Hayden Casey: On Productivity and Creativity, Anne Carson, Trusting Your Writerly Instincts, and His Debut Collection ‘Show Me Where The Hurt Is’

In Show Me Where the Hurt Is (Split/Lip Press, 2025), Hayden Casey’s debut collection, woundedness is on full display across thirteen stories. The stories jump from realism to fabulism, from first person present to third person (stopping briefly in second), and from mundanity into the depths of human experience. As a multi-hyphenate writer-musician-songwriter, Hayden also talks about publishing with an indie press and making an album to go with his book. We spoke at Casey Moore’s Oyster Bar, a Tempe, AZ institution, where we ordered cheap beer and spiked grapefruit seltzers on a warm March afternoon.

Devin Pope: What was the first spark of this story collection, the first story you wrote that made it in? 

Hayden Casey: The first one that came to be was “Hot Yoga,” which was in 2019, and it was the first year of [my] MFA. I thought of myself as a novelist. That’s all I ever want to write: novels. But I noticed in the workshops that the depth of feedback for short stories was so much greater than it was for novel chapters, because of all the missing context. Everything for stories is on the page. You can critique it much more easily. So I was like, I kind of want to try this and see how it goes. There were four stories that we handed in that semester, and that was the one good one. 

I’m trying to remember the genesis of the idea. I think it really started with the end. I was like, how the hell did this person get to that point? I really love an observer narrator, so I put those two things together. I was much less intentional at that point, because I really did not know much about craft. I was following instinct. I just threw it together. When I got [to the MFA], I had this huge moment of, I don’t deserve to be here. Everyone is so much better than me, I don’t know anything. The first year was working to get over that. That story helped me feel better about myself and myself as a writer specifically.

DP: About the book itself, how did that start? Did you submit a manuscript to an open call that Split/Lip Magazine had? How did you get there? 

HC: I had no intention ever of writing a story collection—as I mentioned, novelist (capital N) was kind of my MO. I knew my thesis was going to be a novel. Stories were these little flirts on the side, I guess. But I was going through Submittable and looking at open calls, and I saw calls for short story collections, and I was like, Well, I don’t have one of those. And I kept scrolling. I went, Wait a minute. Hold on. I think I kind of do, actually. Because I’d written a bunch of them over the course of the program, and I realized they had some thematic connection and connective tissue. So I got out a big piece of notebook paper, and I went through all the stories I had, and I made a list of all the ones I thought were good enough and that felt related to each other. I cobbled together a manuscript, and I submitted it to Split/Lip and a couple of contests that were open at the time. Split/Lip was the one who bit. But it was totally an accident. I’d submitted many, many other manuscripts before that, I queried novels before that to no ultimate success, but yeah, I was just like, might as well, right? I’ve got all these stories. 

DP: Nothing to lose by trying.

HC:  Precisely. So try I did.

DP: You mentioned your love of novels. Is that something that you’re still working on? Do you have another book coming out this year? 

HC: Yep, it was my thesis novel [A Harvest of Furies]. And I have three other novel manuscripts that are either ready to go out or that I’m really close to finishing up.

Two of them are much more traditional in the literary sense. The one that’s coming out is pretty experimental. I absolutely am writing novels all over the place, and that’s, I think, where the bulk of my energy will go moving forward. [But] I still have story ideas every now and then. I really want to write a novel in stories as well, because I love reading those, and I love all the different possibilities that are there. 

DP: Do you have any novels that stand out as the novels that got you into writing?

HC: I think the ones that have been the most inspirational to me have been the ones that have made me feel the strongest, because then I have a model for what I hope to elicit from a reader. And so I’m thinking specifically of the people who have really shaped or reshaped the way that I see writing. A big one of those is Max Porter. I love, love, love his work. He’s very big-hearted, very playful. Ali Smith as well: I love her willingness to play around and try things and experiment. 

I will devote myself to a certain writer for a period of time. I had an Anne Carson phase in the MFA, and I read all seventeen of her books that were available in a three-month period. And when I discovered Ali Smith, I read everything we had available at the time—a huge backlog. 

I tend to do that [deep-dive into an author’s books, but] it hasn’t happened as much anymore. I think I’ve found my own voice to a greater degree than I had before, because I used to be very susceptible to being influenced by those large binges. That’s not happening to nearly the same extent anymore. I can recognize a hallmark of that person’s writing that might appear in a certain [book], but I don’t feel like I’m losing all sense of identity anymore, which I did at a point and I had to work to get out of.

DP: I was going to ask you about Anne Carson, because you mention her a few times throughout the book. Tell me more about your relationship with her writing.

HC: I am trying to remember where I started. I think it was “Short Talks.” It’s a collection of teeny, tiny little essays on certain subjects in her very roundabout way that we read as part of Matt Bell’s modernism class. It’s maybe forty pages or so. I was so interested by the fact that the essays were so referential to things I didn’t know about, but I could still parse them and come to my own meaning anyway, even if I didn’t understand the source. That was a really cool discovery for me. I really enjoy the act of struggling through something that’s beyond my comprehension or frame of knowledge, because I think I come to new things that way. 

She works with the classics a lot, because she is a Greek translator as well, and she studied classics in Greek for a number of years. She’s also very playful, and I love people who really are not afraid to break tradition or take risks. I think that’s really rewarding and fun for me as a reader and also as a writer. She tries all sorts of different things. She has very funkily retranslated plays, and she has collections of poetry, she writes plays, she has a collection of sixteen chapbooks that come in a slip case that are all incredibly different from one another. She just has an idea and goes with it, whatever it looks like or however it fits in with other things. And I really love her boldness and her singularity. That was inspirational and freeing to me.

DP: You write about a lot of difficult topics in the book—substance issues, eating disorders and body issues. I was wondering about your approach to writing about eating disorders specifically, or those kinds of harder topics in general. 

HC: I think it’s a thing that I have not seen [written about] nearly to the extent that I think it’s prevalent. And when I do see it, it’s very much a gimmick or a gotcha or a shock value thing, where it’s incredibly dramatized. But I think just seeing it as a real thing—I don’t know if normal is the right word, but a thing that is around us, even if we don’t talk about it or don’t make it incredibly visible. I think with a lot of things, I approach it in that way—trying not to sensationalize, trying not to make that the single story or single aspect of this particular character or story.

DP: One of my favorite stories was the story about brothers, “The Headache.” There’s so much going on in the story. I’m really interested to know how you started off with it, and how you got to the ending.

HC: The entry point into that story was more personal than most, in that it stemmed from my enormous anxiety about gift-giving. It’s one of the most anxious scenarios you can put me in, is having to get a gift for somebody. I know it’s not that deep most of the time, but it becomes this incredibly onerous thing, because it has to be something they’ll like; not only that they’ll like, but that they’ll use; not only that they’ll use, but that they don’t have.

So it began with the scenario of the main character having to get a gift for his brother. It started with the guilt of the narrator, not feeling like he knew his brother well enough to know what to get him. And from there, some other things bled in. Then I was in a workshop and we had a prompt that involved objects that we had to work into our stories. So I was trying to figure out how to build those things into the story. I didn’t realize at the beginning how important the fragility of the younger brother’s mental state was going to end up being, and I also didn’t understand the importance that had on their relationship. As I kept working on that story, it really revealed itself to me that they were much more prominent than I originally thought. The story ended where it did because I think those really took precedence over a lot of other things. 

DP: I also noticed that was one of the few stories where the main character was a man. How do your main characters find you? Most of them were women, or read that way. How did you work on that?

HC: I think I am very interested in gender dynamics. Oftentimes the situation of the story comes to me, and then I have to figure out which perspective feels more interesting or more rich to me. And usually it has been the female perspective in the story. In relationship stories, particularly, I feel like a lot of what I’m engaging with is the effects on those narrators of things that their partners may not be aware of, but that might be more socially constructed. So it just makes more sense in the context of those particular stories for the women to narrate. 

But I have noticed—and this is going to sound strange—I’m trying to encourage myself to write from the male perspective more often, or a male perspective more often, because I think I have a very fixed perspective in my head of what men can be, as we’re conditioned to. I’m beginning to play around with subverting that. 

It is generally that the characters find me, the situation finds me. Sometimes it’s a character, sometimes it’s a scenario. Especially once I started playing with fabulism and things of that sort, it was a way that a fabulist choice can represent a more real life situation. But generally, I have found that in the stories that have come to me, the female perspective has been the one that has felt the most rich and potentially illuminating.

DP: I wanted to ask you about how you incorporate elements of fabulism into your stories. It’s not in every story, but there are enough fabulist elements that it definitely impacts how the whole collection feels. 

HC: I’m glad. It was a thing at first that I was a little afraid of. I wasn’t sure if it made those stories too different from the others to where they didn’t feel like they belonged. But ultimately, I felt like there was enough of a thematic connective tissue so they still felt like they belonged here.

That was something that happened as a result of the people that I was writing around, or the people that were writing around me. I was 100% realist everything. I’ve never really been a huge fantasy, sci-fi, or historical person. I’m very much [interested in] situations, relationships, scenarios. But I was really fascinated by reading the work of the people around me who were starting to play with these things—I felt almost even more affected by it than if it had just been told in a literal, realist way. So it was entirely inspired by the people around me, and then I figured out how to bring it into my world to an extent.

DP: Another thing I noticed was a lot of use of first person present. How did you decide on that? There were a few stories in third person. There was a real range of decisions made across your stories.

HC: First person present is my bread and butter. It’s also what I’ve done the most over my life, so it’s the thing that I feel most comfortable doing. Pretty much everything starts there, and then every now and then I’ll go, you know what? Actually, this doesn’t feel right. I think it should be third person, or I think it should be past tense, or second [person], which I do once in there. 

[First person present,] that’s what I’m very comfortable with. I’ve always loved the present tense and I’ve always loved its immediacy. I feel like that’s really worked on me. Sometimes back in the day, more so than nowadays, third person used to be an immediate distancing force for me as a reader. I would feel like I was at a distance from it, which is not the case anymore, but I think that contributed to why I ended up writing primarily in first person present.

DP: Talk to me about productivity. 

HC: My reputation in the master’s program was the prolific writer. My roommate, who was in the MFA program, told me that several faculty members told him not to compare himself to me in terms of productivity, because the rate at which I produce things is ridiculous. And I’m a musician as well, and a songwriter, and so there’s that whole other thing that’s constantly churning. Creativity is unavoidable.

DP: I want to ask about the duality of your craft, being a writer and a musician. How do those overlay? It sounds like they feed into each other in a productive way. 

HC: They do in some senses, but not in others. Generally, when I have ideas, I know exactly what they’re for. They have very different filing cabinets in my brain. But I brought them together for this project. I have an album that came out on the same day of the book. I turned each story into a song.

I’ve always written in these very differently categorized forms, and there hasn’t ever been that crossover, but I’ve always wanted to make that happen, and I figured, with the first book, no better time. There’s a tracklist built right into the table of contents. 

They generally occupy quite different places in my brain, but they are both tended to pretty much daily. 

I’ve been writing music about as long as I’ve been writing prose, actually, I think I wrote my first song at twelve. It was right after my grandpa passed away. I can still hear it in my head. It’s horrendous, but you know, it’s your first effort. So I’ve always done both. I started writing my first novel around the same time, so I very quickly realized that I’m a creative person and that’s what keeps me going.

DP: What was it like working with Split/Lip and indie publishers in general? 

HC: It’s been wonderful. My novel’s also coming out with an indie press, Lanternfish Press, which is based in Philly. Everyone has been so quick to respond to everything all the time. I’ve heard with the larger presses, that’s not the case. 

Kristine Langley Mahler, who’s the director [of Split/Lip], is fantastic, and she’s been so supportive and generous and kind from the get-go, and just a really warm and energetic spirit to have around and to be championing your work. Edits on this book were done by the former short story editor who has since left, Pedro Ramirez. He sent me a marked up version of the manuscript, and we had a big Zoom call, and we talked about some structural things, and some titles. It was a take what you want, leave what you don’t sort of thing. I went through and accepted most of it because they were wonderful edits. And the marketing folks, Gage and Abby, have been really wonderful to work with. They’ve been really good about making sure everything that’s on the lineup is something I am comfortable with and excited by and looking forward to, and making this fun as it can possibly be. It’s been fantastic. 

DP: Last question: How do you finish things? When do you call a project done? 

HC: Funnily enough, that’s what I asked Lauren Groff at her event for Fates and Furies in Seattle in 2014. She was like, You’re a writer, aren’t you? And I was like, How did you know? And I don’t remember what she said, because I blacked out from even asking the question in the first place. 

But what I’ve noticed is the kinds of changes that I’m making are different between when a manuscript actually really needs work and when I’m just swapping words out for one another, adding punctuation just in a what style mood am I in today? way. 

I think also, as I’ve gotten much more knowledgeable and intentional about craft, I’m able to feel more secure about something being the way I want it to be. 

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Hayden Casey is a writer and musician currently living in Phoenix, AZ. Born in Reno, NV, he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Washington and an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University. His short story collection, Show Me Where the Hurt Is, is now available from Split/Lip Press. His debut novel, A Harvest of Furies, is forthcoming from Lanternfish Press in fall 2025. His short-form work has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, West Branch, and Bat City Review, among others, and his long-form work has been shortlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Palette Chapbook Prize for poetry. He teaches writing at Arizona State University, where he was the 2024 recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Instructor Award.

Author photo by Bruce Andre.