imagination || craft: Monster Things & Secret Books
On Caroline Hagood's Weird Girls, monstrous women, writing trances
Check out the latest offerings at Muse here. Nancy McCabe’s class on essay forms, Shapes of Stories, opens tomorrow (Sun. 9/10)! And Megan Baxter’s The Writer as Researcher has been postponed until December. Check out the new dates!
I also want to recommend an upcoming course, What May Come & How: Speculative Fiction, from my friend Sarah Rose Nordgren via her wonderful new project The School for Living Futures. The six-week Zoom-based course begins October 8th and is taught by award-winning writer Mary Margaret Alvarado. The class will be a place to “engage in the grave and happy labor of dreaming other worlds,” and it is on sale through Sept. 15th. Use the code WHATMAYCOME for a 20% discount at checkout!
Yesterday evening, the power went out after a brief storm here (in Durham, NC), and it stayed out until around two in the morning. I was alone— my child is with their father on Friday nights— and I enjoyed the eerie dark and quiet. How fitting, then, that the book I chose to read by candlelight and clip-on book light was Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022) by Caroline Hagood. Inspired by Jenny Offill’s notion of the “art monster” from her 2014 novel Dept of Speculation, Hagood explores the creative power of the “monstrous” woman. (In an interview I did with writer friends Jessica Mesman and Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, we also tried to parse out the supposed “monstrousness” of the woman— especially the mother— who claims the time and literal/psychic space to create art. Here’s the audio version.)
I loved Hagood’s discussion of the monstrous figures that appealed to her as a child, and how she connected this appeal to a creative force within her, even from an early age. She writes, “I have always felt some deep sense of creativity and power to be found in monsters, ghosts, ghouls, witches, haunted houses, in learning to dwell in darkness without reaching after light.”
You can read more about what Hagood says about this in the photos below:
I also love how Hagood writes of an early “writing trance.” (I found her extended discussion of the Wicked Witch of the West as writer especially appealing. I’ve long been drawn to the strange power of the Wicked Witch and Dorothy, together. The thrilling witch and Dorothy the witch killer, who is herself mistaken for a witch at various points, “so it’s like she’s destroying herself, her own female power, when she melts the Wicked Witch,” as Hagood points out.)
I was quite intrigued by the idea of the “secret book” that another woman gives the author at a writing conference. Hagood writes, “I asked her what I should do about the fact that I had all these ‘monster things’ I wanted to write about that I absolutely didn’t feel I could confess to publicly. She told me to write a secret book, which led me here. But the scary yet thrilling thing is that now you are reading it.”
The secret book in some ways connects to the an idea Kim Addonizio speaks of in Ordinary Genius, the idea of “making a book for yourself’ in your notebook. I wrote about that here. “Later you can mine it,” Addonizio writes, “you can go back and pull out interesting lines and images and memories, find poems to revise and ideas to develop.” (See also the great advice from Emily Mohn-Slate about mining your notebooks for drafts in Nancy Reddy’s newsletter past week.)
“I asked her what I should do about the fact that I had all these ‘monster things’ I wanted to write about that I absolutely didn’t feel I could confess to publicly. She told me to write a secret book, which led me here. But the scary yet thrilling thing is that now you are reading it.”
Ideas for writing:
What writing power could you unleash if you wrote a “secret book”?
Write about a childhood and/or writing “trance.” This could be a time you accessed a state of flow or a strange secret thrill of power or fascination.
I don't know this book but the idea of a secret book thrills me! It's like A Secret Garden, sans melancholy and moors. I'm intrigued/tempted.
I love this book! You might also enjoy Hagood's earlier book, "Ways of Looking at a Woman."