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Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir
“Profoundly unique and honest...somehow executed with an astonishing lack of ego. Hagood will break your heart with her naked sincerity; a masterful, singular writer who sheds light with every page.”
—MARY-LOUISE PARKER, star of "Weeds"
A must-read for fans of Kelly Link, Jenny Offill, and Maggie Nelson.
With the fearlessness 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 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 very real, in the form of an actual goblin that has been following her around since childhood, daring her to live more fiercely...
—MARY-LOUISE PARKER, star of "Weeds"
A must-read for fans of Kelly Link, Jenny Offill, and Maggie Nelson.
With the fearlessness 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 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 very real, in the form of an actual goblin that has been following her around since childhood, daring her to live more fiercely...
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
182 pages, Paperback
Published September 2, 2025
2 people are currently reading
1654 people want to read
About the author
Caroline Hagood
9 books77 followersCaroline Hagood is the author of the poetry books, Lunatic Speaks (FutureCycle Press, 2012), Death and Other Speculative Fictions: An Essay in Prose Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), and Making Maxine’s Baby (Hanging Loose Press, 2015); the creative nonfiction books, Ways of Looking at a Woman (Hanging Loose Press, 2019) and Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022); and the novels, Ghosts of America (Hanging Loose Press, 2021) and Filthy Creation (MadHat Press 2023).
Her speculative memoir, Goblin Mode, shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project on September 2, 2025. Her book, Women of Fantasy in Their Own Words: Conversations with Contemporary Authors, edited with Sébastien Doubinsky, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in December 2025.
Her work has appeared in publications including Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle.
Her speculative memoir, Goblin Mode, shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project on September 2, 2025. Her book, Women of Fantasy in Their Own Words: Conversations with Contemporary Authors, edited with Sébastien Doubinsky, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in December 2025.
Her work has appeared in publications including Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and Elle.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 12, 2025
“[W]riting, and the brainstorming that goes into it, becomes a record of what has reached in and touched our lives at various points, eventually forming a grove of letters others can navigate.”
* * *
“I want a mapmaker to one day chart that space where terrible writing suddenly turns into something that for a matter of minutes glows beyond words.”
Caroline Hagood, Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir (2025)
* * *
Limbo, bardo, purgatory…somewhere in the New York City subway system: Caroline Hagood (the persona of the real Caroline Hagood, author of Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir (2025)), enjoys dwelling in liminal spaces. Here, she can probe the depths of ugliness and beauty, turning trash into writerly treasures.
This latest of her works is combing through a shadowy mind that knows it must be the practical wife, mother, writer and educator—the adult—but also longs for a little rebellion, a lot of messiness, and a total escape from reality. This work does take place in the COVD-era, where life felt like an alternative reality and, thus, penning a “speculative memoir” that blends the real with the imagined feels appropriate to reflect those pandemic days of ubiquitous masks, hand sanitizer, and the full-body shudder any time someone coughed or sneezed within a mile. Didn’t it always feel like you were on the look-out, searching for some sign? For the book’s Caroline Hagood, life is an adventure in which she is on the prowl to do more, know more, produce more. Goblin Mode is certainly a work that will resonate with writers in particular, writers who are always striving to break convention, be earnest yet amusing, and connect with readers. In this pseudo-memoir, stalking around a fictionalized version of New York, and Caroline’s life, is a goblin who remind her (and us) to be ferocious, daring, and brazen. Could this be the writer’s not-guardian-angel but guardian-goblin, prompting writing sessions, assertive conversations, and outrageous responses to creepy strangers and streakers alike?
In 66 short, poignant chapters covering three hectic days, Hagood presents a life, like her Brooklyn, “curving in on itself,” striving to maintain structure but really wanting to get to the heart pulsing inside. It’s a stormy heart, and it takes a goblin to reach in and pull it to the surface, not to crush it but to help it leave its mark on the page. There is hope in this kind of raw, unfiltered writing: perhaps it will stick with raw, unfiltered readers who see themselves in the chaos and who also think, “maybe I need a goblin.” John Keats was wrong to think his name would only be “writ in water,” lost quickly to time; maybe Goblin Mode’s Caroline is also wrong to think that her “own name [will be scribbled only] on the surface of ghosts.” Isn’t longevity every writer’s dream, whether they admit it or not? But every artist’s dream drags along its twin, a nightmare, that disallows the writer from believing in the work.
What is most memorable in Goblin Mode is the humor that strikes out here and there, slipping into serious moments of reaching students who are afraid of their futures, or handling sexual deviants exposing themselves on the subway train, or handling a father’s decline. There are turkeys video-bombing a Zoom job interview, or children pressing sticky handmade Starburst hearts into one’s hand, or dark jokes to help dispel the storm clouds of cancer. Goblin Mode is really about surviving and survival mechanisms: when Hagood writes that “COVD, climate change, and more sociopolitical chaos than I can quantify” has toughened her up, or helped her “woman up” to be a mother, a fighter, we readers understand just how much can happen in a single generation. It is one that still feels the terror of September 11, 2001 and now, as parents in many cases, has the pressure of ensure its own children do not endure such moments. But nothing lasts, poignant or poisonous; it’s no surprise that “Ozymandias” is referenced in Goblin Mode, yet another reminder of decay, lost greatness, and despair. What remains of us but our words, our writing? Can we ever take actions big enough to match the grand visions in our head?
Any time I read one of Hagood’s books, each page feels like a small unfolding treasure that just falls out of nowhere and into your hand – little tasty snacks of words punctuating the path of a quirky life. It parallels the way Caroline herself, in this speculative memoir, frequently squirrels away and tugs candy from beneath the bed mattress, or finds a stash of snacks in the closet, where she tucks herself away for “mom time.” Goblin Mode is the tale of a woman trying to be everything, too much and not enough, and the world that doesn’t ever seem to settle long enough to let her just be. But maybe that’s the point: great writing never grew out of bland, homogenous soil, and placid seas never launched any intrepid ships.
Hagood knows something all artists know: a tiny interest nearly always leads to an explosive obsession that we vow we will turn into our Next Great Masterpiece. Hagood’s frequent preoccupations are writing, motherhood, New York City, teaching, and interpersonal connections (with family, with strangers, with students, with one’s goblin-self). Her work often becomes, even when it strives to be another genre, a braided-essay; in this way, Hagood blends academia with low-brow references, crafting the kind of delectable style all good goblins will gobble down, and then they’ll look for more.
Is it any wonder, too, that the children of this fictionalized Hagood are the kind who “drag junk home from the sidewalk to make sculptures”? The writer-protagonist of Goblin Mode throws all she has into her own work, sparing no scrap, wasting no word. She pillages, takes, borrows, steals ideas where she finds them. She tries to mother the world—her children, her students, the annoying streaker who has no shame in disrupting a college course—but most of all wants to nurse her writing to get it to a healthy, robust place where it reflects her most authentic self. In a time of loss, grief, fear, and pandemic, though, getting anything on the page feels like a small miracle.
The overall feel of Goblin Mode is that of a haunting. We are all plagued by the ghosts of possibility, by the fears of trauma (especially during a pandemic, the effects of which we’re still feeling), and the nagging questions that keep us up at night – and, for writers, pounding at the chocolate-stained keyboard at all hours. I can never really predict where Hagood—the author—goes with her work, having read her essays, poetry, novels, and all the genres in between. But, suffice to say, her words always carry that ghoulish glow that reminds you that in the crumbs and bandages at the bottom of a purse; in the dust in the apartment corners; or in the pop culture and philosophical allusions that intersect (Bad Bunny and Mary Oliver make appearances) in this speculative memoir are hidden the makings of a life—and one unique, fascinating mind.
Above all, Hagood has always been and remains an imaginative writer unafraid to dig into her mind and present anything she finds. “I don’t need something to exist in order to visit it,” she writes, in a provocative line that reminds me that Artificial Intelligence is always making up what doesn’t “exist” from human hands but, at the same time, AI will never be able to be so humanly-strange, earnest, or imaginative. AI has no possibilities to unearth because it is a storage redistribution system and not a generator of the eldritch and new. AI takes the scraps of reality and reassembles – and we all know how well, ethically and morally, that turned out for Dr. Victor Frankenstein. But Hagood has her own Frankensteinian style where “fragments, student papers, lit submissions” bump into “receipts, recipes, notes on bar napkins.” Writing by hand, and in the mind, is a kind of sacred space no one and no machine can reach: it is the author who controls where this output goes, if it is put into print at all. “We are all these strange archives” of scraps, Hagood concludes: give me the strange, the unexpected, the confusing. Give me the human, or the goblin, or the hybrid “art monster” about which Hagood has been so fond in previous work. Let her be my mirror.
* * *
“I want a mapmaker to one day chart that space where terrible writing suddenly turns into something that for a matter of minutes glows beyond words.”
Caroline Hagood, Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir (2025)
* * *
Limbo, bardo, purgatory…somewhere in the New York City subway system: Caroline Hagood (the persona of the real Caroline Hagood, author of Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir (2025)), enjoys dwelling in liminal spaces. Here, she can probe the depths of ugliness and beauty, turning trash into writerly treasures.
This latest of her works is combing through a shadowy mind that knows it must be the practical wife, mother, writer and educator—the adult—but also longs for a little rebellion, a lot of messiness, and a total escape from reality. This work does take place in the COVD-era, where life felt like an alternative reality and, thus, penning a “speculative memoir” that blends the real with the imagined feels appropriate to reflect those pandemic days of ubiquitous masks, hand sanitizer, and the full-body shudder any time someone coughed or sneezed within a mile. Didn’t it always feel like you were on the look-out, searching for some sign? For the book’s Caroline Hagood, life is an adventure in which she is on the prowl to do more, know more, produce more. Goblin Mode is certainly a work that will resonate with writers in particular, writers who are always striving to break convention, be earnest yet amusing, and connect with readers. In this pseudo-memoir, stalking around a fictionalized version of New York, and Caroline’s life, is a goblin who remind her (and us) to be ferocious, daring, and brazen. Could this be the writer’s not-guardian-angel but guardian-goblin, prompting writing sessions, assertive conversations, and outrageous responses to creepy strangers and streakers alike?
In 66 short, poignant chapters covering three hectic days, Hagood presents a life, like her Brooklyn, “curving in on itself,” striving to maintain structure but really wanting to get to the heart pulsing inside. It’s a stormy heart, and it takes a goblin to reach in and pull it to the surface, not to crush it but to help it leave its mark on the page. There is hope in this kind of raw, unfiltered writing: perhaps it will stick with raw, unfiltered readers who see themselves in the chaos and who also think, “maybe I need a goblin.” John Keats was wrong to think his name would only be “writ in water,” lost quickly to time; maybe Goblin Mode’s Caroline is also wrong to think that her “own name [will be scribbled only] on the surface of ghosts.” Isn’t longevity every writer’s dream, whether they admit it or not? But every artist’s dream drags along its twin, a nightmare, that disallows the writer from believing in the work.
What is most memorable in Goblin Mode is the humor that strikes out here and there, slipping into serious moments of reaching students who are afraid of their futures, or handling sexual deviants exposing themselves on the subway train, or handling a father’s decline. There are turkeys video-bombing a Zoom job interview, or children pressing sticky handmade Starburst hearts into one’s hand, or dark jokes to help dispel the storm clouds of cancer. Goblin Mode is really about surviving and survival mechanisms: when Hagood writes that “COVD, climate change, and more sociopolitical chaos than I can quantify” has toughened her up, or helped her “woman up” to be a mother, a fighter, we readers understand just how much can happen in a single generation. It is one that still feels the terror of September 11, 2001 and now, as parents in many cases, has the pressure of ensure its own children do not endure such moments. But nothing lasts, poignant or poisonous; it’s no surprise that “Ozymandias” is referenced in Goblin Mode, yet another reminder of decay, lost greatness, and despair. What remains of us but our words, our writing? Can we ever take actions big enough to match the grand visions in our head?
Any time I read one of Hagood’s books, each page feels like a small unfolding treasure that just falls out of nowhere and into your hand – little tasty snacks of words punctuating the path of a quirky life. It parallels the way Caroline herself, in this speculative memoir, frequently squirrels away and tugs candy from beneath the bed mattress, or finds a stash of snacks in the closet, where she tucks herself away for “mom time.” Goblin Mode is the tale of a woman trying to be everything, too much and not enough, and the world that doesn’t ever seem to settle long enough to let her just be. But maybe that’s the point: great writing never grew out of bland, homogenous soil, and placid seas never launched any intrepid ships.
Hagood knows something all artists know: a tiny interest nearly always leads to an explosive obsession that we vow we will turn into our Next Great Masterpiece. Hagood’s frequent preoccupations are writing, motherhood, New York City, teaching, and interpersonal connections (with family, with strangers, with students, with one’s goblin-self). Her work often becomes, even when it strives to be another genre, a braided-essay; in this way, Hagood blends academia with low-brow references, crafting the kind of delectable style all good goblins will gobble down, and then they’ll look for more.
Is it any wonder, too, that the children of this fictionalized Hagood are the kind who “drag junk home from the sidewalk to make sculptures”? The writer-protagonist of Goblin Mode throws all she has into her own work, sparing no scrap, wasting no word. She pillages, takes, borrows, steals ideas where she finds them. She tries to mother the world—her children, her students, the annoying streaker who has no shame in disrupting a college course—but most of all wants to nurse her writing to get it to a healthy, robust place where it reflects her most authentic self. In a time of loss, grief, fear, and pandemic, though, getting anything on the page feels like a small miracle.
The overall feel of Goblin Mode is that of a haunting. We are all plagued by the ghosts of possibility, by the fears of trauma (especially during a pandemic, the effects of which we’re still feeling), and the nagging questions that keep us up at night – and, for writers, pounding at the chocolate-stained keyboard at all hours. I can never really predict where Hagood—the author—goes with her work, having read her essays, poetry, novels, and all the genres in between. But, suffice to say, her words always carry that ghoulish glow that reminds you that in the crumbs and bandages at the bottom of a purse; in the dust in the apartment corners; or in the pop culture and philosophical allusions that intersect (Bad Bunny and Mary Oliver make appearances) in this speculative memoir are hidden the makings of a life—and one unique, fascinating mind.
Above all, Hagood has always been and remains an imaginative writer unafraid to dig into her mind and present anything she finds. “I don’t need something to exist in order to visit it,” she writes, in a provocative line that reminds me that Artificial Intelligence is always making up what doesn’t “exist” from human hands but, at the same time, AI will never be able to be so humanly-strange, earnest, or imaginative. AI has no possibilities to unearth because it is a storage redistribution system and not a generator of the eldritch and new. AI takes the scraps of reality and reassembles – and we all know how well, ethically and morally, that turned out for Dr. Victor Frankenstein. But Hagood has her own Frankensteinian style where “fragments, student papers, lit submissions” bump into “receipts, recipes, notes on bar napkins.” Writing by hand, and in the mind, is a kind of sacred space no one and no machine can reach: it is the author who controls where this output goes, if it is put into print at all. “We are all these strange archives” of scraps, Hagood concludes: give me the strange, the unexpected, the confusing. Give me the human, or the goblin, or the hybrid “art monster” about which Hagood has been so fond in previous work. Let her be my mirror.
November 4, 2025
This is a delicious book of a woman’s life as mother of two children as well as a writer, with a perfect touch of humor. It’s an easy and fun read as the chapters are short (most of them about two or three pages) and the narrative goes in almost any direction, but mostly talks about her kids, teaching, and a book she’s writing (this one!). I found it very creative, interesting and frequently so funny I had to unexpectedly burst out laughing.
This is a really interesting read about coping…with kids, with a writing career and with stress. If it has a paranormal side to it, that can be a coping mechanism as well. The author’s is a Goblin who is always with her for support and to encourage her to be more assertive.
There’s something very special about this book. It’s almost like talking to a friend and hearing both the scary and the humorous things that are going on in her life. I especially adored what she wrote about her two children because I have grandchildren almost the same ages as her son and daughter. It was as if my grandchildren had teleported themselves into this book!
I found that I could not just read straight through this book because there were so many times that lines of its narrative made me stop and write them down!
My favorite chapter was, perhaps, “Yes, Yes, Crayons” in which the author talks about how other writers get their writing done…some without kids…but others with kids. I also like how the author’s daughter takes over the author’s writing space with art supplies. My own granddaughter has done somewhat the same thing by needing (and having) a very concentrated area of art supplies in our home. What a familiar scenario!
What is this book really about? It’s a vast collection of short essays blasting our seriously damaged world and using literature to influence others (in this author’s case, her students) how to resist. My only disappointment with it was not being familiar enough with quite a few of the pieces of literature she described throughout the book. It disappointed me to miss the inferences the author wanted the reader to understand.
This is a really interesting read about coping…with kids, with a writing career and with stress. If it has a paranormal side to it, that can be a coping mechanism as well. The author’s is a Goblin who is always with her for support and to encourage her to be more assertive.
There’s something very special about this book. It’s almost like talking to a friend and hearing both the scary and the humorous things that are going on in her life. I especially adored what she wrote about her two children because I have grandchildren almost the same ages as her son and daughter. It was as if my grandchildren had teleported themselves into this book!
I found that I could not just read straight through this book because there were so many times that lines of its narrative made me stop and write them down!
My favorite chapter was, perhaps, “Yes, Yes, Crayons” in which the author talks about how other writers get their writing done…some without kids…but others with kids. I also like how the author’s daughter takes over the author’s writing space with art supplies. My own granddaughter has done somewhat the same thing by needing (and having) a very concentrated area of art supplies in our home. What a familiar scenario!
What is this book really about? It’s a vast collection of short essays blasting our seriously damaged world and using literature to influence others (in this author’s case, her students) how to resist. My only disappointment with it was not being familiar enough with quite a few of the pieces of literature she described throughout the book. It disappointed me to miss the inferences the author wanted the reader to understand.
September 16, 2025
After my first reading of Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir, I thought: “This is like having a front row chair to the author’s brain, and I want to stay seated.” I deliberately mention “first time”, as Goblin Mode almost begs to be revisited. The book moves, in short chapters, through a pandemic affected world, rooted in the author’s various roles as writer, professor, parent, being. We are propelled along the streets and tunnels of NYC, detouring to other locations, in beautiful flights of observation and introspection. The book moves! That feeling of motion sometimes gives a breathless quality to the prose, akin to running for a train or bus, the burst of effort questionable but neccesary.
I really want to read this book on a subway, and leave copies to be found.
Hagood makes it easy to commiserate with her narrator/self on subjects ranging from email etiquette to bioluminescence, with much more in between. But while you’re strapped in, nodding along, moments of real emotional weight also occur, a lovely reminder of the fragility inherent in these connections. Will Goblin help to save the day, or ourselves? Read it and see for yourself.
P.s. it’s also really, really funny…
I really want to read this book on a subway, and leave copies to be found.
Hagood makes it easy to commiserate with her narrator/self on subjects ranging from email etiquette to bioluminescence, with much more in between. But while you’re strapped in, nodding along, moments of real emotional weight also occur, a lovely reminder of the fragility inherent in these connections. Will Goblin help to save the day, or ourselves? Read it and see for yourself.
P.s. it’s also really, really funny…
April 2, 2025
After loving Hagood's Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster, I was thrilled to snag an exclusive early edition of her latest at AWP. GOBLIN MODE is a "speculative memoir," a collection of flash nonfiction-ish pieces that take place across a span of three days as Hagood parents and tries to stay sane. The structure reminded me of Midwinter Day, with its rollicking time-slipping hybridity. I loved the way that all the digressions and obsessions she explores came full circle in the end. I think playing with form and genre is so fabulous and nobody is doing it like Hagood right now. The book will be officially released from Santa Fe Writer's Project in September!
September 29, 2025
Caroline Hagood’s Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir is a wild, wonderful, and deeply moving ride. Blurring the lines between memoir, fiction, essay, and speculative fever dream, Hagood offers something truly original: a story that feels both intensely personal and eerily universal.
What makes Goblin Mode so compelling is Hagood’s unmistakably unique voice—sharp, self-aware, poetic, lyrical, and very funny. In a time that feels increasingly chaotic, surreal, and terrifying, Goblin Mode provided something unexpected: hope. Hope that we can find meaning in the madness. Hope that embracing our inner goblins—those unruly, untamed parts of ourselves—might be the path to something braver and more real.
What makes Goblin Mode so compelling is Hagood’s unmistakably unique voice—sharp, self-aware, poetic, lyrical, and very funny. In a time that feels increasingly chaotic, surreal, and terrifying, Goblin Mode provided something unexpected: hope. Hope that we can find meaning in the madness. Hope that embracing our inner goblins—those unruly, untamed parts of ourselves—might be the path to something braver and more real.
October 3, 2025
Inventively conceived on the macro level, with lines that resound on the micro level. I highly recommend.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews