Nevada is full of stories. From the ghosts of Virginia City to the Moonlite Bunny Ranch to Burning Man, complicated histories and personal connections touch every corner of the Great Basin State.
“Matter Out of Place” by AnnElise Hatjakes, released this year by the University of Nevada Press, addresses this with gritty characters and bright spots in dark underbellies in a love letter to the West.
Hatjakes, who holds a Ph.D. in creative writing, earned her master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from UNR, where she works as a teaching assistant professor. Her stories have been widely published and shortlisted for the Neil Shepard Prize in Fiction and the Curt Johnson Prose Award.
neon: What inspired you to write this?
AnnElise Hatjakes: I began writing the stories in this collection when I was enrolled in an MFA in fiction at the University of Nevada, Reno. I was part of the first cohort that graduated from the program, and I felt self-conscious about writing stories set in Northern Nevada, a place that I love but at that point had never moved away from. It wasn’t until I moved to Columbia, Missouri, that I had the distance necessary to see my hometown in a different light. In popular culture, the representations of Reno (and the entire state of Nevada, for that matter) are often very flat. My goal with this collection was to represent this place and the people living in it in a way that honors both its beauty and complexity.
What is your connection to Nevada?
I was born in Reno, and I have lived here for most of my life. During my Ph.D. program, even when I was away from the West, I was still studying and writing about my home state. My scholarly research focused on mythmaking in the American Western. My mom grew up in Winnemucca, and my dad’s family ended up in Reno because — and this is very Reno — because his father wanted a divorce from his first wife.
What do you hope readers take away from this?
I hope my book provides a deeper look at a place that is woefully underrated in my view. After reading stories about a ghost-hunting mother who’s mourning the loss of her infant, a teenage boy who accidentally starts a wildfire while trying to impress a crush, and a college student discovering her sexuality during a field trip to a nearby brothel, I hope that readers gain a sense of what this place is like. I think of the collection as an impressionist painting where all of the brushstrokes collectively evoke a feeling that can’t be captured so cleanly.
What is the most surprising thing you learned while writing this?
I was most surprised by the kind of creative energy that can be unleashed by breaking out of the traditional form. In graduate school, I learned to write a very particular kind of narrative (usually a few compressed scenes with one main character who wants something, but an obstacle is standing in their way). With this collection, I pushed myself to move beyond those constraints. One story is a “choose your own adventure” story, one takes the form of a reply-all email chain, and one includes artifacts like a college research paper.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently querying a dual timeline novel about a historian in present-day Reno who becomes obsessed with the subject of her study, Julia Bulette, a slain brothel madam-turned-folk hero.
I’m also working on a new project, which follows dozens of different characters who are gambling at the same video poker slot at the Peppermill casino.