Dresses, Black Mirror, Exquisite Corpses, and Witches, Too: My Interview with Juliette van der Molen

Hello, Everyone!

I'm continuing my author interviews with the highly creative and talented Juliette van der Molen today, whose latest poetry installment of Anatomy of a Dress was so good that I felt the need to tell you all about it.

Anatomy of a Dress

I'd never thought about the connotations of the question "What will you wear today?" Until I read this book, but now it's been on my mind lately. I used to plan my in-ring days around this question because so much of how the day went would be determined by my appearance (or so I thought). I used to meticulously plan my ring gear for the show's performances, down to the color of the nail polish and the bows in my hair. Sometimes my planning had to commence days before the show even took place and I would have to specially order items and outfits months in advance. I was obsessively committed to having all of the details right for what I looked like in the ring (and that was just my outfit! Don't get me started on how many hours I spent practicing).

The reason I bring this up is because I have (and had) several outfits to wrestle in and now that I think about it, most of the guys I knew had one or two outfits as their standard. Why did I have so many? Why did I feel this pressure to have an entire wardrobe just for my matches? Not only that, I even had a separate line for when I had managerial duties. Was this from me or was this from something larger?

Then I read Juliette's Anatomy of a Dress and suddenly so many things started to make sense. She has very interesting observations about women and clothing in society that I now find myself thinking about all the time.

Juliette van der Molen

DL: When did you begin writing?

JvdM: I’ve written for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was always making up stories and writing them down. I was involved in writing conferences for young authors and resurrected the literary magazine of my high school with the help of a teacher, which had been defunct for years at that point.

DL: Which authors and artists (from any medium) do you draw inspiration from?

JvdM: Growing up in the Midwestern part of the United States, I was exposed to a lot of American writers. My earliest memories of reading were Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Joyce Carol Oates. I read a lot more contemporary writing now, which inspires me. Poets like Jen Rouse, Marisa Crane, Raine Geoghegan and Gaynor Kayne have such strength in their authenticity and ability to paint images with verse. These poets are part of my ever-expanding personal canon.

DL: What are the most magnificent parts about writing?

JvdM: Anything is possible. And I do mean anything. If you want to nestle the moon in the floor of the ocean and light the entire sea, you can do that as a writer. The other part about writing that I love is having a voice. When I write how I feel on the page, no one is taking that away from me. I can create my own platform and I don’t have to rely on a gatekeeper to let me in, which is a beautiful phenomenon of technologies that didn’t exist when I was a young writer.

DL: What challenges do you encounter as a writer?

JvdM: It always looks different on the page than it does in my mind. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s frustrating. I also find it challenging to direct my focus. I have this hopper that is overflowing with ideas, thoughts, scraps of paper with words on them, a bit of leaf I found in the forest, a feather from a bird, etc. Sorting through all of that is difficult. Every idea seems to have its merit and they’re all anxious kids in a classroom clamoring for my attention. But, I’ve only got so much time and energy. It’s difficult to make those choices sometimes, I can be easily distracted by new ideas or the old ones that continually tug at my sleeve.

DL: What specifically drew you to poetry?

JvdM: Writing micro flash nudged me into poetry. I was writing and publishing these 55 word stories. One day someone said to me, “oh, I really liked that poem!”. I had no idea what they were talking about. Then I started playing around with my own words. I did a bit of erasure from my flashes and then started arranging them into stanzas and sometimes rhyme schemes. They turned into a fascination with poetry. So, I suppose it was a bit of childlike wonder and play that led me to poetry. It was absolutely life changing for me as a writer.

DL: How long does it take you to write a poem?

JvdM: Well, that’s a difficult question to answer. Sometimes they leap out almost fully formed onto the page. I was working on a manuscript in November where I wouldn’t allow myself to edit. In not treating that poetry like it was so precious and fragile I was laying track on a consistent basis. I went into the library one day and wrote six poems. I’d never done that before. Now, these are first drafts. They’re far from done, I’ll go back to them. But, I think letting myself get them onto the page in their roughest form freed me and gave me a momentum that was good for the project.

Death Library: The Exquisite Corpse Collection

DL: For your Death Library: The Exquisite Corpse Collection, you used written and visual formatting for your work. Were there any challenges new to you while working on that project? How long did that take to finish?

JvdM: That project was like being shot out of a cannon. I wrote it in about 6 weeks. The idea came and I was hyper-focused, I couldn’t let it go. I spent every waking hour between my day job and eating/sleeping writing that book. The interesting part about it was where the inspiration would come from for each person. Sometimes I’d see a photo and that would kick it off. Other times, I would read a newspaper article about someone’s death and I’d go from there. But, I found that I liked working with photos as inspiration. There’s something that challenges my brain in a different way when I combine visual stimuli with worded responses.

DL: What prompted you to construct the Death Library?

JvdM: Nadia Gerassimenko, editor in chief and founder of Moonchild Magazine was doing a themed call for one of her issues called “Exquisite Corpses.” I was playing around with ideas for a poem and I was still really finding my feet with poetry. It was more in line with prose poetry, which is why all of those poems are formatted they way that they are in that book. Her theme ticked all my boxes for gothic and dark things that I love. I started thinking about the issue she would create and the idea of it being a collection of corpses. Which led to an idea about a literal collection of bodies-- who would do that, why, what would it look like-- who would they choose, etc. I pitched the idea to Nadia, not for the issue, but as a chapbook. She was so enthusiastic for me to write it and that really gave me the courage to go for it.

This show is EVERYTHING

DL: Are you able to select a favorite poem that you’ve ever written? If not, is there one that stands out to you more than any other (one that you learned the most from, one that you get the most praised from, etc.)?

JvdM: It’s difficult to sort that question out, but one of my favorite poems was “Revolutionary”. It was published in Royal Rose’s first issue and it was one of those that came out of me in a rush. It was initially inspired by watching an episode of Black Mirror, believe it or not. In it, there’s this woman and she’s definitely part of a resistance, which her partner seems to enjoy. But, he’s always trying to hold her to him and he says to her, "Do you have to go?" It set me off thinking about how sometimes there’s this idea that men can find women of a rebellious nature attractive, but they end up trying to hold her back for selfish reasons. It’s as if the idea of her is so appealing, but the reality requires too much sacrifice. Women then really have to decide if they’re going to be who they are or who someone else wants them to be, which is not always easy. In the poem, my revolutionary doesn’t have an issue with this:

“because you forgot
who she was,
who she was meant to be,
not yours to keep,
just moments on loan.”

DL: You stated in your book that the inspiration for your new release, Anatomy of a Dress, came from a Met exhibit on gowns and then spiraled. When did you know you know this idea would turn into your next poetry book?

JvdM: I didn’t know for years. I saw the exhibit and was doing my paintings around it and it was at least two years before I started putting it together. At the time of the exhibit, I wasn’t writing anything, at all. I certainly wasn’t writing poetry. I had one of my paintings from my project called “The Charles James Abstraction” hanging above my writing desk. It was like the art started to collide with my ideas about feminism and fashion and current events. None of that was planned, it was more of an organic growth.

"Green Silk" (from the Charles James Abstraction Project), 24x48 acrylic on canvas

JvdM's sketch done in front of the dress

https://www.flickr.com/photos/53035820@N02/4989460166

(Charles James evening gowns- that green dress, tho)

DL: What did you learn while compiling Anatomy of a Dress that was unexpected?

JvdM: I learned that I’ve fought traces of internal misogyny for most of my life. I didn’t realize what it was, didn’t have a name for that. But, so many ideas had been passed onto me from other well-meaning women and other sources that we all contend with, like media. It was just so insidious and I thought, how much did I pass on to my own daughters? I had to take absolute responsibility for that. It’s hard to look in the mirror and point the finger at myself.

DL: What’s one thing you’ve learned from a live poetry reading?

JvdM: That I’m going to have my perspectives challenged and turned on end by someone (and sometimes many) in the room. I always learn something and I discover new people to read or connections to other people in the community. It’s an adventure.

And the reading itself? It can be a lot of fun if you let yourself go and don’t worry about what other people think. Still working on that bit, but I catch glimmers of it now and then!

Confess: The Untold Story of Dorothy Good

DL: Confess is due out this year from TwistiT Press and is compiled of poems about Dorothy Good of the Salem Witch trials. Could you share the impact this time in history had on you and what prompted you to write poems solely devoted to this moment in time?

JvdM: I learned about the Salem Witch Trials as a part of American History classes in school. But, it wasn’t until I listened to the podcast, "Unobscured" by Aaron Mankhe, that I found out about Dorothy Good. The podcast did a deep dive into the trials for an entire season. Within that there was a small mention of this young child who had been arrested for witchcraft. Her mother was one of the 19 hanged in Salem and part of the ‘evidence’ was the confession they extracted from Dorothy. She was only five years old.

I started looking into her and ran into a bunch of dead ends. I knew then that I needed to write about her. People don’t just disappear no matter how much we try to erase things we don’t want to remember from history.

I think what happened in Salem is important. Like a lot of atrocities in history we tend to think we are ‘beyond’ them happening again. Yet, they do happen because human behavior is unfortunately prone to repetition.

I want Dorothy to remembered. And for every ‘Dorothy’ that I happen to find out about, I know there are plenty of other people who have suffered at the hands of corrupt power and discrimination that we never have the chance to hear about.

DL: What are you currently reading?

JvdM: This will change by the day, because I am always reading and it’s usually multiple books at a time. Right now on my shelf for poetry I have Shelter in Place by Catherine Kyle and How to Carry Fire by Christina Thatcher.

DL: What project(s) are you currently working on?

JvdM: I’m working on a historical poetry collection about Mary, Queen of Scots called “Even A Queen” and I’m attempting a verse novel that is set in Wales and has a fairy tale/folklore slant to it. I’m also working on some ekprhastic poetry based on Hilma af Klint’s work, which I hope to develop into a collection.

DL: What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received, or heard?

JvdM: If you’re writing: you are a writer. There’s no ‘aspiring writer’ label that works, it’s really only a label that contributes to exclusion or imposter syndrome. You can aspire to achieve things like being published, but if you’re writing-- you’re a writer. Just own it.

DL: How can our readers stay in touch with you?

I’m on twitter a lot, though I admit the feed goes by so rapidly I miss a lot of stuff sometimes! They can find me there @j_vandermolen or on Instagram @juliette.writes. I also have a website with links to a lot of free reading, videos of my performances, a bookstore and a listing of upcoming events. My website address is www.juliettewrites.com.