There Was Nothing Left But Gold
Abby Hagler
Written from the mouth of the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, There Was Nothing Left But Gold wanders the grassland setting of Cather’s imagination and Hagler’s own upbringing. Following her decision to sever ties with her mother, Hagler drives toward her childhood home, detouring in the landscape of Cather’s Nebraska fiction. These essays – composed of travel narrative, ghost theory, and bits of literary criticism found in gift shops and estate sales – dig into dispossession, unearthing the boundaries of forgiveness, the impact of inherited narratives, and the ways in which the living also haunt.
“As intricately woven as the Nebraska prairie Hagler abandons in order to claim, the lyric essays in There Was Nothing Left But Gold thread through time, layering myths and memory, nostalgia and literary criticism, Willa Cather’s fiction with the writer’s rebellious girlhood in order to understand what haunts a home and what makes a homeland.”
— Sarah Fawn Montgomery
“‘We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry,’ Willa Cather penned in the pages of My Ántonia in 1918. Cather’s lineage, Nebraska girls and artists exiled from the plains, will recognize their codes, symbols, and secret handshakes richly reflected in Hagler’s essays. For everyone else, this collection is an invitation into the dirt and muck, the disappearing, haunted nature of small towns, and the relationships that bloom there, refuse uprooting, and like prairie grass, fall dormant and fallow with the seasons.”
— Erica Trabold
ABBY HAGLER lives in Chicago. Previous work has appeared in Entropy, FANZINE, Ghost Proposal, and Deluge among others. With Julia Cohen, she runs an interview column at Tarpaulin Sky magazine called “Original Obsessions” about writers’ childhood obsessions manifesting in their current work.