The Brooklyn Rail

Natasha Stagg’s roving, listless eyes cast light on our current state of contradiction. Throughout her work, Stagg has written about the ever-deadening pulses of a society in decline. Her first book, Surveys (2016), focused on an influencer’s rise to micro-celebrity, one of few novels at the time bearing witness to fame’s increasingly tenuous definition.

She followed that up with her first collection of essays and short stories, Sleeveless, a series of writings from 2011–2019 that captured a New York in precipitous decline. Her style, in its ability to feel both immediate and removed, showed us that a world once thriving in the popular imagination is now just a psychic shadow.

In Artless, her third collection of writings, Stagg’s wry prognoses of culture extend into the everyday corners of our own isolation. Across essays and short stories, animating details provoke consternation—a father receives a heart transplant from a pig, a friend gets facial implants that illuminate beneath her skin. In our conversation, we touched on a number of topics in Stagg’s new and previous books, discussing what currently informs her work.

Joel Danilewitz (Rail): You write in Artless about having grown up backstage in the theater. How did that influence your love of fiction and writing?

Natasha Stagg: It’s more recently that I’m seeing this as my background. My dad grew up in New York, and went to LaGuardia, the High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. He wanted to be in musical theater but ended up working backstage. My parents also met in the theater—my mom was a scenic artist, and my dad was a lighting designer. And so I was in the theater physically, for most of my childhood. I guess it formed an aesthetic of my life, but maybe not so much a drive.

Rail: This attention towards artifice comes out across these essays, like when you describe Liza Minnelli’s rendition of “New York, New York” from the movie of the same name, writing, “Liza’s character eventually writes the song ‘New York, New York,’ an overly confident ode to a city that isn’t doing much for her at the time. The flat scenery and superdimensional acting intensify the film’s themes of show business’s empty promises, of life’s highs and lows harmonizing”.

Stagg: I’m obsessed with her! Right now, I’m interested in what my actual childhood has brought me to, just like every adult. I was literally up against artifice. My parents were creating the scenery for these plays and ballets and operas—mostly operas—that had some kind of resonance to me because I had thought they weren’t the real ones doing that. There’s this other version of it somewhere else, which there actually is, in New York or bigger places. Since we were in Tucson, it was all touring stuff. And so they were making the interim versions of the bigger, more detailed stuff. So it was sort of like the secondary versions of something. But anytime you’re up close to a set, they don’t look as pretty. It’s that stippling effect. The rocks are not rocks, they’re these big pieces of foam. As a child, you believe, “well, there’s that thing, but that’s not the real thing. Like, there’s going to be a real rock on the real stage.” I always felt like I wasn’t really in an actual set, but that’s what sets look like everywhere.

Rail: In the present, too, we see you coming up against these contrived versions of reality. Your essay, “Subculture,” is partially about the video game Cyberpunk 2077 and how dissatisfied people were with its glitchy depiction of the apocalypse. Is it more difficult now to separate lines of fiction and reality?

Stagg: I believe it’s harder to parse out things like that now. And it’s getting harder for me, especially as I’m getting older and not caring about so many things. When it comes to video games or really any type of interfacing with culture online, I get the concept. Like, okay, the apocalypse happens there. And that seems more apocalyptic to you if you’re involved and understand the language of it. Then you’re more devastated by it. So the further you go in, the more apocalyptic it feels, but it’s still a funny thought to have when you’re considering it. So this video game about the apocalypse came out during the pandemic, and people are complaining that there’s a boat full of bodies outside of their window. They’re looking over and they’re saying, “Oh, the Red Cross boat is so scary, but also, why doesn’t this video game represent the apocalypse well enough?” As though it should be more specific to their understanding of what the original cyberpunk genre wanted this thing to look like. But what if the apocalypse doesn’t look like that? What if it’s very banal and everything’s super sluggish, and people are dying, but really slowly? As if there’s a boat very slowly moving out your window and you’re just aware that it’s filled with bodies. But you don’t see them pouring out or anything.

Rail: It’s a funny place to be in, always inundated with virtual reality. I have never really lived a life without social media, and I enjoyed reading your perspective on how younger generations interpret and react to the world of signs. We’re almost hyper-literate when it comes to deciphering these symbols and these signs, but this has maybe made us even more exhausted and cynical. How were you trying to understand this generation as it relates to millennials?

Stagg: Mostly, I just know that I don’t know. And I’m trying to keep that mindset, but I also know that from looking at the way my generation or other generations have been described, it’s super damaging to generalize. It’s funny to say that because Gen Z has never not been online, they don’t care about physical interactions as much. That isn’t well studied, especially because it couldn’t possibly be true for the entire generation. Human psychology tells you that some people would react in the opposite way. It depends on who you are and how you’re raised and your innate interests. Maybe the reaction would be “Okay, I’ve never not had this thing expected of me, so therefore, I would like to completely escape online interactions.” And that’s a trend that’s being watched all the time, off-grid types or whatever.

Rail: In the intro, you say that you love to name drop, everyone from Cindy Sherman to Sarah Jessica Parker to Kenny Scharf, and in your last collection of writings, you had an entire section titled “Celebrity”. How does name-dropping work within your writing?

Stagg: I’ve always been fascinated by celebrities, the concept of celebrity and how it has changed so much. Everybody’s obsessed with celebrities, that’s why they are celebrities. Maybe I’m being a bit of a contrarian because during my MFA I was told, “Don’t make your work dated.” Take out any indicators of time periods. And I really reacted against that.

Rail: Though you obviously have a lot of era-specific references, there is a timeless quality to your style of writing.

Stagg: Truman Capote famously was a name dropper and that got him in trouble. But people will read his work forever. Especially that stuff. I think it’s not very brave to not mean what you’re writing about, especially if it’s nonfiction.

Rail: I feel like it has a lot to do with power, and our relationship to these people who conceive of having so much power, maybe name-dropping troubles that relationship in a way. I also love how you deploy your own personal details throughout these essays. It seems like it’s serving more within the realm of the story, even though it is perhaps something only you could know.

Stagg: Every time I have gotten in trouble with my friends, it makes me look like such a nerd because I always say, “But it served the story!” And then I’m just telling this person that their life is material for my writing. I’m not really arguing or advocating for myself very well. But, you know, that’s the truth.

Rail: Something that distinguishes these moments from other narrative writing is this low-level dread the reader experiences through macabre details. One story is about someone who gets a heart transplanted from a pig. Do you know from the onset of writing a story whether it will take on a more horrific atmosphere? Or, as William Gibson is quoted as saying in your book, is this just you trying to “get a handle on the present, the present having become extremely fantastic”?

Stagg: I don’t have much of a conscious decision making process when it comes to how these details turn into stories, but I definitely don’t consider myself a science fiction writer—even though there is a story about somebody having a pig’s heart. Some things are kind of sci-fi, but it’s more intuitive than that. I just want to create some scenery and make it feel charged in some way.

Rail: You have also been a fashion writer, and fashion was one of the focal points of your last book. This collection contained more art criticism, though there was a piece titled “Apocalypse” about the grimness of Fashion Week 2020, right before COVID hit. After that essay, we tend to get more art criticism in the book and less about fashion writing.

Stagg: Before the pandemic I was noticing that fashion seemed to be heading for a turn. And I also just get bored—I’ve been writing about fashion for a really long time and you see things starting to repeat. But there was a moment in February 2020, everybody was joking about the fashion apocalypse, the retail apocalypse. And it became what is the reaction to the magazines, fashion shows, and luxury brands that are supposedly keeping fashion alive? It felt like nobody had an answer. I still care about fashion but I’m waiting for something really big to write about.

Rail: Something else I found resonant in your book is your attention to contradictions, and how everything contradicts itself to the extent that meaning basically becomes voided. You write about “the magic trick people can perform by holding two truths to be self-evident simultaneously”. But that’s not a very interrogative way to approach tough issues. Is writing, for you, a way to understand contradiction a little better?

Stagg: I have to remind myself that I can give myself at least some clarity into my thoughts, because it’s so easy for everyone to get lost in a constant need to create a take or to make an immediate response. I think that’s the part of this era that is very depressing to me where everybody seems to be in a group text instead of texting someone one-to-one. It’s so weird when you’re texting with someone, and you’re having a conversation about the Prada show. And then you see them tweeting about the Prada show, and it’s slightly different or maybe it’s exactly the same even, but you’re like, “I didn’t know this was for a larger audience.” Why are all of our slowly-forming conversations and thoughts being projected and then actually responded to in real time so quickly? And so then you’re stuck: “Well this was the way I thought about this thing. And I can’t change it.” I’m really trying to remind myself that I’m a writer because I don’t do that. My love of writing is about forming thoughts slowly and coming up with a thought that also might not stay. I think I said that in the introduction to this book. None of these are necessarily set in stone. Especially since some of them are fiction and you’re not even supposed to take anything away from fiction other than the way it makes you feel. But as a society, we create takeaways from things way too fast.

Rail: What do you feel distinguishes this collection from your previous books, specifically your last collection of essays, Sleeveless?

Stagg: The way I wrote each of them was similar in that I was just writing not really with a book in mind. I was trying to figure out how we were feeling collectively during this time, 2019–2022. I felt like what is there left? What do people really want out of life and emotion?

Rail: Do you feel that you can ever write anything that’s really for yourself?

Stagg: I hope everything that I write, I can make it more for myself by thinking of it as something that can live somewhere else later.

Rail: Has this made you feel alienated from writing?

Stagg: No, I think it’s connected me more to it. Because now maybe even stuff that I write for brands—maybe it’s all a part of what I’m thinking about and living. So why wouldn’t all of it be this representation of my worldview? If I’m writing a press release for my friend’s art show, I think I make it better by thinking about the way it is living somewhere else—it works out for all of us.