Shanta Lee is an award-winning artist who works in different mediums as a photographer, writer across genres, and public intellectual. She is the author of a few poetry collections including the forthcoming chapbook, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It…The Slaughter (Harbor Editions, 2024). Learn more: Shantalee.com
Diana Whitney is the editor of the bestselling poetry anthology, You Don’t Have to Be Everything, and the author of Wanting It and Dark Beds (June Road Press, 2024). A quintuple Gemini, she writes across genres with a focus on feminism and sexuality. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Glamour, Electric Literature, and many more.
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Shanta Lee: Diana, this is so juicy, and before I take a dive into the bigger questions, I want to know about the genesis of Dark Beds. There is so much happening now in pop culture and literature that focuses on the messy intersections between raw emotion, motherhood, and domesticity (I’m thinking of how Halsey talked about it in the film If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power and the current explorations in horror). I want to hear how this book came to be. As the reader, I felt like I was with you and bearing witness to your telling within the cave of this telling in verse.
Diana Whitney: Shanta, yes, this subject is messy and raw and complex. Dark Beds began after I stepped out of The Baby Cave of early motherhood and desire reawakened—desire not just for a lover but for wildness, for creative freedom and adventure. I felt trapped by cultural imperatives of “the good mother”—the need to sacrifice one’s selfhood for children and family—and I channeled my longing into these poems. The speaker in Dark Beds is obsessed with transgression. She escapes the confines of the domestic world by venturing into Vermont’s lush woods and fields, where danger and pleasure intertwine and an intoxicating muse awaits. Many of these poems were born in the woods up the hill from my house, a magical place of ferns and maples where I run on the trails or walk with my journal in hand.
I’m curious about your relationship with the wild, what you call in your book “the fevered feral.” How did This Is How They Teach You to Want It…The Slaughter begin for you? Is there a landscape that embodies the feral?
SL: I hear you on the cultural imperatives of mothering, and I wonder if those strictures played a role in my avoiding it. The fevered feral feels like that escape for me. Last year, I started a manuscript that felt like it was intersecting the macabre and dreamscape. Basically, I asked myself: How can I step away from my me-ness into something that takes some wild twists and turns? Our dreams offer us a doorway through which we can walk and disrobe from whoever we are in daily life. I’ve kept a dream diary for over 20 years, so on one level, this project started before I became consciously aware. The original idea of stepping into my dreams and stepping away from myself merged with thinking about the human as being among the most dangerous of animals, as well as the legend of the wild hunt (“Wilde Jagd” in German) and folklore about ghost riders. What is it to be a hunter? What is it to embody the hunted? Can the hunted thing be a god or deity based on a hunter’s dedication to exploring the worldscape of what they wish to kill?
DW: This is fascinating. Have you ever hunted yourself? Asking because I know some strong women here in Vermont who have intimate knowledge of the woods and can track and kill a deer.
SL: I’ve always found it cool when anyone has that knowledge! In real life, I don’t hunt and don’t have any moral thoughts or enough of a relationship with it to comment. However, I’m drawn to the idea of a goal—whether it is accomplishing what seems to be impossible professionally or, when I was much younger, going after a man I wanted. The concept of a hunt or being a hunter kept me focused and ensured that I would never again be without, having come from a lower socioeconomic background.
For the work, my main question became: What does it mean to slaughter? And what is considered the most brutal slaughter? I had conversations with friends, and my partner described an experience of being on a train where an animal was slaughtered—the bloodless nature of it. In terms of the landscape that embodies the feral, I see it when relinquish all levels of our identity, emerging into the space of imagination without a ceiling. I think many of us come from a long line of wild-child-fevered-feraled-whatnots that need recognition and an embrace. I’m not speaking to the “trend” of marketing or branding the wild feminine. The fevered feral just is; it can’t be bought or sold.
DW: I love this idea of disrobing, of shedding our known identities and stepping into the dreamscape. And seeing wildness as a lineage that we can embrace, one that may or may not be gendered. I’ve been doing ancestor work for the past few years, reimagining and reclaiming my Jewish ancestors in Russia, traveling back centuries to envision wise women, bold crones, and rural witches who can be resources for healing. I’m curious: did Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ “wild woman” archetype influence your conception of the feral? I see kinship with Estes in how you play with myth and folklore in this collection and subvert traditional power structures, like ”The Granny who was always the wolf” (“Like attracts like, like”). And the “shameless howl in wee hours” that the speaker experiences at the end of the book (“Fever Dreams of a Feral (III)”).
SL: Yes! The collection was deeply influenced by what I call my bible, Women Who Run with the Wolves by Dr. Estes. Its stitching comes from different versions of fairy tales that involve girls or women doing what they need to do to live a life of their choosing. My feral sensibility includes the wisdom of Millie Jackson and countless Blues albums with lyrics about never showing too many teeth to a man or you’ll give him the wrong idea. It’s also just in my blood, the way that I know few stories of the generations of wild women I come from, but I can feel their underlying current.
Diana, I have questions about many poems, but specifically “Dumb Blonde.” This one struck me as holding latent warnings about being a girl or woman in the world. I’m thinking of the last stanza:
“Yes, she’s a love-sponge, but she’ll snap
if you make a move for her marrow bone.
She knows what she likes, won’t
hesitate to show it. When the boxer
mounts her, she snarls like a jackal,
spins & shakes him off—her signature
move. Fierce bitch, stubborn bitch, sweet
bitch with the fox-blonde face, the only one
I’ll never have to teach.”
Talk to me about those last lines. They made me think of the way we have to pass knowledge to each other and act as the keepers of our sisters.
DW: “Dumb Blonde” was my way into writing about female adolescence, the vulnerability of girls, how mean and judgmental they can be in their own precarious experience of their bodies. When my daughters used this time-worn gendered insult about our family dog (a golden retriever mix), mocking her even as they snuggled her on the floor, I was disturbed at how easily misogyny creeps into our language and thinking. The mother in the poem admires the dog’s clear boundaries, how she defends them instinctually, even viciously—especially when refusing the mating rituals of the male. What if adolescent girls felt free to reject boys in this way? We can’t even imagine it. The “teaching” at the end is definitely about passing on knowledge, in this case from mother to daughter, knowledge about bodily autonomy and how to defend oneself. In a previous version, the ending was more explicit: “never have to teach / about boundaries.” But I realized the knowledge was something vaster than that.
SL: Seeing your answer and this poem inspired me to revisit how I was taught boundaries as a girl. It was messy. I was encouraged never to become a wife. I found myself trying to find a comfortable place between my desire and giving permission and rejecting what I did not want in an environment where many rules were placed on my body by my parents. I took the feral I wanted to be and discovered some instructions along the way.
Diana, in terms of the transference of knowledge and navigating who you wanted to be in the world, what is your first memory of how you decided to commingle your ferality and domesticity? What is your definition of feral? In our culture, I find that we don’t allow space for all of the things to be true, and we make judgments when the wild woman or feral woman creates her own meaning of domestic space. I am curious about how you have tangoed with that?
DW: I feel a powerful tension between desire/surrender and autonomy/resistance running through all your work—especially in your photographs and in this new chapbook. Thinking back to my own girlhood in the 80s, I wasn’t taught “boundaries” in any meaningful way, especially by my mother, who was a survivor of terrifying domestic violence that was never spoken of in our family. In this silence, and in a patriarchal culture where the concept of consent did not exist beyond the empty slogan of “No means no.” I learned that my body wasn’t fully mine—it existed for boys. For their pleasure and appraisal and judgment. Was I worthy of attention? Was I ugly or hot? How could I make myself more desirable, likable? In adolescence, I suppressed my queerness and hid my longing for other girls, channeling my energy and self-worth into infatuations with boys who didn’t give a shit about me and enduring non-consensual sex without understanding I’d been violated.
SL: Where does the wild woman come in?
DW: The wild woman exists purely for herself; she’s not in service to others. Now, in my middle age, I’m still learning how to own my own desire and speak it, how to integrate my feral self into the domestic world, my role as mother and wife (nurturing, loving, etc.). It’s a lifelong process.
I feel wildest when I’m out in nature—swimming naked in a river, running up a mountain, encountering a deer in the woods. Not in the kitchen, or even the bedroom. Experiencing ferality within the context of a long marriage is challenging. Dark Beds is indebted to the work of Esther Perel, the groundbreaking couples therapist who wrote Mating in Captivity, exploring the connection between eroticism and the unknown and asking “How can you want what you already have?”
You’re right that the culture doesn’t allow for contradictions or messiness, especially for women. That’s why the page can be so freeing—a place for our wildness and strangeness, our multitudinous natures. Writing the poems in Dark Beds was exhilarating, letting me journey into mystery and stay the course of the life I’ve chosen.
Shanta, how does poetry hold all your various selves and identities? How do you connect with both the hunter and the hunted you write about in This Is How They Teach You to Want It…The Slaughter?
SL: I can back into this question by talking about the ways all the arts I explore help to hold parts of me, and how I love bringing them all together for a connected whole. Verse—through its rhythm, construction, and meter—carries so much with control and restraint. Poetry is the part of me that wrestles with the tamed and untamed, restraint and freedom. Perhaps it is wind. My prose is the fire, the raw, the telling that threatens to destroy with its fullness, and it invites rebuilding. My photography and filming work feels like water and earth: it always finds a way through; it can be grounding. Across all of this, there is room for play and eroding boundaries. Poetry will always hold the part of myself that contains layers of meaning I can’t quite get to. I want my self and body to be that kind of verse, that tangible yet intangible equation.
To answer your other question, in my mind’s eye, I am a sharpshooter, a huntress. I feel a rhythm of “go…go and get” for whatever I seek. I would tell myself that no man, woman, or child was going to get in the pathway of what I wanted. This didn’t mean that I would hurt someone on purpose, but that I would push aside the blockage. I also noticed, over time, that I was the hunted, consciously and unconsciously. Rather than judging those moments, this manuscript has allowed me to explore the continuum between prey and predator as a human living within a larger ecosystem. I’ve been the tiger in Angela Carter’s story “The Tiger’s Bride,” and I’ve been the bride who becomes the tiger. On each side of that equation, I ask myself: what am I willing to risk to be in that role?
DW: I love the archetype of the huntress. As someone who was named for the goddess of the hunt, I often find myself weaving her into my writing. In both Dark Beds and Wanting It, I channeled her clarity and keen vision, her power to pursue what she desires and destroy what she scorns. Artemis was a pitiless goddess who lived without men and didn’t hesitate to murder a mortal for trespassing on her realm. I have the symbol of her medieval followers, a crescent moon, tattooed on my wrist, to remind me of that aspect of my nature.
SL: Diana, I am so curious about what is next for you. Where do you imagine going after Dark Beds? Is there an unchartered territory or part of yourself that you wish to explore on the page?
DW: I just finished a new full-length manuscript called Girl Trouble, about girls, rape culture, and excavating female adolescence. This project takes the themes and questions of “Dumb Blonde” and unapologetically runs with them, which has been thrilling and also, at times, depleting.
I’m a survivor of sexual violence and both the daughter and mother of a survivor, so I used feminist theory and generational trauma studies as the scaffolding for the new poems. From Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Nasser to the Steubenville rape case and campus sexual assault, I wanted to amplify the voices of survivors and examine what Melissa Febos calls “the comprehensive mindfuck of adolescent girlhood under patriarchy.” Girl Trouble differs from my previous books in how it moves beyond the personal and domestic to engage explicitly with the world and with systems of power—and to challenge those systems. Because I’m also an activist who writes op-eds and protests in the streets, I explored the intersection of poetry and activism and experimented with the use of humor as well as registers of emotional intensity, ranging from cool detachment to white-hot rage. The Girl Trouble poems were unruly, and I found I often needed to contain them formally, playing with a range of forms including acrostic, abecedarian, sestina, and villanelle.
The older I get, the more I find anger is a source of creative power and the less I care about being likable. I’m embracing the crone archetype of woman as creator and destroyer. It’s liberating.
What projects are next for you, across all the different genres and fields you work in? What are you reading or watching that is inspiring you right now?
SL: Anger as a source for the creative, it feels like channeling. I love that! And congratulations on finishing your manuscript, it is timely! Most of what is watering the garden of my inspiration ranges from good films and podcasts to just thinking about ways to untie myself from the noise of the world, find spaces for nurturing silence and internal alchemy. I am working with a team on an exhibition inspired by Black Metamorphoses, and I’m collaborating with my partner on another iteration of Dark Goddess for an exhibition. I’m also working towards polishing a collection of fiction and co-editing an anthology, Sign and Breath (forthcoming from Etruscan Press), about voice in prose and poetry. There are other projects in different states of finish. My process is holding space for the quality, not the quantity, of the work while also continuing to take lessons from the feral. I find that the fevered feral demands unapologetic space for what is, especially in the landscape of creativity.
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