On opening up new ways of thinking

Vivienne Volker, the fictional protagonist of your debut novel Vivienne, is the widow of Hans Bellmer. Although Volker is a fictional character, Bellmer was very real. What made you decide to zero in on his life and work, and the work of the Surrealists in general?

I’m interested in his strange, discombobulated doll sculptures, which he’s most famous for. They’re gross and disturbing; some say he saw them as a reaction against the Nazi regime and the idea of the perfect body. I wanted to create this alternate universe around that. I’m also very interested in the uncanny, so the notion that this real artist would be in the book, but also that he would have this alternative existence felt appropriate. I wanted people to be able to read [the book] and then deep-dive into his work, but at the same time, not necessarily have to know who the hell he is or who any of the artists that I mentioned are in order to have fun reading.

I thought it was interesting that you decided to invent a fictional art world controversy that tangentially involved a real artist rather than creating a totally fictional scenario—or, alternatively, focusing on a real controversy.

I wanted to anchor the story, but at the same time, deform it—almost like Bellmer’s dolls—because I think of Vivienne as being set a little to the side of this world.

Passages of the novel are composed of social media posts and comments sections. I noticed that many of the comments, even though they take on typical internet lingo, abandon traditional syntax and structures of meaning and start to sound almost poetic. I was reading your interview with Margaret Welsh, where you described poetry as an “alternative language.” In giving these passages a sense of disarray or discombobulation, were you intending to highlight social media speak as an alternative language as well?

Yes—I was trying to highlight social media speak as an alternative language that can be deadening and repetitive and awful, but also have this potential for poetry or a dreamlike, otherworldly quality. It’s kind of absurdist because there are, I think, very realistic “comments” or social media lingo, and then there’s some that are straight-up poetry. But when you cruise around in comments sections long enough, there are some really poetic comments.

I read Internet comments a lot, but [while researching this book] specifically, [I sought out] comments on “controversial” female figures, because Vivienne needed to be this icon that people had a lot to say about and had conflicting views on. I looked at comments on [posts] of people like Kate Moss, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and Camille Paglia—canceled or controversial people—and video tributes to dead icons.

Do you remember any comments that stood out to you as particularly striking or weird?

I don’t know if there’s a specific one, but when a comment opens up into its own world—when you get a sense for what’s going on in that person’s life, and it gets very personal or sad—that can be quite moving. There are a few places in the novel where people are expressing their torment with the world [through social media comments], and then they find these intimate connections with other commenters.

What’s your own relationship with social media, both as an artist and as a consumer of art?

It’s tormented. I think social media is a pharmakon—it can be both healing and poisonous. I try to be pretty distanced from it. I don’t post a lot about my personal life, but I use it for research and I like to know what’s going on, so I don’t like to divorce myself from it entirely. It can be evil and it can be good, and I tried to explore that in the book. I’m addicted to it like everyone, I guess. I don’t have Twitter, but I do haunt it.

Twitter can be a total time suck. I had to delete the app from my phone.

I feel like everything is becoming social media now. There’s a social media-fication of life, in the sense that we’re in constant conversation with other people. Whether that’s actually a way for us to be more intimate and to know more about each other, or whether that’s a cover or a distraction [remains uncertain]. It could be both.

Your character Vesta is super precocious for her age; she cites famous artists and watches Ingmar Bergman films, even though she’s just in grade school. Were you similarly surrounded by art from a young age?

No, I was not. Vesta’s annoyingly precocious at times. I feel tenderly towards her, but I didn’t grow up around art myself.

I was endlessly curious as a child. My mother says I was a 20-year-old five-year-old, so I think I based a little bit of her demeanor on mine. She’s a bit of an alien and a worrier. But I didn’t come to people like Hans Bellmer until much later—I would say, late teens or twenties. Still, it was very fun to imagine a child growing up surrounded by these berserk images and this family lineage.

How did you eventually gravitate toward those areas of interest?

My parents and the people I grew up with, even though they’re not artists, per se, are interesting and strange. I started to write because I was curious about the world and wanted a way to try to understand what was happening. I don’t have an origin story in that way; [Vivienne isn’t] autofiction at all.

You do have a background in the art world—you’ve been an art critic before, and you’ve taught courses at different universities. I’d love to hear about how your study of art has influenced your practice as a writer—not just in terms of subject matter, but also whether it’s shaped your artistic philosophy in any way.

I think there’s something very visual and cinematic about the way I write. When I was writing Vivienne specifically, I was looking at a lot of different images, trying to saturate myself in as much text and image as possible to have it feel illusory or dream-like. I like to travel between different worlds. I don’t think I’m fully in any one of them, but I’ve worked with different art magazines, publishing houses, and gallerists, and Vivienne certainly parodies that arena.

On the note of bouncing between different worlds—before Vivienne, you published several volumes of poetry. What was it like making the shift from verse to more traditional, narrative prose?

Well, I don’t think I would have if this story hadn’t come to me. Vivienne and her story came to me and I realized, “The proper form for this is not poetry or visual art; it has to be a novel.” Crafting a narrative arc feels like a totally different thing than writing a poem. Writing a poem feels closer to making a piece of visual art—[you’re capturing] a moment or a burst of energy. [Writing a novel] was quite a change and it felt rather trippy. I think the only reason I was able to do it is because I used the unit of the line as a touchstone [via] the social media poetry and Vivienne’s poetry.

In terms of plotting, do you create an outline or follow any routine, or do you just dive in?

No. I’m a bit of a chaotic writer—but I will say because Vivienne came to me so quickly, I had a sense of where the story was going to go. I did create a very loose outline so I knew what I was writing towards, although the end came after everything was done. I didn’t know that would be the end—and then I had a lightbulb moment and crafted it later.

Vivienne deals with themes of cancellation and how people in the art world decide who they want to associate with or work with. Your poetry book Magenta was pulled from a small press because of supposed associations you had. [Note: Emmalea Russo had written several articles on film for Compact Magazine, which had published conservative op-eds by other writers.] I’m curious—amidst all the noise, how do you decide who to trust with your work and who to collaborate with?

That’s a really good question. How do I decide who to trust with my work and collaborate with? I think it’s trial and error, but typically I would rather take the risk. If someone reaches out and wants to collaborate or wants to talk to me about my work, I usually will say yes because I’m a very curious person. My problem with the association phobia we have now is that I think artists, just like any other human being, should talk to absolutely anyone, in public or not. Maybe that is kind of risky or dangerous, but I don’t understand how else to relate to the world.

In another poetry book, Confetti, you write about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There’s this pull toward the uncanny, like you mentioned before. Some of the surreal images described in Vivienne also have an uncanny or potentially disturbing quality—for example, Dorothea Tanning’s Tableau Vivant. What’s your fascination with these kinds of images?

I love horror movies. I think that because horror images take us to an edge or an extreme, there can be something almost sacred about them. Because they’re so disquieting, they’re almost like barometers. And I think I am most interested in the uncanny moments, which are often not the straight-up gory, disgusting, in-your-face horror, but something that is slightly tilted or a different version of itself. And with Vivienne, I focused on that because a lot of it takes place in the home, so I wanted there to be a feeling of familiar and home-like comforts alongside strange occurrences like the weird sculpture in the basement or even eerie resonances in the internet comments. Those things, to me, are the “scary” things that open into a whole other way of thinking.

**I like what you said about certain images taking on this almost sacred quality. Fear of the unfamiliar is a very pure emotion, and that’s what makes these images so universally resonant. **

You teach a course called Psycho Cosmos, which draws connections between astrology and artistic discovery. How has your work as an astrologer and researcher of the occult intersected with your creative process?

Astrology is built on the idea of synchronicity or meaningful coincidences. It’s not that the planets are causing something to happen, but rather that there is a relationship between something that’s going on on earth and something that’s happening in the stars. This idea of correspondence between times and places heavily influenced Vivienne because a lot of scenes are happening in simultaneity. I’m really interested in things that are happening at the same time, and how those events might tell us something about the quality or the atmosphere of a certain moment.

Last but not least: the exhibition that Vivienne’s work appears in is called “Forgotten Women Surrealists,” Who are some forgotten artists, regardless of gender or discipline, who have inspired you?

I don’t know if she’s really forgotten, but one of the artists that Vivienne was partially inspired by, [the poet and visual artist] Unica Zürn, is really interesting. She was a lover and a long-term partner of Hans Bellmer, and she committed suicide by jumping out a window. A lot of Vivienne’s story is based on this question of, “What if there was this woman who came after her and was with Hans Bellmer in those final weird days of his life?”