Audio Series: Filthy Creation

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was originally hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. It's a fun little series, where authors record themselves reading an excerpt from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.

Today, Caroline Hagood will be reading an excerpt from her novel Filthy Creation, out May 1st with MadHat Press. Caroline is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. 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.

Click on the soundcloud bar below to hear Caroline reading from Filthy Creation

In Filthy Creation (forthcoming May 1, 2023 from MadHat Press), 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?