The Sophian interviewed Allegra Hyde, Assistant Professor of English Language & Literature at Smith, about her short story “Endangered.” Originally published in American Short Fiction in May 2017, “Endangered” imagines a world in which the government has placed artists in zoos “for their own good.” Hyde’s other works include “Of This New World,” winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, “Eleuthera,” named a “Best Book of 2022” by The New Yorker and, most recently, the speculative story collection “The Last Catastrophe,” named an Editors’ Choice Selection by The New York Times.
AT: You originally wrote “Endangered” in 2017. Or, at least, that’s when it was published. What exactly was going on in the world at the time that prompted you to produce this work?
AH: If we go back in time to 2017, Donald Trump had recently been elected for the first time. I was thinking a lot about the pressures the new regime was putting on the arts and on artists, and the chill to free speech that was already happening. I think now, in Donald Trump’s second go-around, free speech has been chilled, like, a thousand times more, but it was already very much happening in 2016, 2017. So that was on my mind.
AT: Absolutely. The heart of this story seems to lie in the balance between change and continuity. Reflecting on the political climate in this country now, with these attacks on free speech and cuts within state-sponsored arts, what has changed in your readings of the piece, if anything? What has stayed the same?
AH: “Endangered” depicts artists in zoo-like enclosures, which means they are being protected and appreciated in a way, even if it’s a complicated way that comes with trade-offs. Maybe I am more cynical now that there’s more overt censorship and disenfranchisement happening. Things like the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] grants being canceled for writers, if we take the metaphor of the story, suggests that artists aren’t even being put in zoos anymore — rather, actions are being taken to prevent artists from surviving at all.
AT: That moves into another thing I wanted to talk about, which is the balance of hope in this piece. It’s a rather bleak story in general, but we also have some quite funny moments in it. This connects to one of the main tenets that I see in this piece, and beyond into our conversation, is hope within times of catastrophe. How do you see humor’s role in dealing with life’s catastrophes, both in your writing and beyond?
AH: Thanks for that question. I say I feel more cynical now, but I also want to make it clear that I’m not without hope. Or joy. Or a will to fight for the future. You mentioned humor, and I think being able to laugh at the absurdity of authoritarians is partly a way to cope, but it’s also a way to push back. There’s a reason the far-right is terrified of comedians and is trying to take people like Colbert or Kimmel off the air. Humor is a tool I use as a writer to welcome readers into a space of a story, to cultivate pleasure and enjoyment, while also finding a way to talk about things that are difficult or ugly or just generally challenging. It is a tool that is very dear to me as an artist and a person.
AT: I love the idea of humor as a pushback and a resistance. So, at the end of the story, an artist escapes from her enclosure. And we learn that artists are not the only ones kept enclosed. You write, “our world was a series of concentric pens.” What do you see as the relationship between the fate of artists and the fate of society or the world?
AH: What a question. I suppose that, to me, artists are people who…are able to hold up mirrors to society and offer new ways of understanding reality. In our social ecosystem, it’s essential that we have those individuals and groups that help us see beyond our ingrained assumptions, our social norms, because that is how we wake up from the dream state of complacency and realize our own capacity for creating change. At the end of “Endangered,” I’m offering an allegory of how, even if things don’t work out particularly well for this one escaped artist, there’s been a moment in this fictional world where people have second-guessed their reality. And that kind of glitch in the everyday is not nothing.
AT: Yeah, absolutely. I love the idea of artists as like the indicator species in the ecosystem of humans.
AH: Totally.
AT: Obviously a major element of this story is not just the enclosure of the artists — it’s the public view. The narrator of this story, even, takes the role of a spectator. Again, you write about the artists: “There was much about them we still didn’t know. There was much from them we felt we might learn.” And I mean, you kind of already answered this, but to dig into it a little bit deeper, why so much emphasis on the spectating of the artists? How do you see this reflected in our reality?
AH: Zoos were on my mind when I wrote my second story collection, “The Last Catastrophe.” I’m someone who tends to be pretty disturbed by zoos. They can seem like friendly places of education and conservation — and maybe sometimes they are — but they can also be sites of exploitation. I used the analogy of a zoo for how people might engage with the arts because many of us have been to zoos and so we can map that experience onto the experience of engaging with the arts and, in that way, understand both spheres differently. This merging of reference points in a fictional landscape was part of my many-year exploration of the idea of “global weirding.” Are you familiar with that term?
AT: No.
AH: It’s another way of thinking about global warming that places less emphasis on rising global temperatures and more of an emphasis on the way climate change makes everything go out of whack. That can be the weather getting weird, animals behaving oddly — showing up in the wrong places, for instance — or plants blooming in the wrong time of year. To me, “global weirding” also encompasses the way humans have collectively been acting weirder in recent decades. And so “Endangered,” which ended up as part The Last Catastrophe, is an effort to embody “global weirding.”
AT: Artists now as the indicator species of human weirding.
AH: Exactly.
AT: That’s wonderful. Obviously, it’s been more than eight years since “Endangered” has been published. You mentioned that it’s in your most recent collection, and it’s stayed within the public view enough to garner this interview. Why do you think that is?
AH: It’s short. It’s easy to digest. It’s a story I actually still read aloud at events a lot because it’s easy to read in front of people and it doesn’t take that long. I also think “Endangered” still resonates with people because of that spectator point of view — it implicates the reader into the narrative, in a way. And so maybe there’s something about the story that makes people feel like they’re a part of the story, still.
You can read “Endangered” on American Short Fiction here.
