May-lee Chai
An Interview with Donna de la Perrière (Feb 5, 2021)
May-lee Chai: I'd like to ask you questions about the pioneering creative writing course you developed called "Mad Girls, Bad Girls: Writing Transgressive Female Subjectivity." Can you discuss some of the inspiration for this course?
Donna de la Perrière: Well, first thank you for saying such nice things about the course. I believe you were in the very first iteration of that course the very first time I taught it, so I have you and your fellow San Francisco State grad students to thank for making it both what it was and what it became.
I think the seed of the course was actually the critical work I did for my literature Masters at the University of GA, which I did prior to going to Brown for my MFA. Throughout the 1980s I did a lot of reading in feminist theory and a lot of reading of 19th and 20th century female writers (my Master’s thesis looked at female monstrosity and ghostliness in Jane Eyre), and over time I found myself getting more and more drawn to writing that pushed at or blurred or raised questions about boundary and category. So when Joseph and I got to California in the early 2000s and I started teaching at SFSU, I created a course that looked at the ways female makers have explored the building and dismantling of self as well as the ways in which culture has interpreted and defined the female imagination as transgressive. The idea was to explore questions like: What does it mean for a writer or a piece of writing or a formal strategy or a particular subject or point of view to be “transgressive”? How does transgression get defined and who gets to define it? How do those definitions change across time and culture? How have female writers and other makers explored the transgressing of social definitions and of aesthetic boundaries? In short, how have female writers used language to resist what was expected of them and in doing so created spaces in which new ideas about gender, art, and language can emerge?
MLC: I feel very fortunate to have been able to take this class! I remember, for "Mad Girls, Bad Girls" you curated readings from historical texts — from Pliny the Elder to medical historian Roy Porter — that showed historically how the "female imagination" was demonized throughout much of Western history. You then paired that grim history with utterly inspiring, transformative examples of women's writing from Jamaica Kincaid writing about a reptilian mother and colonization in "My Mother" to Daphne Gottlieb writing about a queer girl who was murdered for expressing a crush in "The Whole Word Is Singing" to Tory Dent's "Jade" about her HIV diagnosis to Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" about an aunt who committed suicide and was considered a shameful, unnameable part of the family, among so many other great readings. Who have you added recently? I know you're constantly reading and discussing new works. Which contemporary writers of "transgressive female subjectivity" are you reading and teaching these days?
DDLP: Let’s see… I think the most recent version of the course included Frankenstein and Sula as well as M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus. During other semesters we’ve read Dodie Bellamy’s Academonia and Jane Eyre (alongside Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea) and your own (award-winning!) book, Useful Phrases for Immigrants. We usually look at writing by Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Carter, Lucille Clifton, kari edwards, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Layli Long Soldier, Trace Peterson, Claudia Rankine, Gertrude Stein, Michelle Tea, and others. And while the reading list happens to focus on gender and creative work by women, we always talk about the fact that the ideas / problems / questions we’re looking at with regard to women almost universally can be applied to work by other “categories” of person that the dominant culture (whether that’s patriarchy or white supremacy or gender binarism) has a big vested interest in maintaining.
MLC: I have taught your prose poem "First Love" many times in many different parts of the country in different schools at both the graduate and undergraduate level, and it never fails to impact the students and inspire deep writing. Can you discuss your writing process for this piece?
DDLP: I call “First Love” my twenty-five-year poem because, all told, it took several decades to write. I don’t mean by that that it actually took decades of writing that specific version of that specific poem, but it did take maybe four years of circling back to that specific version of that poem in order to finish it – and it did take two or three decades of trying to write into that particular subject matter (i.e. surviving rape and physical violence in my first “serious” “romantic” relationship) before I was able to complete something that did it justice both aesthetically and emotionally.
MLC: For example, many students have pointed out how your use of white space and recursion within the poem reminds them physically of how memory works and how trauma feels in the body. Can you talk a little about the form of this poem and how you decided upon this form?
DDLP: Yes, exactly! And that’s a great example of why “form” isn’t somehow separable from “content.” The moment I landed on those two formal choices was precisely the moment when I knew I finally was going to be able to make a poem about that subject matter work. Because those two formal choices (to foreground white space and recursion in those particular ways) enabled me to explore both the experience itself and the continuing echoes of the experience – and also to explore what that has to do with the construction of a poem and the construction of a self. Those formal strategies enabled the poem to enact the “story” of a rape that occurred within the context of repeated violence and abuse as well as the echoes and after-effects of that while simultaneously looking at how the demands of conventional narrative often neither allow for the complexities of nor mirror the structures of either the human psyche or lived experience. Humans love linearity and closure and a tidy, coherent resolution, but in my experience that’s rarely the way life actually works.
MLC: In your collection, True Crime, many of your poems explore trauma, pain, the body, and in particular the difficulty of communicating and even remembering. For example, in "Penelope at the Wheel" there is this stanza:
as if were to say
as if to say never the way out, she said
as if all night were spent unspinning
a relocation of fragments
spinning down until: “it just kept
happening, and we were driving, and”
never actually said stop.
This is an incredibly poignant and precise way to describe the way memory of a traumatic event replays over and over in the mind but in these traumatic/re-traumatizing fragments. Genius! How did you choose the poems for this collection? Did you start with a theme and write into that theme? Or did you notice a theme emerging in various poems that you had already been working on?
DDLP: I never start with a theme. Every time I’ve tried to do that, it’s turned out to be the kiss of death. I can’t even have a desk set aside for writing in our apartment because every time we’ve had one, I’ve just avoided it like the plague. It took years, but eventually I learned to just look at something and start writing. Start with something concrete: an image or a word or even a sentence-structure rhythm. If I start with something concrete, the ideas/themes/obsessions will emerge. Those will surface on their own, whether I intend for them to or not. But I have to begin in something concrete or the poem tends to shut down – probably because my (all too present) critical faculties will kick in too soon. I’ve always been a person who writes very slowly. Embarrassingly slowly. Annoyingly slowly. It takes me forever to finish anything – first, because I am a chronic and relentless reviser but also because I find the process of generating new material pretty unappetizing. Although it’s hard work, I quite enjoy the process of revising. Revision makes sense it me; it’s very workman-like. I like moving words and sounds around and trying to make them do things. And although revision requires a lot of intuition, for me it doesn’t require a lot of emotion, and I like that about it. Unlike the work of generation, it doesn’t require a deep-dive into the psyche, which as a rule I do not much enjoy. The various loves and terrors lurking around in my psyche bubble up into my conscious life more than enough already; I have zero desire to intentionally fish around in there looking for more. (And I’m grinning as I say this because while I’m kind of kidding, I’m also kind of very, very much not kidding.)
MLC: Your latest collection Works of Love and Terror contains one of my favorite poems of yours, "Mère," about elderly women who have died and now float over the earth:
they passed the graves of children, they passed their own graves
they tore light out of the starts and wore it as cloaks
other light they flung to earth where it split apart and shattered
The women are incredibly powerful and the imagery haunting and beautiful. What was your process like for writing this poem? Did it take years or come more rapidly? How did the imagery transform through your revision / re-envisioning process?
DDLP: First, thank you so much for the kind words, May-lee. That really means a lot to me not only because I’m such a fan of your work but also because “Mère” is one of the poems in Works of Love & Terror that means the most to me – primarily because I wrote it for my mother during the final year of her life. My mother was such a great lady – wickedly funny and kind and smart. She taught me to read and love words almost as soon as I could talk; I’m not at all sure I’d have turned into a writer if it weren’t for her influence. During the last years of her life, she began to develop dementia, and watching her lose parts of herself, bit by bit, was just wrenching to watch. My trips to Georgia during those years were like deep dives into my own history as well as a larger history of familial loss that could feel difficult to manage. Mostly I guess it all just felt so very, very sad: that human life is so brief and so lovely and so lonely and that each of us finally makes such a fleeting mark on the world. Although my father died when I was young and that was one kind of harsh encounter with loss, there was something very new and very raw about re-encountering mortality, as well as watching the slow unraveling of a beloved self, as a grown-up in one’s 50s. Because at that point it’s so much clearer that time is getting short and possibility is not infinite and, especially for the old and female, the world never valued you all that much in the first place. And so I was thinking a lot about that or, more accurately, thinking and feeling a lot about that: about what forces of nature these incredible women like my mother were, about how little the world appreciated them or even really saw them. About what small marks their leaving made except to the few people who loved them. And that poem came one night, really fast and almost whole. I revised it very, very little, so it felt like a kind of gift. And it also comforted me – so in that way too it felt like a gift.
MLC: Final question: I know that you were born in Georgia, and certainly the South as a particular landscape and a particular history figures prominently in many of your poems. Do you consider yourself a Southern poet? Do you feel that you are in dialogue with other Southern poets? On the other hand, you have lived and taught for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Do you also see yourself as a California poet or an Oakland poet? (BTW, I do not think any of these possible forms of identification are mutually exclusive.)
DDLP: I guess I’m at least in part a Southern poet if only because that’s where I grew up and where my sense of language and self was formed. At this point in my life I’ve not lived in the South for more years than I lived there, but to the extent that every person has their own landscape/language of the heart, I suppose the terrain and rhythms of northern Georgia are mine. And that’s funny because I never felt like a very good fit with the college town I grew up in. It’s probably a different place now (I know folks who’ve moved there and love it), but growing up there I felt like a bit of a freak – and not just as a teenager but as a very little kid. As if I wasn’t quite possible there. I’ve been much more comfortable and much more “myself,” as both a writer and a person, here in the Bay Area – and even back in New England when I lived there. Which has been lovely! But of course, to paraphrase Tonya Foster at her Segue Series reading: “Even as I’m writing about the place that I am, I am always writing about the place that I’m from.”
May-lee Chai: I'd like to ask you questions about the pioneering creative writing course you developed called "Mad Girls, Bad Girls: Writing Transgressive Female Subjectivity." Can you discuss some of the inspiration for this course?
Donna de la Perrière: Well, first thank you for saying such nice things about the course. I believe you were in the very first iteration of that course the very first time I taught it, so I have you and your fellow San Francisco State grad students to thank for making it both what it was and what it became.
I think the seed of the course was actually the critical work I did for my literature Masters at the University of GA, which I did prior to going to Brown for my MFA. Throughout the 1980s I did a lot of reading in feminist theory and a lot of reading of 19th and 20th century female writers (my Master’s thesis looked at female monstrosity and ghostliness in Jane Eyre), and over time I found myself getting more and more drawn to writing that pushed at or blurred or raised questions about boundary and category. So when Joseph and I got to California in the early 2000s and I started teaching at SFSU, I created a course that looked at the ways female makers have explored the building and dismantling of self as well as the ways in which culture has interpreted and defined the female imagination as transgressive. The idea was to explore questions like: What does it mean for a writer or a piece of writing or a formal strategy or a particular subject or point of view to be “transgressive”? How does transgression get defined and who gets to define it? How do those definitions change across time and culture? How have female writers and other makers explored the transgressing of social definitions and of aesthetic boundaries? In short, how have female writers used language to resist what was expected of them and in doing so created spaces in which new ideas about gender, art, and language can emerge?
MLC: I feel very fortunate to have been able to take this class! I remember, for "Mad Girls, Bad Girls" you curated readings from historical texts — from Pliny the Elder to medical historian Roy Porter — that showed historically how the "female imagination" was demonized throughout much of Western history. You then paired that grim history with utterly inspiring, transformative examples of women's writing from Jamaica Kincaid writing about a reptilian mother and colonization in "My Mother" to Daphne Gottlieb writing about a queer girl who was murdered for expressing a crush in "The Whole Word Is Singing" to Tory Dent's "Jade" about her HIV diagnosis to Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" about an aunt who committed suicide and was considered a shameful, unnameable part of the family, among so many other great readings. Who have you added recently? I know you're constantly reading and discussing new works. Which contemporary writers of "transgressive female subjectivity" are you reading and teaching these days?
DDLP: Let’s see… I think the most recent version of the course included Frankenstein and Sula as well as M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus. During other semesters we’ve read Dodie Bellamy’s Academonia and Jane Eyre (alongside Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea) and your own (award-winning!) book, Useful Phrases for Immigrants. We usually look at writing by Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Carter, Lucille Clifton, kari edwards, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Layli Long Soldier, Trace Peterson, Claudia Rankine, Gertrude Stein, Michelle Tea, and others. And while the reading list happens to focus on gender and creative work by women, we always talk about the fact that the ideas / problems / questions we’re looking at with regard to women almost universally can be applied to work by other “categories” of person that the dominant culture (whether that’s patriarchy or white supremacy or gender binarism) has a big vested interest in maintaining.
MLC: I have taught your prose poem "First Love" many times in many different parts of the country in different schools at both the graduate and undergraduate level, and it never fails to impact the students and inspire deep writing. Can you discuss your writing process for this piece?
DDLP: I call “First Love” my twenty-five-year poem because, all told, it took several decades to write. I don’t mean by that that it actually took decades of writing that specific version of that specific poem, but it did take maybe four years of circling back to that specific version of that poem in order to finish it – and it did take two or three decades of trying to write into that particular subject matter (i.e. surviving rape and physical violence in my first “serious” “romantic” relationship) before I was able to complete something that did it justice both aesthetically and emotionally.
MLC: For example, many students have pointed out how your use of white space and recursion within the poem reminds them physically of how memory works and how trauma feels in the body. Can you talk a little about the form of this poem and how you decided upon this form?
DDLP: Yes, exactly! And that’s a great example of why “form” isn’t somehow separable from “content.” The moment I landed on those two formal choices was precisely the moment when I knew I finally was going to be able to make a poem about that subject matter work. Because those two formal choices (to foreground white space and recursion in those particular ways) enabled me to explore both the experience itself and the continuing echoes of the experience – and also to explore what that has to do with the construction of a poem and the construction of a self. Those formal strategies enabled the poem to enact the “story” of a rape that occurred within the context of repeated violence and abuse as well as the echoes and after-effects of that while simultaneously looking at how the demands of conventional narrative often neither allow for the complexities of nor mirror the structures of either the human psyche or lived experience. Humans love linearity and closure and a tidy, coherent resolution, but in my experience that’s rarely the way life actually works.
MLC: In your collection, True Crime, many of your poems explore trauma, pain, the body, and in particular the difficulty of communicating and even remembering. For example, in "Penelope at the Wheel" there is this stanza:
as if were to say
as if to say never the way out, she said
as if all night were spent unspinning
a relocation of fragments
spinning down until: “it just kept
happening, and we were driving, and”
never actually said stop.
This is an incredibly poignant and precise way to describe the way memory of a traumatic event replays over and over in the mind but in these traumatic/re-traumatizing fragments. Genius! How did you choose the poems for this collection? Did you start with a theme and write into that theme? Or did you notice a theme emerging in various poems that you had already been working on?
DDLP: I never start with a theme. Every time I’ve tried to do that, it’s turned out to be the kiss of death. I can’t even have a desk set aside for writing in our apartment because every time we’ve had one, I’ve just avoided it like the plague. It took years, but eventually I learned to just look at something and start writing. Start with something concrete: an image or a word or even a sentence-structure rhythm. If I start with something concrete, the ideas/themes/obsessions will emerge. Those will surface on their own, whether I intend for them to or not. But I have to begin in something concrete or the poem tends to shut down – probably because my (all too present) critical faculties will kick in too soon. I’ve always been a person who writes very slowly. Embarrassingly slowly. Annoyingly slowly. It takes me forever to finish anything – first, because I am a chronic and relentless reviser but also because I find the process of generating new material pretty unappetizing. Although it’s hard work, I quite enjoy the process of revising. Revision makes sense it me; it’s very workman-like. I like moving words and sounds around and trying to make them do things. And although revision requires a lot of intuition, for me it doesn’t require a lot of emotion, and I like that about it. Unlike the work of generation, it doesn’t require a deep-dive into the psyche, which as a rule I do not much enjoy. The various loves and terrors lurking around in my psyche bubble up into my conscious life more than enough already; I have zero desire to intentionally fish around in there looking for more. (And I’m grinning as I say this because while I’m kind of kidding, I’m also kind of very, very much not kidding.)
MLC: Your latest collection Works of Love and Terror contains one of my favorite poems of yours, "Mère," about elderly women who have died and now float over the earth:
they passed the graves of children, they passed their own graves
they tore light out of the starts and wore it as cloaks
other light they flung to earth where it split apart and shattered
The women are incredibly powerful and the imagery haunting and beautiful. What was your process like for writing this poem? Did it take years or come more rapidly? How did the imagery transform through your revision / re-envisioning process?
DDLP: First, thank you so much for the kind words, May-lee. That really means a lot to me not only because I’m such a fan of your work but also because “Mère” is one of the poems in Works of Love & Terror that means the most to me – primarily because I wrote it for my mother during the final year of her life. My mother was such a great lady – wickedly funny and kind and smart. She taught me to read and love words almost as soon as I could talk; I’m not at all sure I’d have turned into a writer if it weren’t for her influence. During the last years of her life, she began to develop dementia, and watching her lose parts of herself, bit by bit, was just wrenching to watch. My trips to Georgia during those years were like deep dives into my own history as well as a larger history of familial loss that could feel difficult to manage. Mostly I guess it all just felt so very, very sad: that human life is so brief and so lovely and so lonely and that each of us finally makes such a fleeting mark on the world. Although my father died when I was young and that was one kind of harsh encounter with loss, there was something very new and very raw about re-encountering mortality, as well as watching the slow unraveling of a beloved self, as a grown-up in one’s 50s. Because at that point it’s so much clearer that time is getting short and possibility is not infinite and, especially for the old and female, the world never valued you all that much in the first place. And so I was thinking a lot about that or, more accurately, thinking and feeling a lot about that: about what forces of nature these incredible women like my mother were, about how little the world appreciated them or even really saw them. About what small marks their leaving made except to the few people who loved them. And that poem came one night, really fast and almost whole. I revised it very, very little, so it felt like a kind of gift. And it also comforted me – so in that way too it felt like a gift.
MLC: Final question: I know that you were born in Georgia, and certainly the South as a particular landscape and a particular history figures prominently in many of your poems. Do you consider yourself a Southern poet? Do you feel that you are in dialogue with other Southern poets? On the other hand, you have lived and taught for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Do you also see yourself as a California poet or an Oakland poet? (BTW, I do not think any of these possible forms of identification are mutually exclusive.)
DDLP: I guess I’m at least in part a Southern poet if only because that’s where I grew up and where my sense of language and self was formed. At this point in my life I’ve not lived in the South for more years than I lived there, but to the extent that every person has their own landscape/language of the heart, I suppose the terrain and rhythms of northern Georgia are mine. And that’s funny because I never felt like a very good fit with the college town I grew up in. It’s probably a different place now (I know folks who’ve moved there and love it), but growing up there I felt like a bit of a freak – and not just as a teenager but as a very little kid. As if I wasn’t quite possible there. I’ve been much more comfortable and much more “myself,” as both a writer and a person, here in the Bay Area – and even back in New England when I lived there. Which has been lovely! But of course, to paraphrase Tonya Foster at her Segue Series reading: “Even as I’m writing about the place that I am, I am always writing about the place that I’m from.”