Parenting & Family Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

Hagedorn slips a whole artistic origin story into what sounds like a casual reminiscence: a childhood without television as deprivation, yes, but also as training. The point isnt nostalgia for a simpler time; its a claim about the kind of mind her work comes from. Radio drama and comics arent just influences, they are technologies of imagining. They force the listener and reader to co-author the world: voices with no bodies, sound effects standing in for landscapes, panels that ask you to bridge the gaps between frames. When she says "That was our television", shes not romanticizing scarcity so much as reframing it as a different literacy.

The subtext is quietly polemical. Television, by implication, is a medium that can do too much of the work for you. Radio makes you build the picture; comics make you animate stillness. That emphasis lands especially well coming from a playwright, someone whose craft lives at the intersection of sound, image, and live presence. You can hear her asserting that her sensibility was formed in hybrid spaces, where storytelling is stitched together from fragments.

Context matters, too: born in 1949, Hagedorn grew up in an era when mass media was stratifying attention into formats, and not everyone had equal access to the newest screen. She turns that uneven media landscape into a generative mix-and-match archive. Immersion becomes apprenticeship; constraint becomes style. The intent is to explain why her imagination moves the way it does: collage-like, voice-driven, visually alert, and suspicious of passive consumption.