Authors Interviewing Characters: Caroline Hagood, author of Filthy Creation

May 1, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Authors Interviewing Characters: Caroline Hagood, author of Filthy Creation

“Compelling and absorbing.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“It’s a shame Mary Shelley isn’t around to offer a blurb for this tender, luminous portrait of the art monster as a modern teen. FILTHY CREATION has so much to say about art, gender, loss, and broken dreams. It’s also a triumphant coming-of-age page-turner whose young heroine grabs your heart from the first page and never lets go.”

—James Tate Hill, author of Blind Man’s Bluff

FILTHY CREATION

In Filthy Creation, Dylan makes sense of her world through art. Her house is a graveyard of inspiring auto parts her mechanic father has dragged home, her family’s ongoing Frankenstein diorama, and Dylan’s own mishmash of assemblage projects that she sets on fire whenever they don’t meet her standards. Dylan and Shay fall in artsy, gothy, queer love even as Dylan is figuring out that her dead Dad—whose ghost has been visiting her even though she doesn’t believe in such things—was not in fact her biological father, but who was?

As Dylan tries to find out, and find herself as an artist, she gets sucked into the world of visiting art teacher, Simon Ambrogio—learning to box and to embrace the more violent side of creativity, and running away from her secret-keeping mother. But she has raw and passionate artwork, and shouldn’t that be enough? Filthy Creation asks what it means to be a girl maker. How do girls fit into the false dichotomy between brilliant, monstrous men artists and supposedly domesticated women ones? And how can a young artist even figure out her own identity amid all this noise?

Caroline Hagood interviews Dylan Cyllene (the protagonist in Filthy Creation)

Are you aware that you’re a character in a book?

I’ve had that feeling a few times, but I thought it was just another weird thing about being a teenager, or maybe even just being a person—this sense of unreality, of what even am I and where do I exist? But you’re messing with me, right?

Am I?

I really can’t tell right now and you’re kind of freaking me out. Next question, please.

Okay, what advice do you have for other teenage girls who want to locate a ferocious sense of creativity, as you have?

To be honest, I don’t even love the term “teenage girl” or “girl.” These titles are so limiting and what do they even mean? But, moving on from that, I guess I would say the first step is to start seeing the ghost of your father. No, no, that’s just me. Not that I really thought it was an actual ghost, but more like my level of missing him that had reached a near hallucinatory state.

But, seriously, back to your question: I truly think that sometimes the feeling that you have lost everything can ignite an almost desperate sense of creativity. Or at least this is what happened for me when I lost my father. I also started trying to have experiences that would shock me into an inventive space. In the end, I recommend that every teenage girl spend less time applying make-up and more time throwing axes, paint boxing, and making largescale trash sculptures, as I tried to do. At the very least, they’ll have a lot of fun.

So, if you don’t love the term “girl,” what do you prefer?

Let’s see. How about just a human? A culture-bearing primate. Or maybe a prismatic container of inexplicable inventive power? Or maybe I should back out of the question altogether by citing Victor Frankenstein on the necessary prep time required to make the Bride: “I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition.”

Why are you so obsessed with Mary Shelley? It seems to be quite the fixation for you.

There’s something that calls out to me about how lonely and misunderstood Frankenstein’s monster seems to be. I also love that he’s actually this well-read, naturally gentle creature. What I don’t love is how society turns him into a monster by what it expects from him. When you’re treated like a monster for long enough, you sort of become one.

But I think at the core of what you call my fixation with Frankenstein is how I see Victor Frankenstein’s quest to make the perfect monster. His whole obsession with composition, as well as the monster itself, is pretty much the most creative thing ever. It’s how I think of innovative stuff: the sewn together bodies of various exhibits, a dangerous, quirky archive.

Fair enough.

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About the Author

Caroline Hagood is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, where she also teaches in the creative writing MFA program. She is the author of two poetry books, the novel, Ghosts of America, and the book-length essays, Ways of Looking at a Woman and Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster. Her novel Filthy Creation is forthcoming in May 2023. Her work has appeared in publications including Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle.