A Writer Writing Purely

Alyson Hagy

“Resplendent,” Beth Kephart, Multimedia Collage

I shelve her books where they belong, among the greats. There’s Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses, I Refuse, I Curse the River of Time). There’s Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety, Angle of Repose). There’s Kent Haruf (Plainsong, Eventide, Our Souls at Night). There’s Michael Ondaatje, there’s Colum McCann, there’s Olaf Olaffson. Where else would Alyson Hagy be, but shoulder-to-shoulder with those who ride the waves of their own mysterious rhythms, those who seek, through fiction, a deeper knowing about our fickle human hearts?

“Watching Angela try something that was hard for her made him feel smaller than she was, lesser, and that was all right because what she believed in was greater than anything he was contemplating at the moment, and sometimes it was okay to shrink down below another person, just as sometimes it was okay to fail at something you really loved. What you had to do, he told himself, was remain loyal to your best impulses, no matter what.” (Boleto)

“She had taken what was intimate between them and refined it, sharpened its reticent claws, then released it in a flutter of language. She’d crushed and resuscitated them both so many times in that book, the one that won prizes, the one that rested on his fingertips with its cover curled like a wilting petal, its margins the color of old teeth.” (“Graveyard of the Atlantic”)

When I won a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2000, it was Alyson who proved to be the lasting reward. She was a fellow grant recipient. We fell into a pattern of conversation, over email (now mostly text). I learned birds from her, Wyoming skies, western artists and western wants, though she was born and raised on a Virginia farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains and imagined herself a doctor before the likes of Richard Ford and Charles Baxter put her at ease with her writerly self.

I learned that language, even language that shelters secrets, can be capacious. I learned that, even as word of Alyson’s high talent was making its way into The New Yorker and The New York Times, even as she was building a creative writing program of great renown in Laramie, at the University of Wyoming, even as she was pitching tents and hooking fish and sifting the stones and bones and wind tales of mountains, even as she was writing for the honest sake of stories and of words, she was the kind of person who would make room for a person such as me, which is to say a woman watching the world through windowpanes and wishing for owls that never came.

There’s too much, in the world of writing, in the way of envy. There’s too much jostling against and taking from, too much of the wrong idea that one writer’s pleasure in making a story is somehow a direct denial of another’s dream. There’s too much that’s false boast and ripe pride, too much that’s whisper. There’s too much that hurts and too many ways to avenge.

But nearly a quarter of a century into knowing Alyson, of being one of her many lucky friends, I take solace—and instruction—on this snowy winter’s afternoon from knowing her books and some part of her soul, from seeing how resplendent a writer writing purely is. I take solace from having Alsyon believe in me—whatever hue I happen to be painting with, whatever sentence I have risked, whatever I have loved and failed, however hard I have fought to remain loyal to my impulse.