Pre-Order Goblin Mode & Thoughts on a Shifting World for Writers and Why I Keep Going

Hang in there...

My new book, GOBLIN MODE, (forthcoming September 2nd 2025 from Santa Fe Writers Project) is now available for pre-order & I hope you'll order it! Things like pre-orders and Amazon and Goodreads reviews are very important for writers.

Please help me make it so that it’s not only my mom buying this thing.

Also, please let me know if you'd like a review copy.

Here is some background:

A must-read for fans of Kelly Link, Jenny Offill, and Maggie Nelson.

With the fearlessness and inventive wit of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch, Goblin Mode explores the wild, surreal experience of being a woman, writer, and mother in a world that's on fire.

In Caroline Hagood' s GOBLIN MODE: A SPECULATIVE MEMOIR, the protagonist, who is and is not Caroline Hagood, takes a surreal odyssey through humor, horror, and plague-time Brooklyn. In a supercharged three-day stretch, she navigates a city full of flashers and parrots who talk to her on subways, makes an ominous visit to a bioluminescent bay in Fajardo, Puerto Rico at Christmastime, mothers two spirited children in an apartment that' s probably haunted, and lives in a world that may or may not be about to shut down. This state of goblin mode that she inhabits is metaphorical, said to have taken root since Covid and all the other sociopolitical unrest. But it' s also appearing in the form of an actual goblin that has been following her around since childhood, daring her to live more fiercely...

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This morning I read one of my favorite Substacks, Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft, on “The Writer as Chimera.” P.S. His new novel, Metallic Realms, has just been released and it’s stellar.

Michel’s chimera piece reflects on the recent uptick in Substack use but also on the shifting landscape for writers (and of course everyone). He chronicles the fall of the old chestnut of working as a professor or freelance writer while working on your novel since the the adjunctification of higher ed and the challenges of publications coming up against the Internet. And let’s not forget the way words are being stolen from writers who work in higher ed grant-writing, to name just one group facing this loss of language.

Michel writes, “With those models collapsing, most of us have to be chimeras and create a literary life out of disparate parts,” and I love any monster metaphor when it comes to the writer and the inevitably hybrid elements that go with collecting shards from various locales and mashing them together to make writing.

I came up against the questions Michel raises in this piece about how writers survive financially when I was interviewed by Hao Nguyen about how I make money writing. It felt almost humorous to be answering these questions as an indie writer and someone who is not Stephen King, but maybe that actually provides a refreshing perspective. (Although, as Andrew Gifford, the founder and director of my press, Santa Fe Writers Project, likes to point out, I have the same distributor as Stephen King, IPG.) Spoiler alert: I make money writing by actually making money teaching. Shoutout to Nguyen’s excellent interview with Michelle Tea that came after mine. Spoiler alert: Michelle Tea actually makes money by writing.

So, if the teaching jobs and freelance writing jobs are drying up and many of us aren’t making significant money off our books, what is being a writer about? To answer this question in terms of what I believe, let’s go back to that Michelle Tea interview. She writes:

I've always known - felt, really - that my path to success, and that does include financial, somehow involved doing community organizing and lifting people up. It's weird. I don't do it in order to be more successful - that wouldn't make sense exactly, I do an insane amount of unpaid labor and always have. And yet I've also just deeply known that by lifting others up I would be lifted up also. A bonus. Because I was really doing it, and still am, because I'm compelled to, and it is really fun and meaningful, and at heart I am just a reader and a fan.

After reading Tea’s comments, I thought of all the times people told me to stop responding to student emails at night, on weekends, at all. I’m frustrated by a 2 a.m. extension request as much as the rest of them but many of these missives are cries for something deeper. These emails are often saying something else: tell me I’m worth something because so many have told me differently. Tell me my voice matters. And I tell them. Because this is what I wish various teachers had done for me, and why I am still so grateful to the ones that took the time. I’m grateful to Veronica Russo for helping dyslexic me to read, for one thing. None of this would have been possible without it. I want to be the Veronica Russo for my students. This is why I particularly understand and appreciate students who learn differently. Give me the student slumping in the back row because I understand.

In short, at the end of the writing line, I may not remember back on the money I made or the New York Times or New Yorker bylines I will probably never attain, but here’s what I will remember: the students I helped to grow as writers (from initial shaky presentations to signing my books at their launches), the books I edited to help other writers take off, the readings and panels I organized that helped other writers find their voices. The other night I sat in my writing group, just marveling at all these writing brains brought together not by the lure of the dollar but by a dorkily earnest adoration of words, ideas, and of course any photograph of a typewriter at all.

Keep on going. Write that thing you must write. Be brave. Be relentless. I promise I’ll be here to read it.