Author Interview: Thera Webb and The Witch, A Play.
A Witch, A Beast, and A Mother walk into the woods...
Hello friends and fiends—
Happy Friday! Today, I’m excited to introduce poet, activist, and anarchist Thera Webb to you. Webb is the author of one full-length collection - The Witch, A Play (White Stag) - and two chapbooks - On the Shoulders of the Bear (Fractious Press) and Reality Asylum (h_ngm_n).
I recently read their collection, The Witch, A Play—& honestly, with that title, you couldn’t have tried to keep me away from it! I had such a wonderful experience with how the images and narrative structure worked together that I knew I had to talk to them about their work.
Below is a lovely chat about gender, fairy tales, and the importance of the witch. So sit back, pour yourself a cup of hibiscus tea, and settle in. If you feel moved, I highly recommend picking up a copy of their collection. I’ll be reviewing Lisa Marie Basile’s collection Saint Of next month, so if you want to pick them up together, you can even save on shipping (wink-wink, nudge-nudge).
Happy #NationalPoetryMonth!
SMW: Hi Thera! Welcome to The Madhouse Review. 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?
TW: Hi! Thanks so much for having me! I’m Thera Webb - the ‘h’ in my name is silent, which is probably the most important thing to know about me. I started writing poetry in third grade, and have had a love/disinterest relationship with it ever since. I got an MFA from UNC Greensboro in 2009 and then stopped writing for a while and picked back up after a couple years. I don’t really relate to people who say they have to write. For me, it’s more of just another creative craft that I do like woodworking or making jewelry. I enjoy it, and it gives me a certain satisfaction, but it’s one of many ways in which I filter the world.
SMW: What was your writing process like for The Witch, A Play?
TW: The Witch is a manuscript I’ve been more or less working on for 10 years. Maybe more. For a while I thought it was complete, [but] was amassing rejections for the manuscript - and one of the rejections I got told me my work was too repetitive, which was maddening because that was kind of the point. I was so frustrated, and had been reading some [of] that Anne Carson book Float, which is lots of chaplets that you can reorder to tell different stories, so I decided I was just going to cut up every single line from that manuscript and rearrange them to be something new, since clearly the “finished” form I had was not working. I’ve called this Sapphoization because I was creating fragments and then filling in parts based on the fragments, like a lot of people who translated Sappho have done. From there the book just sort of pulled together - that it was actually a book about eavesdropping on a lot of voices and piecing together a story told by many points of view.
SMW: This collection speaks to and celebrates a rich history of fairy tales, folklore, and mythology—a few of my favorite things! —and since the witch is such an important figure/idea in those narratives, can you talk a little about what originally drew you to her archetype?
TW: I’ve always been interested in witches. On a purely entertainment level they always have the best roles - they move stories along because they’re a force of friction for heroes to rub against to create narrative electricity. And witches inhabit multiple realities - they’re shorthand stand ins for ancient ways of being - uncivilized, attached to nature - they’re warnings to women about what might happen to them if they don’t toe the line regarding the status quo of gender roles, and they’re powerful and enchanting and mysterious.
SMW: In one of monologues, The Witch says: “I have such sweet thoughts/ to cause the fruit and flowers here to grow/and melt golden into the brackish creek./ And yet you think me false.” This is such a beautiful, sorrowful little gut punch that speaks to the dangers of judgement, stereotypes, and false narratives toward someone (or a group of people). Now I know you have a BA in Gender Studies. Can you talk to how this speaks to gender and identity, and why this is still a battle we’re fighting today?
TW: One of the things The Witch symbolizes for me is the way society has it rigged so women can’t “win.” The Witch is every woman who has been told she’s wearing too much makeup, or has been asked to name three songs of the band whose shirt she is wearing. She’s every person who has been told that their identity is “wrong” in some way. The Witch shows us ways to operate outside of patriarchy and outside of hierarchy by successfully shunning society and doing her own thing.
I think also growing up with lesbian mothers and being around a lot of adult lesbians who were operating on the margins of mainstream society simply by existing, I just have a natural affinity for women who are not conventional.
SMW: In one monologue, The Mother says: “Yet grievingly I went/all darkness/swimming in a blood bag/when the night was lit/and the stars were burning fish/spawning in the rivers of my head.” First off—that imagery! My dark heart sings! But as a new mom myself, I can relate to this feeling of encroaching darkness, of walking into the shadows. I suffered from PPD after the birth of my daughter, and I feel like this is such a haunting description of how it felt to be a new mom with all the blood, scarring, and hormones raging in (and outside of) your body. Can you talk about how you saw The Mother in your collection and maybe give some examples of notable mothers in fairy tales that you pulled from to create her?
TW: I love The Mother! The blood bag line came from a dream I had in college - and I don’t remember anything else about the dream - but that image really stuck with me. This is actually one of my favorite poems because it also references one of Drusilla’s visions in Buffy. And I love a secret reference like that in a poem.
In fairytales it always seems like the mother gets the short end of the stick - she’s dead 90% of the time. She so rarely gets to tell her own story. Obviously, this was historically accurate since so many women died in childbirth, but it’s also an easy tool for setting up a story, right? It can be challenging to find stories where the mother is alive or at all present.
One of the inspirations for my The Mother was the Unanana from the southern African folktale Unanana and the Elephant, which is about a woman whose children are swallowed by an elephant, and how she cleverly frees them from its stomach. I really liked that story because not only was the mother still alive, but she was the hero of the story.
Rapunzel is another mother who has her own story - depending on what telling of the story you’re looking at - she has twins and is thrown out of her tower and raises the children on her own since the prince is wandering around after having been blinded by the tower’s thorns. It’s possible that The Children in my book are sometimes Rapunzel’s twins.
SMW: I’ve always had a soft spot for the villain, so if I wasn’t #TeamWitch, I’d be #TeamBeast for this collection. That said, I love how readers are able to put their own idea of characterization to your cast and define beast. Is it a literal monster? Is it the Devil? Is it a man? A Woman? The Shadow Self? In one of the monologues, The Beast says: “The purest wilderness/is inside/us all/ especially me.” How did you see The Beast, and what did you want them to represent in this collection?
TW: It’s such a relief to hear this is how the Beast came off. I wanted the beast to be really amorphous. Sometimes it’s a beast like in Beauty and the Beast, sometimes a unicorn or a stag, a boar, or a talking lion. Or some other thing, depending on your ideas.
I also wanted The Beast to provide some humor and pathos. So, I think it got some of the most beautiful lines, but also some of the silliest - like the “especially me” line. I always imagine that poem being delivered with a little ba-dum ching after that line. Maybe in some ways the Beast is also The Fool?
I guess The Witch and The Beast are traditionally villains, but I think we can all agree that The Hero is the real villain in this book.
SMW: What role(s) do you think fairy tales have in the 21st century?
TW: We need more fairytales, I think. We definitely need some heavy-handed moral guidance, which I think fairy tales are good at. Folk and fairytales teach us how to be in a society, which is why new contemporary fairytales are useful - they can teach us how to operate in the new world we’re building. I’m not thinking about adaptations here but about whole new stories like The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet, or The Clever Princess. Tales that have a feeling of timelessness but that are thoroughly modern in terms of how they treat gender.
SMW: When it comes to fairy tales, I have a soft spot for Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel. Wolves and witches, what can I say? What are some of your favorites you find yourself returning to now and again?
TW: Oh, I have so many favorites. For a mainstream tale I always like the “12 Dancing Princesses” because it’s so blatantly sexist in a way I find entertaining. The “hero” in the story stalks down these young women who are out having a nice time with their friends, and brings them home to be controlled by their father? So weird. I also really love the descriptions of the gold and silver bejeweled forests that usually come with that story.
But my real favorite is “Tatterhood” - which is a Norse story about twin sisters - one of whom is beautiful and a little boring and one of whom is born riding a goat and goes around whacking trolls with a giant wooden spoon.
SMW: What poets are you currently reading? Are there any collections you’re looking forward to adding to your TBR list?
TW: Everything from Black Ocean is so moving and odd and lovely, I have a couple of their newer books in my to-be-read shelf - Biologicity by Shin Hae-uk and Applause for a Cloud by Sayumi Kamakura. I tend to be one of those people who wants to buy every book a press puts out, so I also have a subscription to White Stag (my publisher), so I get every book they put out. It’s like a poetry CSA.
I’ve taken some workshops with Poetry Field School recently and one of the great things about them is all the new poets you’re reading - both from the readers Elaine Kahn puts together and because you’re in a class with poets you probably didn’t already know. So I get to read newer poets like Em DeVincentis in the workshop and new-to-me poets like Alejandra Pizarnik in the readings.
SMW: What’s next for your readers?
TW: I currently have one manuscript looking for a home - it’s erasures of State of the Union Addresses from every sitting US president from George Washington to George Bush the First. The text of the addresses has been chipped away to reveal a different story of America. I’m also working on another more regular collection of poems.