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
