Interview by Kate Finegan
Paola Ferrante’s debut collection, What To Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack (Mansfield Press, 2019), explores how women survive trauma and abuse, and how society continues to allow these abuses to occur. The collection draws connections between psychology and horror films, is rich with animal imagery, and pulls no punches. I spoke with Paola over mango juices after a vigorous climb at Basecamp in Toronto.
Kate Finegan: In your interview for Wombwell Rainbow, you compare poetry to code-breaking. You note that you want to reveal the obvious in unexpected ways. What makes poetry an ideal form for this sort of code-breaking?
Paola Ferrante: Poetry is the only form where you have to pay attention to all the multiple possible meanings of a word. For instance, my poem PRIME TIME HORROR STORY deals with all the horrors visited on women’s bodies, including anti-abortion laws, through the use of urban legends. In the poem, a man “says he’s concerned / with the state / of the children.” With state, my intention is to evoke a state of being, the state of the nation, the United States—and we all know what’s going on in Alabama and Mississippi right now. Exploring multiplicities in words and teasing out those ideas is what makes poetry ideal for code-breaking. Poetry, with its line breaks to signal attention to words that have multiple meanings, is the only art form where words get to be all the things they are, with all their resonances, at the same time.
KF: Repetition also highlights the multiple meanings of words. You use repetition so beautifully within poems and across the collection. I’m thinking especially about the very first poem, THINGS SHE WANTS, and the way that you build through repetition—”a dog,” “a female dog,” and so on. How does repetition heighten our awareness of the codes within our society and the subtleties of language? What are you doing with repetition?
PF: For me, repetition started very naturally because I have a background in music. What I’m doing with that particular poem, and others that really rely on repetition, is trying to build a sense that this is what’s happening, this is what’s happening, this is what’s happening, now how do we break it? This is similar to what a song does structurally. There’s the chorus, the chorus again, and all of a sudden, you get a variation on the theme. (My Royal Conservatory teacher would be very proud of me right now!)
Repetition also plays into operant and classical conditioning, which are used in the poems as a device. In classical conditioning, you are trying to pair stimulus and response, stimulus and response over and over and over and over again. And in operant conditioning, you’re taking it a step further and saying, “Okay, I’m going to increase the frequency of the behaviour, increase the frequency of the behaviour.” This sort of conditioning happens with abusive and toxic relationships. There’s the conditioning that this is what’s normal, and that’s why it’s so hard to leave abusive situations. With these poems, I wanted the reader to have that experience of being stuck in a repetition that becomes overwhelming. Jim Johnstone told me when you read THINGS SHE WANTS it almost sounds like you’re being beaten. But I’m glad it has that effect on the reader in terms of the experience I wanted to convey.
In another poem, GOING SOUTH, I use repetition to highlight the implicit messages that we get as women in toxic relationships—that things will be better next time. It can be very tough to see your way out of that situation. And that’s where the repetition comes in—because the problem is overwhelming.
KF: What’s your favourite line in this collection?
PF: “Tell everyone I’m smiling / despite the dynamite.” We fake being okay, a lot. And that goes back to the title. You don’t care what you’re wearing when you’re surviving a lion attack, you just want to survive. But there is the pressure to put on a face, to smile while you do it.
KF: I noticed you mention bombs and eggs quite a bit in this collection. What do these mean to you, and how are they in conversation?
PF: This collection has an undercurrent of fear. There’s a fear of being powerless in the face of a patriarchal society and fear and horrors in general that women face. And there’s a lot of references to bombs, because there is the feeling that we’re living under threat. When I look at eggs, obviously they’re a not-so-subtle symbol of fertility. They’re also incredibly fragile. There’s always a fear that they will be broken, before they develop into anything. Then there’s the idea of walking on eggshells in a toxic relationship, what it feels like to hold your breath, waiting for the bomb to drop, waiting for stuff to happen.
On the positive side with bombs, I also wanted to explore ideas of power. For example, when I was researching the poem TO MY PEEPING TOM, I found out that watching the atomic bomb detonate was actually a tourist attraction in Vegas in the fifties, so much so that showgirls would dress up in mushroom cloud outfits to perform. I wanted to give that sense with the bomb imagery at the end of the piece that the idea of who holds this power is changing—“All those women / pictured nightly, / dressed in tiny // mushroom clouds, / wondering if you know what / and who you’re watching, / if it’s going to be different this time, / if you’ve come / too close.” I wanted to say that that enough is enough, that the bomb is going off in popular culture and women are the ones who are pushing the button this time.
KF: It’s crazy what you can find in research. What’s your favourite research rabbit hole?
PF: My favourite was actually for a short story I wrote that recently got published in Room magazine about a sentient sex robot. The interview in that story is almost taken verbatim from an actual talk show interview with the creator of Samantha, a prototypical sex robot. There’s footage of this guy who did bring his wife onto the show and was like, “Yeah, my wife’s totally fine with it, no worries. You can put Samantha into different modes, like family mode.” So that was really fun to research—and horrifying. Then it got me thinking how turning off the robot is the same as an animal playing dead dad, which is technically called defensive thanatosis, or tonic immobility. And that led me to the fascinating fact—which I believe you are aware of—that you can hypnotize chickens by drawing a chalk line. The poem “Pendulum” in this collection makes use of that. All that stuff about which animals play dead? Yeah, that was a pretty deep hole.
KF: This collection puts science and psychology in conversation with horror films. I noticed some mirror images. THE TRUE CONFESSIONS OF BUFFALO BILL refers to “chainsaws spreading / girls open” and SPECIMEN says “Show me yours and I’ll show you / how a frog looks // spread out, pinned down.” How did you bring together these different fields and threads to illuminate their similarities? What was your thought process?
PF: One of my undergrad majors, aside from creative writing, was psychology. The classic studies in psychology are very horrifying, like pre-ethics committee stuff. Like, you’re getting people to believe they shocked other people, you’re holding people in prisons for two weeks. It’s crazy. And the experimenter has all the power—especially when you think about a figure like B.F. Skinner, who informs a lot of this collection. The experimenter is the ultimate authority; he is the one who has all the power, and then there is the person or animal who doesn’t. That’s a lot like horror movies to me. In slasher films, the serial killer has all the power, and there’s always the powerful and the powerless. That’s the connection between those two fields.
KF: You often the use the imperative in poems. In GOING SOUTH, you start with “In case of armageddon, learn your knots.” There’s urgency, and it echoes the language of doctors and experts, people who are positions of power. Could you discuss what the imperative in poems does for you?
PF: It allows for a deconstruction of how ridiculous certain conventional advice is when it comes to personal relationships. Because it’s often a blanket statement. It’s given without knowing the specifics of what someone’s really going through. So in that poem, it’s “learn to tie the knot, but don’t bother with untying. That’s not what you learned in church,” inspired by the terrible advice many people offered to my aunt when she was being abused by her husband.
Then sometimes I use the imperative simply to put some distance between the reader and difficult subject matter so the reader isn’t completely overwhelmed and can process the poem, The last poem in the collection, EXTINCTION, uses the imperative because lines in it are direct advice that is given to women who are trying to leave abusive situations, “Practice an escape route. // Know where you’ll go, even if you don’t think you’ll have to.” In a way, it’s definitely a method of writing a poem about what you can’t write a poem about, which is my favourite prompt from Priscilla Uppal’s class. It feels different from writing something in first- or third-person because I’m very conscious that I’m giving the reader no choice but to be in the poem and react to those commands given and to feel it when someone tells you do this, do this, do this, and to feel that weight on you. I hope it brings the reader closer to the emotional experience of the poem.
KF: There’s so much animal imagery in this collection. Often the imagery is connected to the experience of living as a woman in a body. What do animals offer you when you are telling that story?
PF: I think the reason I use so many animals—aside from the fact that I find them really interesting—is because there are so many assumptions about what’s natural for women to do in our society. But when you look at natural animal behaviour and talk about animal instinct, you can turn those assumptions on their head. There’s some ambivalence towards motherhood in this book, for example. There’s often an unspoken pressure from family and from society that women of a certain age will have children. You know, because your biological clock is ticking.
KF: Like a bomb.
PF: There we go. There’s the eggs and the bombs again. So the poem RATIONING compares the difficulties inherent in the choice of having children to the natural process of burying beetles who eat their offspring if they think it’s necessary for them or their other offspring to survive. So, with animals, I wanted to question what is really natural when it comes to survival? Is it what you think it is? And is it an answer you didn’t want? That’s what I want to put under the magnifying glass—the answers that people don’t want, that this really happens and we need to take a closer look.
KF: Speaking of brutality, as your climbing partner, I have to ask, how is writing like climbing a rock wall?
PF: I’ve thought a lot about this particular metaphor, usually when I’m seven feet in the air and struggling to find the next hold! So, getting on a rock wall sometimes feels impossible. I’m not sure how to approach it, just like in a poem or piece of fiction. Sometimes your ideas are just gestating and you don’t really know the way into them yet. But then when you find that first hold, you find another hold, and another and another, and something takes over to propel you up the wall or through the piece.
And on rock walls, like in fiction and poetry, as you well know, I often get stuck. And I can hang out there for a little bit being like, “Okay, well, we got this far. We got the beginning done. But now what? How am I going to get to the next part?” Because I see the next part. And I can see how I can get through that. It’s the same with a piece of prose. At the beginning, I know how it has to end and I know where I’m going. What’s this midsection? What’s happening here? And then most of the time in order to really feel I’ve conquered a wall, I have to do it more than once even though I don’t really want to sometimes. It’s like, “No, I got up. It’s enough. It’s enough.” But first drafts are first drafts. They might make almost no sense to anyone but the writer, and then it’s only by chiseling away at the poem or the piece of prose that you really are able to do it. That’s the mastery that comes with doing the thing over and over again.
Paola Ferrante‘s work has appeared, or is forthcoming in The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Grain, CV2, Room, Joyland and elsewhere. She won Room‘s 2018 prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for PRISM International’s Grouse Grind. Her debut full length poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was published Spring 2019 by Mansfield Press. She is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and is currently working on a collection of short fiction. She resides in Toronto, Canada.
Kate Finegan‘s work has been published in Prism International, The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, SmokeLong Quarterly, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Size of Texas, is available from Penrose Press. She is Assistant Fiction Editor at Longleaf Review. She lives in Toronto. You can find her at katefinegan.ink and twitter.com/@kehfinegan.