Hayden Casey is a writer, educator, and musician. His debut short story collection, Show Me Where the Hurt Is, is now available from Split/Lip Press. Ashaki M. Jackson conducted the interview.
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Ashaki Jackson: To me, this collection reads as a dictionary of hurt or a series of bereavements. And there are some stories that linger in bereavement — characters are left with perpetual wounds. No happy endings?
Hayden Casey: That’s not something I think about all too directly when I [assembled] these stories, when I was writing these stories. I fully agree with you. I also think for a long time I was a really sad person. I had a lot of pain in a lot of different categories and flavors and textures. Part of the inclination to reach toward stories that confront those sorts of things is to make that a little bit more visible, or to let a little bit of that be more visible than normal. I feel like I’m very good at appearing very chipper a lot of the time. I’m very good at hiding a lot of my own inner turmoil. Part of that is me letting some of that out of myself and into some other shape. In conversation with that, and also as a separate thought, I don’t know if I necessarily believe in happy endings, or at least not necessarily without the texture of other emotions.
I think for a lot of these stories, as I was writing them, conceptualizing them, approaching them, I was thinking more about the concept of resolution as separate from the concept of happiness. Whether it’s a character coming to a discovery, a character finally acknowledging something after burying it in their own consciousness for a decade or two, or characters having a confrontation and coming to some sort of resolution, even if it’s not permanent, even if it’s not happy, even if it just sort of feels like a pause or like a an empty set of brackets. I think yeah it wasn’t necessarily top of the list to work some happiness in here, although I do think that there is an element of happiness in here which I really, really enjoy writing, which is the concept of delusional happiness.
AJ: Yes, there was delusion!
HC: I love a delusional character. I love a character who is losing themselves in a sort of false reality that isn’t ultimately happy. But at moments, it resembles happiness from certain angles and certain lights. I think that contributes to the overall flavor. I definitely wouldn’t say that I’m reaching toward happy endings at any point in here.
AJ: That makes sense when you say that there are people living in their own realities. There are multiple realities in each of your stories. There’s always someone who thinks something new and different is possible, or who gains clarity about a thing, or is approaching an epiphany. Then outside that bubble, here comes reality, and it’s a very sharply pointed pin.
The resolutions are uncomfortable to sit with. There is uncertainty, there are feelings of rejection, of conflict. The characters don’t experience that; I’m feeling it. Now I’m drawn into the story. How did I get in this? You know that NeNe Leakes meme.
HC: “Now, why am I in it?” [Laughs]
AJ: And you write such complex characters who [aren’t always likeable]. For transparency, I yelled at you about one of your characters on the phone.
HC: You did. [Laughs]
AJ: “Matteo.” His grief was so big it spills everywhere in the apartment, even on his equally bereaved roommate. Boxes of grief in the hallway. Boxes of grief and gnats in the kitchen. How do you write these very challenging, complex characters that you — the readers — [struggle to] root for?
HC: For me, it always has to be grounded in some sort of comprehensible reality — some sort of reality that a reader can empathize with regardless of the difficult things that are happening or the decisions that are being made that we don’t necessarily agree with, or the ways that this person is acting out their grief. I approach everything from the perspective of How did this person get here? Why are they the way that they are? in hopes that makes some of the less palatable stuff a little bit more palatable, although there are still moments where we will shake our heads and we will click our tongues at the boxes all over the living room that have not been cleaned up and the intrusion into the forbidden space [laughs].
I don’t ever want to write difficulty for the sake of difficulty, just to bring another sort of texture. And I want it to feel grounded. I want it to feel rooted in the human experience and hopefully as sympathetic as possible to a reader. And I really like the interplay between somebody who we understand and feel a certain sympathetic way toward and watching them make a catastrophic mistake or doing a horrible thing or saying a horrible thing because that’s how we are. We’re all complicated, and we all make mistakes, and we all love each other. I like getting at that sort of very realistic aspect of the human experience, which is that sort of complicated nature of everybody.
AJ: You mention that your characters come from your imagination — you’re not modeling after anyone, you’re putting human experience together in each of these bodies. What is that process?
HC: It’s never the same twice. Usually what happens first is the genesis of the idea of the story, whether it’s the premise or a sort of relationship that I envision taking place, or something familial, or whatever. There will be the conceit first, and then I’ll start writing it. I don’t think it’s ever necessarily a real direct question that I’m asking myself, What is this character going to do? How does this character respond? How can I shape this character to complicate that person’s interaction with this premise? Ultimately what I go for is How can this character be shaped to make this story play out in a way that I don’t necessarily think it’s going to play out, or that that takes it in a new direction? What’s an element of this character that I can bring in that throws a wrench into this entire thing? That often involves a bit of floundering.
I very often will begin a story and not know much about anybody whatsoever. But through taking it scene by scene, and figuring people out a little bit better, and figuring out the complexities of their dynamics and their relationships with themselves is a really useful part of that sort of brainstorming for me.
To TLDR everything: the conceit of the story comes first, and then the characters flesh themselves out in my earliest grappling with scenes that I’m envisioning for that particular story. And often a lot of stuff changes between the very beginning scrap of something that I write and the finished version of it at the end. But it involves a lot of listening and a lot of trying and a lot of failing. But retooling and repurposing and work [laughs]. A lot of work.
AJ: A couple’s relationship had become lackluster in one of your stories. The husband gets excited when he realizes that his wife is a writer, and he becomes this otherworldly creature who has to be fed by new work. How do you create a character who straddles reality — who starts off as a husband and becomes a story-hungry creature that has to consume his wife’s work as if it’s chlorophyll?
HC: Trial, error? I was thinking about separation of art from artist and how that might lend itself to this particular premise. Then the story led me in an incredibly different direction. But in that story, I was very, very interested in — and taking advantage of — the concept of perspective. The whole story is third person limited, so it’s limited to her brain only. All of the characterization that we get of him, very little of it is objective. It’s a lot of projection from her perspective, her wonderings, her musings, her thoughts. And I find that to be a really interesting tool, not only in characterizing the partner, but also characterizing the narrator because it lets us into what her anxieties are and what her fears are, and what her visions of resolution might look like, and also her deep desperation. I think there’s a real desperation in that story to me, and that was something that I wanted to make visible. I’m thinking of a certain adage that I learned in a screenwriting class a long time ago: one of the tenets of dialog and scene is that each interaction between two people should be a little more intense or dramatic in a consecutive scene. We don’t want the action to fall necessarily. If there’s a really big moment, we don’t want the scene after that to be super dull and boring. There should be that sort of escalation. And that’s sort of how I think about this relationship in this particular story as well.
I think that the gradual ratcheting up of the intensity as the story goes on, and the gradual inclination of his unhingedness from reality and her desperation is one way that I make that change happen in this particular piece. It’s thinking about, all right, this scene that just happened, is each of them at a 5? What would it look like if they were each at like a 6.7, right? And then what would that scene look like, and what physical deterioration is going to have happened in his condition? Is his shirt going to be sweat stained? Is he going to have Cheeto dust on his fingers? How is his dialog going to change? How immediate is he going to be instead of warming up to the concept of dropping a hint. Thinking about the intensity as a build and how that contributes to those conflicts in that piece is what I was going for there.
AJ: Your work can be very musical and poetic. There is a section in the story about the roommates who end up dating the same person.
HC: Oh, “Pretty Things.”
AJ: It’s a supernatural story in which combinations of the lovers are so entwined that they take on each other’s body parts. There is this section on p. 93. It starts, “I said…”
HC: “I said, Isn’t it weird? And Tom said, What? And I said, To kiss someone else’s hand that is really partly your hand, someone else’s ear that’s really your ear, someone else’s teeth that are really your teeth. And he said, Every relationship is just a relationship with the self. Everyone looks for some form of themselves and their partner. This is an illuminating magic. He ran his finger down my jaw, gentle as a tongue. I keep thinking of that. I feel painfully alone for the first time in months, but I have forgotten how it used to feel. The pain of it is fresh again.”
AJ: What informs your poetic sensibility?
HC: That’s a great question. I’ve always been concerned as a writer with the sentence and how the sentence can be put together in a way that either hasn’t been done before or that maybe it’s a matter of contrast, a matter of what came before and what’s coming after. But I got very concerned with the sonics of the sentence in my master’s program at ASU because I am not somebody who reads aloud very often. There was this whole discourse a couple of years ago about people who have internal monologues in their head and people who don’t have audible internal monologues in their head, and I do not. When I read, I don’t hear in my head what the words are. I just move through them, and they process in my head without sort of a sonic element whatsoever. It was a very sort of new thing to me, and it kind of broke my brain a little bit in a wonderful way. But I think it worked really well in conjunction with other concerns that I had about the sort of beauty of the sentence and the phrase and the paragraph and the story overall. But I also took poetry classes in the master’s program. I took three classes with Sally Ball, and I took one with Solmaz Sharif when we were lucky enough to have her. And that taught me a lot.
You’re gonna probably groan or frown at this, but I still would not call myself a poet. I have a hard time acknowledging myself as a poet.
AJ: Boo! Tomato, tomato, coconut, coconut!
HC: Throw tomatoes [laughs]. But I feel like I have to be knighted or inducted or something into this field. I do feel like the sense of poetics is very present in everything that I work on even if I wouldn’t necessarily call the thing itself poetic or poetry or what have you. But another sense, I think, was just being exposed to a lot more poetry and a lot of very wide-ranging poetry in those classes and beyond, because the group of folks that was gathered at that place, at that particular time, all had very, very different styles, and interests, and reading histories, and influences. I think being exposed to all of that helped me understand poetry in a different way and helped me see the elements of it that were already present in my work, or that I wanted to be more present in my work, regardless of form or genre, necessarily. So I think it’s a combination of the people that I was around, the reading that I was doing. I also started reading a lot more poetry around the time and just sort of bringing that into the brain soup, in combination with everything else that was going on at the time.
AJ: You’re an avid reader. I have known you to drive to a residency with a vehicle full of books, and have books shipped to the residency, and make your way to the local bookstore to purchase additional books. What genres or authors do you think contributed to your capacity to write this collection or write generally? Who did you read while you were writing this, or who or what inspired you?
HC: I would also like to acknowledge that just because I had all of those books and bought all of those books did not necessarily mean that I was reading them. It just means that I have a problem. [Laughs]
AJ: [Laughing] Weren’t you reading a book a day? Is that my imagination?
HC: Yes. Correct. No, you’re correct. [Laughs]
But in terms of direct influences. I have a hard time thinking about the collection as a whole just because it didn’t emerge as a whole. I was never really writing toward a collection. That was not ever my goal. I just wanted to write short stories and learn the form a little bit better because it was something I had very little experience or understanding of. So these stories were written over almost five years, and it was only at the very end of that that I went, Oh, you know, these kind of fit together. They feel like they are talking to each other. And then the collection was born. But there are lots of individual influences across the book itself, once again, a lot of that has to do with the people that I was around in the master’s program, which led me in different directions.
Some of the stuff in here that’s leaning into body horror or fabulism or magical realism was a direct influence from the people around me who are writing those sorts of things, because that’s their kind of bread and butter. And I went, How might this work in my world? How might this help me achieve some of the aims that I have? Also, I feel very inspired generally as a writer, and I feel that sort of inspiration present in this work by people who are very focused on interpersonal, close relationships, and who write more quiet stories.
Elizabeth Strout is a huge influence on me. I love her eye for character. Her eye for change, for changing people is really beautiful to me. So, I think that she is a big part of the inspiration, the influence that’s making its way into this particular work. I’m thinking of the stories and short story writers. I’m thinking of Allegra Hyde, who writes mostly in a more genre fiction setting. She’s very concerned with the conflict between collective responsibility and individual responsibility, and that’s what a lot of her writing grapples with and reaches toward and thinks about and she also just writes amazing sentences. Part of it is that I love every line of her work, but also thinking about all the different shapes that her stories take, I find inspirational. She has two story collections at this point, and they feel very unified, but they also have such great range within them in terms of subject matter and length and period, future, present, past, etc. She was somebody I was thinking a lot about, and sort of kept her work alongside me as I was writing these stories. Also Anne Carson, obviously, who is the epigraph at the beginning of the book. She has had more of an influence on me overall than pretty much anybody I could name because I discovered her, and I immersed myself in all her works very quickly as you know I tend to do. And what I love about her is I do not feel like she operates within any sort of bind. I feel like she is absolutely free to do whatever she wants to do, whenever, whatever shape it takes, whatever it looks like, however it emerges, she just sort of follows the trail of the idea, and that’s something that I’m happy to have in the world as a sort of freeing thing.
AJ: Any musical inspirations? There’s a page at the beginning of the book instructing readers to download or stream the album inspired by the book. “Visit HaydenCasey.co/ShowMe.” You are a celebrated musician with multiple albums streaming. I wonder how that also plays into your writing, or if there’s an inspiration to your music that’s related to your writing.
HC: I will say that I am always listening to music while I’m writing. So there is perhaps a sort of influence from the emotional tenor of whatever it is I’m listening to in the background. Often I’ll try and kind of line them up. If I know that a particular scene that’s coming is going to have a certain emotional resonance, I’ll look for a piece of music that feels kind of similar to that. It’s often wordless, it’s often ambient music, which I find very centering and grounding, and it helps me focus. It helps me keep my train of thought when there are 800 million other things going on all the time around me.
The biggest musical influence on my text writing is Grouper, who’s an ambient musician. I love her to pieces, and she has a lot of music with vocals in it, but they’re often incredibly hard to decipher, so they don’t get in the way of the words that are happening in my brain, which I think is a really nice kind of effect.
The music that I [referenced] on that page that you mentioned is inspired by the story. I took each song or each story one at a time, and I [asked myself] what would this sound like in music form? In some cases, it broadened or complicated the narrative that already existed in the story. In some cases, it switched perspectives, so we got to hear from a different person as the narrator of the song. In some cases, it was a more direct transliteration from one form to the other. But I do create in both spaces, and I have always wanted to merge them together in this sort of way. So it was really fun to make that happen. I figured I’d wait for a book because I could guarantee that it was going to be available and be able to be experienced alongside the music.
Another thing that I want to mention is that I often steal titles of songs I’m often inspired by If I’m listening to a song on loop, sometimes that title will work its way into the story somehow or serve as the sort of launching point. So looking at the table of contents, “Evergreen,” which is the story about the dissolution of the relationship and the writer, is one of the titles. There’s a song by Ben Howard called Evergreen, which reaches for sort of similar emotional ground. (I also hate titling things. And I hate titles. Part of it is just sort of a cheap kind of reach.) There’s a song by Big Thief called “Pretty Things” that I stole the title from. There’s a song by Grouper called “Headache” that I stole the title from, and that really, literally, inspired the entire story, just the word headache. Listening to that song inspired the whole thing, which is silly, but yeah, sometimes the influence is as direct as the title.
AJ: Tenderness emerges as part of your character development, but also it’s beyond the character. For example, you incorporate care for the environment or the people who are in the environment. I remember the grandchildren coming to play in their grandmother’s front yard in one story. The little boy rushes directly to the sprinklers in his trunks while the little girl thinks, I’m too old for that. Then she finally bends and goes to join her brother at the sprinklers.
HC: To be honest, I think “tender” is one of the words that might be the word used most often to describe my work by people. I think it does speak to my approach and my interest in character, above all, in making people as realistic and as complicated and as eventually transparent, perhaps, as I can in the writing process and making sure that I never let the story get away from me, or let the story, the plot, take precedence, or the or any other really element of the of the writing take precedence over the sort of wholeness of the character. And that’s what I care about most. I think it’s something that I might be hypersensitive to as a result of that being my chief, my primary concern. I’m constantly looking for the places where the character feels underdeveloped or the scene feels rushed, or the interiority needs to be sharper, or things like that. I’m constantly pressing on what exists, thinking about, how can this deepen? How can this be more clearly illustrative of this person’s conflict or desire or past or whatever? Because that’s what I’m most interested in, is making these people that I’m writing about feel as whole as I possibly can and like people that might walk in off the street.
AJ: I’m excited to hear how this collection came together and how your mind works. When you talk about the stories, I still have characters in my mind. That’s how indelible the writing is. Show Me Where the Hurt Is is a collection I would have loved to have read in my literature classes because [the stories are] clear and memorable.
Hayden, you have another book coming out soon. Does it have people who shift into other shapes or have unnatural hungers and desires? What do we have to look forward to in your future work?
HC: Yes, I do have another book coming out. It’s coming out in October of this year. It’s called A Harvest of Furies (Lanternfish Press), and it is a retelling of The Oresteia by Aeschylus. So it’s a retelling of an ancient Greek trilogy of plays, tragedies. Many of the things that you mentioned do happen, are on the page. Essentially, it’s a family story. A father who has been away at war for a number of years returns home, and he is a completely changed man, and his return is going to unleash a lot of chaos, a lot of secrets that have been buried over the years and things that have been hidden are going to become revealed. And there’s death because it’s a Greek tragedy, so duh. But this is a family that has long believed that they are cursed, and so we are seeing the curse take shape again.
Character is my chief concern. I spent a lot of time figuring out who all of these people are. The two primary narrators are the two eldest of the three children. Their names are Emma and Orrie, and they are 19 and 16 years old, respectively. And it’s incredibly playful. It does a lot of strange things on the page, which I’m excited for you to experience. There is a Greek chorus that transitions between perspectives. There are voices, there are visions, there are glimmers. Wow, which? What do those mean? I don’t know. You’ll find out. I had a really, really, really fun time working on this, and I’m proud of it and happy with it, so I’m excited for it to also emerge into the world.
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