Allegra Hyde is the winner of
the 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Her debut story
collection, OF THIS NEW WORLD (University of Iowa Press), is our feature today. She is young, fresh, and ready for you to buy a copy of her book, which offers a menagerie of utopias: real,
imagined, and otherwise.
Q. What was your process for putting together this collection?
A. Of This New World emerged organically from my longtime fascination with utopian
communities. I’ve always been drawn to groups of people seeking to live out an
ideal—groups like the Shakers or the hippie communes of sixties. No matter how
well planned these utopian endeavors are, conflicts inevitably emerge. This is
ripe territory for a fiction writer! Of
This New World starts with a retelling of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from
Eden and ends in a Mars colony. The collection includes stories told using
conventions of science fiction, historical fiction, realism, absurdism, and
other modes, but every story offers a different way of considering the utopian
experience.
Q. How long did it take from start to finish to complete the
collection?
A. I wrote “Free Love,” a story about
an uprooted flower child, back in 2009. The story was later published in the Bellevue Literary Review—my first
appearance in a print journal—and this publication gave me the confidence to
keep going. The rest of the stories
emerged in the subsequent years, the last one being written in the spring of
2015. I received the news that Of This
New World would be published in January 2016.
Q. Who read your drafts?
A. My husband, Alex
McElroy, is also a
writer. We met in the MFA program at Arizona State University, so you could say
our relationship was born from a fiction workshop. For better or worse, we work
closely as writing partners: exchanging draft after draft of our stories. Alex
has read my book, Of This New World, more
times than either of us can count.
Q. Did you use an agent? If not, why not?
A. I didn’t use an agent. Conventional
literary wisdom seems to be that agents avoid short story collections, so I
decided to go the contest route. There are actually quite a few contests out
there, including the Iowa Short Fiction Award series run by University of Iowa
Press, which I ended up winning.
Q. What is your best rejection story?
A. A few years ago, I wrote a deeply
personal story called “Bury Me.” I showed it to a professor who suggested
several literary journals as possible homes for the story, though he said
specifically that The Missouri Review probably
wouldn’t be interested. After
unsuccessfully submitting “Bury Me” to numerous journals and contests, I
started to believe the story would never go anywhere. On a whim, I submitted to
The Missouri Review. Several months
later, I received an acceptance letter from TMR’s
editors. Even better: the story was later selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize anthology.
Q Where were you when you received the offer for the book to be
published?
A. I was actually living in Bulgaria
when I received an email from Jim McCoy of University of Iowa Press. He wanted
me to give him a call, but I had to wait about six hours for our time zones to
align. Those were a long six hours!
Q. What words of advice
would you give to a writer on the journey toward publication?
A. I must turn to Anne
Lamott for this one: “I just try to warn people who hope to get published that
publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so
much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force
yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It's
like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the
caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns
out to be its own reward.”
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