Mark Maynard: The stories inGhosts of Wyomingall have a very strong sense of place and a strong sense of character – each seems to mirror the other. How do you observe not only the people you write about, but also the places they inhabit – and how do you get both into your stories so vividly? Alyson Hagy: I’ve been thinking of character and place in tandem for so long that I rarely separate them in my mind. I think it comes from growing up in rural Virginia in a culture that marked you immediately by who you were (your mother, your father, your kinfolk for generations) and where you were from (every crossroads had a name, every building had a long, story-filled history). The people I grew up among were, many of them, as tied to the land they lived on as they were tied to their relatives. That’s not so true in suburban America, where the specific connections to land—what you can grow on it, what livestock will thrive on it—are not central to peoples’ lives. I guess I became used to hearing people speak in a language that linked them to place. Talk about drought and flood, frost and fungus, tobacco prices, milk prices—those are the stories I absorbed. When I moved to the West, I found people who had transferred that kind of connection to the land with them as they moved to Wyoming from other places. Character is destiny, right? Well, the character of the place where you build your life can also influence your choices, your values, your passions. That’s really the only business writers are in if you think about it—listening, watching, chronicling human passions. I’m addicted to listening. And I ask a lot of questions. Most folks are very willing to talk about what excites them. MM: Many of your stories in the collection invoke a sense of characters being haunted by a collective past. What makes Wyoming particularly prone to ghosts/ghost stories? AH: I guess I’d say that every place that has suffered a couple of decades of human habitation is prone to ghost stories. We like ghost stories—as much as they unsettle us. Wyoming has been home to European settlers for only about 170 years. That’s not very long, so the stories out here seem shallow to me, and many of them are borrowed from other places. Wyoming (and the rest of the American West) is also a place people have been attracted to as a place to “start over.” I guess I don’t think we really get to start over with completely clean slates. Our heritage follows us. Our crimes. Our prejudices. And sometimes those things won’t leave us alone no matter how much we want them to. Several of the ghosts in the book are linked to famous crimes committed in the state—lynchings and murders that people still argue about to this day. Why can’t we put some stories to rest? Why are certain injustices so hard to swallow? I’m really 74 theMeadow
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