Rachel Reeher Interviews Allegra Hyde
Allegra Hyde is the author of Eleutheria, as well as the short story collection, Of This New World, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, Hyde's writing has also been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best Women’s Travel Writing, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Her stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Threepenny Review, and many other venues. Hyde has received fellowships and grants from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Elizabeth George Foundation, the Lucas Artist Residency Program, the Jentel Foundation, The Virginia G. Piper Center, Writing Workshops in Greece, the National University of Singapore, the U.S. Fulbright Commission, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Oberlin College.
You can purchase a copy of Eleutheria here.
From Managing Editor Rachel Reeher*: Eleutheria is a story of survival in a world devastated by climate crisis; a story of love and desperation and the boldness to chase new futures in the face of global catastrophe. Willa Marks is raised off the grid, plunged into the modern world as a grieving teenager, and forced to navigate a crumbling capitalist society, a feverish romantic relationship, and the promise of climate revolution in an experimental community called Camp Hope. Eleutheria is an examination of exploitation, climate justice, the ethical prism of activism, and what it means to preserve hope at all costs.
RR: What was the genesis of Eleutheria?
AH: This question is hard to answer. I first went to the Bahamas on an environmental research trip around 2009, and I found the place really compelling environmentally, culturally, and historically. I was interested in how these layers of history had concentrated on the island and overlapped and evolved and formed a pattern—essentially, of idealism and exploitation—and how these patterns unfolded over and over again, whether under the guise of Puritans becoming pirates, or environmentalists becoming neocolonialists. I was interested in that complexity, and the fact that it was still unfolding, that the present and the future were still so connected to the past. From there, I couldn’t get the place out of my head. I ended up going back and working with an environmental group after my undergraduate degree, and eventually that led to writing a short story called “Shark Fishing” that was in my first collection. “Shark Fishing” was the longest story in the book and yet it still felt like I hadn’t quite said what I wanted to say about this place and what it meant, how it was part of this larger story of the Americas and our climate crisis, among other things. So, I ended up embarking on a novel that I started while I was at Arizona State. It took a long time for the novel to come together, over five years. In some ways, I would never advocate for working from a short story and turning it into a novel, because you have to really break the short story before you can move ahead. It’s its own animal, in terms of revision and development. But I did it. And now I have this book.
RR: I didn’t realize the novel started as a short story. In some ways it seems like that might offer you a miniature roadmap of sorts, but in others it seems like you said—a process of complete deconstruction and reimagination. It almost seems harder than starting a novel from scratch.
AH: Absolutely. One of my early teachers was Karen Russell, who worked from a short story to write her novel, Swamplandia! So I had it in my mind that it could be done—a person could write a novel from a story—and then a couple years ago I was talking to Karen and she was like, “Oh, you should never do that! Writing from a short story is terrible, don’t do it.” But it was too late—I was in too deep!
RR: So, my next question is in regard to hope. Willa comes from a background of survivalists, conspiracy theorists who are terrified of the future, and who move further and further off-grid as she grows up. She’s sort of raised in this bubble of utter despair, but throughout the book there’s a communion at play between fear and hope. Willa’s hope is a response to her parents’ despair, an attempt to outrun it, and her allegiance to hope and her effort to change the future is Willa’s own version of survival. Her view of Roy Adams until the end is a kind of inverse of her parents—he’s a man of action, a man of futures, of measurable change. The axis of the book is hope, and I’m wondering if that was something you were thinking about from the beginning? Why, too, was hope so important to you in a book that also holds so much grief and destruction?
AH: When it comes to the climate crisis, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach it, how to talk about it—and if I could advocate for one thing right now, it’s to practice holding two ideas in our minds at the same time. First, a recognition and awareness of how severe this crisis is, how extreme; and then, also, to hold in our minds the understanding that we do have agency as individuals, communities, society, and we do have the ability to go in a different direction than we’re currently heading.
I advocate for those two ideas being held simultaneously because, from what I have observed, a lot of folks who recognize the severity of the crisis subsequently give up—they slip into a nihilistic mindset. Or, people refuse to acknowledge how bad the crisis is and take a business-as-usual approach, and maybe have hope that things are going to be fine. I’m interested in finding a way to hold these ideas simultaneously, to calibrate them in a way where we can make informed, productive decisions that lead to action.
For Willa, her hope can be so extreme that her calibration is sometimes off. She gets blinded by hope and can’t always recognize other realities at the same time. But I thought that made her an interesting character to follow, and given the absence of hope for a lot of folks, it seemed useful to depict that mentality on the page.
In the bigger picture, as far as the novel goes, I wanted to explore what it might look like to actively mobilize against climate change and to use fiction as a space to think through possibilities for action—rather than writing climate fiction that was just a doomsday scenario. That isn’t to say that the solutions and approaches people take in the book are necessarily the paths we should pursue, but it seemed necessary to embody hope in different ways.
RR: And the book does such a great job of revealing complexity in that way. There’s the commentary on eco-apathy and the complacency that capitalism facilitates to keep itself going, even by environmentalists, scientists, researchers themselves. You address this issue that climate change is perpetually distant from us—a problem for someone else, or sometime else. But on the other end of that spectrum, especially in the world right now, there’s also the belief that hope is a delusion—that things are so bad that nothing can be done—which leads to another kind of complacency. I’m interested in your response to this passivity. I love what you’re saying about using fiction as a way to mobilize and to act upon these things. Often fiction is seen as escapism, rather than a call to action, and I’m interested in the ways you’re pushing back against that.
AH: Personally I’ve never thought of fiction as escapist. Actually, that’s a total lie. I’ve totally escaped into fiction as a reader. But as a writer, I don’t think of fiction as escapism. I think about storytelling as an opportunity to show a way of being, of thinking, to create a set of norms and values that will maybe be integrated into a reader’s life, or in a small way, into a cultural system.
By depicting characters in Eleutheria who are trying to mobilize against climate change—who are wrestling with ways to take action—I wanted to put forth the idea that no one knows the best way to address this incredibly complex problem. But personally, I think trying to address climate change, or even just believing that there is a path out there for us, is important. That’s what I wanted to offer up. And in that sense, Eleutheria isn’t meant to help a reader escape anything.
RR: What is the family tree of this book? Were there other pieces of art or media that informed it, or helped you bring it to life?
AH: Because I wrote this book over many years, it absorbed a lot of texts, fiction and nonfiction. I was deeply influenced by Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, and the arguments Ghosh puts forth about how literature—especially realist literature—hasn’t been able to capture the climate crisis in a way that feels real and useful. The machinery of a realist novel often necessitates a kind of steadiness of situation. For me, The Great Derangement offered up a challenge for writing fiction that describes what it’s like to exist in the Anthropocene—an era of extreme natural events and catastrophes—while also presenting a vision for where we could go.
I was also influenced by The End of Protest by Micah White, who was one of the founders of the Occupy Wallstreet movement. That book is about how our current forms of activism often fall short, and how social movements require evolution alongside our evolving world. White describes how activism can be both short term and long term, and how, just as a meme or a song can move through the world in an instant, it’s possible for an idea to move through the world very quickly. There’s the potential for us to make dramatic shifts for the better if the moment is right. The other big idea in White’s book is that change also happens across generations. When I’m feeling depressed about the climate crisis, I remember that actions I take now might not translate in an obvious, tangible way in the moment, or even in my lifetime, but they could still matter to someone being born a hundred years from now—and that fact had a big influence on me and on this book.
Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde, out March 8, 2022 from Vintage.
I also read a lot of first-person narrators, because writing a novel in the first person—where it’s just one voice for the entire book—is a challenge. You’re stuck in this person’s head thinking, how do I make this interesting? How do I make the novel move the whole time and give a full sense of what else is out there? Books like The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, were useful because those first-person voices are so captivating and the story never stops moving.
RR: I’d love to talk about the fringe communities in Eleutheria. Willa’s survivalist parents, the Freegans, and Camp Hope are communities that reject the mainstream, and that each attempt to reinvent the mainstream in various ways. Each of them has their own idea of what paradise or utopia might look like, which is a concept that shows up throughout your story collection as well. Was examining this concept and these communities in a novel a different experience than in your short stories? Did it reveal anything new to you?
AH: It was really different. My story collection explored the utopian imagination from different angles—looking at a Mars colony, back-to-the-land hippies, Shakers, and others—but those stories were all discrete, they were in their own containers. In a novel, I was able to explore different groups’ ideologies and perspectives within the scope of the same universe, and through a single character, Willa, who interacts with each of the groups and provides the connective tissue for those varying perspectives to be in direct conversation. This hopefully shows some of the different ways people are dealing with the challenges of living in the Anthropocene—but also how these different groups are connected. Ultimately, these ideologies are all part of one larger story and one human reaction to crisis—so I appreciated having the space of a novel to allow them to coexist in that way.
RR: Does your writing practice or process differ based on the form in which you’re writing?
AH: Writing stories has always felt most natural to me, and that’s likely because it’s a shorter medium. My process would be that I would get an idea, then sit down and write a draft from beginning to end, and maybe it would be really sloppy, but I would have a sense of the arc and where I wanted it to go, and I could work from that original shape. I couldn’t do that with a novel. It required a whole other way of working. I had to write the novel piece by piece, rewriting and reorganizing those pieces as I went, rather than having something singular that I could write quickly and then polish obsessively.
I think too, I could get away with more in stories. A story can coast on voice or on an idea, or can highlight one craft element, but when it came to a novel, I couldn’t get away with just having a compelling voice. I had to learn how to construct a plot, and that took some time. But I’m grateful to have had an excuse to grow in that way. I think I’m a better story writer now, having learned how to write a novel.
RR: At one point in the novel, Sylvia says, “You try hard to be good, but there’s no such thing as good. Only scarcity and plenty, our fear of the former.” Do you agree with her?
AH: There are times I dip into a Sylvia mindset. Often when I’m tired. I would say as a side note that all the characters in the book are a little bit me, and a little bit not me, so Sylvia does embody a perspective I’ve felt. But I think, at the end of the day, I don’t agree entirely with her. I’ve always been wary of full-on moral relativism that does away with the notion of good. For me, there is an ineffable goodness out there that can be universally sensed—an underlying rightness as well. It can’t always be agreed upon, and it can be hard to detect, but ultimately, I aspire to believe that there’s a goodness and a rightness in the world that’s real and true.
RR: I’d love to talk more about Roy Adams. Adams’ character, and the book overall, force us to confront the objective morality of environmentalism. Adams believes the good that Camp Hope is doing absolves his wrongdoing. Camp Hope’s tenets of environmental respect are in many ways inspiring, but Camp Hope itself is an example of modern-day colonization and echoes a history of exploitation of the Bahamian people. I’m wondering about your own relationship with Roy Adams’ character and the contradictions of Camp Hope. How did these things develop over the course of your writing?
AH: I’m not the first person to say this in any way, but for the environmental movement to move forward and to be successful, it has to be connected to a movement for social justice. It has to make sure that the most marginalized populations are being protected, served, and uplifted by whatever actions are being taken to deal with the climate crisis. A colonialist, white supremacist mindset informed the forces that have created the climate crisis, so those forces cannot be a part of any climate solution. I wanted to show that reality through Camp Hope and Roy Adams.
It’s also why it was so important to have the historical interludes running through the novel, because those sections illuminate these patterns of exploitation on the island, and cut through the rhetoric that Camp Hope espouses. And I agree, so much of what Adams proposes and theoretically could accomplish by bringing a certain level of machinery to the environmental movement could do a lot of “good” in terms of conserving resources, maybe even stopping temperature rise, etcetera; however, if such a movement is still tied to oppressive forces that have historically done so much damage, and continue to do damage even now, that’s not a movement I want to be a part of, and it’s one that I think ultimately wouldn’t succeed. What I hope the novel shows is why that won’t work, why it can’t work, why it shouldn’t work. And why Roy Adams is a figurehead for that reality.
RR: At the end of the novel, we get a section of narrative from Sylvia—the most we hear from her the whole book—and it does a lot of work to reveal the pieces of that relationship we couldn’t have seen from Willa’s side. I’m wondering what went into that decision, and what made Sylvia’s voice so critical in the final pages.
AH: To be fair, it was in some ways an opportunity to recap what had happened in the novel. The letter from Sylvia is there to tie everything together, albeit from this other perspective. To me, Willa’s and Sylvia’s ideologies—their ways of being in the world—form a kind of double helix that’s at the core of the novel. Even though the book is primarily told by Willa, she’s so affected by Sylvia, that Sylvia remains a twin ideological force in the novel.
Ending with Sylvia made sense to me because it highlighted that double helix, the pairing of their perspectives that shaped the whole book. In another way, I hoped the letter would be a cathartic moment for the reader, because we’re released briefly from the tyranny of Willa’s POV, and we get the breath of air of another vantage point.
I’m also just a lover of letters. The act of writing and sending off this physical object, knowing that you may or may not hear back, is beautiful. I can’t believe we get to put a fifty-cent stamp on a piece of paper and have it carried all over the country. Also, there is a power in that kind of person-to-person message. I wanted to give the reader the opportunity to be in that intimate space with the characters.
RR: In the end, it’s the children that are finally the catalyst for change. Was that the ending you saw coming from the start?
AH: That was something that came later. I didn’t necessarily know where the book was going to end up, but as I went through the revision process, I tried to listen to what the novel itself was telling me in terms of where it logically made sense to go, both on the level of narrative, as well as in light of the research I was doing on social movements, environmental issues, and other topics.
When I realized what ending made sense for the recruits and also for the children out in the world, I found it personally quite horrifying. When you spend years with your characters, you end up caring about them a lot. So even though it’s all fiction, to orchestrate any violence against them, or pain or suffering, is a really difficult choice. But ultimately, the end of the novel was meant to capture the reality that future generations are saddled with. The children’s demonstrations are an embodiment of the extremity of the crisis. And perhaps by embodying that reality, these children could wake up the adults of the world to the degree that’s needed.
RR: That choice felt like the final note of that collision of fear and hope, and the reality that, especially in terms of the climate crisis, you can’t have one or the other, it has to be both. And it’s devastating. But in the same breath, it’s hopeful, because you realize that at least the children of the world recognize what needs to be done, even if we don’t.
AH: Absolutely. I find our real-world youth activists so inspiring. I bow down to them. They are always making me want to do more. I don’t think I’m alone in that.
RR: What is your hope for Eleutheria and books like it? What kind of change do you think they’re capable of shaping?
AH: I think that all fiction contains implicit norms, values, and belief systems—and that these systems eventually echo outward into the real world. As writers, therefore, we have the opportunity to create the stories we want to see in real life—to imagine narratives that can open doors in the world. I don’t know what my book is capable of, but I hope that the new generation of climate fiction that’s emerging helps give people the tools to see a future beyond the dichotomy of business-as-usual or doom. I don’t want people to give up. I hope that, despite all the horrors this book depicts, readers leave Eleutheria with a sense of hope and possibility.
Rachel Reeher is an MFA candidate in fiction at Arizona State University, and the Managing Editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. She’s received awards for her teaching from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the National University of Singapore, and the Marvin Fisher Fellowship, among others.
*This interview between Managing Editor Rachel Reeher and author Allegra Hyde was held over Zoom on February 21, 2022, and was edited for brevity.