Horror Writer and Folk Musician Carter St Hogan Finds Relief in Discomfort
"Everything is so much grosser than anyone talks about"
By Laiken Neumann, Fri., June 30, 2023
Austin audiences may know Carter St Hogan as the bluegrasser behind exploratory folk project Creekbed Carter Hogan. The trans nonbinary creative released his first LP, Good St Riddance, in 2021. Hogan, who uses he/they pronouns interchangeably, self-produced the concept album, reimagining the story of the 14th-century St. Wilgefortis as a ghostly queer love epic.
They calmed anxieties about the project by drawing a through line to fiction, a primary career goal established at age 11. "This is like a novel, so it's not a big deal," they recall thinking. "It's fine, and I'll never perform it."
While Hogan started plucking strings on Austin stages around 2018, his commitment to the written word recently came to fruition with One or Several Deserts. The collection of eight short stories examines survival, power dynamics, and small-town surveillance via body horror. Published by independent Minneapolis outfit 11:11 Press in April, the stories often find relief in discomfort.
"Horror is the place where I found people were talking about the things that felt honest to me. Everything else felt like it was about other people having a nice time," says Hogan, who earned a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University in 2016.
"It's about people outside of a thing or experiencing something completely different from what people around them experience," they continue, particularly noting the genre's effectiveness in sharing trans stories. "Especially body horror. Something's happening to your body, and no one else fucking understands. In fact, they think you're crazy."
In One or Several Deserts, the Oregon native imagines industrial pig farming, the Greek myth of Pasiphaë, party game boar torture, and shame-riddled evening rituals. The grotesque situations reveal daunting truths of human experience, and positive outcomes are few and far between.
"Even the happy endings in horror are the worst," he laughs. "What's the happy ending? Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The happy ending is that she's not dead. Now she has to deal with everything."
Nevertheless, Hogan consistently depicts an ultimately hopeful survival instinct in their harsh, intimate tales. As the writer places characters, human or not, in threatening situations, they still attempt to reclaim their own autonomy.
"Watching somebody choose something, I think, reminds us that we also can choose things," they say. "We can opt in or opt out but it is actually our decision. It doesn't get made for us. ... It's very empowering, especially for someone who once thought they had no options, had no choices."
He roots many stories in the natural world, something also evident in Good St Riddance's atmospheric field recordings of whistling crickets, swooping swallows, and rushing water. These organic settings lend an optimistic, omniscient consideration to Hogan's work. The earthly connection is just another power dynamic he explores.
"There are relationships you form with everything. And so, what if even the rocks matter? What if everybody matters?" he asks. "Is it so devastating that as one story ends another one begins?"
Nine years in the making, the stories edged away from brutality and became more forgiving over time. "It says a lot about how I was managing my gender at that time, too," they say. "I think I was just constantly controlling myself."
Embracing expansiveness, Hogan's uncertain of their future in fiction but hasn't stopped writing. They describe their current work as "weird personal essays, sort of, that look like Bible passages," happily exasperated by their unconventional structure. They also spent the last three years widening one of the collection's stories, "The Geodic Body," into a full-length neo-Western novel about a trans mystic who falls in love with a rock in the 19th-century Texas Panhandle.
Hogan says musical ventures helped him become less ruthless toward himself. "To me, [music is] so forgiving and generous and expansive in a way that fiction just isn't anymore," he shares.
Their upcoming sophomore album, set to be released next year, reflects that change in a hop away from their lonesome debut. "I'm not just listening to the songs I have performed a billion times. I'm listening to my friends interpret them," he explains of studio collaborations with Little Mazarn's Lindsey Verrill and Jeff Johnston, as well as flute-toting folk quartet Large Brush Collection, with whom Hogan split an EP in March.
Once it had been painstakingly written, the story collection had a similarly community-based release. Hogan and their girlfriend Asher Ford, owner of 3D-printed home decor brand Object Lover, created the book's cover using a mess of plant-based plastics, Pepto-Bismol, and tire sealant. They also hastily threw a book release party at the Museum of Human Achievement.
Lugging rural heat, inherent brevity, and a blunt commitment to our most disgusting nature, One or Several Deserts remains a worthy, albeit unorthodox, summer read. As Hogan puts it, "Everything is so much grosser than anyone talks about."
Creekbed Carter joins the Cactus Cafe’s free Other Voices tribute to Nanci Griffith on July 6 with Katie Lessley, Emily Shirley, Deidre Rodriguez, and others.
