I’ve never met Jenny Irish, but hers was a name I’d heard spoken of in my various writing groups—a writer to watch, a writer to read, a writer who had something to say. When her publicist contacted me asking if I would be interested in doing an interview, I jumped at the chance to get my hands on Hatch.
The cover of the collection is a mossy-green background with an amorphous, silver ball—an deformed egg, or a womb. Or a mouth screaming into silence. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was unsettled as one is when approaching a work of divine truth—I would learn a history I am subject to, but am kept curiously in the dark about, and I would be given insight into a future that is not yet performed, but feels as inevitable as consequence. I read it. I read it again. I read it a third time. I will read it again.
Jenny and I connected over email throughout May to discuss reproduction, technology, testicular tanning (a thing!), the forward and backwardness of progress, and curiosity.
A.A. Balaskovits: One of the (multitude) of themes you work with in Hatch—motherhood, the progress and unprogress of technology, reproduction and extinction—that stayed curled in my gut was the human paradox of how we simultaneously forget and cannot help remembering our past, encapsulated by your lines “In the age of the metal womb, how quickly humans forget” and “there is a theory: cellular memory—events recorded by flesh.” There’s an awful implication there, of being trapped in a cycle where we repeat the same cruelty, as though it was written on a cellular level, even if we don’t know the story of it. Notably, the character who best understands this appears to be the metal womb, a mother who births cannibal children who are kind to baby mice, though even her existence is part of a long history—Culpepper, forceps, the canned-ham faced billionaire—of advances in medical technology which, inevitably, mauls the mother, in some manner, in some way.
Do you believe we are caught in this explosive stillness, where through every advance—the invention of glass, for instance, which lead to the crafting of jars, which subsequently are used to suffocate fireflies, as you say—creates a recursiveness we cannot seem to adapt beyond?
Jenny Irish: I really appreciate this question; thanks for asking it. While Hatch is speculative, the collection draws heavily on historical events and figures. I hope the inclusion of that material brings readers to question the cycles we perpetuate. In history there are clear patterns that we actively choose to look away from, rather than engage. Our relationship with technology is one. There is, as you said, a particular rhythm: one step forward, one step back. A help. A harm. As a teacher, I think about the sudden, salivating investment in AI in higher education. I’m not questioning that AI has positive teaching applications in certain fields and circumstances, but that doesn’t mean that it should be an element of every class. Often, it seems to me that the people making large-scale decisions about how to incorporate technologies have particular fiscal motivations that override considerations of potentially detrimental effects. I do worry about how “educational technologies” create distance between people while flattening individuality. Consistently, my experience has been that students want to be known. They want access to and connection with others. I don’t believe we’re hopeless, but I do believe our motivations are often wrongheaded and lead us to predictable bad endings.
Your answer reminded me of a literature class from my undergrad. There was a sudden technology requirement, and my (beloved) professor instituted the much-maligned Second Life into our class. We would come into the classroom and “chat” with one another through our computers and avatars, though we were sitting right next to each other. It was bizarre. But Pandora’s AI box has been opened, and there’s no closing the lid, and that is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. As Hatch suggests, one of the few beings who has compassion for humans is not other humans but the metal womb mother. It seems like a sly nod to Frankenstein: our creations might not seek to destroy us, but rather, they might be better at humanity than humans.
We humans seem to be able to look away from human suffering. We often, I think, show more compassion and dedication toward the well-being of animals than that of other humans. I think it’s because it can be too hard to look suffering in the eyes and feel compelled to action, but helpless. For some people, it’s too much to imagine themselves and their loved ones in precarity. Sympathy is an easier position to hold than empathy. I was talking to a friend recently about how every day is just a violent collision of the grotesque and the beautiful. Every day it could go either way, what I see first: something amazing or something nauseating. Hatch, I hope, captures this contradiction of experience.
One of the joys of this collection is how masterfully you connect moments from history—Cleopatra, Culpepper, poor beheaded HitchBOT, etc. Can you tell us your research process, and what you found that was surprising? Was there anything in your research that was left out of the collection?
Truthfully, I always have PBS on in the background—nature shows, history shows, science shows—and I’m always hearing and seeing things that grab me that I have to then seek out. I’m not really watching the TV, but I like background noise. Periodically, something will just catch my attention and I’m off to the races. There are a lot of elements of Hatch that are supported by data. I looked at a lot of information about pregnancy and birth throughout history. I spent time on the CDC website looking at more contemporary statistics, especially about infant and maternal mortality. I spent time on the NIH website. I read a lot of historical documents about midwifery and “monstrous births.” So much doesn’t appear in Hatch. Michel de Montaigne, who recognized severe birth defects as an “error” of nature, not an omen, and discouraged punishment and fascination. Pregnancy as illness. Luther’s moon calf. Agnes Bowker delivering a cat. Mary Dyer. Anne Hutchinson. The Monster of Cracow. There’s a lot that didn’t make it into Hatch explicitly but still informed it. Testicular tanning! There is so much out there about testicular tanning. I watched a ridiculous amount of videos about crayfish. I found a whole series of lessons for elementary school science class about crayfish. When I thought that the well on the roving island might play a bigger role, I read a book about stonemasonry in New England. Ultimately, a lot of what ended up in Hatch was determined by events that were happening as I was writing. It’s a revolting true story that Donald Trump held a rally nearby and that the side of the highway was lined with people selling merchandise that was racist, gun-centric, and anti-women.
In your writing process, do you return to the bits of research that were left out and plan on using them in future work? In truth, I am intrigued by the concept of testicular tanning, something I have only learned about today. Has any bit of Hatch come from the vestiges of your other works?
So—there is some research (dating back to 1939) suggesting that tanning the scrotum can increase testosterone levels, but the research has never been peer-reviewed and the act seems widely discouraged by urologists. À la Tucker Carlson, the far-right became briefly enamored with the practice as a panacea for an alleged decrease in sperm counts and testosterone over the last fifty years. (NOW YOU KNOW!)
It would be nice if I could use things that I’ve researched, or written and taken out of Hatch, for other projects, but it doesn’t really work that way for me. Bits of Hatch were around for a long time, but I didn’t have any plans for them until they became Hatch. There are shared themes across them, but my books are pretty distinct from one another. One has a lot of rhyming cannibals, another is about surviving girlhood, and another is about ideas of the monstrous. Things can’t really transfer from one project to another. That said, sometimes I learn about something, like stonemasonry, and now that I know it, some of that could always appear in something else.
I wanted to ask you about one of the later pieces in the collection—“Safe”—an “old story” about a piss-poor magician and his remarkably supportive wife. I won’t spoil the tale, but it ends on such a beautiful and painful line, “What he did not know about himself was that he was a man who was not actually good at anything at all and it was only ever his beautiful wife that let him live in the illusion that he was.” I read it as a fairy tale with the sly twist that love—selfless, pure love on behalf of the wife—is also suggested to be her own downfall, something she will drown in, because she never said no. I connected this to the larger narrative of Hatch: how women’s bodies (in particular) are used, and often abused, in the great tale of history—even our own! Is this based on a true tale, an old fairy tale, or is this an invention of your own?
Yes! Thank you for sharing your reading of the piece. The story in “Safe” is made up. I felt like Hatch needed something to link the metal womb, the insipid billionaire, the would-be-humans (banging to get out), and the larger concerns of the collection. It was, I think, the last thing I wrote. I know it’s really obvious, but I liked the idea of the multiple meanings of the word safe. The metal womb keeps trying to tell her would-be-future-humans that they’re safe, but neither the metal womb or the beautiful wife have control over their bodies and how others choose to use them.
What book have you recently read that you would recommend?
Oooh. I love this question! I’m very excited about Maggie Nye’s The Curators, and I just read The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana), and The Summer of the White Fox, and After by Mark Alice Durant.
What are you currently working on?
I can’t work on one thing at a time! There’s a novella that I’d like to finish (I have an angst-y relationship with it), and there is an easier-to-work-on-collection about werewolves, filicide, and houses (that I don’t really know how to talk about yet).
Hatch is, among many other things, a political, historical envisioning of healthcare and autonomy. What would be the ideal reaction from your reader? What do you want them to take with them? What do you want them to consider or reconsider? What do you want them to do?
What a big question. First, I fully accept that publishing Hatch means that I don’t have any power over how people interact with the book. Publishing, in part, is about trusting readers and respecting their experience. I hope that any reader will leave curious, wanting to seek out more information about whatever aspects of the book most connected with them. As a human living in our very precarious and too often cruel, disengaged world, I do hope that Hatch encourages readers to consider complex relationships between cause and lasting effect. I feel that we too often grossly oversimplify and treat as binary—as black and white—issues that are incredibly tangled. As a person who is genuinely afraid of the future, I would hope that Hatch encourages readers to think about all the ways in which we are all complicit and to consider what impact we can have individually and collectively. Last, for all that Hatch is in many ways a dark book, I want there to be something hopeful to take away from metal womb’s commitment to understanding herself and her refusal, for many years, to give up, though there is little to encourage her to keep going.
A.A. Balaskovits is the author of Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet and Magic for Unlucky Girls. Winner of the grand prize in the Santa Fe Writers Project literary awards, her work has been featured in the Minnesota Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Journal, Indiana Review, and many others. She currently lives in Chicago. Find her at aabalaskovits.com.
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