The Madhouse Meets The McHughniverse and Then Quietly Destroys You

Hello Friends and Fiends--

Today in The Madhouse, I'm so thrilled to have Jessica McHugh back here again to chat about her upcoming poetry collection The Quiet Ways I Destroy You. However, before we jump into that, it would be remiss of me not to mention her other collections: Strange Nests and A Complex Accident of Life, both of which are absolutely inspiring and grotesquely wonderful. Do yourself a favor and pick them up when you get a chance, and if you're interested in getting a black-out poem commissioned, too, you read more about how to do that here.

Preorders for The Quiet Ways I Destroy You can be found below:

• Ebook: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Ways-Destroy-You-ebook/dp/B0CFWVLDFS
• Print: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFX64JC2

For now, though, sit back, relax, and let me whisk you away to where the asylum meets the McHughniverse, a small spot of existence filled with the cosmic and the strange.

Yours cruelly, 

Stephanie M. Wytovich 

SMW: Hi Jessica! Welcome back to The Madhouse. I have to tell you. It’s been so wonderful watching you blossom as a poet, and I was over-the-moon excited when you reached out to me about your upcoming collection The Quiet Ways I Destroy You. Can you talk a little bit about your draw to black-out poetry and how/why it’s become your preferred method?

JM: That’s such a huge compliment coming from you, Stephanie. You’ve been a major inspiration to me as I’ve evolved as a poet, so thank you for that, and for having me back in The Madhouse. It definitely feels like coming home again.

I’ve been a writer all my life—poetry, short stories, I even started writing novels in 4^th grade—but I’ve always craved visual art too. When I was a kid, I played around with watercolors, charcoal, all kinds of weird sketches, but my visual art abruptly stopped in middle school due to bullying from my brother & his friends. I don’t know why they ridiculed me over my paintings and not my stories—less effort for them, I guess—I’m just grateful they didn’t steal more creativity from me.

It wasn’t something I thought a lot about over the years. I always said “I can’t draw” in discussions about visual art rather than get into the truth, so eventually I came to believe it. I came to believe a lot of incorrect things about myself, it seems. Just a few months before I discovered how much I enjoyed making blackout poetry, I seriously contemplated stepping away from writing as a career. I just wasn’t having fun anymore. It‘s wild. I had no idea what was right around the corner, or how deeply it would nourish my artistic soul.

Blackout poetry satisfies both the writer and visual artist in me, allowing me to communicate through words, color, erasure, clutter, illustration, and sculpture. As someone whose encounters difficulty expressing my feelings verbally, this artform accesses places of my psyche that require more glitter than words to express.

It also has a high celebrado payoff. I feel accomplished when I find a poem. I feel accomplished in a new way when I complete the artwork. Another sense of accomplishment comes if it’s published, and yet another if I sell the piece. In that celebrado sense, for me, it beats novel writing to a pulp.

SMW: This collection used Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women as its primary resource. What is your connection to the novel? And what about it called to you at this point in your life?

JM: I think Little Women is the caul in which most female-identifying humans are formed...which is an idea I explore further in this collection. From the book to the musical to the many film adaptations, it has always been a part of my life. The 90s score basically plays in my head non-stop. In high school, I got an A+ performing a mixed-piece monologue during which I transformed from Tatania at the height of rage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream into Beth March during her legendary death knell. At one time or another, I have been Marmee, the four March sisters, Hannah, Sally Gardiner, and more. But I feel like I could’ve only seen it now, as a 40-year-old bisexual woman whose body has been mandated, whose friends and family suffer under the bigoted policies of cowardly, ungodly men and their parasitic followers. Now I see the power of this story, and how it teaches us to recognize the power in our individuality as well as the shared spectrum of womanhood.

SMW: I’d love to hear a bit more about your artistic process with the collection and with the form in general. How do you go about selecting colors, creating the art, staging the poems? Is it spontaneous? Which comes first—the poem or the art?

JM: The poem always comes first. So much of the words’ orientation on the page influences the shape of the artwork, so it’s something I have to be very sure about before I start coloring. However, it’s not exactly rare for me to have all my colors ready and then change the entire poem in the last seconds. When I’m making a collection, I tend to write all of the poems before I add a drop of color so I have a more complete picture of what I want the artwork to communicate, so there’s sometimes months between writing and coloring. For The Quiet Ways I Destroy You, it was almost a year. And I ended up cutting 40+ poems from that group before the blackout process began.

Sometimes I get ideas about colors and shapes while I’m making the poem or looking over it months later, but I don’t usually get a full sense of the piece’s personality until I’m ready to black it out. It might look like I'm just staring at a piece of paper like an idiot when I’m figuring out the artwork, but I’m essentially evaluating all the tiny and not-so-tiny ways the poetry translates to colors, shapes, illustrations, and sculpture. And as annoying as this might sound, I see it, kind of like one of those Magic Eye illusions, but the hidden images are associated with the words already floating around in my mind. I do like to play with opposing imagery and subverting expectations when it comes to the interpretation of the words, though.

SMW: I noticed a lot of blood imagery throughout with allusions to menstruation via phrases and words like “hammered strawberries,” “turning red,” seeds, etc. Personally, I love that we’re out in the world talking about our periods now and that the stigma attached to them is slowly being removed and challenged (even if pink tax still exists! *eye twitch*). When it comes to horror though, how does menstruation factor in with topics such as body horror, the monstrous feminine, witchcraft, female rage, etc.

JM: While not every woman menstruates, I think we’re all attuned to a certain feeling that we lose a lot of blood in the process of becoming women. Whether it’s coming to terms with that monthly agony and the subsequent loss of it at a certain age, whether it’s all the ways we can birth children or lose children, the surgeries we require for our outsides to match our insides, the surgeries to prevent our bodies from killing us in hundreds of ways.

Menstruation itself is quite fascinating to me, though. I learned about it fairly early from my mom, who was a nurse, so I was really excited, then quite impatient, for it to happen. It seemed like I was going to experience something magical, though I had no evidence of magic affecting my friends who got it before me. Of course, I regretted that excitement once the reality of cramps and shits, mood swings and ruined clothes, finally set in, and I loathed it for years. When I started using a Diva Cup, some of that magical feeling came back. I’d always seen my period once it was soaked into something, which I quickly disposed of, but it was different in the cup. There was so much of it, crimson so dark it was almost black. It pours like oil on the first days, but its consistency and color changes as the days pass, and you really get to see how beautiful and disgusting it really is. AND MAGICAL. The biology of it, the extraordinarily natural blessing and curse of it...menstruation basically encompasses all horror genres. You want body horror—hey I've A1 steak sauce is oozing out of me by day 4, honey, come and get it. You want a haunted house story—my walls are literally bleeding over here. And you can get into all kinds of fun areas of witchcraft and cults with menstruation viewed through a lens of sacrificial blood. It’s a fun topic to splash around in.

SMW: Your poem “The Happy Times, Finished” reads: “Go to bed./ Try to sleep in spite of the great trouble.” I read that and my heart dropped in my chest. You know I love how much your work challenges and confronts the patriarchy, and my head immediately went to Roe V. Wade being overturned here…in addition to, well, a million other horrible things happening in the world right now. As we both know, horror has always been political, but I want to know how you specifically use it as a platform for activism, particularly with your poetry.

JM: I am both overjoyed and devastated that you recognized the inspiration behind this piece. It was created on the day Roe v Wade was overturned, in direct response to it. As Marmee says, “I am angry nearly every day of my life,” and though she hopes not to feel that anger, I embrace my own, just as I embrace my glee and my sexuality and my silly gooseness.

I feel powerless in a lot of ways that terrify me, but art makes me feel like I have control. It allows me to express the things I’m both scared to say and that I feel will fall on deaf ears no matter how loud I yell. It does that on an intimate level, but it’s bigger than that as well.

That’s one of the main reasons the sections in this collection are divided in 4 parts. The poems in the 1st part are mostly an I / You POV to show that we start this journey alone. The 2nd part is She / Her / They to illustrate how we watch and meet other women who inspire us. The 3rd section is in We / They POV and encourages embracing the vast spectrum of womanhood, joining together, and becoming something more complicated, something to be feared. Which is how we wind up back in the 1st person POV in the last part, with little hints of they, she, and we, because even though we have united, we are still individuals in the complex root system of womanhood.

SMW: With a story like Little Women, I appreciated how you challenged notions of femininity, womanhood, sisterhood and gender. Can you talk a little bit about how you handled this? Was it conscious or subconscious in its fluidity and conception?

JM: I approached the collection knowing I’d be embracing different kinds of femininity as it pertained to the March women, but it wasn’t until I was pretty deep into it that I realized the overarching story was much bigger than expected. I already had poems written for Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, but I started to add as many other female characters from Little Women as possible. Speaking from so many different points of view allowed me to explore all these little rooms in myself, where I composed from places of rage, love, fear, and fulfillment, sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously. At one time during the writing, I was under the impression that Marmee / Mother was the mycorrhizal fungi that connects us—and she is still a strong unifier in the collection—but after I hit the 100^th poem, I realized the story of Little Women itself is what seeps into our roots and joins us, no matter what kind of woman we are...or will be...and that kind of support from our fellow sisters is what allows us to feel free.

SMW: To build on the above, I loved seeing a focus on awakening throughout: an awakening to self, to sexuality, to rage. I attended the Queer Canon panel at StokerCon ’23 recently and they talked a lot about whether queer joy as a place in horror. How do you think your collection speaks to and handles that?

JM: To quote Eric LaRocca during that Stokercon panel, “THERE IS NO ROOM FOR JOY.”
I kid, of course. To be frank, as a bisexual woman in a straight relationship, I often feel like I’m not queer enough, or that I shouldn’t be allowed to label my work as queer even though it is unquestionably so. In this collection, I threw those fears aside and embraced everything that I am without apology. Honestly, I’m not sure there’s a single queer poem in this collection that doesn’t exude joy...and maybe a little vengeance. As far as little rooms in myself go, that was a wonderfully cathartic one, and I hope these poems help others feel the same.

SMW: Something I’ve always admired about how you work is that you’re always finding time to write. You write at your job, on your off time, at conventions. It’s such a bright light to see someone love what they do so much and it’s inspiring to writers, no matter where they’re at in the career. How do you keep that love affair—or perhaps marriage would be a better word here—with and to writing so fresh and passionate and exciting?

JM: There are ups and downs, to be sure. As I said before, I considered stepping away from my writing career in 2018. But writing itself...I don’t think I could ever step far away enough; it would always be nipping at my heels. I think the enduring passion of this inky marriage (I agree, it does feel like that) comes from curiosity. I keep wanting to find out what other stories and characters and sticky icky things lurk in my psyche and figuring that out brings me an immense feeling of comfort and joy. As for the frequency of my work, I honestly don’t know what to do with my hands otherwise. Ally Wilkes said much the same at Stokercon when I noticed her knitting socks at the bar. I write to occupy my hands, to explore my mind, to fill the empty spaces, to calm me in awkward situations, to distract me from grief, to perk me up when I’m feeling tired. It is the cure-all for nearly every bummer in my life, and though I’m sure we’ll have our skirmishes until the end, I have no doubt our obsessive love will get us through.

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

JM: I’m currently reading Cina Pelayo’s Stoker Award Winning collection, Crime Scene, Maxwell I. Gold’s Bleeding Rainbows & Other Broken Spectrums, and John Baltisberger’s forthcoming experimental prose & poetry collection, All I Want is to Take Shrooms and Listen to the Color of Nazi Screams, which is a really fun mixture! I’m definitely looking forward to your new collection, Stephanie, and I’m always eager to read anything Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Avri Margariti, & Christina Sng put out.

SMW: What’s next for your readers?

JM:I have lots of fun stuff coming up, including Seek & Hide: an education and interactive blackout poetry workbook playbook coming from Apokrupha this fall! My HP Lovecraft blackout poem “Arched Bridges” will appear in the 100th Anniversary Edition of Weird Tales Magazine (the 1st ever Weird Tales blackout poem!! EEK!) in October, and I’m a featured poet in Under Her Eye with my piece, “A Map of the Backyard,” coming from Black Spot Books in November. Also from Black Spot Books, I’ll have a story in their Mother Knows Best anthology, coming in 2024, along with more I can’t quite spill yet. And I am currently writing the 3^rd and final installment of my Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy from Ghoulish Books. Keep an eye out for Witches in the Warren coming in 2024 as well!

Thanks for stopping by!

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