Shaye Callanan ‘26
Staff Writer
This past Thursday, author Allegra Hyde came to the Holy Cross campus to present a craft talk in the afternoon and a reading at night in the Prior Performing Arts Center.
Hyde began her craft talk by addressing the importance of the first line of a story. She asked if anyone in the crowd had ever experienced love at first sight, as this is what she feels the first line of a story should make readers feel. She mentioned that first lines provide the “aesthetic DNA” of stories, as they set the tone for the whole story to come. A good first sentence has to have “both clarity and provoke curiosity on the part of the reader”.
Hyde then mentioned some research she had done, where she asked people on Twitter what their favorite first lines of books were. She compiled the results and created a packet for us to read and compare. This was an interesting exercise, as it became clear that many first lines in popular literature follow similar patterns. Many of them either include death and time, have some sort of bizarre concept that intrigues the reader, or use dialogue that immediately transports the reader into the scene. She closed by mentioning again how reading the first line of a story can be like love at first sight because it matters that the first line matches the reader it comes across well.
At 7:30pm in the Booth Media Lab, Professor Morris Collins introduced Allegra Hyde for a reading of her fiction work. He mentioned that Hyde is highly awarded and has received four Pushcart Prizes and O. Henry Prize. She also teaches Creative Writing at Smith College. Hyde began by telling the audience her main inspirational pull towards writing fiction: she ponders what it means to be alive in a world that feels surreal. She said that we experience “wild storms, 80 degree days in October, and politics that feel bizarre”. This enables a concept she refers to as “global weirding” as opposed to global warming. She says the world feels weirder and stranger than ever, and while this is terrifying and incomprehensible, we have to find humor in it to keep going.
Hyde began by reading her story entitled “Endangered” which was about artists enclosed in cages by the government. The artists are in a zoo of sorts, in which business people and government officials can walk around and view them and their work as if they were animals. She then read her story “The Future is a Click Away” which personifies “the Algorithm” that rules over its society and is an all-knowing force in the world. She said that she “turned up the volume a little bit”, with this story, as it is scarily close to our reality. She finished with “The Tough Part”, a story inspired by an article she read about the phenomenon in which moose were turning white. In this story a couple traveled around in a moose costume, hoping to save the population of moose in the world. Themes confronted included capitalism, greed, and the common good. The ending of this story was especially compelling, as she repeated the phrase “the tough part is continuing on” many, many times at the end. Hyde’s fiction work utilizes comedic “weirdness” to contextualize the inexplicable phenomena we confront daily in our world.
Featured image courtesy of The Baltimore Review
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