Born in Pittsburgh, Andrea Hairston is a playwright, author, retired professor of theater and Africana studies at Smith College and artistic director at the Chrysalis Theater.
Hairston graduated from Smith in the mid-’70s where she was a physics-math major. After a year of editing math textbooks for publisher Houghton Mifflin, which she called “waitressing of the mind,” Hairston went to graduate school at Brown University where she earned a master’s degree in playwriting.
She wrote and produced plays for many years before becoming a science-fiction novelist.
Hairston’s latest novel, “Archangels of Funk,” is her fifth and was released in May. Her work can be described as dystopian, but falls within the popular “Hope Punk” genre. Hairston is from the Florence section of Northampton, and as an avid bicyclist who doesn’t own a car, she draws on her knowledge of the area to create the settings in her novels.
Hairston sat down with us recently to talk about her latest novel, her reason and inspiration for writing and to give us a little preview of her sixth novel, which could be released sometime in late 2025.
Q: Looking at you history as a writer and playwright, you have written a lot of plays, But lately, more novels. What has moved you in that direction?
A: Well, I got a graduate degree from Brown in playwriting, and I love the theater. It’s amazing, there’s nothing like it, absolutely nothing. It is the most difficult art form because you have to corral all of these people plus your words. I was also a director and I worked with musicians and puppets. So I did festivals, which is featured in my book. That is really unbelievably hard. You need all kinds of resources. Your voice as a playwright, you speak in a choir of other artists. It requires really amazing skills of cooperation, creativity and a lot of energy to raise money, find the actors, find the spots, put it on. I was doing pretty much everything while teaching at Smith College. I had a theater company and I did that for many years, but I had stories that wouldn’t fit on stage because a stage play or a carnival is actually a certain length of story length. And then a screenplay is another length and a novel or a short story, those are all different story sizes. And I had stories that weren’t going to fit on stage or on screen. At first, I was writing those stories as novels and then I loved writing novels. I taught at the University of Hamburg in Germany for a semester. I was a guest professor. I taught Black women playwrights in Germany. It was great experience.
While I was in Germany, I had the experience of — I’m fluent in German, but I learned German from southern Germans and I was in north Germany. I actually had a wow (experience), this is really weird. These Germans aren’t like those other Germans, which of course, makes total sense. But it did this thing to my head that I realized how we slot people … how I slot people. All the ways that growing up in America makes me view people somewhere else, whereas they don’t view themselves that way. And people in northern Germany viewed me as southern, you know, Italian or German. And I’m like, “No, I’m African American, we have all that same stuff,” but they had their reference points that allowed them to make sense of me. So they put me in their story and I was like, “Oh, wow.” So that’s when I decided I had to write science fiction novels. I wrote a novel and that was my first. Well, I wrote one and then I had to write another one. That was my first time writing novels. There were huge stories. I was like, “OK, I’ve got all these characters, I’ve got all this stuff. It will not squeeze into a two-hour play.” I then went to Clarion West, which is a sort of professional boot camp for science fiction and fantasy writers in 1999, and I worked on becoming a novelist. I was continuing to do my theater all along, and then I decided I would focus on the novels because I had these stories to tell that were larger and … the theater is exhausting. But I love the theater, so I put theater artists in my novels. That was very satisfying.
In “Archangels of Funk,” there’s a festival, and I know a lot about putting on festivals, so it gave me a really good source for writing those moments, doing the research to make it live on the page.
Q: When you say you have these stories and these characters, they’re in your head and you have to get them out. What do you mean by that?
A: The story comes to me. I start writing it down. And the characters come talk to me and demand that I tell their whole story and figure out the rest of what’s going on with them and how they relate to each other. That’s usually what happens. I wake up in the morning. I often I have a pen right by my bed so I can quickly write notes. I’ve been like that most of my life. It used to be poems, but I don’t publish poems, but I think through writing these, either character monologues or explorations of a setting or someone says something and my interest is like, “Wow, what would that mean? Or how would that work?” And then I write about it. So it’s like I have a sketchbook. The way a visual artist sees something and then starts their imagination, goes away with it, and they can then develop it into a sculpture or a painting or a drawing or whatever. That happens to me with ideas.
Q: “Archangels of Funk.” Your latest book. It’s science fiction, is it fair to say it’s dystopian?
A: Yes. But I’m what some people call “hopepunk.” I start with it being really bad, and how are we going to figure our way out of it? That’s my question. It has to be real. It’s not like, “and then they all lived happily ever after.” The task of the characters is to solve their impossible problems. I hope myself that I will be able to do it. Periodically, as I’m writing, I’m like, “are you going to be able to do it?” I’ve given them a really hard problem. It’s work that I as a writer have to do as well as the characters … to work within really difficult and challenging situations to see how we can make that way out of no way.
Q. Published in 2024 — did the pandemic inspire it at all?
A. I started the book in 2020 right before (the pandemic) like March 1st. So I’m starting to write and the pandemic hit. People were, “You’re getting up and writing?” and I said, “Yeah it’s like my way out of no way.” So it literally helped me … and I observed all the amazing things that people in my community were doing during the pandemic. They were solving impossible problems that we had yet to encounter. And community members were coming together and figuring out ways to address it. … I was deeply impressed with the ways in which people managed, like artists, like, who are performance artists, had to figure out how to perform during the pandemic and stay in touch with each other. I taught during the pandemic online theater classes. So we had to figure out how to do something that is essentially a live art form on camera, you know, separated from one another.
Q: Cinnamon Jones is the main character in the book. Where did you come up with her?
A: I wrote another book called “Will Do Magic for Small Change” and Cinnamon Jones appears in that book as a young person. I interviewed a bunch of people who all grew up in the ‘80s. That’s when Cinnamon Jones is growing up, which is 20 years after I did. I wanted to know what it was like. I got really good, amazing stories from a whole range of people about what it was like to grow up in the ‘80s. So I wrote that book, and it was about the ‘80s. And then in “Archangels of Funk,” I have her be 60 or almost 60. … I wanted it to be someone who felt like she came from an amazing group of people. Her ancestors made a world possible for her, so she’s able to be things that her grandparents couldn’t have been. She’s able to do things that they didn’t get to do, and still, despite all of that, it’s not looking good. The first line of the book is, “Who’s afraid of the future?” And she feels like she’s let down this whole line of people that have sacrificed, have worked hard, have made a way out of no way so that she could have all these opportunities and possibilities, and she squandered that and hasn’t really done very much with it. She has a whole range of very critical thoughts about herself, and she has stratospheric expectations, which is a line from the book, about herself. … She didn’t quite succeed in terms of her own assessment. Many people might think she succeeded if they looked at her, but she feels like she let down (all these people).
Q. You’ve described the setting of your book as “the Massachusetts of your mind.” How did this area influence the book?
A: Totally. One, I’m a cyclist and I bike everywhere. I could just use that knowledge. I know all the people, people on the bike path all over, and I bike all over Western Mass. It (the novel) really takes place in the Pioneer Valley, in Northampton and Amherst, some alternative version of that with the bike path essential, with the malls and the colleges and universities and the farms and all the major features. If you are from this area, you will recognize it. I have some moments that take place in Florence, Mass. There’s a Sojourner Truth statue there. I use that in the book. There’s a great tree walk where you can see these ancient old trees that were here when Sojourner Truth was here. There are the malls, the dead mall, that has been revived. I use the Valley; I call it, “we’re on the other side of the tofu curtain.” So I make fun of us as well, of course. And I’ve been here a long time, so I have a sense of it for a long time. It’s like a near-future alternative Massachusetts, Western Mass.
Q. What is the inspiration for your work? What do you get out of writing, the satisfaction level, if you will?
A: I have to write. I come from a family of talkaholics, and my grandfather was a Baptist minister. I swear the pulpit was an excuse for him to tell stories to large groups of people on a regular basis. And the stories were glorious. He was a biblical scholar, so he could pull anything from anywhere … yesterday’s headline, a novel he read, a comic book he saw and put it all together and on Sunday. He had magic. He would do that every week. I used to sit in his study with him when I was a little girl while he wrote those sermons, and he would read little excerpts to me. So I think I come from a family of storytellers, and then I got to watch him work as a writer because he had to write that sermon every week. So it was a discipline as well as a calling.
But, back to life, (my writing) what is my part of the relay race? It’s something that I have to offer the world. I feel that in the relay race, this is what I’m doing. I write. I observe the world like my grandfather. So it’s definitely, you know, straight up from him. And I try to make sense of who we are at this moment in relation to who we have been and who we might become.
There’s a delight in being creative and playful and playing and then sharing that with others.
Again, when I say there’s nothing quite like theater, writing novels is pretty much like doing a play, because you have to do the costumes, the sets, the lights, the characters, the backstory, the whole thing.
Q. What’s on your horizon? What are you working on now?
A. I’m writing another novel, which was due in August, and it did not get done. I’ve been a little off my game the last few weeks, but I’ve been writing every day. So I’m hoping that sometime at the beginning of the year, I’ll have it done. It’s a murder mystery, so I’m very excited. I’ve never done that before. It came to me; it’s called “The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays.” It’s also science fiction and there’s a dog character who is one of the major detectives. I do a lot of research on dogs, and … there are two dogs in “Archangels of Funk,” and I come from their point of view. And all the dogs are different. They’re just like other characters. I’m really having a lot of fun trying to understand how my dog is going to communicate to the people.
The thing that the dog knows … the dog knows a whole lot of stuff, but doesn’t have verbal language. The people are walking by clues that they don’t even notice. But they know things the dog doesn’t know. I’m very much struck by how the worlds we make are like a dog. They don’t have as many colors as we have, so the world visually looks different. But they can map the scents. They can tell time with scent. They know this was recent, as in, you know, a few minutes ago, or you’re still here, go find you. Or this was a year ago and you used to come here … I’m really enjoying it. I’m in New England and I’m writing about people who are facing difficult challenges.
