Jen Campbell is a bestselling author and award-winning poet from the North East of England. To date, she has written ten books for adults and children spanning nonfiction, short stories, poetry and picture books. Asides from her writing, she regularly guest lectures on the history of fairy tales and the representation of disfigurement, talks about books on BBC radio, runs a hugely successful book review YouTube channel and a book club for TOAST. Her podcast BOOKS WITH JEN was an iTunes top 100 podcast. Editor Sam chatted to Jen about her literary influences, the undeniable influence of fairy tales on her writing and the power of literature to challenge negative perceptions of disfigurement, bodily difference and queerness.
Jen Campbell, photo provided by the author
If we were to take a rummage through your bookshelves, which books by women writers of the past would we find? And of all these writers, who has been the most influential to you?
A lot of my work revolves around the history of fairy tales, so an obvious (but nevertheless true) answer is Angela Carter. Nights at the Circus and her collection of fairy tales from around the world are my favourites by her. If we dive back even further than that, I have to give a shout out to Madame d’Aulnoy, who ran literary salons in the 1600s, specialised in fairy tales and was rumoured to be a spy.
Which books have been particularly significant for you and helped shape your future as a writer?
Three books that very much influenced me as a young teen, though, were Through the Looking Glass, His Dark Materials and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. All three of those books taught me something about experimenting with narrative, with world-building, and merging the real with make-believe. All three are books I revisit every year or so.
At Lyonesse we are committed to championing the work of women who are breaking boundaries and challenging literary conventions. Which of your contemporaries do you particularly admire and enjoy reading and how do they push the limits of women’s literature?
I don’t think I could name just one. I’m a huge fan of Ali Smith. Having her write about our current political climate in her Seasonal Quartet these past four years has been such a comfort. Her words are liquid light. Lily Hoang and Maggie Nelson brilliantly push at the boundaries of creative nonfiction. Bernardine Evaristo and Fatima Farheen Mirza —in both of their most recent titles— paint character landscapes in such ambitious, tapestry-like ways.
References to folklore and fairy tales reoccur in your writing and you also regularly discuss fairy tales and their origins on your YouTube channel. Why do you think fairy tales continue to be so popular, especially for women writers?
I think fairy tales are popular for a variety of reasons; some of that is nostalgia. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; we gift them to our children. But the reworking of fairy tales is especially popular with marginalised groups. I’m drawn to them less because of my identity as a woman, and more because I am a queer disabled woman. Gender-stereotyping in fairy tales is powerful to subvert, yes; but to me it is even more powerful to rewrite those lost tales where princesses end up with princesses; where men fall in love with mermen (after all, that’s what the history of The Little Mermaid is all about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuSqIpqJ-Xc); and where the villain doesn’t have a disfigurement as literary shorthand for their ‘evil.’ A fairy tale I find myself drawn back to time and time again is the Intuit myth of Sedna, who refused to marry a man, and was consequently thrown into the sea by her father. He cut off her fingers in a rage, and these fell into the ocean beside her. Those morphed into whales, sharks and fish, and Sedna grew up to be a goddess of the deep.
The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night, 2017
You chose to open The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night with a quote by Mary Shelley and the influence of Frankenstein can be felt in “Animals.” How did the novel inform your own writing?
Until the 1800s, anyone born with a disfigurement was medically called a monster. As someone with a rare form of ectodermal dysplasia, which means I have ectrodactyly (missing fingers), alopecia, and other things, I am interested in the dissection of what makes society see us as ‘human’ and ‘other’, where that line lies, and how it moves around. Frankenstein embodies that.
There are also several other experimentations with posthuman bodies in the collection which feature human-animal-nature metamorphoses. In “Animals,” we see how humans acquire different animal hearts and in “Plum Pie. Zombie Green, Yellow Bee. Purple Monster,” human teenagers are fused with plants. What does the posthuman body and human interactions with non-human species and nature offer your characters in contrast to binary identities?
I am passionate about the representation of bodily difference in fiction, both in the real sense (my stories have characters with ectrodactyly, others who are wheelchair users etc) and in the magical sense, too. Playing with bodily form, in this case in a short story about teenagers who sprout plants and are experimented on by tree surgeons, is a more abstract way to comment on disabled experiences, ownership of bodies and the history of the freak show.
You regular speak out about challenging ableism and promoting more positive representations of disfigurement in both literature and the mainstream media. How can we move towards representing disfigurement in a more positive light? And which other writers do you think are already doing this well?
The hashtag #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs pretty much sums it up. Own Voices work is very important; projects surrounding disability and disfigurement need to include those from within the communities they seek to represent. Lazy tropes such as ‘disfigurement = villainy’ need to go (think most horror films, every James Bond villain, the most recent adaptation of The Witches —more on that here https://www.buro247.com/culture/life/the-witches-remake-disfigurement — the list is endless). Check out the work that Changing Faces UK is doing. You can also find lots of book recommendations on my Youtube channel centring disability, disfigurement and deafness.
The Girl Aquarium, 2019,
In the past few years you have published both short stories and poetry collections. What’s next? Are there any topics which you are especially keen to explore in your work?
I’m working on a few different things, none of which I can tell you too much about, I’m afraid (sorry!). I have a new book forthcoming September 2021, which is for older children and adults and which focuses on fairy tales from around the world. I’m also working on some nonfiction surrounding disfigurement and how that intersects with folklore, too.
Jen’s short story collection The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night is published by Two Roads, and her children’s picture book series, Franklin and Luna, is published by Thames & Hudson and illustrated by Katie Harnett. She is also the Sunday Times bestselling author of the Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops series, and The Bookshop Book. Her poetry collection The Girl Aquarium won an Eric Gregory Award, and the Jane Martin Poetry Prize. You can find more information about Jen’s work over on her website: www.jen-campbell.co.uk
Niamh Boyce is an award winning writer and poet from Ireland who is based in the Irish Midlands. Using the novel and poem to unearth the witches, ghosts and other buried voices of marginalised Irish women, her writing frequently explores womanhood and the oppressive influence of the Catholic religion and patriarchy on women’s lives. In 2012, she was awarded the Hennessy XO New Irish Writer of the Year for her poem “Kitty” and later went on to publish her first poetry collection, Inside the Wolf (2018), in which she dissects traditional fairy tales to explore art, motherhood and her Irish ancestry. Boyce’s debut novel, The Herbalist was published in 2013, gaining her Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards the same year. Set in 1930 rural Ireland, it tells the story of how the arrival of a mysterious medicine man to a small Irish village impacts the lives of four women within the community and exposes the culture of shame and silence which oppresses them. In 2019, Her Kind was published and shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature. Taking the title from the Anne Sexton poem, the novel provides a speculative account of the Kilkenny Witch Trial which saw a group of Irish women condemned for witchcraft in 1324. In this interview, Lyonesse Editor Sam Young and Niamh discuss some of her feminist literary influences, the enduring allure of myths folklore and fairy tales, and giving voice to the historically silenced women of Ireland’s turbulent past.
Niamh Boyce. Copyright Miguel Ruiz
In our Literary Lyonesses section, we give thanks to the women writers of the past and acknowledge how their writing helped to shape the future of women’s literature. If we were to take a rummage through your bookshelves, which books by literary lyonesses would we find?
Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born is one. My copy is twenty-eight years old, and I love reading what younger-me underlined, and scribbled in the margins. I don’t write on novels, but treat non-fiction books like a conversation and I highlight, underline, and sometimes argue back in the margins. Of Woman Born blew my mind, it was the first feminist work I read – there weren’t many in my local bookshop, and those were pre-internet days. I was pregnant and in my first year of college, and went into labour during my English exam writing an essay on Rich’s poetry… so all those things combined made for a potent relationship with the book! There was a definite feeling of awakening. Many of the books still on my shelves are by writers I first came across at that time. They’ve become talismanic over the years. These include Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens by Alice Walker, The Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert and Gubar, The Second Sex by Beauvoir. There was also The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, a mad, brilliant and imaginative book that I’ve re-read many times. There’s no one quite like Carter!
At Lyonesse we are also committed to championing the work of contemporary women writers. Which of your contemporaries do you particularly admire and enjoy reading?
Pond by Marie Claire Bennet is amazing, one of those ‘nothing happens but everything happens’ books. It’s told from the point of view of a woman living in isolation in rural Ireland. It’s an intense enlivening read that has been marketed as a short story collection in some countries and as a novel in others, but it’s just itself, just Pond. Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s A Ghost in the Throat is a treasure, a pleasure, a joy – a hybrid work that weaves autofiction, essay, history, poetry, mystery. Its narrator is obsessed with the poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonail. I love the author’s descriptions of breast feeding, of housework, the rhythm of her honest poetic style – ‘This is a female text’ the author tells us, and it certainly is, and one that nourishes and inspires.
Ireland has an extremely rich heritage of myth, folklore and fairy tale which is rooted in the oral tradition of storytelling. How do you think this heritage and tradition has informed your own writing?
The Irish myths I learned at school were the tales of the warrior class, heroes like Setanta, and Fionn Mac Cumhail. In these retellings, which came with vivid illustrations, women were depicted as pawns, if depicted at all – with the exception of Niamh from “Tir Na N’Og” (“The Land of the Young”). Of course, there are many vital strong women in Irish myth – Aine, Macha, Morrigan, Queen Maeve for a start, but I have no memory of them featuring in the stories we were told. I visited Queen Maeve’s Cairn in Sligo a few years after leaving school, and got some inkling of how much more there was to the Irish mythology. Legend has it that Maeve was buried standing up, spear in hand, facing Ulster. Built 5,000 years ago, her cairn can be seen for miles. Reading the land can be more enlightening than any book! I love lore relating to land and liminality – caves, forests, hawthorns, witching hour. Setting is really important in my fiction. I spent a lot of time in Kilkenny, walking the routes my characters walked, while writing about the medieval witchcraft trial of Alice Kyteler. Many of the scenes were written on the site where they played out. I love to tap into the atmosphere of a place, touch the old stones, walk the ancient steps… The same went for The Herbalist, I took notes by the river, down the alley where the herbalist lived, and in the square where he sold his potions to the women of the town. There was a lot of folklore around that trial, and I grew up hearing snippets. I love kitchen sink folklore – those half-heard stories, advice and warnings. I find folklore endlessly fascinating, more so than mythology. Give me talk of charms, superstitions and taboos over a grand battle any day! Sean O Sullivan’s A Handbook of Irish Folklore reveals reams of traditions and charms around birth and death – from superstitions about the caul to the omen of a bird entering your house. Duchas.ie is another amazing resource. There’s such poetry in the rituals recounted in the Irish Folklore Collection – the cross in the soda bread, the warning whispered before a basin of water is emptied out the window, a dream coming ‘out’, the red ribbon around a baby’s wrist. I think my preference definitely relates to class and gender. The oral tale, with its unpinned and changeable nature also reveals more about the ordinary people, than the recorded, sanctioned story. When I want to find out about a place or people, I turn to folklore, the songs, the lore, the rhymes, the crimes – there’s where I feel the root is, the testimony I’m interested in. I go on to read the bigger picture, the ‘official’ history too of course, but feel that folklore is the level closest to that lie that holds the truth.
Inside the Wolf, 2018
In your poetry collection, Inside the Wolf you take traditional fairy tales and breathe new life into them. What attracted you to the process of rewriting fairy tales? And why do you think fairy tales continue to be so powerfully alluring?
Allure is the perfect word. Their lure is very strong for me, there is so much to love, the transformations, the strange creatures, the dark forests, the drops of blood on snow, the wolf waiting behind the tree… but I think the lasting nature of the allure might be due to the circumstances around their retelling. I heard these stories over and over as a very young child, lying in bed, just before going to sleep. Most likely, they seeped into my dreams and played out there too. There’s something magical about being read to, about closing your eyes and hearing the words, and seeing the tale unravel, your version of the wolf, the forest, the grandmother, the girl. It’s possible that the fairy tale characters and their stories became interwoven with my own concerns and battles in my dream world as a child and became ‘charged’ for me at that early stage. Another source of their power lies in their oral origins, they were crafted to be remembered and recited. They rhyme in so many ways – the repetition of phrases, of plot elements, colour, symbols, the use of three – they are simple stories, easily held in the mind, and full of refrains we love to repeat – What big eyes you have grandmother? And he huffed and he puffed and he blew the house down. Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I am the ginger bread man. I don’t think I’ve encountered stories in such a potent way since. My writing is a way of re-entering these tales and working out traumas or questions of identity, or subverting expectations within a pre-made, familiar story-scape. The characters and stories are already highly charged, as I mentioned earlier, which makes them very potent.
There are various references to mythical and folkloric women, such as witches, mermaids in your poems. Who is your favourite mythical woman and why is she appealing?
I went mad for mermaids a few years ago. In fact, when I was pregnant, I even went through a phase of painting heavily pregnant merwomen that I sold in the Galway Market. They were lusty, roundy creatures rather than delicate Pre-Raphaelite sirens. I craved fish and wrote poems and stories about underwater women. I might have gone a little mad, but it was a very creative time! Writing poems on scraps of paper, painting on everything that didn’t move. I spent a lot of time at the sea shore. I began writing from the point of view of a selkie and it grew into one of my first short stories. Around that time, I got a letter in the post. One of my paintings had ended up in the possession of a man who lived on an island not too far away. It was a very, very long letter – maybe fifteen pages, and he said he loved the painting, and that he was in fact a descendent of a Melusine mermaid himself. It was very surreal. The figure of the mermaid felt so powerful in those days. It might have been the notion of a tribe of women who lived beneath the sea, an underwater sisterhood… but there was more, I associated them with preverbal knowledge. I don’t have the words to explain it, just to say that mermaids gave me a certain feeling, an irresistible urge to create. The way the tide is tugged by the moon.
Is there a specific myth, folk or fairy tale which you are repeatedly drawn back to or constantly creeps its way into your work?
Little Red and the Wolf. I love the various motifs and elements of that tale, the red hood (added by Perrault, so not in the original tale), the fact that the main character is a girl, moving between her mother’s house and her grandmother’s house, and of course the figure of the wolf. Its creeps into my poetry on a regular basis – it’s so ripe for subversion. Catherine Orenstein’s powerful study Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked is an inspiring read on many aspects of the tale.
The wolf and the threat of being attacked by wolves is a motif which reoccurs in your writing. What does the wolf represent? And how does it relate to the women characters within your poems and novels?
What the wolf represents changes from one piece of work to the other, from one phase of my life to another. In my poetry, it represents instinct, sex, transformation, rebirth. I love Kiki Smiths work ‘Lying with the Wolf,’ a sculpture in which a clean sleek fully formed woman steps from the belly of the wolf. The wolf is a matrix. In poems relating to the story of Red Riding Hood it represents the place where you are told not to go to but must enter anyway. The tale has that dream quality in which all the characters are aspects of yourself. It might sound strange, but in my poetry the wolf represents almost everything primal, except death. In the world of my second novel Her Kind, the wolves were a fact of life – Ireland was known as Wolf Land at one stage, and are a threat to the women in the novel. There’s a pivotal scene where mother and daughter are circled by a starving wolf, and the mother is about to cut her daughter’s throat rather than have her eaten alive by a wolf. This act drives a wedge between them.
The Herbalist, 2013
Ireland has a dark and turbulent history which has been oppressive for all marginalised groups but particularly women, whose right to their own bodies have been repeatedly denied and controlled by the Church and the State. Set against the backdrop of 1930s rural Ireland your novel The Herbalist (2013) highlights some of these issues, exploring rape, victim shaming, the Magdalene Laundries. As an Irish woman and writer how have these issues shaped your writing? And, do you think things have changed sufficiently in Ireland or is still more work to be done?
This is difficult – I had to wrestle with this question – to ask it of myself and think awhile. To be honest, those issues come out in my writing despite my intentions, rather than because of them. I have made peace with that now, but when I began writing, I actually felt hijacked by my subject matter. What I mean by that, is that I never intended to write the books I did – when I began to write fiction, I was surprized to find that the world of my stories was in the past – where was that sexy edgy contemporary novel I sat down to write? When I first began to write I used the free writing method, just letting the words flow, seeing what came. Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing the Bones was an influence. The voices that came were from women living in 1930’s Athy, and their stories circled around the arrival an Indian Herbalist. It was a real-life case; a trial I’d come across while archiving old newspapers years before, and forgotten about. The voices were stronger and more alive than anything else in my notebook. So, I gave in, ditched my attempts at an edgy contemporary thriller, and wrote The Herbalist. Looking back, it was a gift – a book that gave itself to me in the way some poems do. And once I accepted that I was writing it – it was a joy to write. Each woman in the book is pushing back against the rigid society of the time. My drive, I discovered – was working with voices that have been supressed or silenced, and mixing fact and fiction. I’m drawn to sex, power and justice. Part of writing is discovering what kind of writer you are, I guess.
My concerns are connected with the stranglehold the church/state in Ireland had on women and men in the country I grew up in, to the vividness of the misogyny, the sanctioned hatred and media witch trials of women like Joanne Hayes and Annie Murphy. I still remember sitting in my school uniform beside the radio and hearing that Anne Lovett, a fifteen year old girl, had died giving birth beside a grotto to the ‘Virgin’ Mary – the shock of that moment has never left me. The horror that I lived in a country where such a thing was possible, where such a thing was the tip of the iceberg. Paula Meehan wrote a very powerful poem about Anne Lovett’s death called “The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks.” Almost thirty years later, in 2012 Savita Halappanavar died after being denied health care in a Galway hospital. Suffering from septicaemia and needing a termination, she was denied the procedure, the midwife saying, ‘this is a catholic country’. Savita died as a result. There were candlelit vigils, signs that said ‘Never Again.’ Change in the law eventually did happen, but only because of the huge work women put into campaigning. As Anne Enright said sat the launch of The Long Gaze Back (Sinead Gleeson’s anthology of stories by Irish women writers) – ‘it’s a double burden for women, not only do you have to suffer the discrimination, you have to put in all the fucking work to fix it.’
Her Kind, 2019
The theme of witches and witchcraft is a topic which you explore in detail in your novel, Her Kind, described as a “vivid re-imagining of the events leading up to the Kilkenny Witch trial” that took place in Ireland in 1324. What attracted you to retell the story of Alice Kytler, Petronelle and Basila?
The Kytler witch trial was initially mentioned to me by Patricia Deevy from Penguin Ireland when she asked if I would consider writing a novel about Alice Kyteler. This was back in 2013, when Penguin published my first novel The Herbalist. I wasn’t attracted to the idea at first as I was in the middle of another story and the Kytler trial felt a little too familiar to be interesting, the way local things often seem unexotic. However, after a while, I was curious and started to research a little. I soon discovered that I didn’t know the full story at all…Soon after, Petronella came into a poem I was writing. I still wasn’t committed to exploring the story in the form of a novel, but she was beginning to intrigue me more and more. What spurred me on, to be completely honest, was a video aimed at tourists in Kilkenny Cathedral. It was a screen placed beside Ledrede’s effigy. (Ledrede was the Bishop responsible for the witch trial.) An actor played the role of Ledrede, and told us the story of the evil witches, and that ‘pestiferous Petronella de Media.’ All these years later and his version was still the official one? That was enough. I opened the word document that night, titled it ‘Petronella.’ It became the novel Her Kind.
Her Kind is a speculative historic account of women’s lives, whose stories has been manipulated as a result of attempts to erase them from mainstream historical narrative. How burdened did you feel when attempting to tell their story from subjective viewpoint?
Very. There are so many ways to tell a story, and when you’re about to begin, you make decisions that shapes the kind of story it will be. The Kilkenny Witchcraft trial had all the ingredients of a sensational piece of work – the bizarre accusations, the witch trial, the powerful figure of Alice Kyteler, and the bishop’s mania. Imaginatively potent, I looked forward to dramatizing those aspects with relish. But as I researched further, and discovered more about the case, in particular, Petronella De Media’s fate – I felt a responsibility to do her justice, and not to sensationalise her story. Hers was the voice I felt most obligation towards. The women in the case are defined by the accusations made against them still, by the words of Bishop Ledrede. Petronella’s ‘confession’, came from his pen, and was written in his voice. I decided early on, that I would have to write her story without glossing it over, or making it aesthetically pleasing – as is often done with women’s pain in fiction and film. I decided I couldn’t write the book unless I could write from her point of view, in a way that felt authentic. I began by writing the most difficult scenes first. I wrote many drafts and versions of those scenes. One day as I was writing, I read over the scene I had just finished, and I felt her say, ‘stop making it beautiful, it wasn’t beautiful.’ I rewrote, culling all flourishes. When her thread was written, I knew I could write the rest of the book.
Jack Zipes describes the term witch as being “mimetically loaded.” Once used as a label to shame and oppress, it has since been re-appropriated by feminists as a term of empowerment. What does the term mean to you?
A lot of contemporary women are self-identifying as witches, reclaiming the term, and it means so many different things to different people doesn’t it? For some it’s primarily a way of accessing their own power and intuition, or becoming more connected to nature, or their own sensuality. It’s quite a fluid thing, not that easy to risk defining. Some work alone, and some in covens, formal and informal. The connection I have with my female friends feels coven like, more so as the years pass. I find the idea very exciting and empowering, especially in relation to creativity and feminism. More and more, I’m interested in magical thinking, in working with intuition over so called ‘logic’ – in dreamwork etc – I did a workshop recently with Alice Tarbuck on poetry and spells. Her book A Spell in the Wild is wonderful. We Were Witches by Ariel Gore, a book about being a single mother in the nineties is honest, powerful, and magical.
In Her Kind, silence manifests itself in various ways. Low social status enforces voicelessness upon the servants, Petronelle is forbidden to speak of her former Irish identity and Basila engages in a selective silencing of her choosing. Can you talk a little about how this theme of silence specifically relates to the women in the story and the process of telling their stories?
At an early stage, I knew what the last line of the novel proper would be, and that it would be Basilia who said it. (I don’t plot or plan the novels, but often know what the final image, or sentence is going to be, then I figure out how to get there.) When I had that sentence, instinct said it would be the first time Basilia spoke aloud. There would be a great weight then, to what she said. When you have no power, you have the power to withhold. So, muteness is a weapon Basilia uses – against her mother initially. It’s a way of punishing her. She keeps herself to herself, won’t speak, won’t share her dreams. As time passes, she becomes used to that silence, finds comfort in being peripheral for many of the people in Alice Kytler’s house, though not Alice. When I was writing these two characters, I was very aware that Irish was their first language. In the opening pages of the novel, they enter a town where Irish is not spoken. (The English colony of Hightown) Basilia’s muteness is related to this fact. They are Irish women living inside a walled town in their own country, a place where their own language and kind are outlawed. It is not somewhere Basilia can speak freely in her own tongue any way. And of course, the novel is written in English – as Irish is not my first language. I, myself, felt a certain muteness in relation to this 14th Gaelic girl and so the theme of silence is linked not only to their identity but to my own. When Petronelle surrenders their real names and language in exchange for the safety of the colonisers … she mistakes them for things that can be easily retrieved.
What you are working on at the moment? Are there any topics which you are particularly keen to explore next?
I’ve been working on a novel called The Women for the past two years. It’s set in the 1850s, between Edinburgh and Ireland. It’s about writing, mediums, asylums, memory and the Irish famine. It weaves fact and fiction, as is inspired by the goings on in the life of Catherine Crowe, author and spiritualist, who wrote the game-changing book Nightside of Nature. It’s becoming much more fictional and fantastical than my previous novels, a little more fun – perhaps a response to the past year of lockdown.
Despite being only 23 years of age, K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is already making waves on the literary scene. Her debut novel, Bestiary, waswritten whilst she was still an undergraduate and picked up by One World/Random House in the US in 2020. Shortly after it was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She has also been Lambda Literary Award finalist and National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.
Shortly after the February 2021 UK release date of Bestiary, Lyonesse editor Sam Young and K-Ming Chang chatted across time zones via the marvels of video call, where in aptly serendipitous fashion, their interview coincided with Chinese Lunar New Year Spring celebrations which were unfolding outside K-Ming’s Chinatown apartment in New York City. As lionesses and lions beat their drums to ward off the multitude of 2020’s demons, K-Ming spoke freely about her queer literary inspirations, Taiwanese and Chinese mythology and folklore, and how her experiences as a member of the Taiwanese American diaspora informed the novel.
In Lyonesse we give thanks to the women writers who paved the way for women’s literature and champion contemporary women writers who are pushing the limits of women’s literature today. Who are some of the women writers (past and present) whose work you particularly admire?
Definitely the writers who made me want to write were Marilyn Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dorothy Allison, Qiu Maojin and Emily Bronte. Another writer I particularly admire is Venita Blackburn, who wrote Black Jesus and Other Superheroes. Every time I read that book I feel like it creates new forms of possibility and a whole new language which is full of humour and tenderness. It also contains several fascinating relationships. I also really love Vi Khi Nao, who wrote a book called Fish in Exile. Her writing style is so intoxicating and disorientating in the best possible way!
What is your favourite woman-centered story?
It’s such a joy for me to talk about women-centred stories because they are so important to me. I would say that Revenge of the MooncakeVixen by Marilyn Chin has had the most profound impact on me as a writer, because it completely transformed my conception of what a novel could be and what storytelling could look like. It’s a retelling of Buddhist fables told through a Chinese restaurant family in America and I loved the mythologizing of this family’s history – something which has obviously shaped my work deeply. It’s so irreverent, funny and gross, but also has a sense of reverence at the same time. There are also two sisters in the book who I really love and I also particularly love this character named Moon, who wreaks vengeance and havoc on those who have wronged her.
You belong to a wonderfully diverse and thriving community of queer women writers publishing today. How essential is it to identify the queerness of your writing? Or should we resist the urge to compartmentalise writers into categories?
For me it is definitely very important to name the queerness of my work and draw attention to the fact that I’m often writing about lesbian women. I have a very strong root with a lot of lesbian literature which includes books such as Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin and Trash By Dorothy Allison and these lesbian writer foremothers are extremely important to me. I definitely think that this book would not exist without lesbian literature. I also believe that there is something about queer literature and its lineages which is really important to cite. As a literary genre, it is such a diverse spectrum and there’s so much inventiveness and form breaking. By talking about the queerness of text, it automatically includes all these other texts, which is both community forming and subversive. I love the idea that often with queer writing you can feel like you are very much inventing a language either for things that don’t yet exist or that have deliberately been withheld, distorted or which don’t fully belong to you – I felt that a lot when I began writing stories about queer girls – that I was grasping at ghosts. I think that’s why the characters in my stories are very inventive and playful with language. I want them to have a deeply creative sense of language, in the way that they create themselves and their own mythologies and desires through new language. There’s a power in that which is magical.
Bestiary is a complex and multifaceted novel with so many layers. How would you best define the book?
I would say its part family saga, part queer love story, part mythology and also part speculative history. Often when we talk about speculative literature, we usually talk about futurity (dystopian sci-fi for example) but I’m really interested in the idea of speculative past which means applying certain tropes from the genre of speculative fiction in order to reinvent or reimagine history and to also reconsider what is possible in telling the story in a different way.
Women very much take centre stage in the novel which primarily focuses on the grandmother, mother and daughter of the family. You said that your intention was to “subvert the static idea of a canonical history” by allowing the women in the family to embody their stories. How does this process of retelling stories, in particular, myths, enable the characters to become empowered?
An intense desire to talk about matrilineal lineage is the reason I write. I’m very interested in stories which are passed down by women, the stories they tell to each other and how they create their own lineage and histories – stories which they carry within them that are not in any way ritualised or respected because they are not part of official historical or family records. When I was taking a Chinese history class in college, my professor pointed out the fact that you can only track the men because they are the only ones officially written down in official records. My mom also told me this saying, “A daughter that you marry away is water that you throw out” so there’s this real sense in Chinese culture that daughters are not only never part of official lineage but also that they inherit severance or are born to be discarded. I grew up hearing that and I myself also never had family records growing up so it’s deeply important for me to write about these women because although they are the centre of my life, they are very much invisible from history.
Bestiary has been repeatedly praised for its visceral style of writing. There’s a real sense that the stories the women tell literally become written on their bodies, transforming their identities. Was this embodied response to stories and the act of storytelling a conscious intention?
The visceral quality of the writing isn’t something that I fully realized I was doing until afterwards although it also made a lot of sense because I’m very interested in oral history, and I think there is nothing more visceral than that because you’re physically embodying the story. In order to tell a story, it literally has to pass through your entire body and out through your mouth. It is also very dependent on who is telling the story so consequently becomes very subjective. It’s very much a story about storytelling, and how telling stories can become a vehicle for survival, reinvention or transformation but also enable the inheritance of trauma.
Themes of transnationality and cultural hybridity run throughout the novel and you capture very well both the feeling of being displaced and the fusion of different cultural identities which occur as a result of migration. How did your own personal experiences of being a member of the Taiwanese American diaspora influence the women’s narratives?
I certainly think that my past shaped the book immensely. There’s a certain kind of assimilation narrative that is really common in a lot of Asian American literature and media. There seems to be this belief that you have this point of origin which gets lost and consequently you spend your whole life grieving that. However, that really wasn’t my own experience and so I wanted to resist that idea a little. I also wanted to portray a different kind of narrative where the desire for whiteness or Americanness wasn’t the main driving force. One where the characters felt like they were at the centre of their own stories, rather than on the margins of some bigger story.
The novel has been described as a ‘transnational fairy tale,’ due to the fact that you fuse together Taiwanese and Chinese mythology with aspects of American culture. What does the term fairy tale mean to you? And what makes us keep being drawn to retell them?
To me the term fairy tale is a very Western thing. You would rarely call the Chinese tales that I grew up with (such as the Butterfly Lovers or the Legend of the White Snake) fairy tales per se, they would be referred to as folk tales or myths and would be considered to be more ethnic or marginal. Yet there’s definitely something about the term “fairy tale” in our vocabulary that sounds fanciful or whimsical. The term also feels a little more universal and of course, more child centered too, which is actually so ironic because fairy tales can be so brutal! They are often extremely violent, devastating and tragic and so to call them “fairy” tales feels very soft, paradoxical even. One thing that I’m really interested in is the fact that so many different cultures’ fairy tales and folklore have very common archetypes and themes. The ones we are drawn to tell again and again reveal a lot about what is at the root of our societies and beliefs, on this very grand, even cosmic scale. Yet there also seems to be a bridging of cosmic grand scale ideas with the more interpersonal scale things like intimate relationships. I think that when someone decides to write in that space it is always very much about defining the rules and the expectations of a world, or indeed challenging those preexisting ideas.
The stories you weave into Bestiary are a mixture of Taiwanese, Chinese and Fujianese folk tales. Are there any specific tropes or motifs that define them?
In terms of mythology, the myths from these particular regions have a lot of deities in common which appear to have migrated, like the goddess of the sea Mazu (there’s actually a chapter in the book named after her). She’s one of the biggest deities when it comes to the Taiwanese diaspora, which I suppose makes sense because she’s goddess of the sea and therefore also the goddess of migration and immigration. Given that Taiwan itself is a nation which is a combination of so many diasporas, this also makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m also really fascinated by that.
Chinese mythology is very interesting because it predates people like Confucius in some ways. And Confucian was extremely patrilineal – he certainly had a lot of things to say about women! I think much of mythology predates a lot of constructions of patriarchy to a certain degree, at least Chinese mythology. Every one originates from a snake goddess and there’s a certain kind of power in that. However, at the same time, with many of the Buddhist deities that featured in the myths I grew up with, such as the Goddess of Mercy, it seems that there’s this very particular kind of woman to be worshipped, one that is either extremely virginal or motherly, I suppose in a similar way to the Virgin Mary in Christianity. They all share a common saintliness which is very much rooted in the fact that they have either never married or refused to marry, have sacrificed themselves on behalf of the patriarch or have taken a disavowal.
I would also definitely say that in a lot of Chinese myths and folktales, and even in modern soap operas today for that matter, the character of the evil stepmother, mother in law or an evil maternal figure is also very present and I enjoy unravelling that. Why must sacrifice be the one thing that makes you good? I think that too often that is the message conveyed about motherhood, this notion that the more selfless you are as a mother, the better you are. That’s also definitely something I like to push against in my writing.
The Female tiger spirit, Hú Gu Pó is one of the magical women who features in Bestiary. Can you tell me more about the original Taiwanese folktale which you based this character upon?
The majority of Taiwanese people trace their ancestry to Fujian and consequently many tales emigrated from that province to Taiwan. As a result, the Hú Gu Pó Tiger tale which is the main folktale within Bestiary, is originally of Fujianese origin. And it’s so strange because there are actually no tigers on Taiwan – they would literally have had to swim across the ocean to end up there! And so whilst this idea of tigers living on an island is very strange in itself, it’s simply the product of this story having migrated and settled. Today it’s a Taiwanese children’s folktale which tells the story of a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. It depicts a sort of Little Red Riding Hood style scenario, where the spirit impersonates these children’s grandmother’s and ends up eating their toes. In the original ending of the story, she gets killed by the oldest child who forces her to jump into a vat of boiling hot oil but I prefer an alternative ending to that story – one where she actually survives. I think it’s important to examine this story in the context of the lessons we tell children about what it means to be a good woman and a good mother, and what it means to lack maternal instinct, because I think that this villainous grandmother figure is supposed to symbolize this idea. I’m really fascinated by women who refuse traditional roles, like being a wife or a mother and instead follow their own desires. In this particular story, it is a very literal desire which manifests itself as an intense hunger.
Bestiary borrows its name from the Latin bestiary vocabulum, meaning compendium of beasts and the novel embodies this idea, combining both fabulous creatures with real species and frequently blurring the lines between the two. Traditional Medieval bestiaries typically used non-human species as stand-ins to represent human morals and values with each of the animals being heavily imbued with religious symbolism. To what extent do you feel that Bestiary follows this pattern or did you aim to represent animals and nature from a more subjective stance?
Another common thread of Taiwanese and Chinese mythology and folklore is to feature elements of human animal transformation. I grew up with a story book on Chinese mythology which featured Gods who were fusions of snakes and snails and wild Goddesses with snake tails and where evil women were turned into snakes and foxes. Those are definitely part of my pantheon of stories but asides from these influences, in general I’m really interested in bodily transformation of all kinds, be it those types which are more grounded in reality, or the more fantastical ones. I really enjoyed researching the book’s title and finding out what a Bestiary really was because it made me see certain similarities, for example, telling stories about animals as a kind of way of making moral statements about the world which many fairy tales and myths do. But at the same time, I also loved the fact that there were so many dissimilarities between what I was doing and a traditional bestiary. Traditional bestiaries emerged from the Western Christian tradition, a place in which animals are considered to be lower than humans in the hierarchy and humans are seen as supreme beings, situated at the top of the pyramid whilst animals are things to maneuver or control. Similarly, environment and land are regarded as passive entities there for humans to mine or control. In contrast, in indigenous storytelling, the land is living, and there’s a more respectful relationship with animals.
Nature and the elements are heavily present throughout the novel and there is a sense that everything is interconnected. Bodies literally become the land or are consumed by the elements and even inanimate objects adopt human or natural characteristics. Can you tell me a little about the presence of nature in your writing?
I think it stems from a combination of mythology and me witnessing my own environment. The first myths I ever learned were the ones about how the sun and moon came to be, where there is the belief that the sun and the moon are living things which interact with heroes in animate ways and have an agency of their own. I became really fascinated by the idea of bodies of water also having agency of their own and the indigenous belief that they have inherent life. These elements really influenced the way that I wrote about the landscape in Bestiary. Added to these influences, the fact that I grew up near a landfill influenced me greatly. It’s this kind of alive place, which is the product of our own waste, stinking and burping gases. And so I became fascinated by the idea of the metabolism of the land, digesting all of these things.
The strong emphasis on women’s bodies is perhaps most strongly felt in your vivid descriptions of bodily excretions. How does this deep rooting of the characters’ within their bodies and their fluids relate specifically to their gender as well as the relationships they enjoy with those around them?
All of us are taught to feel so much shame around our bodies yet the people with whom I feel most intimate with and trust the most deeply are the people I’m most likely to talk to about my body and vice versa so it’s a beautiful sign of intimacy, this porousness about talking about your body in ways that we would never in other circumstances. I wanted everyone in the family to not only be very much rooted in their bodies but also know each other’s bodies intimately. They are taking care of each other in this very physical way because there’s no one else to do that. They also don’t have that luxury of being able to physically distance themselves from the body, for example, the mother works at a chicken factory and has to slaughter animals and literally take them apart. It wasn’t really a conscious thing, I didn’t even know I was writing about the body. I spend 90% of the day thinking about bodily functions, like eating or going to the bathroom so it’s strange that literature seems to be so empty of that.
The daughter’s metamorphosis,which sees her suddenly grow a tiger tail, coincides with both her transition from girl to woman and her process of sexual awakening as a young queer woman. How would you say the protagonist’s girl-tiger identity formation specifically relates to these two aspects of her transition?
I think that in terms of her gender identity and her sexuality, the implications of the tail are maybe not so much directly related to how she feels about gender and sexuality and more that the tail ends up being a part of her sexuality simply because it’s a part of her body. Honestly, I really had no idea what the tail meant when it first emerged. She just grew it and I was like, okay, this is going to be the beginning of something. However, it does essentially end up becoming this other limb or organ of desire but again, purely because it’s a part of her body. As a new part of her I was interested in exploring how she would relate to it. I also became interested in how she had these desires but also this history of hunger which consequently ended up becoming very entwined. I think there’s something really interesting in showing how desire can manifest in this really physical way and the fact that the tail also becomes a manifestation of her hunger is really fascinating given her lineage of the tiger spirit, who also represents this very intense hunger. The fact that the daughter’s own desires are burgeoning meant that the two things ended up running parallel to each other.
The process of acceptance of her new posthuman female-animal identity brings about both positive and negative consequences for the character. What do you feel that the posthuman female-animal body offers in contrast to binary identities?
I think the bodily transformation for me was really this way of centering their hunger and desires and their kind of magical abilities within their bodies. I’m not sure if her new body offers anything specific but I think there is definitely something about letting your desires lead you. I had an alternate ending to the novel where she severs the tail but I realized it didn’t feel quite right. As this tale is a legacy of her inheritance, which is very complicated and very multifaceted, for her to separate from that would just imply that there’s some way to sever yourself from your lineage, be wiped clean of that or even exorcised of it. I wanted it to have implications and for her life to be somewhat uncertain, because often when you inherit a lot of intergenerational trauma, you always carry it with you and there’s always an element of fear or doubt that remains.
K-Ming Chang’s / 張欣明 Bestiary is out now from One World/Random House. You can read more of her writing at kmingchang.com and also pre-order the limited edition micro chapbook, Bone House, a Taiwanese-American retelling of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, out in June 2021. Her short story collection, Resident Aliens, will be released by One World in 2022.
Lyonesse Journal 