Sadie Hoagland and Maria Kuznetsova first met in 2008, when they were studying fiction writing at UC Davis under Yiyun Li, Lucy Corin, Lynn Freed, and Pam Houston. Each has a second book out this spring — Kuznetsova’s second novel, Something Unbelievable, from Random House, and Hoagland’s debut novel, Strange Children, from Red Hen Press — so they took this opportunity to catch up.
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Red Hen Press, 2021Sadie: Before I get into how much I loved Something Unbelievable, I want to ask you if there are any craft tidbits or lessons you learned during our time together at UC Davis that you carry into your writing or practice today?
Maria: One time in the workshop you and I had together, Yiyun Li said that any good story has at least three stories in it. This idea of subplots and thinking of narratives within narratives was what eventually led me to write a novel. At first, it just caused me to turn in a lot of messy, overly complex short stories, but eventually I realized how to sustain several plotlines for an extended period of time and voila — I wrote my first novel.
How about you? What was the biggest tidbit of advice you took away from our MA in Creative Writing program at UC Davis?
S: I also appreciated something Yiyun Li told me: which was that stories sometimes need objects to ground the characters and their movement/change throughout the story. I really appreciated that, and use it in my stories and in my teaching. And then, Pam Houston told our class once, something like, “Just because it happened to you doesn’t make it interesting,” and I absolutely quote her on that when I’m teaching. I feel like I really learned to be a part of a writing community there as well — and how rewarding that can be.
M: I love that idea so much! It’s especially important when you’re writing somewhat autobiographical work, like I do. Also, related to our writing workshops, I remember reading an early version of Strange Children in 2008 at UC Davis. How and when did you know you had a novel? How did you sustain the project over so many years, while also publishing another book in between?
S: So, at first, I thought I was just writing linked short stories, probably about the time I left Davis I had four stories. And then in that year after, I was like, No, I want to write a novella! So, I wrote a novella. But then I learned that nobody loves novellas like I do, nobody publishes them; it was 110 pages. But still I tried and what I heard from publishers and agents alike was that the project had a lot of potential, but it needed to be more fleshed out. And so, when I went to get my PhD, I was writing short stories throughout that whole time that would become my short story collection, but I also decided that for my dissertation, I wanted to return to Strange Children and make it the novel I felt it could be. So, it went from novella circa 2010, to novel in 2015. During that time, I was also getting my PhD, having a child, and finishing the short story collection so it feels like it was a long, slow, journey.
What about you, did you have an inkling of this book when we were graduate school?
M: Though I didn’t start Something Unbelievable quite that early, I did write some early versions of it in 2012, then spent 3-4 years on a novel that didn’t get published with Natasha and her grandmother as side characters, so this book has also been brewing with me a long time. And the summer before I started our Davis MA program, I spent two months in Russia and Ukraine, and was really fueled by a sense of history and wanting to write down my family’s stories. I wrote about my great-grandmother during a pogrom, my great-grandfather being purged, and my family evacuating after Chernobyl before I got to my grandmother’s war story. It just took me a while to figure out which stories I wanted to focus on.
S: Wow. That’s a lot to process. I love this book, especially the braided narrative of Something Unbelievable and I found both stories, Natasha’s and Larissa’s, to be equally compelling. I loved that — that I could be just as wrapped up in one woman’s fight for survival in wartime Ukraine as I was in the microdrama of a woman dealing with a postpartum identity crisis. Did you always know you would need multiple points of view to tell this story? Did you try to tell it any other way? Was it difficult to strike a balance between the two?
M: This came out of a novella from Larissa’s point of view — she tells the story of her survival in WWII to her granddaughter, Natasha, who puts on a play based on it for the stage. As I kept going, I felt like I had reached a natural conclusion with Larissa’s story around 120 pages – I was just adding scenes but not adding depth to the book anymore. Around that point, I realized Natasha deserved her own perspective — that having a modern character processing this story would build on themes of inheritance in the novel and add layers of meaning to the story. First, I wrote her character in third person, but I realized this didn’t feel right and switched to first person. It was still such a tightrope walk of deciding how much each character should talk, and also who should talk when — there are four sections where the perspective shifts — but eventually I found the right balance.
S: That’s so interesting that both of our books have a novella in their origin story!
Random House, 2021M: A lot of novels do, right? At least, that’s how I’ve always written novels — they tend to start from a short story that won’t stop growing, and which sometimes ends up taking up multiple points of view. I was so impressed by how many different points of view you had while managing to keep all of them feeling compelling and like the story was being pushed forward. Each of these sections is also quite short, moving from character to character probably at least a dozen times each. How did you know who was going to speak next? Or when storylines, like Levi seeing Jeremiah again after thinking he was dead, would intersect? Were there characters who had a POV and then were booted? Why was Jeremiah, the character who escaped and moved into a group home and had to navigate high school and being in the real world, in third person (which I loved)? How did this complex POV come to be and how did you organize it along the way?
S: Well, part of it was the strategy of a first-time novelist; the different points of view allowed me to switch gears when I felt unsure of what was ahead. But as the plot emerged, it became clear that it was important that the story be told in different iterations, and that each character would have really different ideas about what was happening in their community, their own “truth,” and that those truths would all be very different and create a surface tension between them. But to your question — it was so hard to organize. I had to come up with these crazy charts to sort each character’s journey through this story. Jeremiah was perhaps easiest as I added his sections later and at that point I was thinking about the novel in more big-picture ways so I could step back and know that I wanted him to be told through third person because I didn’t want him to have any agency. I didn’t want him to have a voice because while he’s the predator of the book — he’s also the ultimate victim of the book. But the rest of them speak through their own voice, and I do think they each have something important to add to the story, both plot-wise and theme-wise.
M: Your novel also has these italicized parts — the voice of a ghost. Can you talk about how those parts came to be?
S: I really like strange, disembodied voices. I also liked the idea of a character moving backwards through the story; Haley, the ghost, has already been to the end of this story and is circling back through. I’m really interested in non-linear narratives, cycles of redemption, and so I think all of my writing plays with that in some way. But Haley also served an important plot function in that I wanted someone from the outside looking in at the community to be able to give the reader some strong images of the town, snapshots of the setting. So that’s why she became important first, but then of course she started to infect the plot.
M: And related to that, and because I’ve been on a Faulkner kick since moving down South, I have to ask – was there a Faulkner influence here, like As I Lay Dying / The Sound and the Fury / multiple POVs and the language itself? Or were there other books or influences you had in mind when writing this?
S: I love Faulkner. So yeah, I was influenced by his use of the circular time and this book definitely has a character whose past is kind of catching up with them, and their fate is predetermined, like Faulkner’s Joe Christmas in Light in August. Yeah. But aside from Faulkner, I was also interested in eschatology and how time works for people that believe in both an afterlife and “end times.” While researching this book, I watched this documentary called Sons of Perdition, about boys that get kicked out of polygamy. They’ve been taught that the afterlife is why you live and how you live so that you can have this like, beautiful eternal life, but then once they’ve been kicked out, they believe that they’ve already lost that. It’s almost like their life is already over — they’re already damned for eternity. That was certainly something I was thinking a lot about with the character Jeremiah.
M: You said in your acknowledgements that your grandmother told you stories of the polygamist lifestyle — though obviously my grandmother’s story was quite different, I also wrote a lot of this book (at least the Larissa parts) loosely inspired by my grandmother’s stories and experiences in WWII. I’m wondering how you felt about fictionalizing these experiences. Were you worried about “getting it right”? About offending people — your family or the community at large? What kind of research did you do?
S: The family legend of why we’re not Mormon is that a great-great grandmother couldn’t handle polygamy. Actually, the story goes that she was a first wife and when wives two and three came along she was unhappy, but when her husband bought his third wife new curtains and not her…well, I guess that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. So, she left the church and then raised her children out of it. This story definitely intrigued me as a kid.
For my research, I read a lot of nonfiction books on polygamy and survivor testimonies from many different FLDS communities, newspaper articles and even FLDS documents and prophecies. At one point I paid a former community member, a young man who had been exiled, to drive me around his community and tell me all about growing up there, his own exile, his own experiences (That was intense). As an outsider to these kinds of communities, I don’t think I could “get it right” per se — and I absolutely see Strange Children as taking place in a fictional place — but I do very much hope my book engages with that world in a way that feels empathetic.
I had similar questions about your book. I was curious as to what was autobiographical, if anything, in terms of your grandmother’s story, or even your experiences as a new mother?
M: My grandmother was only five when her family evacuated to the Ural Mountains during WWII, but there were a few set pieces from the novel that really happened to her — hiding under a train while being bombed by Nazis, starving so much that the meat was dropping off her arms, and her grandmother falling under a train while she was holding her hand, to name a few things. But I made the grandmother character and her sister teenagers, the same age as the two brothers, so there could be more of a romantic plot going on, and so the character would be old enough to make sharp observations. One thing I struggled with when trying to turn the stories she told me into fiction was worrying about creating kind of more conventional love stories while everyone was starving to death, in the most dire circumstances one could imagine. But from my grandmother’s stories, I also knew that there was romantic intrigue from the older people in the mountains, which made me feel less guilty about adding more conventional plots on top of great suffering. I guess it’s hard to avoid romance, and maybe the dire circumstances can even bring out those impulses.
WVU Press, 2019S: That’s such a powerful image: a woman, a train, and a child. How poignant to know it’s based in your family history, too. What was the most interesting part of your research? The most challenging?
M: The most interesting part was just going through family photos and hearing my parents and grandmother’s sister cobble together this 80-year-old story. The most challenging was trying to imagine a character in such a different circumstance from my own who could still have relatable feelings — petty jealousies, love for her parents, a “wild heart.” I hope I pulled it off!
S: Oh, you definitely did! I enjoyed the romantic parts of the story line, and thought they worked well with Natasha’s story, and her postpartum crush. Did you feel you related to Natasha in some ways?
M: I started working on the Natasha parts just after my daughter was born. I had serious postpartum depression, but mine was very different from Natasha’s — she struggled to connect to her child and kind of wondered if she had ever really wanted to be a mother or just did it because it seemed like the thing to do. It was interesting to put myself in her shoes for sure — for me, I connected deeply with my daughter right away and had no regrets, but completely lost my sense of self in the process. I guess I related to Natasha in that way. And for her, that loss of sense of self was particularly hard because since she was an actress, she was really invested in her appearance, which she felt like went to hell after the baby was born. And unlike writing, which you might be able to sneak in while the baby is napping, to be an actress, you actually have to go places.
S: I loved the tension between identity and maternity that comes up not only in Natasha’s character but also the relationship between Larissa and her sister Polina, when they say goodbye at the train station- there’s something so palpable there — the way that maternity can divide women, or a distance can suddenly be so clear between sisters. There’s a tension that can happen between women over motherhood, and that’s not something that we like to talk about.
But when Larissa and Polina say goodbye at the train station- there’s something so palpable there- the way that maternity can divide women, or a distance can suddenly be so clear between sisters. Can you talk about this?
M: Things are quite different now, especially in America, with it being more and more common for people to make a choice not to have kids. But as Larissa herself stated, it was hard for a woman in Soviet Russia to understand why another woman would decide not to have a child. Larissa was convinced that her sister simply wasn’t able to have kids. When she learned she just never wanted to, she was kind of outraged, but as time went on and family life got more complicated for her, it was something she began to understand more. When she and her sister went to the mountains, Polya was the conventional flirt, while Larissa was a bookish loner. But something happened during their stay that ended with Larissa leading this remarkably conventional life while Polya left the country and lived freely.
And along the lines of motherhood, as you’ve said, the young men in the polygamist society in your book are kind of outcast, while the women are the most relevant, as wives and maybe even more importantly, as mothers. While they share their husbands, their children are their own. How did your own motherhood affect the way you looked at these characters as mothers? How did you envision that it would be different from or similar to your own experiences?
S: While a lot of the novel I wrote before having children, I wrote Emma’s birth scene after giving birth myself, and was definitely grateful to be writing with that experience in my pocket. I think, and this maybe speaks to Natasha’s experience, that before I had children, I projected some ambivalence onto the experience of motherhood in the character of Emma. Perhaps somewhat in the character of Cadence. I thought being a mother would entail a certain detachment — but luckily, Iike you, that was not at all the case when my daughter was born. It was love at first sight.
One aspect of Natasha’s character I love is how she outwardly presents herself and her true feelings. Speaking of — I thought you portrayed social media so well — both Natasha’s quick, almost unthinking posts, and how they differ from how she feels. As writers we are often pressured to promote ourselves and our work on social media. Do you relate to Natasha, or how is your relationship with social media different/same as hers?
M: I definitely feel that pressure to promote myself on social media, which feels both necessary and extremely icky. I miss the days when I only used Twitter for puns or sharing Onion articles, but alas. Something I discovered when I had a new baby and book come out the same year was that people tended to be much more excited about any posts of my baby than about my book. On some level, this made sense — I mean, everyone can see a baby and like the post, while not everyone cares if I published an essay or short story. But still it bothered me, making me feel like having a baby was more important, or a bigger accomplishment than my professional success. Natasha really feels this, especially because as an actress in a popular TV show, while not being a star herself, she already spent much more time promoting herself on social media than I did. When she’s trying to get herself pumped up about acting again while being a new mom, she finds that people are much more excited by posts about her baby napping than about her auditions, which confirms her feeling that everyone only sees her as a mother, forgetting all of the meaningful things she had done up to that point.
S: It’s so true. Babies and pets get all the love! Or the “likes,” in this case. I thought Natasha’s take on social media really added to the authenticity of her character. We seem to get such a candid view of her thoughts, and her desires. Speaking of, I really liked the theme of a “wild heart,” (this is the term Yuri uses anyway) which comes up with both Natasha and Larissa, and seems synonymous with perhaps “not monogamous”? Or “easily bored”? I really liked how you presented this aspect of their characters through this non-judgmental lens. It also seems to separate love from sex in a way I really appreciated. In Larissa’s case, her infidelity is associated with her beach house. In Natasha’s, it seems a direct reaction to her maternity. Do you think their hearts are wild in the same way?
M: Growing up, Larissa was a maternal figure of sorts for Natasha since she didn’t get along with her mom, who passed away when she was a teenager. She was aware of Larissa’s affairs and as the story went on, Larissa wondered if this “wild heart” was something she passed down to Natasha. I think they are similar in the sense of wanting something more than domestic life, but also in maybe wanting something more out of their particular partners — to feel more challenged, or more excited, by their company. For Larissa, it might have to do with thinking about the freedom her sister got and which she missed out on. For Natasha, it definitely has to do with the thing her social media posts seem to confirm — that she feels like she is “only” a mom and wants to fight that feeling.
S: I relate to how Natasha feels. I remember in the early days of parenting wondering if the world would pass me by while I breastfed 12 times a day. Do you feel it hard to find time/energy to write as a working parent? Has this been a hard adjustment for you? I ask because it definitely took me awhile to figure out when in the day, or the week, or sometime in the month, I’d sit down with my own work.
Random House, 2020M: It took me just about a year to figure it out — which coincidentally is when my family and I moved to a different state, I put my daughter in daycare, and my postpartum depression finally tapered off. That first year, I tried to be very cavalier in the beginning, bringing my daughter to the coffee shop and rocking her stroller with my foot while working on Something Unbelievable. It didn’t take long for me to realize this was unsustainable — that she wouldn’t always nap like a newborn forever, and that I couldn’t just squeeze my writing identity into my former life. Looking back, there were many things I wish I had done differently, but I wonder if just taking a break from writing would have helped. I thought this would have stripped me of my former identity, but I think what forcing myself to keep going actually did was put more pressure on myself to “do it all.” I wish I had enjoyed that whole “life passing you by” thing you mentioned — I completely hear you, but now, I wonder if things would have been different if I had more acceptance about the fact that my life had completely changed. Now that my daughter’s in school, I write almost as much as I used to in grad school.
S: I’m hoping to get there! I had a second child, so I feel like I started over again but I am looking forward to that! What are you working on now?
M: I’m actually working on another Oksana novel — a comedic and dark take on my postpartum experience, which included almost a full year of unrelenting insomnia! How about you? What is the second novel you’re working on about — you said it was much more organized or easy to write than your first and I’m curious about why.
S: My second novel is called Circle of Animals, and it’s about a Marin County woman, Sky, whose hippie mother goes missing the same week Sky is sexually assaulted at work. She takes some time off to recover and search for her mother, and ends up finding out a lot more about her mother’s past, and her own, than she could have imagined. It’s almost done and it was soooo much easier to write: I approached it with a plan: the idea of writing a literary mystery, mostly in third person, mostly chronological. There are only two points of view, and significantly fewer characters. It was a lot of fun to write in such a different style than Strange Children.
I hope when these next books come out, we can do this again! Maybe in-person in a cozy bookstore, like it’s early 2019 again!
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