Madhouse Author Interview: Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell by Stephanie Parent

Hello friends and fiends--

Today in The Madhouse, I'm sitting down with Stephanie Parent, author of the recently debuted poetry collection, Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell. In Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell, Stephanie Parent’s feminist, fairy-tale-inspired poetry combines the horror and the happily-ever-after of traditional fairy tales with a modern perspective. Both personal and universal, these poems are inspired by familiar and forgotten tales.

Both the collection and Parent's responses were so enjoyable to read, and I found myself adding a few books to my TBR list, too. I hope you all will enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Please be sure to pick up a book or two on your way out!

Best,

Stephanie

SMW: Hi Stephanie! Welcome to The Madhouse. Since this is your first time joining us here, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what drew you to poetry in the first place?

SP: Thank you so much for having me! I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and was a big reader throughout childhood—I was the stereotypical girl with her nose in a book, who found friends in the pages I could relate to more than the people in my real life. While I read in all genres, I wasn’t particularly drawn to poetry until I started enjoying novels in verse as a teenager. Then, while in grad school for writing, I had a wonderful teacher, the poet Amy Gerstler. I wouldn’t have read or written nearly as much poetry as I have if it wasn’t for Amy’s classes, and I wouldn’t continue to read and write as much poetry as I do if it wasn’t for the vibrant poetry community on Twitter.  

SMW: What was the writing process like during Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell? I know in the foreword you mentioned you didn’t initially plan to publish or share these with anyone other than yourself, so I’m curious if your approach differed from any of your other projects, or if you found your routine consistent with this one?

SP: Writing this poetry collection was definitely a unique process for me. I began writing these poems in the first months of the pandemic, so I had a lot of emotional energy and very few in-person social interactions to channel it into. At the same time, I was working on a nonfiction project that I was convinced would be my “big break” into the publishing world (it wasn’t), so I was very conscious of trying to write for an audience and live up to publishers’ expectations. These poems came out as an antidote to that—my subconscious pouring onto the page, without worrying too much about whether people would see the work as “literary” or “accomplished,” or even like it, or whether it was in line with current trends. I wrote a poem whenever I felt like writing but didn’t want to work on the nonfiction project, and eventually, I had enough poems and ideas that I wanted to finish it as a book. I’m not sure I’ll ever again take on such a big project that starts out “just for me,” but I think it’s interesting that this collection found a publisher while the nonfiction book didn’t. Maybe fate was arranging some things for me behind the scenes!

SMW: In your poem “Into the Forest,” you write: “Fairy Tales tell us/ We all have a forest within us.” As someone who is obsessed with witches and folklore herself, I’m wondering why you think the woods became this liminal space for occult happenings throughout history. And according to classic literature—and honestly, maybe contemporary literature, too—do you think the woods hold different symbolism and dangers for men and women?

SP: What a great question! To answer this in full would probably be an essay, so I’ll keep it somewhat simple. To start with, if we go back far enough in time, in the places where fairy tales were first told, where wise women performed rituals and witches were sought out and burned, there was much more wilderness than there is today. With the lack of electricity and roads and the prevalence of wildlife, the forests were darker and deeper and more dangerous. Getting lost and encountering dangers in the woods was a very real possibility, and many stories probably evolved as cultural warnings to beware [of] these dangers. At the same time, forests could be a place to intentionally get lost or hide oneself, and thus became the best location for those who wanted to engage in occult or spiritual activities outside of cultural norms. In addition, because the woods were such a big part of people’s lives, they made an apt metaphor for our subconscious, the deepest, most hidden parts of ourselves.

As for the second part of the question, yes, woods generally have a different symbolic meaning for men and women. In fairy tales, male heroes often set off into the woods to make their own futures, plowing through the trees to come out the other side; whereas female heroines get lost and/or trapped in the forest, or are forced to hide in the woods to escape an even greater threat. In broad terms, the male journey was often conceived as active while the female was more passive—although if you dig deeper, female characters can actively fight their ways out of the woods, and/or claim a connection and power from the wilderness.

For both male and female characters, the journey into the trees is often a metaphorical step into adolescence and discovering sexuality. This seems to be emphasized more for women, in stories like Little Red Riding Hood—this makes sense when we think that female sexuality was traditionally considered dangerous when it was not controlled, just like the woods are dangerous and beyond our control.

SMW: I’m a big Disney fan, and I’ve appreciated the direction they’ve been moving in with regard to portraying strong female characters lately. As such, admittedly, I might have cheered a bit while reading your take on Little Red Riding Hood with your poem “Red Hood in the Woods.” I love that you took that tale and made a statement about women and violence and how women aren’t “asking for it” with what they’re wearing. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to putting a feminist spin on fairy tales—something, let’s face it, we so desperately need!

SP: Many years ago I read Marina Warner’s scholarly study From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in fairy tales—it’s fascinating and very readable. I was very influenced by Warner’s idea that fairy tales evolved as a way for women to take back agency through storytelling. Even the most reductive, patriarchally centered versions of fairy tales retain elements of powerful femininity: the fairy godmother in Cinderella, for instance. So my personal view is that there are many different ways for fairy tales to be feminist, just as there are many different ways for women to be strong. A modern version of Little Red Riding Hood might emphasize a woman who takes ownership of and expresses her sexuality despite the threat of violence. On the other hand, traditional versions of Cinderella depict an apparently quiet, meek young woman who allows a prince to save her. Look closer, though, and think about how few options were available to orphaned women before the modern era, and we see a heroine who defies her oppressive step-family, takes every opportunity she can to get out of a terrible situation and receives help from the strong, magical female figure of the fairy godmother.

With the variety of poems in my collection, I wanted to explore the many different ways fairy tales depict strong—but also three-dimensional, sometimes scared, weak, jealous, flawed—human women.

SMW: To build on the above, let’s chat about your poem “Poissonnier,” which I absolutely loved, and who could blame with me lines like: “Our human legs are things of violence” and “What is love,/If not a split, an opening/An offering of yourself to be/Ruptured.” I feel like we could have an entire interview about these two lines alone, but for time’s sake, let’s talk about the female body and this symbol of the “split” self. There’s so much there, whether we’re talking about the ways that women change themselves and shapeshift to fit in or protect themselves, or the subtle (okay, maybe not-so-subtle) vaginal symbolism of the open wound. How do you like to work with the female body when it comes to horror, and do you feel like subverting the treatment of the female form is important in contemporary horror? Why or why not?

SP: What a great question! As you might be able to tell from “Poissonnier” and other poems in this collection, I have a strong interest in sadomasochism—it’s something I became obsessed with at a young age, in a bit of a symbiotic relationship with fairy tales. Fairy tales are full of characters—especially women—who actively hurt themselves or accept ill treatment from others, and their suffering leads to some kind of reward in the end. In The Seven Ravens, the heroine cuts off her finger to save her brothers; in The Maiden Without Hands, the heroine allows her father to cut off her hands and ends up marrying a king who gifts her with silver hands. These acts of violence were exaggerated versions of women’s reality throughout history, in a time when many died from childbirth, where poor women might literally work themselves to death just to survive, and where there was no legal recourse against domestic violence or rape. Fairy tales could provide a sort of comfort for women who could not escape their bodies and their physical pain, but who could, through storytelling, imagine a transcendence and redemption resulting from their suffering.

As a child who dealt with emotional pain for various reasons, I really clung to this idea of pain and suffering leading to some kind of reward in the end. I was also attracted to the idea of physical pain as almost a release—the emotional made into something tangible, which then allows this pain to be exorcised. That led to my interest in BDSM, and I ended up working in a commercial dungeon for six years. My first horror novel THE BRIARS, which is coming out next year from Cemetery Gates, is set in a commercial dungeon like the one I worked at. The body horror in that book comes from women struggling with their desires to receive or inflict pain, and the inevitable scars (physical and psychological) and lack of control that can result. It asks how women can take back that control, without going too far in the opposite direction and causing more destruction.

In a larger sense, and to get back to your question, I definitely think it’s important for female authors, artists, and filmmakers of horror to subvert the treatment of the female form. While fairy tales (which can be considered horror) and gothic novels are often told from the female gaze, so much of modern horror is from a male gaze that objectifies women, fetishizing their pain without allowing the viewer or reader to experience it empathetically and three-dimensionally. It is time for that to change.

SMW: In your poem “Gretel,” the little girl is faced with a difficult decision and ultimately chooses her blood family over the potential family she could have had with the witch. Again, I feel like we could talk about the witch for ages, but I’m curious why you think the archetype of the witch is so attractive to women, especially, and why you think that sometimes even if they want to walk the path with her, they turn away from her in fear?

SP: The witch is the original outsider, the counter-cultural icon, the woman who, whether she originally chose to live outside of society or was cast out, has come to own her powerful identity. And it is a power that is entirely divorced from the qualities women are traditionally valued for, like beauty, youth, kindness, etc. That combination of power and freedom that the witch embodies calls to every woman on some level—even those of us who want to be accepted by society, to go to the ball and wear the pretty dress and kiss the prince, at some point we realize that role is both exhausting and precarious. From the earliest age, we are taught to control our appearance and behavior to be attractive to men—to shave and pluck hairs, to watch our weight, to be kind and gracious, to be sexually available but not promiscuous, to embody all these contradictions and perform all these behaviors that require constant maintenance. Yet still, we’re told we could be prettier, thinner, nicer. The witch doesn’t have to worry about any of that. She doesn’t even want that. In many stories, she can transform herself into a beautiful enchantress if need be, but she doesn’t choose to stay in that form.

The witch is also uniquely powerful not in spite of the fact she’s a woman, but because of it. While fairy-tale witches have imaginary abilities, they’re connected to real-life cunning women who knew how to use the natural and spiritual worlds to cast spells and treat ailments. Since these women held beliefs that challenged organized religion, and many offered birth control or performed abortions, they were branded as “witches” and ostracized or worse.

Even today, when witch trials are ancient history, I think women may instinctively turn away from the witch’s identity out of fear of being othered or rejected. Western culture has spent centuries branding the witch—the powerful woman who does not follow social norms and does not care about pleasing men—as something evil and disgusting. This kind of deep-rooted imagery is easy to internalize and hard to overcome.

SMW: Your Baba Yaga-inspired poem “The House on Chicken Legs” had a line that stopped me cold and made me smile: “The house finds you.” And it always does, doesn’t it? So much of fairy tales focus on the domestic confines that women are placed in and desperate to break out of. In some ways, it’s the house that traps them, but in others, it’s the forced obligation, the assumption that this is where they are supposed to remain, that their allegiance is to the house, the family. Baba Yaga, herself, exists as a way to subvert that mindset. Can you talk a bit about how Baba—and her house, ironically—kind of became this feminist symbol for freedom?

SP: I touched on this in my previous answer about the appeal of the witch, but Baba Yaga is a particularly memorable witch figure. Baba appears across many stories in Slavic folklore and is accompanied by many symbols that transform traditionally limiting parts of femininity into something powerful, freeing, and yes, even grotesque. The first example, as you mentioned is her house that walks on chicken legs—taking that symbol of domesticity, the home, and turning it into a way to roam free. Baba Yaga also has the power to fly on a giant mortar and pestle—tools used in traditional female tasks, but in Baba’s case, she uses the mortar and pestle to grind the bones of people she eats. Even Baba’s own body is monstrous: her teeth are strong enough to break bones and tear meat, and her limbs can expand to fill her entire house. She exists as a defiance of everything small and quiet, good-natured and motherly, and traditionally attractive that women are supposed to be.

In my poem, I wrote not from the point of view of Baba Yaga but as Vasilisa, the heroine of one of the most well-known Baba Yaga stories. In this story Baba is ostensibly the villain: Baba captures Vasilisa, who is a Cinderella-type figure mistreated by her stepmother, and threatens to kill the girl if she does not perform impossible tasks such as separating poppy seeds from soil. With the help of a magical doll gifted by her dead mother, Vasilisa completes all of Baba’s tests, and Baba gives Vasilisa a light inside a skull that kills her stepfamily when they look upon it. Vasilisa then uses her talents as a seamstress to make it to the big city and marry the Tsar. So, even though Baba is the evil witch in the story, she is also almost a fairy godmother: she tests Vasilisa, forces her to discover her inner strength, and helps her escape a terrible situation and find a better life.

SMW: Out of all the folklore you worked with in this collection, which was your favorite to explore and why?

SP: My favorite was the Grimms’ story Jorinda and Joringel, which I discovered while listening to an online lecture by the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic early during the pandemic (Google them, listen to their lectures, take their classes—they’re fantastic!). I can’t remember whether I read this story as a child, but it’s eerie and chilling, full of evocative symbolism. The simple version: a young girl and boy in love, Jorinda and Joringel, venture into a forest where they find a castle inhabited by a witch who transforms girls into songbirds and keeps them in cages. The witch turns Jorinda into a nightingale and freezes Joringel where he stands, but later releases him. Joringel begs the witch to free Jorinda, but the witch refuses, so Joringel leaves and lives in a distant village for many years. Finally, he dreams of a flower that will break the witch’s enchantment, goes on a journey to find this flower, and manages to do so and return to the castle to free all the girl-birds and reunite with his love.

When I heard this story as an adult, I immediately wondered if I had read it as a young child and absorbed the imagery into my brain without remembering the story itself. From the age of preschool, I remember having a recurrent fantasy where I was kept in a giant birdcage in sort of a harem-greenhouse, where there were many other caged girls. I later realized this was the beginning of my BDSM inclinations: it was my brain’s way of trying to make sense of and romanticize the fact that I felt trapped in my life as if my body and thoughts did not belong to me. Just as fairy tales take horrible feelings and realities and turn them into magical stories, our own subconscious fantasies do the same thing.

In terms of the Jorinda and Joringel poems in the collection, I originally only had three or four, but my editor thought it would be great to do seven to go with the fact that is 700 to 7000 cages in the witch’s castle, depending on the version. This allowed me to explore the different characters’ perspectives in greater depth. For me personally, the most evocative aspect of this story is the idea that maybe a part of Jorinda wanted to become a bird; maybe that was why she wandered so close to the witch’s castle. Maybe a part of her wished to become a beautiful, precious treasure, even if that meant giving up her freedom. Maybe the cage was a kind of escape. I could go on, but the symbolism is so deep here and speaks so much to subconscious emotions that I think everyone will have their own interpretation.

SMW: What poets are you currently reading? Are there any collections you’re looking forward to adding to your TBR list?

SP: I’m currently reading Grace R. Reynolds’ Lady of the House and Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares. There is such a wealth of speculative and horror poetry out there that I wasn’t aware of till recently—I feel I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg! I’m excited for Cynthia Pelayo’s upcoming Crime Scene since I loved her previous true crime poetry collection, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, and I’m also very intrigued by Stephanie Kaylor’s Ask a Sex Worker coming from CLASH Books in 2024.

SMW: What’s next for your readers?

SP: My debut gothic horror novel, The Briars, is forthcoming from Cemetery Gates Media in May 2023. I poured my entire self and my emotions into this novel, and I really hope people will pick it up. I drew directly from my experience working for six years at a commercial dungeon, and the book includes other types of sex work as well. It makes some powerful statements about misogyny and the many different versions of female strength. It’s also fun—I mean, what better setting for a gothic ghost story than a BDSM dungeon?—and is an insider’s view into that dungeon world, with all the dirty secrets exposed. I can confidently say this book will be like nothing most people have ever read, so I hope it finds its audience.

Like The Briars, my next few books focus on sex work. In both my failed nonfiction project and my journey to finding a publisher for The Briars, I discovered the appalling amount of misconceptions about sex work(ers), the widespread belief that sex workers’ stories are not worth telling, and the downright disdain for people who have engaged in this profession. I’m working on both a short story collection and poetry collection centered around sex work and BDSM, so hopefully, I will finish and publish them at some point!

Author Bio:

Stephanie Parent is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California as well as a former submissive and switch at a commercial dungeon. Her debut horror novel set in a BDSM dungeon, The Briars, is forthcoming in May 2023 from Cemetery Gates Media. Her debut poetry collection, Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell, was released in August 2022 by Querencia Press. Stephanie’s poetry has been nominated for a Rhysling Award and Best of the Net.

Follow Stephanie on Twitter at @SC_Parent and Instagram at @SCParent for updates on her writing.

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