I met Emilie Menzel this year, via a friend’s introduction: We were both debuting with our weird books, having both won small press contests. I was so eager to hear more about Emilie’s experiences and work. How was she handling the wild rush of publishing a book into the big world? Then when the cover of her book-length poem, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, landed in my inbox, I was entranced. A woman adorned with antlers stared out at me from a mysterious green field. The beautiful cover suggested this would be the kind of poem that I would relish: rich and lush, haunted and haunting.
And it was! The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, winner of Hub City Press’s 2023 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, is a hybrid work, dancing between poem and plot, evergreen fable and modern domestic drama. Poet Diana Khoi Nguyen praised the way the poem “employs logic as a poetics of longing and grief, a vital instrument untangling trauma and its aftermath.” And though the poem covers such dark territory, I also found it brilliantly funny: self-effacing, surprising, human, and brutal.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Emilie over late-night, dimly lit zoom calls from our respective homes (New Orleans for me and Durham, North Carolina for Emilie) about fables, her unique approach to research, and the healing power of transforming into a creature.
Marguerite Sheffer: Thank you so much for speaking with me; I so loved The Girl Who Became a Rabbit. For me, reading it felt like stepping into a dream world of fragmented fables punctuated with these brutal bits of reality. I’m wondering, in addition to the selkies that appear in the text, are there other particular fables or fairy tales you had in mind while you were writing this piece?
Emilie Menzel: This is an interesting question because, overtly, I wasn’t writing adaptations of specific fables or fairy tales, but the language, atmosphere, and rhetoric of these forms are very much in the spine of Rabbit. Myths, transfigural stories, fairy tales, fables—all are very much a part of my regular reading and my artistic background. If I’m building the body of a story, it’s hard for these stories not to make their way into the skeletal form.
I did read and ruminate over several feminine transfiguration stories. I read many adaptations of selkie and kitsune myths (I’m thinking of The Fox and Dr. Shimamura, for example), which are often stories of women carrying around this animal spirit within them that then flares at inconvenient or emotional times. For kitsune, it’s often depicted as a madness or hormonal rush overtaking the woman. I was intrigued by the idea of this hidden power, and the ability to hold both—to hold both this personhood and then this creaturely self, that then become intertwined.
There’s also a fairy tale called “Donkeyskin,” which is a rather horrifying story. The poor woman (I feel like they’re all poor women; that’s another point I was considering) is abused and, to escape the situation, she embodies a donkey. It’s quite visceral. And also in the background of Rabbit are of course a lot of Ovid myths: Daphne, Apollo, and all these myths in which the woman is transfigured by a curse. I was interested in the idea of, “What if the transfiguration is not a curse so much as empowerment?” A movement of reclaiming a sense of self, when the space of the human body or the human physicality is not working. The current physical positioning is dangerous, or it’s hurtful, or maybe it’s just not a good fit. But what if the transfiguration is instead intentional and owned.
All this to say: There are a lot of myths and fairy tales and fables in the mythos of Rabbit, but there was no intention to rewrite a direct adaptation.
You started to talk about the idea that in myths or fables, sometimes these poor women transforming is a curse, but that you’re reconfiguring that transformation as a power, an ability. One thread I really loved in The Girl Who Became a Rabbit was this idea that imagination and storytelling can be an act of transformation and maybe of healing from trauma. I especially loved that line in the first section, “This is not a body in pain. This is a body more victorious. The story of a selkie slipping in and out of her skin’s silhouette remolded.” Could you speak a little bit more to the role of storytelling in healing, and how you complicate that relationship in this piece?
Intentional storytelling and intentional acts of imagination are so much of how we find our ways in the world! Sometimes we forget that much of our lives are narrative arcs we have ourselves carved into creation. Let’s say I want to think of myself as a creative person; I then pay attention to information in ways that are in conversation with that belief. I teach myself to see myself as a creative. Often this is a subconscious process, but in Rabbit I wanted to make the narrative act intentional and autonomous, maybe a bit dramatic as well.
The story that we tell of the body is so often something given to us by other people. A lot of queer fairy tales and queer myths explore rewriting these narratives of bodily identity and ownership, or the gaps between physical and felt body. The shapeshifting can become a path toward ownership and of reclaiming a sense of embodiment by rewriting these stories of the body, to rewrite the history and say, “Okay, I was taught to have a certain posture or hold my hands in a certain way or engage in conversation in a certain way from my childhood and background”—stories you learned about how to behave from others. But what if in addition to that, you create your own stories. There’s a passage in The Girl Who Became a Rabbit about rolling octagons into your hands through piano scales, of different ways of building the body that are more your own, insisting that it’s your story.
I was also considering the multiplicity of personal narratives. For example, think about recounting the story of a relationship—romantic, familial, or otherwise. You’re one person; you have your perception of the relationship, and the other person or other people have their perception. People prioritize and balance facts differently. They notice differently. They will tell stories of the same events differently. This is absolutely not to say that anything one person says goes, but stories refracted through multiple people are messy. I was thinking: If you imagined parts of the relationship—imagined you had a shared experience or a shared understanding that the other individual then does not corroborate—did those parts of the relationship you thought you were having count as well? And then from there, if we’re going to imagine things and we’re going to open that box, what other things would we like to be imagining? I’m saying “imagination” here not as meaning misguided or completely fabricated. It’s pretty literal to be imagined, to be an idea versus the physical world. So, I was thinking a lot about how messy that line was.
I was also watching a lot of Martha Graham documentaries, who’s a marvelous dancer, choreographer. And a lot of these films that I was watching were in black and white. She’s in a monochrome color and is working with these very angular body lines. I was reading a lot about Nijinsky, who was also a dancer; I was looking at Calder sculptures, which work with a lot with contrast. So I was thinking a lot about angle, a lot about shadow, and a lot about the turning between the two.
Going back to the idea of balance and shadow in the Calder mobiles, I was wondering about the structure of the poem. At various points, I was reminded of webs or fractals, and there are images of houses full of reflections and windows and shadows and light. As you were writing the piece as a whole, were there any forms—natural or unnatural—that inspired the structure?
I definitely was looking a lot at sculpture, dancers, abstract art. Beyond artist inspiration, I was living in a loft apartment where the windows were high above the ground level such that I was often looking up at the sky or the neighboring building through these dramatic windows. I was living in New England for a lot of the time that I was writing this. New England winters are filled with this constant, very particular blue light; it’s everywhere. And I had a large collection of glass bottles I had placed upon those windows’ sills. The blue of the winter through the blue of the glass, and then a large clock tower face through the window, too, if you stood at the right angle.
For the fractal structure of the work, it’s really a conversation about the line between prose and poetry. We’ll start back a little further. I had been writing a lot of very tightly-controlled poems, or trying to. It was as if I had only a certain allocation of words. I would do my initial draft and really be thinking about line breaks, about the breath. I have a background as a pianist and a violinist, so I was thinking about musical notation and how in music scores, you have a sense of having control of how the piece is performed, even though you really don’t. I could hear how I wanted the final product, but I was struggling to get that on the page.
And it meant that I was going through—what I think was an important process—but really struggling to write anything new and just doing this fiddling work of, well, what if I put the line break here? No, go back, move it here, okay, move it here. While I learned a lot about line breaks, I was stunted in what I could produce.
And so I took a fiction workshop. It was a generative writing workshop. I was the only poet in the class, and a little terrified, but also rather proud. Okay, I made it here. And I had to produce a certain amount of words or pages each week, which was way more than I was usually writing in a semester. I just had to push it out. The way I did that was by returning again and again to the same subject.
I’m so curious about this because I come from the world of fiction, and I’m far more comfortable thinking about plot and story than about line breaks and rhythm and sound. There’s clearly an underlying story, an arc, in The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, though the reader only gets bits and pieces. I realize they are connected, but I don’t get every piece of the puzzle the way I might when reading a more traditional short story. So, when you are writing a narrative poem, how much are you thinking about that underlying story? Are you thinking about elements like “plot?” How do you decide how much to reveal?
I love this question because I am currently working on a book in which I am trying to write explicit narrative, and really struggling at it! I’m marveling at fiction writers’ ability to consciously architect a more clearly defined story. In comparison, when I was writing The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, I was thinking of the scenes and narrative almost like set design or atmosphere building, and less in terms of any structured rising action, climax, resolution.
I was thinking of it less in terms of plot and more in terms of tempo and movements. I had a sense of the energy of the direction of the book, which is really in a lot of ways what plot is in the end. But I wasn’t approaching it from that mindset of plot. I was playing more with tempo. Okay, here’s a lull. Now that’s become too familiar. Now we need something faster. Now we need something tighter, the lines need to be tighter. It was almost more like putting together a music score rather than thinking about it as constructing a story.
That makes total sense, having read it, and I love hearing that description.
But the plot is there. I don’t want to say it’s not there. And I think that was part of putting the writing into prose, that suddenly you put it into paragraphs and it has these gestures of narrative. People start reading the narrative into it.
Yeah, I was reading it both thinking about the beauty and the interest of individual sections, but also wanting to know what happened next, wanting to know where these things would land. You said you’re moving even more into narrative for your next book. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
The new book centers around a single wolf character. Right now, I’m in character exploration of this fabular creature, and the goal has truly been to make writing fun for me again. I had put so much pressure on myself or expected a certain final product that I was having a lot of trouble writing. It wasn’t enjoyable for a couple of years there. Honestly, much of my writing development is figuring out how to let myself be myself, to get out of my own way.
Which is to say: I bought this five-year garden diary and I’m using the prompts in the garden diary as starting points for the wolf exploring a landscape or topic. Or I’m coming home from working at the library and thinking, Okay, what if we do a descriptive schema for categorizing the puddles around where the wolf lives? Or I take the wolf out to trot in the field. Roll around with description or faux seriousness. The writing process is figuring out how to play. And it’s letting me find ways to write about persona, personhood, perception, and the creaturely in unexpected new ways. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’m excited to see it growing and finding organic shape.
You mentioned your work as a librarian, and I know that classification and identification come up as a theme of The Girl Who Became a Rabbit. For instance, a speaker’s father classifies her as a dik-dik. Meanwhile she transforms not only into a rabbit, but also other mammals as well. The poem itself defies classification, as a hybrid work, which as you mentioned can be interpreted in many different ways. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on why humans love to classify things, but also want to defy classification.
I went to school for library science after sending this book out, and actually the book was accepted probably six months into my first library job. And so I really love your question, but I was also surprised: Oh, the categorizing, organizational curiosity was there. It was there all along! But of course.
From a psychology perspective, categories help us quickly know how to interpret and respond to information. They’re often quite instinctive groupings that happen without conscious awareness. But the way we categorize behaviors, objects, experiences—to go back to our conversation about self-narrative construction—these categories and the labels we attach to them shape our experience of the world. Creating your own categories, then, is a form of autonomy. Or your own language for categories. Or having a different organizational system. The organization and hierarchy (or flatness) of categories also shapes how we respond to our environments.
In Rabbit, I was definitely playing with people’s gestalts for poetry and prose. The narrative effect of putting ideas into paragraphs! The poetic effect of syntax! Absolutely fascinating. There’s also an interesting comparison here to be made about how Rabbit is an exploration of the narrator’s identity, and simultaneously there’s a lot of trying to identify and label others. There’s a brief section of the book on taxonomy, but it’s like a child’s understanding of lineage and relationships. The book has a fascination with the beauty of naming but a frustration with the inherent imperfection of any one category.
I want to ask about the different perspectives throughout the piece. While some voices seem to repeat, the point of view shifts throughout. At one point, one of the speakers confesses that “there’s too large a dose of his first person crowding out my consciousness.” I loved that line. I triple underlined it. So, building on what you just shared about capturing care and confusion as a way to build up truth, how did you land on the poem’s perspectives and weave them together?
It goes back to that compositional music character. There’s an almost choral quality. In the movie Amadeus, whether or not it is an actual Mozart quote, the character says that a beautiful thing about opera is that you can have multiple stories happening simultaneously, creating a cohesion, an effect together that is different than it would be if it was a solo or the aria. I was interested in the overlay there. I think that is part of this transfigural exploration, this pulling between identities, this internal shifting, this gathering the self and the different selves you carry throughout the day. That’s also a product of the fractured images and narrative shapes that are in the collection. It was written through so much accruement of one passage here, one passage there, and then building, and building, and threading them together.
How do you think about research in your work?
I was just actually talking to a friend of mine about this recently, about how much fun I am having checking books out as a librarian. I can have books delivered to my office! I can get books from anywhere in the world! And being able to find and have access to books so easily changes how I engage with them. I’m more adventurous across topics, more dabbling. It’s quite different than how I’d go about gathering books in a bookstore. I can bring home stacks, use a text greatly or only for its ambiance.
The library and gathering this abundance of books is such an important part of my writing process. Most people think of research as fact-seeking, the way it would be if I was writing a historical novel or a nonfiction book; this is a more experiential information seeking form of research. I’m researching certain verbal or visual textures, intentionally prompting serendipitous curiosity. I’ll have certain topics that I’m interested in—right now it’s botanical field guides, animal anatomy, old arthouse cinema—and I’ll bring home several books from the library on those topics from across genres and fields, a mix of nonfiction, fiction, art books. I also work a lot with picture books, and I’ll lay them all out on my dining room table topped with small objects or stones, pieces of paper. I gather together repeated images or patterns across books, like I’m conjuring specific atmospheres or shapes into the room before I start writing.
Wow. That is a very interesting process. Is that something you developed over time?
I’ve been doing that for quite a while. I’m very lucky to have been immersed in the world of books since I was little. This practice of gathering books and objects into little ritual creative spaces, I’m pretty sure I gathered that from my mother, who is a visual artist. As a child, whenever I would go into my mom’s studio (i.e., the spare bedroom), her desk was always carefully curated with art books, stones, and little wooden animals or little boxes or pieces of paper she had found. I think I learned that form of research early, as just a part of the creative process, this creative atmosphere-building through texts and objects.
Marguerite Sheffer is a writer who lives in New Orleans. Her debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees (University of Iowa Press), won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She was named a 2023 Veasna So Scholar at The Adroit Journal. Her stories also appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epiphany, The Offing, Smokelong Quarterly, and The Cosmic Background, among other magazines. You can find her online @mlensheffer and at www.margueritesheffer.com.
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