozer,’ because there’s all this construction going on. I’m like, you know, write down that turquoise porta potty, it’s a very vivid image, you can use it.
INTERVIEWER
In “Woman of the House” in Story, you took inspiration from your in-laws. What kind of creative liberties did you take to be able to fictionalize this story?
HAGENSTON
I took many creative liberties. Where this came from, the kernel of it was, well, my father-in-law was a missileer in South Dakota in the Air Force in the early 70s and I thought that was really interesting. My mother-in-law, you know, took care of the house and raised the two boys. One of the stories that came out during our FaceTime weekly meetings was that a magazine salesman came to the house one day, and she said, ‘We don’t have money for magazines.’ And he saw a piggy bank behind her and he said, ‘I bet there’s money in the piggy bank,’ and she was like, ‘No!’ and made him leave, like he didn’t even come in the door. But I was thinking, well, who is the person who would let him in? Who is the person that for whatever reason is going to open the door? In my memory, it was an encyclopedia salesman. Later, she was like, no, it was actually a magazine salesman, and I was like, it doesn’t matter, but I think encyclopedias work better for me. And that piggy bank, once I put that in the story, I knew it had to break somehow at the end of the story, like I wanted that piggy bank to break somehow. And that was pretty much all I took. I worked on that story for years, like years, and I did research about missileers and I interviewed my in-laws and I said like, ‘What do you remember when you first moved there?’ because they moved from Massachusetts. And my mother in law said there was a buffalo tied up outside of a hardware store and I just wrote all of those details down. I looked up the house where they lived on Google Maps. I got all the military jargon from my father-in-law. When I finished it, I sent it to them. I didn’t want it to be too much like their actual lives. Like I’m not writing about them. I sort of used my mom for a little bit of this stuff just because my mother grew up in Orlando, but Donna’s a made up character who I just put a few little facts about other people. Neither my mother-in-law nor my mom are that character. My first draft, I had a ton of backstory, and just so much that like half the story was backstory. I just cut, cut, cut. So this character, I had to give her a completely different name. The father in that story is nothing like my father or my father-in-law. So I like to take real places and then make up the people to go in the places.
INTERVIEWER
I loved all the little background details that were kind of thrown in there and all fit together really nicely. How do you make like, even your side characters really full and real?
HAGENSTON
I think a lot of it is just taking notes and asking questions, and all the side characters probably were other characters at first that didn’t do enough in the story. Or I’m working on a story right now where I’ve got too many side characters. So I’m taking a few out and combining them. I think it’s like a long process of accumulating scraps of detail that can eventually make one believable character. I don’t know. Does that make sense?
INTERVIEWER
Yeah, like picking and choosing from your different notes and everything. Something else that I really admired in your work is the idea of transcendence of human emotions, and they’re all very recognizable to readers. So even though “Woman of the House” is set in the 70s, these feelings and issues she faces are still very relatable to women today. And, like, I could almost envision reading this as something dystopian, which some of your other work features. How do you go about capturing these specific emotions?
HAGENSTON
I actually like that idea of it being dystopian. I’d like to take that same kind of character dynamic and put it in the future and see how it plays out. I like that idea, actually. I think even though the situation is made up, I think the emotions are real. Like, that’s stuff I felt. We all question ourselves and wonder if we’ve made the right choices and feel insecure about things. And so a lot of my writing comes out of me feeling these things a certain way, and then thinking about how would that emotion translate into another situation, into another character?
INTERVIEWER
Yeah, it all feels really up close and personal, especially added on with all those background details. Transitioning to “The Age of Discovery and Other Stories,” those dystopian ideas definitely come back a lot and that transcendence of human emotions, both in the realistic and the like ultra weird stories. Specifically in “Hi Ho Cherry Ho” and “Storage and Retrieval” which both feature robots in different forms. Could you tell me a little bit about the robots in your stories? Do you try to humanize them? And why do you feel drawn to technology in your writing?
HAGENSTON
I don’t know where all these robots came from. And then I started writing another robot story, I just kind of ran out of steam. Like, well, that robot story is not going to work. There was a bachelorette party and a robot somehow… I’m still gonna work on it. It entertains me to write it and sometimes that’s enough. I’ll just write it for fun. Well the “Storage and Retrieval,” that’s the library robots. There are library robots and I’ve seen one and it blew my mind. There’s more and more of them throughout the country. The librarian or somebody types in the call number and then the machine, it’s in this gigantic room and it just zips back and forth and it finds the container that has the books. I recommend doing ‘library robot’ on YouTube and you can see it in progress. It’s fascinating. So that’s a real thing. I watched video after video of those things and thought of like, how do I describe this thing? With the “High Ho Cherry Ho” robot, I was reading articles about robots, like those robots that old people can cuddle, you know, and I read about this experiment where people were given some kind of robot to just sort of take care of and then they were told, ‘okay, now, beat it with a baseball bat’ or something like that. And people were like, ‘no.’ I mean, they didn’t think it was real, but they just thought like, that won’t feel good for me to do that. And I thought, well, what if the robot is asking you to do terrible things to it? How would you react to that? So that’s sort of where that came from. And that was a story I just started and I thought this is just crazy, whatever, let’s just see what happens. I had many, many drafts of it and many people reading it and giving me suggestions. So I don’t know if I was trying to humanize it or not, I was just sort of like, what else is it gonna do?
INTERVIEWER
That’s such an interesting concept, especially with how they’re researching more, doing more now. It kind of reminds me of that Milgram experiment where they asked people to like, shock another person, except in this case, it’s a robot. So what would you say is your strangest story in this collection? And how far do you take the strangeness or is there a point at which it can be too far-fetched? How do you ground it?
HAGENSTON
It can definitely be too far-fetched, but I don’t talk myself out of anything. I’m just like, let’s put this crazy thing in motion and see where it goes. Like I cannot think, I cannot pull back; I have to just go full speed ahead and see where it goes. I don’t know what’s the strangest story. It might be the one with the floating bread. My husband worked at a bakery for a while and there were just stacks of bread everywhere and so I thought, I have to use this in a story somehow. I couldn’t find my way into a realistic story. And then I started thinking what if the loaves were floating?
INTERVIEWER
That was an interesting one for sure. I was also going to ask, it seems like a lot of the spaces or environments like that your stories are set in, like a bakery or restaurant, I guess have you taken from working in those spaces? Or how long do you typically spend in a space to be able to write it?
HAGENSTON
Well, definitely the bakery I spent a lot of time in. There’s a story where there are two girls that go to a bar and try to not get hit on. And that is sort of a made-up space, but it’s sort of based on a place that I had been with a friend of mine. We were like the only women in the bar and there’s some creep who was like, ‘Hey, you’re a bunch of little fillies,’ and we’re like, ‘what? Fillies? Goodbye.’ We just left. It’s just weird. So I was sort of trying to picture that place. It was like 20 years ago, but in my head I was picturing that place. There’s some stories that take place in France and I’ve spent some time there because I have friends who live in the South of France. When you have friends in the South of France, you must visit them. Whenever I go there, I sit down and I take tons of notes. I have a terrible, terrible memory, which is useful because I know I can never say ‘oh, I’ll remember that later.’ I know I can’t so I had to write it all down, right now, while I’m here. Like if there’s music playing, what people are saying, what the sounds are, what the smells are. I’m really big on just going to a place and taking a lot of notes. So sometimes it might not be a place I’ve been to often, but I’ve been to enough to sit and just take lots of notes about it.
INTERVIEWER
What other themes and or topics interest you or appear in your work often, and is there anything that surprises you?
HAGENSTON
I’m interested in this space I’m in now, like, being older, old enough to remember typing on a typewriter in college, an electric typewriter. It all just seems so quaint now, like I remember that. And then being on the cusp of like, who knows what’s coming next—AI is going to like control our lives or whatever, I don’t know—so I’m terrified of that. So it’s interesting to be sort of in the middle here between these two places with technology. I’m a little anxious about technology, like social media makes me super nervous, you know, I never even joined Facebook. So I’m writing, thinking about those kinds of spaces and things that people my age are dealing with, even if I’m not specifically dealing with them. I’m thinking about my parents getting older, and then I don’t have kids, but I have friends who have kids who are going off to college and what’s that like to be, you know, a parent but also probably soon a caretaker. I think what’s surprising me is I’m also going back to writing about things that happened a long time ago. I’m working on a story that is set in a house I lived in when I was like 12. I’m thinking of this particular house that I lived in and setting the story there even though the characters aren’t the same. Or thinking about this job I had when I was 22 and I lived in London and worked at a pub, and couldn’t really find my way into it. And now I’m sort of finding my way into that after all these years. So that’s something that’s surprising. Like, oh, I’m never going to run out of material. Lots of stuff to write about still.
INTERVIEWER
Would you say it’s more like a combination of fear and nostalgia or some other emotion?
HAGENSTON
I don’t think it’s nostalgia because I’m trying to avoid nostalgia because when I write, I mean, there’s lots of stress. Like the house I’m thinking of, it was a very stressful time in my life; we were renting, my sister and I were sharing a room, and it was just very stressful. So I’m trying to tap into that kind of anti-nostalgia, I guess. Also what’s interesting to me is always the conflict, like I’m not interested in writing about anything where there’s no conflict. Maybe I had a pleasant time in this situation or this setting, but who’s having a terrible time in this setting, who’s having not a good time? That’s the story I want to write.
INTERVIEWER
It always is more interesting to read about.
HAGENSTON
Yes, that’s what I tell my students. I’m like, do you want to read about people who are happy and having a really nice time and nothing ever goes wrong? They’re like ‘no!’ So, then you don’t want to write that either. Like give your characters problems. Brainstorm conflicts they can give characters.
INTERVIEWER
It is very real. Segueing from that to your story, “Sea Ice,” I read in a previous interview that you had actually experienced an active shooter warning as a professor, and that it took a while to write about that. Could you tell me a little bit more about your experience and process going through this story?
HAGENSTON
Many years ago, I’m not even sure how many, maybe six, seven, I was teaching a creative writing class and we got an active shooter alert. I locked the door, turned out the lights, we all sort of crouched behind the desk and chairs and it was just awful. It was very calm, like we had people running down the hallway. It was all a complete false alarm. Nobody had a gun, nobody was threatening to shoot anyone. It was like some crazy misunderstanding. But students were getting alerts like, somebody’s shooting in the cafeteria, like I don’t know where all that stuff came from. None of it was true, but we didn’t know that for a long time and it was just such a helpless, horrible feeling. I just remember like the window of the classroom was kind of cloudy and I remember just seeing people running by. It was awful. And I did tell my students like, ‘Well, now you’ve got something to write about.’ And then I was like, at the end of the semester, ‘None of you wrote about that.’ I didn’t write about it either. So it was many years and then I was like, I’m not going to write exactly about that, but I want to try to, you know, process that emotion. And then it became about a professor and a student. And then I was like, is it two third-person points of view? And then I was like, one has to be first-person and one has to be third. I’d never done that before, I didn’t know I could do that, and I was like, whatever, I’m just going to do this. I was picturing my own liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, Elizabethtown College, and it wasn’t exactly that place, but that’s what I was picturing. So I put it in a real place but then imagined the rest of the situation.
INTERVIEWER
Yeah, the whole story did feel very eerie like what you were feeling at that time. Are there any other topics that you kind of have found similarly difficult to write about in the past? Or do you ever feel really emotionally caught up with a story or character?
HAGENSTON
The things I have difficulty writing about is if I start something that is too close to my actual life, not because it feels emotional, but because I know what happens and I’m already bored, so I don’t want to write the stories. I was trying to write about my parents and how they met, but fictionalize it, but I kept writing about the real people and it just didn’t go anywhere. Because, you know, I have to make stuff up, otherwise I’m not interested. Like I know how this goes, I know the story. This is why I can’t write nonfiction. I’ve tried it and I’m like, no, I’m bored. I have to make stuff up and turn it into a story. So that’s usually what I have trouble with just because if I already know where it’s going, I’m not going to write it.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve got to add some pizzazz to it.
HAGENSTON
Yeah, I have to ask, what are these people going to do now? I have no idea, I have to find out.
INTERVIEWER
Just write until you find out.
HAGENSTON
Just write until you find out. I tell my students this too, like when we talk about published stories, what’s gonna keep you reading? But then when they’re writing their stories, what’s gonna keep you writing? If you already know what’s gonna happen, are you going to keep writing? And usually, no. And that’s what I really enjoy. I have folders and folders of story beginnings that are not going to make it into real full stories, and that’s okay. I probably have to write 10 or so stories before I get one that’s a complete story. So I always have to keep writing stuff.
INTERVIEWER
It’s a long process.
HAGENSTON
But that’s okay. I have like five or six things going at once, but it’s a long process.
INTERVIEWER
Do you usually know where your stories are going or how it’s going to end?
HAGENSTON
I usually start with just the beginning and write the first couple of pages. Then I’m like, okay, now I have to figure out what they do next. But I usually don’t know where it’s going to end until I’m at least halfway through. I know everybody has their own process; I think there’s some writers that need to have it figured out in their head before they sit down to write, but I have to have it not figured out in my head and then partway through the process I have to start thinking like, alright, where is it gonna end? It starts in this place, will it end in this place? Is there something that’s going to resonate at the end of the story that I planted at the beginning of the story but didn’t realize it yet? I just have to claw my way through. At some point I need to know how it’s going to end, at least the time frame; is it going to take place over an afternoon, a week? I have to figure that out pretty soon. And then I usually rewrite the endings like five or six times. Beginnings are so fun and endings are just really, really hard.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking of shifting in a story, with “Hematite, Apatite,” this is another strange one. You kind of transform the depiction of the Salem Witch Trials in “The Crucible” and then transition to a Hansel and Gretel modern retelling. How did you decide on merging these two?
HAGENSTON
At first, I just had the witch thing. I was reading books about witchcraft and was really surprised, I hadn’t realized how much older some of these women were than I pictured. They were like 50’s, 60’s, 70’s; you know, they were older. That was what was interesting to me: this image of this 60 year old woman who’s accused of witchcraft. What’s she gonna do? I didn’t know what she was gonna do, and then I realized she was gonna be like, ‘yeah, fine, I’m a witch!’ Then I had to figure out what she did, and I had to give her an occupation, so I thought, it makes sense if she’s dealing with children and they’re accusing her. And then what does she teach? My sister taught science for a while, she was a high school science teacher, now she’s a middle school librarian. I asked her, ‘What kind of stuff do they teach in elementary school or middle school? Sciencey stuff?’ I always liked rocks and minerals and then I actually bought a book on minerals for children, there’s pictures and the names of stuff so I can think of what they look like. And then I just couldn’t figure out how to end it so the Hansel and Gretel thing was just—that’s been my favorite, weird fairy tale ever since I was a little kid so that sort of popped up in there, and it was a bit of a surprise to me. I’m going with it. There’s a witch, there’s a little path leading to the house.
INTERVIEWER
It was a fun twist to realize towards the end. I also liked circling back to the geology with the rocks leading to the house.
HAGENSTON
I learned something about rocks writing that story!
INTERVIEWER
Have other fairy tales or classic stories inspired your writing?
HAGENSTON
I’m sure they have. When I was really little I got a Grimm’s Fairy Tales book and I’m sure it was not the real Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But when I was still quite young, I got the real Grimm’s Fairy Tale book and it’s like, wow, these are just brutal, I love it! You know, there’s things getting hacked off right and left. So I’m sure that’s informed stuff. The story, “The Seven Ravens” in The Age of Discovery—there is a chopped off finger in the Grimm’s fairy tale, “The Seven Ravens,” and I was like I’ve got a chopped off finger, I have to figure out a way to put ravens or possible ravens in here just as an homage to that fairy tale.
INTERVIEWER
Ending with the final story in your collection, “Storage and Retrieval,” can you talk a little bit more about how you take moments of personal anxiety and translate them into your writing?
HAGENSTON
I think in all of my stories, the anxiety is kind of what drives it. I’m not going to write about the things that actually make me anxious, but I’m going to put those emotions in somebody else and figure out what they’re anxious about. One thing I have been using in terms of something that is useful for anxiety, living in Mississippi, there’s a lot of tornado warnings. That makes me anxious, and I’ve actually used that in stories. I’m working on one, there’s a tornado warning and I’m like, I could definitely put that into the story. I just try to think about who else might be feeling this way, who is this character, what is their situation. So I can start to go through those notebooks, like maybe the mom at freshman orientation wearing the white jeans, maybe she’s going through something. What is it? Why is she anxious? Okay, she’s here at orientation, what’s going on? Why is she not having a good time? So just like that I can start brainstorming and writing stuff down on the many notebooks I have flung about the house. Tear it off and put it in a folder, maybe work from it later.
INTERVIEWER
What do you hope to impart on your readers?
HAGENSTON
That’s a good question and I don’t know. I mean, I’m hoping somebody will read it to the end. Will be entertained, or want to know what’s going to happen. And I think that’s all. But also I don’t think about the reader at all, I can’t think like ‘what’s somebody going to think when they read this?’ I do read it to my husband, I always read my stories out loud to him. He’s really good at coming up with like, ‘I was bored here. Kind of lagging here.’ And I can always tell when I’m reading it out loud, if my own mind starts to wander when I’m reading my story, I’m like this is not working. I don’t really think about a reader until I’m far enough through it and then I start with my husband; where did it get confusing? Where is it boring? And usually when I’m reading it, I can start to tell those things myself. Mainly it’s just that somebody enjoys it, or gets to the end, you know, and had a pleasant experience or an unsettling experience, or any kind of experience, whatever. If anybody just reads it, I’m happy about that.
INTERVIEWER
It’s great that you have an at-home critic that can be honest with you.
HAGENSTON
I am very, very lucky. I realize that.
INTERVIEWER
Looking forward, do you have any upcoming plans? Any travels, themes that you’re wishing to explore in your writing, or things that you’re excited about?
HAGENSTON
I got a Mississippi Arts Commission grant a couple years ago, which I used to go to Washington D.C. and go to museums, and took a lot of notes there. I’m really interested in art museums, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that yet, but I’ve got these notes and folders and stories that are started. My husband and I just went to Italy for the first time and I took lots of notes in Venice and Florence. I don’t know what I’m going to do with that, but I’m going to do something. That might not turn into a story for another year or two. Who knows? But I’m looking forward to looking at the stuff I put aside for a while and just seeing where it goes. Themes-wise, I have no idea what I’m writing about. Other people tell me what I’ve written: ‘Oh, this is about this!’ Okay, yeah, that sounds good. I can never think about a theme—maybe when it’s in a late, late draft I’ll think, do these things hold together? If not, why not, and is there something more cohesive? But mainly, I’m just interested in taking characters and putting them in a weird situation and finding out what they do.
INTERVIEWER
That’s wonderful. I’m sure it’ll be fun to go through all those notes.
HAGENSTON
Yeah! And because I have such a bad memory, I’ll look at stuff like I don’t even remember writing this—it’s great, it’s like somebody else wrote it. I mean, it’s not that bad but I have enough distance that it’s like, wow, I barely remember this, but now I can do something with it.
INTERVIEWER
I need to start doing that. I’m feeling inspired.
HAGENSTON
Do that! Write stuff down and just put it in a drawer for three months, don’t even look at it.
Mia Fischel is a journalism student at Denison University, with minors in Classical Studies and Ancient Greek.