Mitchell Hagerstrom

Gathered Pieces Mitchell Hagerstrom

The pieces in this collection have been gathered from the author's work during the 1970s through the 1990s, and the settings reflect her moves from Southern California, to Missouri, minus some years in the 80s, to San Francisco, to Louisiana, and a jaunt into Mexico. The earliest pieces began life as classroom assignments. Compose a story about two women who are sitting at a table with a vase of white roses that shatter: became Ornamental Bruises. Describe one of your evening dinners last week: became The Runaways. Write a poem about a color: became Grey is the color.... What those and other assignments produced was enough to convince the author she could do what she always wanted to do: write. A survey of the collection shows a large handful of sad pieces: a visit to the hotel where RFK was assassinated, a man whose wife has left him and taken their son though he pretends to his brother she has not, a tousled-haired streetwalker in San Francisco, scattering ashes on a San Francisco beach, a man who dies but lives on via a Mockingbird's song. Other pieces are upbeat or offbeat: a woman's revenge against her Christmas-hating husband, an odd meeting with Francis Ford Coppola, a man's jealousy over his wife telling a friend about her childhood, a cuckold wallowing in his misery, a young Mexican woman who falls into delusions. Each piece, whether prose or poem, was built on the manipulation of memories, the re-imagining of tales the author's been told, of observing both her own life and the lives of others. Whether in the construction of a poem or to advance a story's narrative, the author allowed her characters to borrow the very beds she's slept in, to steal food off her tables and words out of mouths.