A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MONICA FERRELL AND DIANA WHITNEY
Diana Whitney is a queer writer and educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (Workman, 2021), winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of three full-length poetry collections: Wanting It, Dark Beds, and Girl Trouble (CavanKerry Press, 2026). Diana writes across genres with a focus on feminism and desire. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Glamour, and other outlets. She has received grants and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Vermont Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, she works as a developmental editor and a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.
Monica Ferrell is the author of four books of fiction and poetry, including The Future (March 2026) and the collection You Darling Thing (2018), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and Believer Book Award in Poetry. Her novel The Answer Is Always Yes (Dial Press/Random House) was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Novels of the Year. Her first collection of poems, Beasts for the Chase, was a finalist for the Asian American Writers Workshop Prize in Poetry and won the Sarabande Books Kathryn A. Morton Prize. She has been recognized with residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. She has taught fiction and poetry for the MFA Programs at Columbia University and Bennington College, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Purchase College (SUNY). She was born in Delhi, India, and divides her time between Vermont and New York.
Diana Whitney: I’d love to talk about The Future and how it reckons with history and sometimes deep history. What is the origin story of this book for you?
Monica Ferrell: This is my third collection of poetry, and like the first two, it’s tracked with different stages of my life.
I’ve heard it said that for debut poets, the first book is kind of inventing the myth of oneself—reckoning with, recognizing who you are and what you’ve been made of, what has influenced you. I don’t mean just poetically, but other things that contributed to your emerging as an individual self. That was definitely true of my first book. It was kind of becoming a person.
My second book had to do with asking questions around romantic love and marriage. I was in a phase of my life where I was going through all that and considering getting married. And then, I did get married and was trying to figure out what that was, what those responsibilities were, the joys of romance, and the shitty parts too.
So I knew this third book was probably going to track with what was going on with me. And the big change was that I had become a mother of one child, then, while writing the book, two children. So I thought, oh, I’ll be writing a motherhood book. But to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t excited about that.
I think there is some ingrained misogyny in me where I was like, “Oh, a motherhood book, golly gee, that’ll be earth-shaking.” And it’s too bad that I didn’t automatically consider it a worthy topic. I think I had a tendency to dismiss things that are domestic.
DW: I think the culture trains us to view motherhood as some niche thing, not a literary subject, and we need a special journal or press for those poems. Actually what I love is how motherhood is threaded through your book, as opposed to announced.
I felt more and more as I was reading it that the future is actually born through a woman giving birth. And it’s astonishing that we would ever think otherwise.
But then you consider the power of misogyny, which we’ve been steeped in for millennia, to make us think the work of gestation and birth is something irrelevant and trivial.
MF: Yes, I was questioning that. I would say that the book has a lot to do with time. What changed for me in my relationship with time started with the pandemic, honestly, the whole Groundhog Day nature of it—just the same day over and over, time not seeming to move forward yet everything needing to be renewed, you need to make the meals, do the washing, teach classes online. In the beginning, I would count down days . . . we’ve lived through three weeks of this, we’ve lived through four. It felt kind of apocalyptic, the world ending, though around that time I also read about the discovery of the earliest known pandemic, found in the bodies of people living around 30,000 years ago, and I thought, “Oh, actually we’ve been doing this more or less forever.”
DW: Girl Trouble also began in the depths of the pandemic—the first poem in the collection, “Watching Thelma & Louise during Lockdown with My Daughters,” was actually the first poem I wrote, long before I knew I was writing a book. It was a claustrophobic time when the days blurred together and we were isolated as a nuclear family unit. That darkness became an incubator for the poems.
My two kids were in middle and high school then, so it was a particularly intense passage that they were going through. I experienced a kind of double vision, remembering my own girlhood as I witnessed what my daughters and their friends were living, and I started writing on themes of female adolescence, including surviving sexual violence. I returned to some of the hardest years of my life, you know, 12, 13. It was an excavation and I had to write my way through it. Sometimes I tried to contain it in form, but I’m a slow writer and it took me years, starting around March of 2020.
MF: I consider that to be very fast! I mean, the writers whom I admire are not popping out a book every couple years.
DW: Definitely. Marie Howe is a poet I love and she writes maybe one extraordinary book a decade.
MF: She was my teacher. And to your point, she said to us once in a workshop, “Don’t you want to write a poem that can be engraved in stone and last a thousand years?” She was like, I don’t want to write the here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of poem, a flash in the pan.
DW: Yes, sometimes I tell myself, “If Marie Howe writes a book a decade, who am I to think I should be faster?”
It’s interesting what you said about your third book being more expansive because that trajectory feels true for me.
My first book, Wanting It, was definitely inventing the myth of myself, and then I went into domesticity and desire, marriage and betrayal in my second collection. This new book is still deeply personal but it expands outwards systemically, looking at what it means to live in a culture that’s steeped in casual violence, from an offhand comment made by a dad at a playdate to a long section called “Open Secret,” which is about the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. I was pulling a thread between all these stories, wanting to show how my story is not extraordinary, I’m just one of millions and millions of survivors.
I did a lot of research, reading books and interviews and watching documentaries on the Epstein survivors and the victims of Larry Nassar. I wrote found poems or centos as a way to amplify their voices.
MF: I definitely felt kinship with that work of yours and in fact personally have tried various kinds of working with documentary materials on the same topic. A few years ago I was at a residency and I tried very hard to make it work. There was this guy, I’m not even going to invoke his name, but he was one of those incels who had gone and shot up a gym . . . It was an aerobics class, I think. He used to work out at that gym and leer at the women. He went back when they were peacefully doing their exercises. And he left behind a manifesto. I tried to use his words and put them formally into different structures and ultimately I was just so sick from the experience. I felt like it could be interesting but on the other hand, my stomach got to turning at a certain point. What was that like for you to work with that material?
DW: It was sickening. I actually did get physically ill. I have a chronic pain condition that can flare up or lie dormant for years and no surprise, it flared up during that time.
But it felt necessary. It’s interesting that you say, “I’m not even going to invoke his name,” because one of the rules I set for myself was never to say the name Epstein. In the poems I use “he” or “him,” and if it does appear, I black it out. I feel like that name, especially now with it splashed all over the news, has been said enough for eternity.
I was trying to turn my attention to the survivors, and there were more poems that got cut from that section. It ended up being much smaller than I’d intended. I thought maybe it would be half the book, but it became one chapter in the midst of other strands.
MF: Yeah, that was the right call, from my vantage point. I wanted to ask you about structure and sequencing, because it’s so carefully done. But first I want to say that if you had allowed that particular thematic piece to grow larger, it would have felt like it limited the book to be about a single malefactor. Instead there’s an historical echo—this is happening in the culture, but it’s also happening on a personal level, and it’s also happening thirty years ago, and it’s happening today and to people who are not even known.
DW: That was my hope. When I was in it, everything was so muddled, and I had to give it time to sit before I did the sequencing that you mention. It became clear for me that I was going to need a lot of different forms to contain the material.
For example, I was writing about the Steubenville rape case and I knew I was going to put it into a sestina because I needed a very specific scaffolding to hold it. I wanted to be guided through it with the six end words, and I wanted to know that it was going to end—and for the reader to know that too. And instead of one voice which is fairly consistent throughout the book, maybe like my previous collections, I became aware that there were many different voices. Some of the “I” speakers are stand-ins for me and some are not. Some of the daughters in the book are echoes of my own and some are not. That’s something I love about poetry as opposed to, say, writing a memoir, where you’re claiming the book is true and factual and it all happened to you.
The arc of Girl Trouble starts with home and motherhood, childhood and adolescence, then moves into college and my campus assault, then out into the culture, to the superpredators. What drove the sequence was not just sorrow but rage. It was cathartic on a personal level and quite powerful to let anger release in poems for the first time. I felt like finally, as a middle aged woman, I had permission to let rage come through. I also knew I wanted to end with more lightness, with a throughline of resilience, to say: despite everything, we’re still here. We’re still alive.
MF: Yeah, I was really struck as soon as I opened the book by the first poem with Thelma and Louise and the daughters. I’m conscious of ending my book with my own birth—having talked about being grown and giving birth to other people, it ends with my own, which is sort of backward chronologically.
But it seemed important, and this is going to sound sort of new age or woo woo, but maybe linearity is a false construct anyway.
I mean, DNA is not linear. Traits come back to us. It’s crazy to me that when a woman has a daughter in her womb she has that daughter’s eggs inside her—more than that girl will ever have, maybe 2 million eggs when she’s a fetus and then she loses them. I was really thinking a lot about these cycles and it doesn’t seem strange to me at all to end with the speaker being born.
DW: That was an amazing moment, because I’d spent time with the earlier poems in The Future and was struck by how we keep cycling back. We go back to the ’50s, to the 18th century, we go back to Mary, then even further back, to the aurochs and the time when humans lived in herds.
There’s this sense of the evolution of the species, so when everything narrows and simultaneously expands in the moment of the birth of the poet, it feels explosive.
I wonder if you can speak about poetry as a kind of spellcasting, something that can protect us, as in “With Amulets.”
MF: Yes I thought it was funny that in your book you mention a guy with a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag.
DW: Ha, that poem is about the culture war happening here on my dirt road!
MF: I changed mine at the last minute and didn’t name the exact flag. But that was what I meant about the weird flags at the grocery store.
DW: Yes—“Red hats, weird flags / Emblazoned with snakes and runes”—it’s eerie and very effective, it feels like it doesn’t have to be 2020, we could be in a different point in history.
MF: Right. When I see these snake flags, there’s something very ancient about it too.
In making this book, I took a lot of research trips to places. I’ve always loved archaeology anyway. One example that struck me, which comes in one of the late poems, is when I went to this place in Denmark, where they have a huge horde of silver late Roman shields and swords and all kinds of objects. And they are carved all over with prayers to their gods, for preservation in battle basically. And it’s such a weird feeling because whoever carved them, whoever wanted to be preserved, is not only long gone but presumably, their carvings and prayers didn’t work. Because they went into battle against the Danes, who chopped them up and took their stuff and then threw it in a bog hundreds of miles away from wherever the battle was. It’s chilling because you feel like, I’m looking at their hopes, their hopes were to be alive. And, they tried their darndest, but all you can do is write shit down and hope that it sticks.
I’ve always been kind of interested in forms of writing as witchcraft, like in Roman times apparently, if you wanted to curse somebody, you would write out what you wanted to happen to them on a piece of paper and then you would burn it, and then you put the ashes in wine and drink it. But you didn’t have to be a witch or anything. It was enough to be an ordinary person. You would write something on a piece of paper and then make it a part of you, so I was thinking about that when I wrote “With Amulets.”
DW: I love that backstory. I do not claim to be a witch, but I felt that same potency when I was channeling the current of rage in my poems. I was in the midst of the research on Epstein and Nassar, while being an advocate for survivors in my hometown—because there was a sexual abuse investigation happening in our school system while I was writing the book.
And I kept seeing the same patterns of harm repeating and thought, I’m going to write a curse poem. I’m going to write an actual curse for a perpetrator or abuser. I’m a backyard gardener here in Vermont and know that some of the things we grow are poison. Some plants in the nightshade family can kill you, and I imagined myself as a hedgewitch casting a spell. It was exhilarating to see a poem as a kind of a hex.
Let’s talk about form. Could you speak about your process of composition in The Future, because I found your stanzas very crystalline—often in tercets, sometimes with no end punctuation, lines starting with capitals. Did they come out that way in your early drafts, or was it through successive revision that you found the form?
MF: That was a really new thing for me, and I don’t know if I’ll do it in another book, but these ones came out that way. Not every poem in the book is like that, there are some that are more of my older style. Most of the time I’ve done initial capitalization of my lines, which some people would criticize as being old fashioned. I see it as being in line with my poetry mentor Lucie Brock-Broido, who also thinks quite a lot about poetry as sort of sorcery. But even though I was doing the capitalizations before, there is something different about the stanzas this time. Often they don’t have punctuation. They came out like individual utterances. If anything, they felt a little bit like one-line statements by a woman on stage in a black box theater, a dramatic monologue quality. Most of the time I had no idea where I was going next, I was just following along statement by statement.
In this regard, perhaps I was influenced by Mark Strand, who was my husband’s mentor. Strand apparently said that he’d put down a line and then put down the next line out of that line, and then line three has to come out of line two, it can’t come out of line one. It has to keep moving forward in that way and you really feel it when you read his poems. Each new line is so unexpected.
Sometimes I do this experiment with my writing classes, word association.We go around in a circle and the trick is to say your word out of the person who speaks immediately before you and you can’t have an idea from farther back and be holding on to it. You actually have to just go with whatever you were just given. I think that helps to make it impossible to force things. You can’t say, “Oh, I have this really cool place where I want to end up.” We all know those poems, which feel too pat.
DW: Right, like you’re writing towards some grand moment.
I really felt that your speaker had this calm authority, that the poems were of a piece.
MF: This lineation style is making it a lot easier for me to read the work out loud.
DW: They read that way internally for the reader, too.
MF: One thing about your form that strikes me is how really, carefully worked over it is. In many cases—you know, this is a big book. I’m not going to say in every single poem, but in many of them. Even visually on the page: for example, you have lines that are in cascading stanzas. And the effect of it for me was a sense of your asserting power over this material. Asserting a command and control over it.
DW: Anywhere I could impose something on the material, I did. For example, in the “Open Secret” section, I used cascading stanzas to describe Epstein’s island and the environmental degradation he wreaked there. I needed to contain that site of abuse and not let it consume me.
It became clear as I was writing that this was going to be a maximalist book. Not a tight project book with a singular theme or note, which has become quite popular. The further I got into it, the more I saw it as a multitude of voices and forms. I was also varying it for myself, enjoying the challenge and musical pleasure of writing a villanelle, and then moving on to something more stark, like an erasure poem.
During the editing process, there were definitely people who told me to trim it down, to cut the more explicitly feminist poems. And I held my course, which felt good.
MF: I don’t think it is superficial to notice a cover first. I noticed yours, which is arresting and beautiful. First of all, are you related to the person who made the cover image by any chance? I noticed your last name in the notes.
DW: That’s my daughter, Carmen. It’s a photo she took when she was 17, for her senior year art exhibition. I gave the CavanKerry Press designer a few of Carmen’s photos to choose from. I wanted to use an image made by a teen girl, of a teen girl—to foreground that perspective in Girl Trouble. It felt like the opposite of the male gaze.
Your cover is so striking. Is it an image you chose?
MF: Yes. I’m very happy with how it ended up. What is in the painting is a woman who can’t see. That seemed to be important for the idea of the future and our not being able to perceive what’s there. Also, in this case we don’t know whose hands those are either.
DW: That was the first thing that I thought when I saw her—are those her hands? They might not be. It suggests this quality of inner sight.
MF: Totally. And now that it’s out, I’ve also been looking at other covers by female authors. I don’t know if you’ve seen Maggie Smith’s, which is also a woman’s face covered up. As with your book.
DW: You see her throat and her ears in close detail, but her eyes are closed.
MF: And so we don’t know what she’s seeing either, which gives it an inner sight quality as well. Her eyes are trained inward. I don’t want to limit the image to one meaning. But perhaps the suggestion is that, today, the only way for a woman to cope is by, you know, not looking at what’s there.
You make a clear case for that in the opening poem, the one about Thelma and Louise going off a cliff, with the speaker watching the film with her young daughters. That there is no place in the world for their style of female liberation. And somehow this seems to be connected to the not seeing, you know. As though a rupture with the real has to happen in order to live one’s reality or, you know, cope.
DW: Absolutely. And yet somehow we persist and the speech persists.