We Are Conditioned, We Are Conditional: On Cassandra Troyan's Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled

‘If we’d only stop flailing
we’d realize we float.’

I first read Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled in pdf form while at my desk at work under the glare of one thousand fluorescent lights, Cassandra’s words fantastically magnified on the computer monitor. I felt odd and more than a little disoriented. Where did the poems start? Where did they end? And were the black pages poems too, or titles, or something else, some other, unnameable art form altogether? I scrolled and read, the poems blurring together into an kind of melancholic state. After “Shells,” part three of four (following “Carriages” and “Chambers,” and preceding “Hides”), I needed a break. Plus, my shift had ended at 11 pm and I was the only living person still sitting in the office.

My fiancé had been writing in a Burger King down the street, and on our way home he asked me about Cassandra’s book. Was I enjoying it? How did the poems compare to Cassandra’s poetry circa 2011 (an energetic and exciting time for me in the internet writing scene, during which I devoured anything and everything Cassandra Troyan had published online and wildly and more often than not drunkenly asserted to anyone who would listen that she was one of THE BEST poets I knew)? Responding to these questions was difficult. They were different, I said. I didn’t know, I said. What did these poems make me feel? I couldn’t say. Was I different now? Was Cassandra? Maybe we had both changed in ways that disconnected us as ideal writer / reader. I felt sad.

First thing the next morning, I sat in bed and read “Hides” on my laptop, and everything changed. Here it was, for me. I found purchase in these poems, was immediately drawn to the space they took up on the page, their breadth and their intensity. Cassandra begins:

Now I would like to play the role of provider / inviter
of supreme romance supreme terror

Yes, I thought. Yes, yes, yes, I continued to think as I binge-read the last 50 pages of Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled. What was so different about “Hides”? Or, what was so different about my reading of “Hides”?

1. I felt more comfortable while reading “Hides.” Sitting in my bed, my house enveloped by rain clouds (I live at the top of a hill overlooking the city), reading off my laptop in natural lighting gave me sense of control over my environment I hadn’t had in my office.

2. “Hides” begins with an epigraph from Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs that made me feel ‘same’:

The juddering of climax, as involuntary as a death rattle, I took to be a statement of hopeless attachment. Why, I don’t know. I didn’t think of myself as sentimental, I thought of myself as spiritually alert.

3. The sexuality and brutality in this section felt like a huge throwback to Cassandra’s poetry circa 2011, which I had felt connected to then in a very intense way (I had ‘taken a lover’ who was mentally and physically exhausting me, in unequal parts dangerous and wonderful. Cassandra’s writing made me feel like I was part of some kind of club of poets writing about sex and sexuality in an empowering way.)

4. Everything fell into place, aesthetically. The black pages felt less like title cards here and more like poster poems, like,

I WANT EVERYTHING TO HURT MORE THAN IT NEEDS TO AND SOMETIMES YOU JUST GOTTA BEAT THAT PUSSY UP

stands alone, I think, but also acts as a kind of conversation starter for the poem that follows, which begins:

“What does that mean in terms of / sexual gratification / exchanges of diversions / distracted tongue”

5. There is so much scary beauty here.

Hides made me feel nostalgic and excited. It also made me want to immediately reread Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled, which I did, which felt like an entirely different experience than it had when I read the first three sections.

People change. But the thing is, we don’t just change over long swaths of time (which is what three years can feel like to a 26-year-old human with a heightened sense of her own impermanence), we change from setting to setting, from day to day, from condition to condition, and these conditions can drastically change something as simple or as difficult as reading a pdf of an old friend’s new book. These conditions can change our connections to the world and our home and ourselves. Find your right conditions and Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled will meet you there.

I Suggest Slippers for Elsewhere Be Read As a Manifesto for Queer Optimism

Matthew Burgess’s Slippers for Elsewhere is a buoyant and colorful debut. Much like the rainbow beach balls bouncing off of the book’s front cover (courtesy of an untitled Joe Brainard collage) Burgess’s poems cheerfully recall the unrepeatable summers of suburban childhood and Joan Collins crushes amidst “the shirtless huddle / of sexy extras.” Sustained by a boyish curiosity for American pop culture, and the ever-perplexing heteronormativities that frame the queer child’s experience of everyday life, Slippers for Elsewhere is a festive Technicolor romp punctuated with fisticuffs and red polka dots.

The imagery of the book’s first section, “Lift Off,” evokes the bizarre and deliriously exciting sense-making process characteristic of childhood. In the poem “Theme for a Pulse,” the speaker, as in so many of Burgess’s poems, is a precocious young boy; he writes:

when the red x in EXIT splits
and becomes Walt Whitman’s chopsticks,
I unfold the napkin and crease it
into a scorpion

which stings my ankle
then vanishes behind a golden
podium: Ladies and Gentlemen . . .

At what moment during the family outing does the poet-child “tune-out,” as it were, or begin to imagine the lively elsewhere beyond the dull, starched restaurant napkin? For the child, boredom may prompt bemusement, but for the poet, it is the familiar and its uncanny ties to the familial which cues the poet to begin making.

Stanza by stanza, in his short poems Burgess displays a keen sensitivity for the peculiar ways in which reading and recognition become inevitably intertwined with the queer world of touching feeling and writing being. In this way, Slippers for Elsewhere breezily treads across the lyric space foregrounded by Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s essay, “A Poem is Being Written” (which in turn looks back at Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten”).

Recalling Sedgewick’s legendary and erudite treatise on spanking and poetry, Burgess’s “Theme for a Pulse,” explores the disciplinary impulse that shapes so much articulation. Subtle (queer) refusals, often recognized as evidence of a stubborn child-like resistance, therefore, stand out. “Yellow There,” a meditation on the various shades of American summer yellows, transports readers “to the place where / the pencil reigns—” in the decisive private mind of the child. There, “a million crayoned suns and mustard on buns” hold court, far away from the abysmal adult napkins and menacing older brothers who control the weather. Similar to most of the other poems in Slippers, “Yellow There” is an invitation to the secret tree house of association, and other shadow puppets. In such houses, as in so many of Burgess’s poems, rhythm rules all.

And yet, Burgess is careful to remind us the poet is not always a child; he is also a conflicted adult turning to look back, often in fondness, and sometimes, in forgiveness, as in the poem “Childish Things.” While he recalls the lesson, “A dog is not a pony,” the poet also reports, “Sometimes the shame of scrambling for the piñata’s contents outweighs the impulse to pounce.” The first admission is fairly benign: didn’t everyone learn that lesson at some point when we were still small enough to try and innocently fail? The second disclosure, however, carries the added burden we seldom couple with childhood shame: desire. “Sensitive Machine,” the book’s second section, wrestles with this theme to liberating effect. In “Morning Poem,” for example, Burgess flirtatiously ponders, “Am I/in trouble? Do I want to be.” Yes, please: lines like these make it wholly impossible not to envision Eve Sedgwick smiling somewhere in the background.

For these reasons, I suggest Slippers for Elsewhere be read as a manifesto for queer optimism, which, according to Michael Snediker, “doesn’t aspire toward happiness, but instead finds happiness interesting.” Alongside the anxiety, embarrassment, and scenes of adolescent trepidation resides an ebullient outlook in Slippers, best appreciated perhaps with a Cuba Libre on the ferry to Fire Island.

Real Life Shit

Lantern Lit. Volume 1 is a cool little book. Here’s the format: poets James H. Duncan, Mat Gould, and John Dorsey each contribute chapbooks comprising the three sections of Lantern Lit.’s first outing. The result is remarkably consistent in terms of theme, style, and even form, though each poet offers a unique voice and perspective.

Duncan’s “The Darkest Bomb” serves as the first section of this anthology, and immediately sets a tone that will carry through the remainder of Lantern’s pages. Stylistic choice made in Duncan’s first poem carry through the other poets’ sections to some extent: a preference for the lower-case, sparse punctuation, breathless line-craft, and serve as hallmarks of the moment and the mode in which these poems are delivered.

“Seasick on 46th / …and then crossing Fifth Avenue as / big dollop raindrops hit the pavement like / face slaps falling from a seasick green / sky…”

These are urgent poems, which live resolutely in the modern landscape. There’s a quality of resilience about them, of vivacity in spite of urban decay— “those great whales full of bones / decaying with the sunlight in their guts”.

Mat Gould’s contributions to this volume inhabit the same epoch as Duncan’s and employ similar formal conventions. They sing a world in disrepair, but they sing in nonetheless. Gould’s are grateful poems, full of creation out of rubble: “and to think, all of this from wet dust”.

In “The Universe Itself Laments,” the introductory poem to Gould’s section, “the sky is full / full of whatever else there is / a gallery of pastel prints-”. Elsewhere, the poet reconnoiters the edges of his frame of reference, writing towards “lanterns / above / the sea / out / of reach”.

If Duncan and Gould’s sections survey a contemporary landscape through the lens of each poet’s essentia, Dorsey’s “Happy Hour Madrigals” “sing the gospel of real life shit” (to quote the publisher) through recollections of characters living real life shit. In poems named “Drunk John,” “Sarah,” and “Creepy Steve,” the poet reaches perhaps toward Gould’s lanterns above the sea. In a bout of booze-fueled poignancy, though, “…he just kept drinking / waiting for a happy hour / that never came.”

If you’re into sunsets, couplets, and grand allusions to heroes of Greek mythology, look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you’re looking for “real life shit,” you’ll find all you need in Lantern Lit. volume 1. Reach out above the sea, sip warm beer, and read good poems. “Hang the hide,” indeed.

People Who Might Inhabit This Place: On Michael McGriff's Dismantling the Hills

From the opening poem, “Iron,” we read:

I could say I left town for both of us…

and for the first time felt illuminated before the sight

of water as it rushed beneath the massive turbines

spinning on the beige and dusty hills, powering a distant city

that would set me free.

The speaker says he could have left, but at the end, he “can turn away from nothing.” From here, the reader is introduced to the speaker’s world, a “great series of inadequacies.” McGriff’s poems range from the ways in which his father informs the speaker’s beliefs, to how the daily act of domestic work replaces any sort of religious practices; his father “never read anything he couldn’t touch.” The physicality of the language draws me in, especially in “Silt,” where the speaker compares the “mineral strangle/of roots, clay bleeding down,” to “silt like meat ground by a woman/whose eyes have taken the color/of basement cinders.” In the poem, the house is “taken by silt,” and there’s a repeated use of “pulling,” a motif he continues in the next poem, “Coos Bay.” Here, we get a glimpse of the city, in a list of images, ending in “…the last of the daylight,/a broken trellis falling into the bay.” This series bombards the reader with images of a hopeless place. McGriff uses this list to transition to a series of poems about the people who might inhabit this place.

Some of the poems center around people like Tanya, with deep connections to this homeplace, the dust and “chuff” of king salmon, connections so deep that they cannot leave, always entering some sort of “kingdom,” a word that McGriff uses in multiple poems. The use of this word creates a sense of holiness, so much that even the dust of this place’s earth is eternal.

McGriff’s description of Coos Bay is effective and powerful due to a reliance on more than mere description. These poems are populated. They explore the world of the roofer, the worker, people who know life in this “kingdom” created, where these people’s connection to the landscape is strengthened. The poem “Mercy, Tear It Down” seems to underline McGriff’s project. In it, a prison crew is contracted to “take the ridge. Tear it down.” In this poem, daylight “breaks its bones across the ridge,” a point from which “you could see/the whole town.” From here, he writes, “Tear it down, tear it down.”

In the last poem, “Cormorants,” McGriff brings an end to the book’s arc, tying in previous themes. He echoes the sentiment in the opening poem:

Watching the breakers

stack against the early light

I remember my old desire

to wear the house

of the hermit crab

and skitter under the riptide

past the town’s

invisible border

to the rolling foam

and quiet fires.

The speaker of the poem proceeds to walk a suspension bridge formed by his fears, upon which he finds his father, and in the wind, his mother’s wrists, and leaning over the rail, he hears his brothers. This bridge is only imagined, but on the bridge, he contemplates his town:

each suffering lies stitched

to the wing of another,

death rises

and death recedes, the mouth

of this life threaded

to the voice of the afterlife.

In the end of the poem, the cormorant’s flight path measures his love for his town, and yet heavy with “the remarkable freight” of our lives, surrounded by cliffs.

Less Is More: Klaus Merz's Out of the Dust

There is a freshness of approach, an originality of metaphor in Out of the Dust by Klaus Merz (beautifully translated by Marc Vincenz) that is astounding. Alongside that magnetic originality — of image, phrase and characterization — is a kindness and romantic (with a small “r”) impulse that makes his poetry irresistibly appealing.

The opening poem “Hard into the Wind” turns the tables on being a nonconformist — “Never played golf…or sailed hard into the wind” — speak to the poet’s self-loyal lifestyle and values, a “never” contrasted with what he HAS frequently done, “see(ing) within my nearest /, all the way into her /childhood faces.” Thus the poem conveys a soft but firm sense that not sailing “Hard into the wind” is hard too.  Reversal of direction, and the startling oxymoron, are two of Merz’s spirited array of techniques.

Moments like “Clouds roll/adamantly by” (“Pinacoteca”), “Since yesterday he owns a mobile and/the world considers him healed,” (“Back Office”), and “Entered an area/somewhere south of trepidation”) all convey the truth that when a poet enhances reality with metaphors, truths much harder to find than appearances are revealed. Nowhere is Merz’s artful blending of characterization and oxymoron more evident than in the brief poem “Beyond Recall”:

“Towards midnight
a yodeling moped driver zips
past my window
with his visor open as if
he were going off to a happy war.”

Merz conveys the ludicrous concept of a “happy war” through the peculiar, almost unreal moped driver; he manages to make his (admittedly vague) antiwar statement a humorous one. The conclusion — “Why then, a little later / does the noise / of my burning cigarette paper / terrify me?” — suggests an intuition against war on the part of the apparently very high strung narrator, one that emphasizes the absurdity of a “happy war.”

Merz’s world is a shimmering window onto beauty and insight, so precisely understated that many of the poems border on the hypnotic and can be read time and time again. It’s no wonder that so many are short, eight or ten lines or less: his eye and ear are both so incisive that if he wrote at too great length the resultant intensity could be painful. Merz is a poet who expands and deepens with his conciseness, who embodies imagism’s implied aesthetic of “less is more.” This book of exceptional magic will expand the horizons of anyone who reads it.

Fragmentation and Loneliness, the New Dance Craze: A Love Note to Music for Another Life

Music for another life is a collaborative text, a print book with color images (shot by Max Avi Kaplan) and black serif-font text (composed by Kristina Marie Darling) on facing pages. Image and text dance and sway in the reader’s imagination. But taken separately, what work does the set of images perform? And what work the text?

Kaplan opens with the iconic cover image: a female figure in a red dress. She is blonde, gloved, resting on the grass, her eyes closed. We see her, but she does not see us. In the next image, she stands, red skirt, gloved, handing a letter in the direction of something or someone we cannot see. Then she looks into the afternoon sun, her gaze opposing the gaze of the greek goddess in relief behind her. She pauses, red fingertips to red lips, looking down, still not making eye contact. And then she descends the entry stairs of a building, stepping away from the goddess in relief. She looks out, for a ride, maybe, handbag clutched tight. A solar flare lights her face, still looking into the distance past the viewing subject. A misplaced halo. For the first time, her context is natural, trees and sky rather than built environment. She stands in her red suit next to the building, poised as though an argument were arriving, or a mother in law, or a firing squad. And then, the image again of the cover and frontispiece: red suit, gloves, blonde hair, lawn. She stands before the butterfly bush in her sleeveless floral dress, no gloves, Raybans pulled forward for a better look. This is the first time she gazes directly at us. She places the sunglasses onto her face. She is at the beach, just a palm tree and sky behind her, her arms akimbo. Like a doll. She is playing with her sunglasses again. On a hammock at the beach, sunglasses removed, we see that her blonde hair is a wig and her floral dress a fifties swimsuit. On a blue chaise cushion, from just above her, just the top of her blonde wig, her white arms splayed from elbow to fingertip, ungloved hands open. We don’t know if she can see us. She relaxes on the chaise, water in the distance, her gaze away from us toward something inland. We reposition to be next to her. She looks at us again. A pout, a plea. She is in the garden among the hydrangeas. She stands in a stone courtyard, ungloved, clutching her handbag. Her sundress pinched at the waist, heels like pegs beneath her feet. She stands, arms stiff, like a doll. A shot from the ground in front of her. She looks at us. Has she been crying? Is she trying not to cry? We think one or both might be true. She turns to walk away. She looks away, pillbox hat at the back of her wigged head, classical architecture behind her. The hat is a turban wrapped like a swami’s. She pouts before a Georgian porch. We stand beneath her as she looks over the railing, her ungloved fingertips painted red as talons. A halo of clouds. We step back. She stands at the railing, testing the sharpness of the black iron finial with a red fingertip. We are now meters away from her. She has climbed the railing and is standing on the lower rung, looking out past us. She has reached the gate. She caresses the finials, thinking. And then she is at the edge of the lawn, near the trees, arm outstretched to whatever might save her.

Neck deep in the swimming pool, she floats. She comes to the edge of the pool and hangs on to the side, her forearms relaxed on the blue tile. Her hands on the blue tile. A wedding ring on one hand, a bracelet on the other wrist. Relaxed.

But of course this story the images tell is nothing like the story the text provides. The images provide us a narrative from the outside, the story as a stranger would see it, the story of a woman who has manufactured an image and presence for public display, a story we have been enculturated to accept and read and participate in as we construct our own physical and visual identities.

Kristina Marie Darling’s text “makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone,” as Robbe-Grillet writes that the new novel (and novelist) must do. Each page offers a collection of narrative detail that seems both discordant and unrelated to the facing image. The elements of each page’s collection do not necessarily cohere. Only in the long read, as the reading subject collects and aggregates the layers of detail from page to page to page, does the coherence occur. I found myself reading and re-reading the text to loop the narrative strands together: the narrative voice, the marriage, the social expectation and the protagonist’s response, the comments on fashion and expectation, the emptiness, the loneliness. The loneliness. Darling’s narrative tessera begin as fully formed sentences and then fracture and fragment as the story draws on until, at the end, on the final page, we have shards of text, five abstract unrelated sentences followed by two images in fragments. From the “bluest eyes” and wedding-cake of the first page of text to the “unsuitable blue sky” and “dust … settl[ing] on the hem of my dress” on the last, the movement from hope to resignation is both magical mystery tour and confession. Adelle plays her part in the images; Adelle comes apart in the text. And together, that brittle, fragile dance of what seems and what is are the deep gift of this beautiful, haunting book.

I love this book. It requires work; or it doesn’t. You can look at it as a curiosity, a set of intriguing musings and gorgeous, quirky photographs. Or you can sift through the layers and fragments and, as you suture together what Darling and Kaplan have created, find yourself somewhere in the thread (or even the needle).

An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling

Leah Umansky: Reading Vow, is like peering into someone’s secret past. A woman is said to be married. Her fiancé dies. She is left, bereft and almost-helpless. It reminds me much of Jane Eyre (for what would Jane be without her Rochester?). On the other hand, it reminds me of Charlotte Bronte herself and the way the Bronte Parsonage was both her home and her fortress. She died soon after she was married, too. With this said, how does your poetry lend itself to allusions? Do you find these books and stories are intrinsic to your life as a writer, or do you seek out these connections?

Kristina Marie Darling: That’s a great question. Most of my poems arise out of my life as a reader. I’ve always been intrigued by Marianne Moore’s use of the term “conversity,” a word she coined to describe the dialogic nature of poetry. With that in mind, I envision my poems as a response to the work that came before my own. By that I don’t just mean poetry, but also fiction, visual art, and literary theory. I’ve always thought it was the writer’s job to not only revise and modify earlier texts, but to forge connections between different texts. With Vow, I definitely sought to explore the relevance of these nineteenth century women’s texts to contemporary debates about language, gender and received literary forms.

For me, Vow represents a corrective gesture. In much of nineteenth century literary culture, women’s writing occupied a marginal space. For example, the sketchbook – which consisted of songs, notes, poems, diary entries, and a mixture of many other types of writing — was considered a predominantly female literary form. More often than not, literary forms that were marked as female were relegated to a private space. When writing Vow, I was interested in taking this marginal space, which women’s writing so often occupied, and making it a focal point.

LU: I’m interested in the speaker of these poems. I know you just founded your own feminist press, Noctuary Press, so I know you have a clear relationship to gender in writing. What is her connection to the self? She’s strong, yet impressionable. She wants answers. She wants direction. She wants. What governs her? Is it desire? Is it loneliness? Is it the story inside being the bride? Women are expected to be so many different roles, besides being a woman.

For example: She “doesn’t know how” to use her wings.

                        She “doesn’t know how” to wear the dress.

                        She tries “ascending,” but says “it’s hard to know.”

                        She says,“a locked room, but what else?”

KMD: I’m very interested in the notion of the palimpsest, a text that is written, erased, and written over again and again. This is exactly how I envisioned the speaker of the poems in Vow.  She is inscribed and reinscribed with many different roles, expectations, and normative ideas about gender. These range from the complex culture surrounding weddings — the white dress, the ceremony, and the other accompanying rituals — to the myriad beliefs about what a wife should be, and what constitutes failure as a wife. The speaker of these poems definitely feels that she has failed as a wife, and as a result, she has been buried alive by the many normative ideas about marriage that have been inscribed onto her. She is motivated by the desire to erase this palimpsest, and find out what’s underneath the words and beliefs others have imposed upon her marriage and her identity. With that said, she is also interested in carefully documenting everything, for herself and for other women in her position.

LU: Also, why is the speaker so compelled to the “other” versions of herself. First, these versions are human: “I dream another me exists in the burning house, reading aloud from what I have written” (16). Then non-human and storied: “I am a broken mirror. Shattered glass. . . . But somehow in the dream I’ve grown wings. Tell me, does this change everything” (21)?

KMD: When writing Vow, I was very interested in the instability of the individual self. For me, this question is inextricable from the other concerns that the book addresses — questions about gender, identity, and marginal spaces. Throughout the collection, the speaker of the poems is haunted by other potential or possible versions of herself, that for one reason or another, were never fully realized. I was very interested in exploring why some of these possible selves remained mere possibilities, relegated in the end to marginal spaces. In the examples you cite, the speaker has been unable to actualize these truer versions of her identity, because they remain incongruous with the rhetoric surrounding marriage, womanhood, and femininity. 

LU: With that said, there is also a modern spin in this book, especially in how the speaker discusses film, which is clearly an anachronism.  Why does she focus on films?  Are films something you think about a lot as a writer. (Films are one of my favorite things next to books because they too are a story). She says, “In a film version of this story, I wandered a corridor filled with locked rooms:  endless foyers, a nursery, the master suite” (14).

KMD: Is it connected to the story we tell ourselves. The way we long for the movie version of life — the costumes, the soundtrack and love in its the purest, unadulterated love. What is your favorite movie? What do you imagine would be the speaker’s favorite movie?

You’re absolutely right that the films the speaker imagines in the book are “movie versions of life.” I thought of the films that the heroine imagined as a kind of daydream. I’m fascinated by dreams that function as projections — of emotions, of personal identity, relationships, or interior transformations that often go unnoticed by others.  I’m very interested in how individuals choose to represent purely interior events, often completely intangible and abstract in nature, through concrete visual means. More often than not, the laws of physics or time no longer hold, as this is what feels most true to the experience. In this respect, the work of dreams and film is much like the work of poetry.

With that in mind, I think the speaker’s favorite movie would likely be What Dreams May Come. My favorite, however, will always be The Royal Tenenbaums.

LU: I LOVE THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS!! Okay, let’s detour into literary theory, something I rarely say, but I feel Vow has a sort of voyeuristic element to it, in which the reader watches this woman deal with grief and loss. She sees herself. I see myself, and it makes me remember learning about Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory and her focus on “the male gaze.” Here, this speaker, this woman, is someone to feel sympathetic towards, but she can also be argued as being a spectacle, or an object of desire for the opposite sex.  Do you see a connection to Mulvey at all ?

KMD: Yes, absolutely. But I was also heavily influenced by feminist models of psychoanalysis, particularly those that seek to create a more egalitarian model of psychoanalysis. I think that, in addition to being seen as an object of desire by others, the woman in the poems is experiencing herself as another. And for her, this ability to see herself from another’s perspective becomes a tremendous source of insight and personal transformation. Sigmund Freud described the mind as a text, and for him, the process of analyzing the patient was like literary interpretation. The speaker of the poems in Vowseeks to take power from the hands of others who seek to interpret her grief, her femininity, and her trauma, and become both analyst and analysand.

LU: Every story is based on another story. This is a vow us writers secretly take. We may not be aware but in every story lies archetypes of another. In Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, a fantastical story about love, loss and myth, she discusses fate: “perhaps I could’ve changed our fate, for fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. I should have killed her and found us a different story” (7). Would your speaker have changed her fate if she could? Would she lived a different story? So much of our life as women is dictated, but the power we have is in choosing. Every decision opens a door, or room. In every decision, we take a vow.

KMD: I love this question. In spite of the book’s feminist stance, and my interest in received literary forms, language, and gender, I don’t think that a different narrative arc would solve the speaker’s problems. I say this because the traditional roles of wife, mother, and bride are so inscribed into the culture, that women are still haunted by them. Even if the speaker had taken a path of resistance, she would have still been plagued by other possible selves. What if she had acquiesced to the demands of culture? Would she be happier? There’s only so much an individual can do. At some point the culture needs to change as well.