MADHOUSE AUTHOR INTERVIEW: FOREVERHAUS BY KAILEY TEDESCO

Hello friends and fiends--

Today in The Madhouse, I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome Kailey Tedesco, witchy poet extraordinaire!  Tedesco (she/her) is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: SheUsed to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing), Lizzie, Speak (2018 winner of White Stag's full-length MS contest), and FOREVERHAUS (White Stag Publishing). She currently teaches courses pertaining to Gothic literature and the witch at Moravian University. Her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, Passages North, Gigantic Sequins, and more. Her collection Foreverhaus completely enchanted me (and continues to haunt me in the best of ways!) and I have not been able to stop thinking of it. I first encountered Tedesco's work through Luna Luna Magazine, where she writes these deliciously lush and dark pieces about witchcraft, womanhood, poetry, and all things strange and unusual. If you're new to her work, I highly encourage you to check out some of her work there and to peruse Luna Luna in general. It's a beautiful literary journal filled with writing advice, occult history, rituals, and media recommendations that span the worlds of magic, shadow, and liminalities. 

When it comes to Foreverhaus though, fans of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House will absolutely adore this collection of witchcraft, illusion, disassociation, and dreaming. While reading I envisioned spiral staircases and ectoplasm, pendulums, and seance rooms. I felt inclined to salt my doorways and cover the mirrors in my house, and I think you folks will be stocking up on brick dust and eggshells after reading this collection, too---which you know is just the highest of compliments from me.

Before we jump into the interview, I want to leave you with one of my favorite lines from this book to help set the mood. It's from her poem “the afterlife as an option” where she writes: “i take back my baptism / let me go where i’d like.” When I first read those lines, I distinctly remember putting the book down in awe. Tedesco's writing is so evocative, but more than that it's a reminder of how much power we hold inside ourselves. Reading her work leaves me feeling untouchable, not to mention highly excited to embrace my darker roots and ease into my villain era. I hope you'll all enjoy this conversation as much as I have and that you'll consider picking up her work soon. I can guarantee you won't regret it.

Hauntedly yours,

Stephanie M. Wytovich

SMW: Hi Kailey! Welcome back 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?

KT: Hi Stephanie! I’m really honored to be here & I’m such a fan of all of your work!

I’m a sleepy mom currently living in Allentown, PA. I teach courses on literature and writing (primarily centered around Gothic Lit) at Moravian University and Northampton Community College. I’ve been writing for many years now and have released three full-length collections of poetry. I love horror movies (of course), animals, and vintage clothing. I also love to travel when I can, mostly to old honeymoon hotels with their original heart-shaped tubs.

I was a super moody kid who grew into a super moody adult, and I think poetry has always been my preferred mode of processing. I lost my grandmother when I was eight and immediately put pen to paper. I think it just felt natural to play with language and try to put all those overwhelming feelings into words that came close to capturing what was happening in my head. I’ve also struggled with OCD and sleep paralysis since I was at least a teenager. Both my seemingly endless “thought loops” and my sleep paralysis “sightings” really freaked me out for years and years and years. Mostly, I just didn’t know what was going on with me or why certain thoughts or images would pop into my mind. I felt really isolated by [that] so again poetry became a way to vent some of this out without giving away what I felt, at the time, shouldn’t be shared. If I wasn’t writing poems to soothe myself, I was incessantly praying (thanks, Catholic upbringing), and poetry was always MUCH more enjoyable and obviously healthier.

Now that I’m treated and more knowledgeable about my mental illness (& sleep quirks!), I feel more comfortable exploring it all more openly. All of this lends itself really nicely to horror poetry. 

SMW: What was your writing process like for Foreverhaus? Does witchcraft and/or ritual feature in your process at all?

KT: Yes, for sure! With FOREVRHAUS especially I turned to automatic writing practices and psychometry. I love Shirley Jackson’s consistent illumination of everyday objects—jars of jam, cups of stars, stone lions, & on & on & on. I spent a lot of time at antique stores and estate sales while writing this collection and I let myself really feel the stories of the objects I was interacting with. There’s this really cool space for communication here that leaves me open for images and language I wouldn’t normally tap into. This process & ritual has since become habitual for me.

SMW: That's so amazing, especially because, in my notes, I have this feels like a haunted estate sale written there in regard to the overall vibe of the collection. With that said, how do you define the term foreverhaus? And do you consider this a horror collection?

KT: FOREVERHAUS is a final destination and a liminal space all at once. It’s where you go when you die and when you dream. I wanted to create an archetypal space that is universally recognizable. It is the house in your neighborhood that makes you uneasy for no particular reason. It’s an afterlife. It’s a maze of personal traumas.

I do consider this to be a horror collection. Many of these pieces were inspired by horror tropes and images, both from reality and from media. I think ultimately this was an exploration of the way that folklore, in particular, both makes up our identities, but also has the ability to cloud our memories. This, to me, is a horrifying concept in a psychological sense. I’ve also always been fascinated by the warped optimism of a haunted house. If it’s haunted, that means there’s something for us after death. Whether or not that’s desirable is to be determined. This is the ambiguity I love to just soak up in horror. 

SMW: Your poem “gushblood” has stayed with me since I first read it, and it’s one I’ve revisited a few times since. The last few lines read: “i can eat everything now thanks to the gushblood/ i live in a doorway of splatter my caul blooms fungal with turrets/ you are welcome to the bloodfeast but first/ ring the bell or you’ll drown.” I love how violent and primal this is, and something I’ve been noticing in the publishing world lately is this refreshing embrace of female rage and dark female archetypes. Can you talk about that a bit and how it relates to your work?

KT: Thank you! This was one of the first poems I wrote for this collection.

I am a HUGE fan of Julia Kristeva’s work surrounding abject horror. I was particularly fascinated by the way so many legends, specifically with ties to femme identities (like Bloody Mary) concern themselves with the body.

I love the idea of exploring the body in a state of abjection and power all at once—bleeding and oozing but persisting. So often the corpses of women are the subject of poetry, and of course, in so many instances they are simply dead without any agency. I think it’s important to unpack and deconstruct that. Men, in particular, have objectified and exploited dead women for ages. Now I want them to wake up and talk back. 

SMW: Your poem “invisible world” has direct ties to the Salem Witch Trials and CottonMather’s manuscript The Wonders of the Invisible World. Here you talk about the disappearance of women and the monstrous and/or haunted mother, and because I know you also teach a class on witches, how does the history and archetype of the witch play a part in your poetry and perhaps your writing in general?

KT: I truly don’t ever tire of reading about The Salem Witch Trials. It’s such a tragic and deeply complicated history. With FOREVERHAUS, I was particularly fascinated by the Puritanical cosmology during the time of the trials. There was this pervasive belief in the unseen world, and this was the space [where] the devil, witches, and also angels were supposed to reside.

I think the Salem witch is so interesting because they were not witches at all. They were, ultimately, marginalized people who were accused based on any number of factors that may or may not have even had anything to do with their actions or ideas. So, in this poem and in most of my work, I like to explore these cosmologies for what they are—folklore. Of course, the trials, in many instances, came down to a fear of individuals (mostly women & folks in poverty) claiming power that was thought to be unearned. I like to play with this power in my work. To me, this is the most base definition of a witch—someone who claims power for themselves, regardless of whether society says they can have it. 

SMW: After I read Foreverhaus, I immediately picked up and devoured your collection Lizzie,Speak. Something that I adored in both of these collections was your focus on historical figures (turned urban legend) Bloody Mary and Lizzie Borden. Can you talk about what drew you to these women?

KT: I am consistently drawn to myth, especially when it’s myth made from historical fact. So many people I’ve encountered assume that Lizzie Borden is simply a character from a nursery rhyme when in reality, of course, she was an actual human being struggling with identity and oppressive family dynamics. Culturally, we’ve warped her humanity into this myth where any number of powers have become possible for her. I wanted to explore this space of myth in the collection Lizzie, Speak while also negotiating that contrived mythos with her actual existence.

It was different with Bloody Mary, though. I was interested in exploring each iteration of the maiden/mother/crone archetype as they move about this Foreverhaus. I wrote a lot about this punishing mother who is really just another evolution of the speaker in the collection. I couldn’t divorce this mother from my own ideas of Bloody Mary growing up—a woman you call upon, only to be terrified when she replaces you in the mirror. I thought it would be interesting to make Bloody Mary one in the same with this mother and then, ultimately, also the self.

I read a lot of Alan Dundes work on Bloody Mary while teaching a writing class on folklore and legends. I was really interested in how this is a ritualistic legend that is performed and told differently depending on where you are from, but ultimately it comes down to a fear of aging, both in a vain sense, but also in the sense that our greying hair is a harbinger of our imminent death. Bloody Mary then felt like a really natural sort of Virgil, or guide, for the Foreverhaus. 

SMW: Several times throughout the collection you refer to the candyhaus or the haus of gingerbread. What influence have fairytales and folklore had on you as a writer, and are there certain ones that you continue to feel drawn to or inspired by?

KT: I was always an incredibly shy kid, but I was also always the kid who would start telling scary stories at slumber parties. Ghost stories and fairy tales are my comfort zone. When I don’t know what to say or how to share myself in conversation, I often turn to these foundational stories and archetypes. They’re universal in a lot of ways and therefore unifying.

I grew up in the NJ Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil legend has been told to me probably thousands of times. I feel a kinship with him as a sort of guardian of my hometown. I’m not religious in the traditional sense, but I think stories like these [in]form my personal belief systems and ideologies about the world. Working with archetypes like witches and devils and gingerbread men is my favorite thing to do when formulating a new poem or project. 

SMW: It’s no surprise to anyone reading this interview that I am a huge fan of haunted houses (real, fictional—doesn’t matter!). More often than not, we see ties to the feminine with the occult, and it’s usually the mother, wife, daughter, etc. who gets an inkling that something is off in the house, starts noticing disappearances, or becomes sensitive to changes in temperature and other sensory details. In your poem “poltergeist I” you write: “my mother once said everything is haunted when you are/the haunting—now all the prayer-closets screech with her wrath.” What do you think the link is between women and haunted houses specifically?

KT: Oh, this is really interesting! I constantly return to this book I have on Spiritualism and social justice called Radical Spirits. There’s some really cool and progressive (for the time!) discourse on gender and mediumship in this text. There’s a part that discusses how the most connected mediums were often feminine, but they didn’t always necessarily identify as women. This is something I think about a lot when considering the ways that witches and mediums have been accepted or condemned throughout time.

I feel like maybe this connection between femininity and hauntings comes down to feelings of hyper-vigilance. Since femininity is so often othered or belittled, there seems to be a higher likelihood of femme individuals looking inward and outward at the same time as a form of self-preservation and protection. If you’re constantly in a state of checking yourself and your surroundings, I feel as though you’re more likely to pick up on things that others might not. 

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

KT: I’m currently reading and loving Bianca by Eugenia Leigh. I’m so struck by her writing on motherhood and mental illness in particular. I also just finished The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw which is technically a novella, but it was so, so lyrically lush and gorgeous. And, I can’t wait to get my hands on The Shining by Dorothea Lasky.

To be honest, I’ve been grieving the sudden loss of my beloved dog, Barnabas (who FOREVERHAUS is dedicated to—he was with me the entire time I wrote and edited it). He was really everything to me. I find that when I am grieving I seem to turn to more linear narratives, so I’ve been mostly tearing through paperbacks lately. I read Elizabeth: A Novel of the Unnatural by Ken Greenhall (& what a journey that was), and I’m looking for more of these pulpy quick-reads. I’m a lifetime fan of V.C. Andrews, so give me anything filthy, absurd, and Gothic, please! 

SMW: What’s next for your readers?

KT: I have a new full-length collection that explores the complexities of postpartum depression (based on my personal experiences, anyways) through the persona of Mrs. Leeds who is the folkloric mother of the New Jersey Devil. Fingers crossed that this manuscript might see the light of day soon!

I’ve also been experimenting more often with visual poems and I’m hoping to put a little chapbook together with these soon. I have a poem shaped like a dollhouse coming out soon in Driftwood. I’m really excited to share this one! 

 ----

“FOREVERHAUS, Kailey Tedesco’s timely examination of domesticity made macabre, conjures the architecture of a dwelling whose vestibules ail, its floorboards imbued with an intimacy matched by such exquisite details as “jadeite bowls” and “a suit of tooth-plaque.” Tedesco grants as much reign to Bloody Mary as she does to language steeped in beadwork of the afterlife. I marveled at ghostlore, cakerot, and “peppermint christ,” while connecting with a narrator who wants “so badly to look like i come from a place / of costumes.” Reading FOREVERHAUS is like attending a Halloween party thrown by Anne Sexton and grimoire’s best clairvoyant. A beautiful eeriness promenades the collection—from Bela Lugosi to Theda Bara, these poems are nostalgically embroidered. There’s even room for Zelda Rubinstein on the guestlist. “Gothic in stature,” Tedesco’s aesthetic makes a home.”

-Jon Riccio, Poetry Editor of Fairy Tale Review

“Kailey Tedesco’s FOREVERHAUS transforms the body into house, each poem/spell a baroque door between our very human world and the otherworldly haunts of personal memory, familial understanding, and the faith and lore in all that lies between. Tedesco writes, “Once I was inside the / dark, I could experience everything fully”: FOREVERHAUS is a lyric, compassionate haunting that, with every sharp line, will spellbind you toward the glitter and wonderment found in horror.”

-Carly Joy Miller, author of Ceremonial