Holy Water in a Haunted House
An Interview with Meg E. Griffitts
My first memory of Meg E. Griffitts is of her desk. We both worked as teaching assistants while M.F.A. students at Texas State University and shared a group office space. Daily, I stared at the postcard-sized poster of the 1950’s sci-fi film, The Attack of the 50ft Woman, she had taped above her workspace. The image is quite provocative. A classically attractive, extremely tall woman straddles a highway as she terrorizes the drivers, causing crashes and mayhem beneath her legs.
As I got to know Meg and witness her incisive intelligence as a teacher, poet, and friend, it was no surprise to me that she’d selected this image for her desk. Much of our discussions between lesson planning centered on gender, power, and contradiction, which are also some of the central themes in her gorgeous and stirring debut poetry collection, Hallucinating a Homestead.
It was a pleasure to reconnect with my old colleague for this interview, in which we discussed the similarities of music and poetry, the creative process, and writing about sex. Though we chatted back and forth over email, I almost felt as if we’d traveled back to our communal office days in Flowers Hall.
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Shannon Perri: Before we dive into your book, I’d love to learn about your philosophy on poetry. Do you believe that poetry is meant to be read as literally as possible, or is it more about evoking a certain feeling--or something else? Put another way, what should the reader ask of a poem, and a poem of its reader?
Meg E. Griffitts: Poetry to me has always been like music—a medium that doesn’t rely on a literal/singular interpretation and one that has a flexible relationship with its audience. I know folks who listen to the same song a thousand times and don’t know the lyrics, only how it settles in the chest and makes their body move. The best poems function in this way where it begins in the body. For me, poetry has always been about capturing a sound emanating from the dark, turning over phrases to expose their underbelly, for giving fabric to these feelings.
The questions we ask of poetry and poetry asks of us can be so personal. For my work, I’m reminded of poets like Ross Gay, Franny Choi, Joanna Klink, and Layli Long Soldier who ask readers: how could you live if you were allowed to live any way you wanted? Then as a reader I’m always asking what have I looked over, what do I still need to witness and ultimately investigate? I hope when readers read my poetry, they’re asking for something to be exhumed, to pull something to the water’s surface and look again, and maybe to forgive those visions. Because it’s this work that leads to new questions and frontiers.
SP: It sounds like, to you, poetry is meant to be an opening of sorts. Or to be the opener.
MG: Absolutely. Poetry, like awe, can be a gateway to the underworld, a bridge to ruminating on our seedling-place within the universe.
SP: In prose, there is a divide between truth and fiction. A book is a memoir or novel, a collection of essays or stories. We don’t ask that of poetry. Do you think we should?
MG: That’s such an interesting question because I think some poets are granted the distance between themselves and their work while some are read firmly through the lens of their identity. And so I think in order to ask poetry to establish a clear division between fiction or truth, or not, that requires a discussion of politics and poetics. I know that for a long time, I tried to avoid being seen or vulnerable in my work by relying heavily on images and lopsided language and I didn’t offer more than a title to buoy the reading. But it was Cecily Parks and her feedback to “ground the reader” during one of her graduate workshops that showed me how to balance the wild and strange with a voice. She taught me how to walk into the eerie depths and return. So, I’d say my work is a blend of truth and fiction but to what degree every poem varies, and I love the mystery of that arrangement.
SP: When did you first start writing the poems in Hallucinating a Homestead, and when did you know you had a collection?
MG: This collection took shape over the course of five years. Many of these poems I wrote during and after grad school in Texas as you can probably tell from the talismans throughout the work: a lot of cacti, rivers, and globed skylines. While some of the more recent poems like “Mother Nature’s Hot Girl Summer,” “... Ellen DeGeneres Shadowboxes,” and “Survival Skills for the New Age” were written after a series of large scale changes to my life where I had to adapt very quickly. I moved to Portland, came out, and then that fateful March when the pandemic hit, so ya know some real Saturn Return stuff. The collection really came together in the aftermath of that and I was playing around with the ordering of the poems in a dark bar when the title came to me. And that’s when I knew it was ready to be sent out, there was just a sense of getting to the end of a corridor and walking through a door.
SP: What drew you to writing poetry originally?
MG: Music was the hook in me that drew me to poetry but I didn’t really read a lot of poetry until college when I met Jake Adam York. He really got me interested in what a poem could do—resurrect the dead, give cadence to a choir, sing a murder ballad—and it was his love of music and artists like RunDMC, Lil Wayne, the list goes on, that connected me to poetry. He really looked at poetry in a way I hadn’t before—a way to avoid autobiography. It could be an elegy, a portal for forgiveness, an interrogation of place, a way “to feel two contradictory things at once.” His encouragement and tender-hearted presence propelled me forward.
SP: The poems in the book feel vulnerable, yet fierce; mystical, yet of the earth. I’m curious about your writing and revision process, as well as to hear what it’s been like revealing yourself through publication.
MG: I must confess much of my writing and revision revolve around the seasons. Late spring and summer is when I revise and catch up on reading. While fall’s silence and winter’s hibernation is when I find myself writing most. It’s taken a long time of adjusting my routines, making lots of playlists, and thinking about productivity to start trusting my writing cycle and not get swallowed up by doubt in the down time but the pandemic has required a certain settling.
And I’ll admit it’s been terrifying and exhilarating to find my work in the world, especially because it deals so specifically with shame and my ghosts, but the power in speaking back to those premonitions and the support from my community has motivated me to descend again and again.
SP: That's so fascinating about how your writing process aligns with the seasons, as seasons show up again and again in your poems. Are there other ways that the seasons, or nature in general, inspire your work?
MG: As a kid, we moved around a lot, so I looked to the natural world for a sense of order and belonging. The moon was the Virgin Mary’s mouthpiece. In the forest, I felt a kind god. The natural world was my guide to the spiritual and though Catholicism wasn’t a sustainable way of thinking for me, it did open up a path to an ecstatic ecology. I began to look above binary questions of good v evil and manmade hierarchies, which uncovered a complicated relationship to mother nature. For example, I have the privilege of going to the woods whereas a lot of folks don’t (safety, accessibility, economic) and in order to write about the river and the fields, there must be an acknowledgement of how whiteness grooms these spaces and makes environmental beauty an access point of white supremacy. So, I think my poems are always a gesture back to nature—and thinking about the tension between cycles and swelling climate change, ideas of mother nature and god, American manifest destiny and indigenous stewardship.
SP: Many of the poems are formally playful. For instance, one mimics a medical checklist, while others take on the “how-to” form. Could you talk a bit about your creative approach to form in poetry?
MG: Maybe it’s growing up in a military family but I love structure, or maybe more accurately—a vessel for strong emotions. I love experimenting with different forms, and I keep a running list in the back of my notebook of possible poetic forms I come across. For example, “How to Tell You’re the Right [ ]” was inspired by a survey I took before a therapy session and “Horrors” was imagined as newspaper clippings of missing girls. On a practical note, form can be used as a breath of fresh air in the midst of a bombardment of images or a series of doom and gloom like in “Date Night at the Circus.” Readers are given the structure of Vladimir Propp’s narrative sequences but it’s a false sense of structure, the numbers are random, the phrases jarring so that the reader has to rely on the form to roam in the bizarre wreckage. I also enjoy using form as a way to subvert reader’s expectation like in “sleep paralysis” where I’m using couplets, which have their own rhythm and romance, to lull readers into more treacherous territory. The couplets almost act as holy water in a haunted house because when I write in couplets, I’m turning off the lights.
SP: The collection is unapologetically sexual. One of my favorite lines is: “don’t be alarmed when your clitoris crystalizes.” As a writer, what makes sex such a captivating subject?
MG: Sex is interesting to me because its taboo, both universal and personal, and reveals so precisely how entrenched violence is in our culture. I talk about sex because it’s a way to talk about power particularly whose sexuality is treated as inherent versus external. Writing about sex allows me to conjure bodily autonomy back into existence, it’s part kicking in teeth and part spell—and truly one of the few safe places to say “no.” Sex also allows me to play a lot with point of view—who’s being observed, who’s participating, who is and isn’t there—almost like a palimpsest over traces of colonialism and capitalism. My poems can often mimic the disassociation that happens when your body is a site of politics and violence, so the return to the sexual body is a relief for the reader and a practice in healing. And sex can be funny—and we could all use a good laugh right now.
SP: You know, I almost referred to the collection as erotic, and it can be, but it's often not. The sexual poems are frequently about violence and power, as you mention, and I would argue gendered violence and power specifically. How much were these topics on your mind when writing these poems--what questions were you hoping to raise?
MG: A LOT. As a queer nonbinary writer who was socialized as a woman, my body was/is translated to me through violence. Pussy is an insult, transwomen and girls are murdered almost daily, and most porn is a brutal display of dominance, power, and shame. Femininity was a contract with an audience that could flip the script at any time. So, a lot of my writing involves identifying those ghouls that have seeped through the cracks so I can unpack, unlearn, and move the hell on. The initial questions I raise are what is femininity? and what is my sexuality separated from the patriarchy? But I’m also asking how femininity reckons with its problematic history of being used as a shield for white supremacy with an evolving definition of gender and power. I want readers to ask how violence has been marketed to them as desire, as a responsibility, an eventuality?
SP: There are so many killer lines in this collection. For instance, "as you fall emulate a girl / pulled from a lake toes first" or "the self is a fitted sheet." For our final question, I must ask, what’s it like moving through the world as a poet? Are you constantly observing your surroundings, hunting for images and metaphors? Or do they stumble onto the page when you sit down to work?
MG: I have a tandem approach in how I write poems. In the nineties, my bedroom walls were glowing with J14 cutouts, phrases from my mom’s magazines, and stickers. And I haven’t grown out of this collage aesthetic. My notebook is full of phrases and snippets of conversation—calls with friends, titles of tv shows, the real housewives of whatever, billboards, craigslist posts, it’s all a patchwork quilt. There’s scraps of receipts and bills with lines on them littered around my house and in the bottom of abandoned totes. My Notes app is a chaotic jumble. I don’t push too hard to come up with images. I don’t want my relationship to nature to be extractive. It feels like burrowing into a meditative frequency where images come and go as leaves on running water—and I have to write it down immediately or it’ll be gone. But during the act of writing, I pull from my notebook and those sources as inspiration but rarely do they make it into the poem as first perceived. I transform those initial observations usually through researching—an animal’s defense mechanism, the sound a titbird makes, if a hummingbird can survive being frozen. I love to research. And I find the images evolve and the poem is more compelling when I approach it this way, like a climber studying the rockface for their next leap.
Shannon Perri
Shannon Perri holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University and a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Texas. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in various newspapers and literary magazines, such as Joyland Magazine, PANK, Sycamore Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Texas Observer, Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, and Literary Orphans. She lives in South Austin with her husband, son, and menagerie of pets. Follow her on Twitter at @ShannonPerriii.
