Meet English Professor Dr. Sadie Hoagland
Dr. Sadie Hoagland is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her teaching and research areas include creative writing, translation, postcolonial studies, narrative theory, and contemporary literature, and she’s an important resource and mentor to our creative writing graduate students. As a member of the graduate faculty, she teaches both master’s and PhD students, and has supervised numerous theses and dissertations. Her novel “Strange Children” recently placed second in the Del Sol Press First Novel Competition.
What do you enjoy most about working at UL Lafayette?
The people. The students are always willing to share their thoughts, ideas, and humor in class and are very respectful of each other. In turn, I have enormous respect for the work they do, especially as many of them are also working other jobs and/or taking care of family. My colleagues are warm and have gone out of their way to make me welcome here, which makes working at UL Lafayette a great experience.
What can the creative writing concentration teach to a PhD student?
Our program is unique in that it’s a generalist program, allowing our PhD students to specialize in more than one area. I think this is helpful both in terms of the academic job market but also in terms of learning to inhabit the world as both a writer and a scholar, to integrate the knowledge from literature and theory into one’s creative writing. Increasingly, writers need to be able to speak fluently about their own work in a wider cultural and theoretical context, and to be able to articulate theories of teaching creative writing. Our program prepares students to do so.
After your education in creative writing in California and Utah, how has Louisiana affected or influenced the way you write?
It’s a little early to tell Louisiana’s influence on the purely aesthetic level of my work, but I will say coming from two very dry places it’s fascinating to be in a place so teeming with water and life. I am used to having to make an extended effort to make anything grow, but in Louisiana I don’t even have to water my lawn—one can only hope this becomes a metaphor for my creative output! The people too, are very different, and there is a cultural premium here on narratives as a crucial part of identity (you meet someone, and they tell you their story). This is something I’ve always been interested in, but in Louisiana these narratives are much less individualistic and much more tied to family and history which brings out a certain sense of connectedness between the people and the verdant place one notices right off. I imagine some of those rich voices, and their cadences, will work their way into my writing. In addition, my students have always influenced me, and this last year I found their hard work and self-discipline downright inspiring.
Tell us about your research, your writing, your recent publications.
My research and creative work are always in sync, and my current project deals with the ways in which Americans cope with grief and death. I am interested, as I’ve just said, in the relationship between narrative and identity, and this project is not a complete departure as many of the stories I’m writing deal directly with grief as a space where narrative ultimately fails us. Language cannot describe certain kinds of loss, nor can it always account for why misfortune befalls us.
Historically, from the Book of Job to the Odyssey, our narrative impulse has been a desire to explain why ill fate befalls us (he must have sinned, say Job’s companions, or Odysseus has bad luck as a result of blinding the son of a god). Contemporary manifestations of this impulse are still present, and these are interesting to me as well as the resounding silence that surrounds inexplicable loss: random accidents, violence, suicide. In the face of death, our culture often reverts to cliché and symbols (sympathy cards and flowers) which, to me, mark grief as even more outside language. My most recent publication, Nine Stories, reflects this research and my own experience: it’s a narrative about a suicide in the poetic form of a pantoum. I used the pantoum form because the repetition of certain lines seemed to echo not only the limits of language for the bereaved, but also the emptiness and the confusion; the way time persists even as our world comes to a halt.
What are the plans for the future of the creative writing concentration at UL Lafayette?
I’d like to see The Deep South Festival of Writers become a permanent fixture in the program; it would be nice to expose our students to several different aesthetic styles by bringing in writers from all over the country to read, and that would also be a nice way to involve the community. I also want to help our excellent student-run literary journal, Rougarou, get more exposure and support. I hope we can continue to encourage our students to challenge themselves, to make the rigor of doctoral study work for their individual interests, and as faculty that we can find more ways to support them as they integrate their academic and creative work.
Learn more about the creative writing master's and PhD programs at UL Lafayette >