i said recently that i only send out newsletters when i've accidentally had too many emotions about a piece of art, and i'm sorry to report that i just came back from seeing the broadway production of hadestown, a piece of art about which i've had too many emotions for more than a decade now. i'm aware that it's done several national tours by now, and is so popular that actual theater people are beginning, quietly, to despise it, but I'm afraid there was always going to be a hadestown newsletter.
the first time i fall in love with hadestown—yes, this is a love story—i'm almost twenty-one, and it's a niche indie concept album written by anais mitchell and produced by ani difranco.1 my husband, who isn't my husband yet, has purchased the CD for our upcoming road trip, because it's 2011 and we still purchase CDs. he has no idea how many times he is about to listen to it.
it hits me first as a series of oddly intimate echoes. it's set in a company town that could be in coal country (where my people are from), or the rust belt (where my husband's are). times are hard, and getting harder (the recession was over by then, but not really), and a woman is in love with some kind of poet (when I met my husband, he owned a tent, a composition book, and a guitar). that's the genius of a myth, maybe—that it feels specific enough to be true, but vague enough to feel true to you, personally.
when i tell people what I'm listening to, i talk about folk music as resistance and the aesthetics of labor. it's a metaphor, i say, because i know this is how you make fantasy sound intellectually serious, and i am, at this point in my life, very concerned about seeming intellectually serious. i still love fantasy, but i'm careful to phrase it in the past tense: i used to read silly books about magic, but now i'm going to grad school, where i will read important books about structural power and empire and the invention of tradition. (forgive me; the porque no los dos meme has not yet been invented).
but even then, i was pretty sure hadestown was not a fucking metaphor. it's a story about resistance and labor, sure, but it's also a story about gods and heroes and magic. hades is the boss of a company town and a literal god. persephone is a bootlegging barkeep and the queen of the underworld. the wall is industrial capitalism, the wall is a border, the wall is a wall. it's history and fantasy, folklore and fact, and neither project stands without the other.
when, at twenty-four or five, i finally get up the nerve to write fiction of my own, “wait for me” is the first song i put on my playlist.
the next time i fall in love with hadestown, i'm twenty-six, and a cartoon villain has just descended a golden elevator and promised to build a wall to keep us free. hadestown has been revived as a play, and everyone is talking about its eerie prescience of “why we build the wall.” anaïs mitchell is cast as cassandra, because it's easier to pretend she's a prophet than admit how often american history repeats itself. this, too, is the genius of a myth: that it can shift and stretch, so that it means what we need it to mean most.
the next time i fall in love with hadestown, i'm thirty, and i have front-row tickets to depression. i've never sympathized much with orpheus--the original guy who had one job--but for the first time i understand how doubt comes in. how you could love someone enough to follow them hell, but not trust them enough to follow you back out.2
hadestown hits broadway around this time, and i'm super annoying about it, obviously: have you heard the original lyrics? it was actually a concept album, first— but eventually the desire for dibs—the eighth deadly sin—gives way to a kind of wonder. look at us all, learning the words to songs that are a decade old, for a play that is set a century ago, which is a retelling of a story that was first told more than 2,000 years ago, which i cried about just last week.
maybe that’s the real genius of a myth: that we’ve sung it before, and we’ll sing it again. that we’ve told it for different reasons, in different times—that it’s been subverted, reversed, disneyfied, darkened, appropriated, translated, reinterpreted—that it’s been posted on ao3 and performed in high school gyms—and we’re still not through with it. that it runs from the past to the future like a long banister, rubbed smooth by the hands of a thousand generations. a myth is a story from the world that used to be, told in the world we live in now, for the one we dream about.
the next time i fall in love with hadestown, i'm thirty-three. i'm sitting in the balcony at the richmond altria theater and my husband is beside me, and it strikes me as a miracle that we're here at all. in the fever of a world on flames, in the season of hurricanes--though times are hard and still, somehow, getting harder—though the dice are loaded and the games are fixed--we're still living it up on top, listening to an old song about a hungry girl and a poor boy. it’s a love story and so are we, and what, in this whole bad world, is more radical than love?
it’s easy to get mawkish about the Radical Power of Art, so let me be clear: when the chips are down, i hope you reach for a brick, rather than a book.3 punching your local nazi or giving your friend $50 does more to change the world than working on your screenplay, nine times out of ten. so i don’t think hadestown—a fantasy, a love story, a myth—moved the needle, whatever the needle is.
but it did move me. i don’t think art is what will bring down the wall, or even put a crack in it—but i think it’s the reason we put our eyes to the gap. i think when i’m worn down—when the air is poison and my first grader has a lockdown drill and somebody still has to fold the laundry—i often find myself humming an old song.
news
i don’t think i ever sent out the cover for starling house?? somewhere, my publicist is closing her eyes and counting slowly to ten. anyway it's dark and lovely and lustrous, from the inimitable micaela alcaino!! it comes out 10.31.2023, and you can order it wherever books are sold. there will be a barnes & noble exclusive edition with cloth binding and a bonus chapter. if you want a signed copy, my local indie new dominion bookshop ships anywhere in the united states.
there's also going to be a paperback omnibus of a spindle splintered and a mirror mended! go stare at the cover, designed brilliantly by david curtis. out 2.13.2024.
further reading
the wga is on strike! i’ve never been on strike before! i didn’t know it would be this funny!!! (obviously, the conditions that led to the strike are not funny, and if you are a member of the alliance of american motion picture and television producers: i hope the orcas sink your favorite yacht).
relatedly: there are lot of AI thinkpieces right now, but ted chiang’s grimly unsentimental new yorker essay is the best one.
if that made you feel miserable—if art-making itself feels doomed and absurd—listen to the newer talk easy episode with george saunders. at the very end he talks about his wife, who he married three weeks after meeting her. (this, too, is a love story).
have you read tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? if not, someone’s probably told you about it—maybe too many people, so that you’ve developed a weird grudge against it. if so, i’m so sorry, but it’s fucking great.
if you weren't on a campus in the mid-2000s, miss difranco was very important to college girls who were against the war and quietly wondering if they were bi, but found it easier to publicly like ani difranco and the be good tanyas
i think often of that vonnegut quote about the vietnam war: “every respectable artist in this country was against the war. it was like a laser beam. we were all aimed in the same direction. the power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
It's not that I hate you for how beautifully and gorgeously you articulate your Ideas and Thoughts and Musings, it's just that I strongly dislike you. (Obviously, I kid.)
Counting down the days to Starling House...
Hadestown saved me in June 2019 when my dog had a 20lb tumor removed. And again in July 2020 when my grandfather died alone in a hospital from Covid. And every time I drive home in the dark, chasing after my writing dreams, begging it to wait for me. ♥️