Core Memories: Maggie Boyd Hare
We believe the origin of our work as creators is important to consider and hold. In CORE MEMORIES, we ask artists and writers about their own creative beginnings. What led them to operate in their genre of choice? Was it a specific moment, an errant thought, a movement? Was it an insight, a person, a place? Years into their work, does it continue to resonate?
In this edition, we interview Maggie Boyd Hare.
Maggie Boyd Hare is an MFA candidate at UNCW where she works as a teaching assistant and as poetry editor for Ecotone. Her essay, “Self Portrait in Essays I Don’t Want to Write,” received a notable in Best American Essays 2023, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Hayden's Ferry Review, the Arkansas International, Juked and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram at @maggie.boyd.hare and at maggieboydhare.com.
What is your CORE MEMORY?
I grew up in rural Kentucky where I spent a lot of time outside and a lot of time in a Methodist church. In Sunday school when I was really small, maybe seven or eight, the teacher played out Bible stories in shoebox-sized Tupperware full of sand. The box was the desert. We all got carpet squares to sit criss-cross applesauce on and she set the desert in the middle of us and quietly ran her hand over its surface, said the desert is very hot during the day and very cold at night and it is always changing. She made a little hill with her palm, then calmly leveled it. She brought out wooden figurines and small sheep and trees, she lifted them in and out of the desert to teach us these ancient stories of the Judeo-Christian God. I felt completely rapt by this. Growing up immersed in communal acts of imagination and shared language set something spinning in me.
How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?
My work is driven by curiosity and mystery. I’m generally more interested in what I don’t know than what I do. I think I learned how to be comfortable with, and maybe even excited by, the unknown when I was listening to those old stories set against an ever-changing landscape. The idea that a Tupperware on a linoleum floor could be a desert and an important narrative could play out in this tiny space for a bunch of kids—that we could lean closer, our knees pressing into our carpet squares—feels essential. When I write now, I’m reaching with language toward meaning and witness. I’m trying to set everything side by side to see what I can find. This feels so close to the experience of sitting on the hard floor early on a Sunday morning, watching the teacher’s hand move the pieces around so something could unfold.
Are there any new projects you’re working on?
I’m currently working on a book-length lyric essay that explores desire, gender, belief, and the ways that we inhabit or push against imposed ideas of self. It involves a lot of crushes, car washes, queerness, and collapsing time.