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Last year, two friends had poetry and short-story collections come out in Aqueduct Press's Conversation Pieces series. One is Lisa Bradley (The Haunted Girl), whose works have appeared in Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium, among other venues, and who's been anthologized in Rose Lemberg's The Moment of Change and Sylvia Moreno-Garcia and Orrin Grey's Fungi, among other collections. I got to know her work through her poem-a-day on LJ. Those entries are mainly locked, but here and here are a couple of evocative short-form poems that she shared publicly. I loved The Haunted Girl (review here), and the other day I asked if I could interview her about it. She agreed!
The title of this collection, and of one of the poems in it, is “The Haunted Girl.” Can you talk a little about the different forms that haunting takes in this collection?
There are few, if any, see-through, rattling chains, type ghosts here. Most of the hauntings come from our ability to imagine other outcomes, to impose counterfactuals on memories.
The Haunted Girl in the title poem is an amalgamation of girls killed in horror movies. The narrator is haunted by the knowledge that this didn’t *have* to be the Girl’s fate. She imagines ways to help the Girl, but none of the counterfactuals work because our world IS the horror movie: it created and perpetuates misogynistic tropes. In “Teratoma Lullaby,” “Blood Is Thicker than Water,” and several other pieces, the true haunting is a yearning to fix broken families, to rewrite personal histories.
There are some curses in the book, too. Casting a vengeful curse is pushing your counterfactual into the future. If, on the other hand, you’re the one cursed, then much of your tragedy comes of imagining the beautiful life you’d have otherwise.
( on family )
( horror--plus humor? )
I hope the world will one day get to see your novels, as I have a powerful love for the one I’ve read. As a writer of poetry, short stories, and novels, do you find one or another of those formats more amenable to some topics or themes than others? Are you driven to write in a particular format, or is it a conscious choice--or does it vary?
I can’t imagine writing a whole novel about family, not the way I do in poems and short stories. That kind of emotional intensity and self-reflection would probably kill me. (Current “me,” that is. Never say never, right?) Family usually sneaks its way into the novels, but it’s not the focus.
In my mental shorthand, poetry is for ideas, stories for character, and novels for action. I realize this differs from current genre expectations, which may explain why my poetry has been more outwardly successful than my fiction.
Thank you so much for this interview! Your description of a curse--“pushing your counterfactual into the future”--as well as your insights about family, especially about the sense of walking into a story already in progress--have really given me food for thought, as has your neat system for what things become poems, short stories, and novels.
You can read more from Lisa on Twitter or here on LJ.
The title of this collection, and of one of the poems in it, is “The Haunted Girl.” Can you talk a little about the different forms that haunting takes in this collection?
There are few, if any, see-through, rattling chains, type ghosts here. Most of the hauntings come from our ability to imagine other outcomes, to impose counterfactuals on memories.
The Haunted Girl in the title poem is an amalgamation of girls killed in horror movies. The narrator is haunted by the knowledge that this didn’t *have* to be the Girl’s fate. She imagines ways to help the Girl, but none of the counterfactuals work because our world IS the horror movie: it created and perpetuates misogynistic tropes. In “Teratoma Lullaby,” “Blood Is Thicker than Water,” and several other pieces, the true haunting is a yearning to fix broken families, to rewrite personal histories.
There are some curses in the book, too. Casting a vengeful curse is pushing your counterfactual into the future. If, on the other hand, you’re the one cursed, then much of your tragedy comes of imagining the beautiful life you’d have otherwise.
( on family )
( horror--plus humor? )
I hope the world will one day get to see your novels, as I have a powerful love for the one I’ve read. As a writer of poetry, short stories, and novels, do you find one or another of those formats more amenable to some topics or themes than others? Are you driven to write in a particular format, or is it a conscious choice--or does it vary?
I can’t imagine writing a whole novel about family, not the way I do in poems and short stories. That kind of emotional intensity and self-reflection would probably kill me. (Current “me,” that is. Never say never, right?) Family usually sneaks its way into the novels, but it’s not the focus.
In my mental shorthand, poetry is for ideas, stories for character, and novels for action. I realize this differs from current genre expectations, which may explain why my poetry has been more outwardly successful than my fiction.
Thank you so much for this interview! Your description of a curse--“pushing your counterfactual into the future”--as well as your insights about family, especially about the sense of walking into a story already in progress--have really given me food for thought, as has your neat system for what things become poems, short stories, and novels.
You can read more from Lisa on Twitter or here on LJ.
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