LA Public Library: Interview With An Author: Andrea Hairston

Press release from the Los Angeles Public Library:

Daryl M.

February 24, 2022

Andrea Hairston is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre. She is the author of Mindscape, shortlisted for the Phillip K. Dick and Otherwise awards, and winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. In her spare time, she is the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College. She has received the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award for outstanding contributions to the criticism of the fantastic. Her latest novel, Redwood and Wildfire, is the winner of 2011 Otherwise Award and the Carl Brandon Kindred Award, and she recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.

I was teaching a course that investigated Blackface Minstrelsy and Wild West Shows and some of the students proclaimed that they would never have acted in those kinds of shows. That’s what we could say sitting in our comfy 21st century reality. I wanted to dig into the experiences of African American and Indigenous American theatre and film folk at the turn of the 20th-century. I wanted to bring to life their joys and the impossible challenges they faced. I wanted to celebrate people loving and believing in each other in a world that would otherwise make them invisible to themselves and each other.

My Grandfather and Great Aunt were inspirations as were Aida Overton Walker, a turn of the 20th century African American performer, and Zitkala Sa, a Yankton Dakota Sioux writer, musician, educator, translator, feminist, and activist.

I was trying to write a near future novel and after 140,000 words I decided to write a screenplay about the grandparents of the major character. These powerful old tricksters kept interrupting the novel I thought I should be writing. I’d write long backstory digressions that gripped me more than what was happening in the present. So I decided to do the research and write a historical screenplay. That became the outline for Redwood and Wildfire .

Redwood inspired additions to my wardrobe. I’ve been wearing fascinators ever since I wrote the novel.

I taught a class, went to Georgia and the Georgia Sea Islands. After writing the screenplay, I had a writing residency at the Blue Mountain Center, a working community of writers, artists, and activists set in the heart of the Adirondacks, and got over 200 pages written and then finished the book a few months later.

How much we don’t know! So many women filmmakers and theatre artists have been ignored. I knew this intellectually but the deep research gave me a visceral ache for the work these women did.

Aida Overton Walker, Charlie Chaplin silent films, and Metropolis.

They appear in Will Do Magic For Small Change which will be out in October 2022.

The Treeline—The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlence,
There There by Tommy Orange,
Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, and Troy L. Wiggins.

Alice Childress
Pearl Cleage
Michael Ende
Frans De Waal
Anna Deavere Smith

The Whole Library.

My Mother knew everything I was reading. She just asked me what I thought—so I had to be prepared to tell her.

I could read anything.

I’m a content girl.

The Whole Library.

The Broken Ladder—How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die by Keith Payne.

I’m a theatre person. I really enjoy the reread, the ritual read, the story that can get to me again and again through the days of my life.

I just watched Pan’s Labyrinth and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again, and they were breath-taking on every level.

I’d be on Mount Desert Island in Maine or in the Bavarian Alps, with all my dear friends—riding my bike, appreciating the natural bounty and the beauty, talking art, eating good food, scheming and dreaming for the next moments of our lives.

I can talk about what I want no matter what question is asked.
This is my universe; I write the rules.

Archangels of Funk is a novel that takes place in the Massachusetts of my mind in an alternate present/near future after Water Wars have scrambled the world. Archangels is in the same world as Redwood and Wildfire, but it’s a standalone book. There are Circus-Bots, Cyborg-Dogs, Hill Town Wenches, and a Next World Festival.

Redwood and Wildfire Hairston, Andrea View on OverDrive View in Catalog

This press release was produced by the Los Angeles Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.