Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognised writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of 2022. a “Working Life”, their newest collection of poems, is out now. They live in New York and in Marfa, Texas.

In this interview, Eileen Myles chats with Alex Creece about poetry as both polemic and pathetic, genre and gender, rescue dogs, teeth, puppets and Muppets.

Header image: © Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times/Headpress (licensed for one-time use)

 

I’m having my morning coffee with Eileen over Zoom. It’s Wednesday afternoon in Marfa, Texas, and Thursday morning in the regional Victorian suburb where I live. I’m on fobbing off my boring tasks, and I’m beyond exhausted, but our conversation is energising.

There’s a Cool for You poster on the wall behind Eileen and I meet their dog, Honey, about halfway through the interview. I’m sitting on the floor, my own dog bouncing around behind me.

This interview takes place in January 2024. It takes me almost a year to get my shit together and finish transcribing it.

 

Alex Creece: Hey, Eileen. Thanks so much for chatting with me today! So firstly, I wanted to talk a little bit about your recent book, a “Working Life”. 

I was watching you read from this book on YouTube, where you said it’s not exactly about labour, but more about the plan – like architects making a little model of something, rather than the thing itself.

You also mentioned that it’s about 30 per cent poems about your ex, which I personally think is pretty good, in dyke terms.

Eileen Myles: It’s not bad, I know! I very deliberately counted when I was putting it together. I thought, Is this too much? No.

AC: Not bad at all. Could you tell me about how a “Working Life” came together? I know this was at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, which arguably allowed for more time to be creative in solitude.

EM: I mean, I loved how COVID was for writing and just being, you know. I felt like I just had my day in this pure way that I hadn’t had since I was like a lot younger. Like, you’re a writer, you want to be known, then you get known and it’s fucking too much.

I’m always being asked to do things, and I’m trained to say yes, with the idea of always needing the money for years. Then [with COVID], it just suddenly was this full stop. No more gigs.

I was working on this long novel project that I’m still working on now. I just feel like prose needs some kind of relief – I would usually write a little bit and then I would go see some people. And I didn’t have that. But interestingly, for poems, it was perfect.

I felt like I was just… a living notebook, you know? And I always am. But when there’s other things I have to do, you’re not always as receptive to poems as I was during the pandemic. So, it was really cool. Now it’s weird, I’m in the same place, but it’s a completely different situation and I’m like, where are the poems?

 

AC: In terms of being a writer who has become ‘known’, as you said, I was wondering if you find it harder to write poems now? Some people may canonise you as a public figure, as opposed to a writer, which I can imagine would be frustrating. Do you ever feel conflicted between your own creative inclinations, and what people expect or want from you?

EM: No, I don’t. Poems have always just felt like my business. If I write and publish a book of prose, there’s much more brouhaha than there is about a book of poetry.

It’s sort of like a different gig entirely. Poetry is more flexible. People in the art world might ask me to write a poem about something, or lately I’ve started performing with these two musicians. It’s really fun. Like, it’s the last thing I ever thought I would do, but they just kind of asked one night, “Hey, you want to bring some poems to this club?”

So, there’s a way that poetry is very mutable and modular; it can do all these different things. It’s not a commodity, exactly.

Even in the context of my career, there are some things that I feel I have to write, for money, or for a friend. Like I owe them something. And that’ll be the big thing I’m working on: the book of prose or whatever.

By contrast, poetry feels very much like a private track. It’s just about what I’m noticing or what I’m going through.

 

AC: I love that. I agree – poetry feels much less commercial than other forms of writing to me, and even antithetical to commercialism, which can be freeing. This actually feeds into something else I wanted to talk to you about: that poetry is a little embarrassing, in my opinion… in a nice way! You recently edited an anthology called Pathetic Literature, and I wanted to know your thoughts about poetry as a pathetic genre?

EM: Poetry is way pathetic! There’s nothing more pathetic than being at a party, somebody asking what you do, and saying, “I’m a poet.” Once in a while, people are like, “Oh, cool.” But really, you feel like you’ve just exposed yourself to anything they might think. It’s not like you’re a lawyer and they think, “Huh, I could use this person.”

When you say you’re a poet, people are like, “What the fuck do you mean? You’re an adult and that’s what you do?”

You’re a poet too, right? You get it. Also, I have to say something: if you notice, I have two missing teeth right here. My dog might have done it.

Over the past six years, I had two crowns put on teeth there that were cracked. First, I bit a dried fig about six years ago and the tooth just popped right out! They fixed it and put an implant in. Then in January, I bit a slice of pizza and heard a pop and I knew it wasn’t the crown: it was the fucking tooth.

I went to the dentist, and they said it cracked all the way up, and they had to take it out. You know, so I’m [currently] waiting for new teeth. But the thing that’s so weird is they were like, “Have you experienced any trauma?”

And I was like, “Trauma? What are you talking about?” But then I realised they meant [trauma] to the mouth.

When my dog was young, she was a head-butter. And yeah, she definitely got me in the mouth a couple of times. So, I think she may well have cracked my teeth. So normally I have a retainer I can pop in and look like I have normal teeth, but I’m just like, I’m so over it. But I didn’t want to sit here this whole time and wonder if you were thinking about it.

AC: Oh, not at all! My dog is a head-butter too. Her head is like a Goomba from Super Mario. I actually love teeth. I collect people’s teeth. So, when people lose teeth, I’m kind of there being like, “May I have the remnants, please?”

EM: Amazing! Okay, so you’re down with teeth and their absence, too. I just needed to say that, so it’s out of the way.

AC: Yeah, totally. Even speaking of being a poet, I went to the dentist the other day and he was like, “You really need to come see me more often.” And that’s wild to me. I’m a poet. The fact that I come to the dentist at all is amazing. He should be thrilled that a poet can put money aside to see the dentist.

EM: Right? A rich person should create a grant fund just for poets’ teeth.

 

AC: Yes, that’d be ideal! When creating and reading poems, I sometimes think about [famous New York School poet] Frank O’Hara saying, “You just go on your nerve,” as something of his poetic philosophy. Poetry is quite nervy, and sometimes nervous.

Do you feel like your own poems go on nerves? Or, what’s the Eileen way to write a poem?

EM: Huh. Let’s see… you know, usually there’s a first line that resonates. I just feel like it’s a good line, but I also feel all these other things jangling behind it. Like, I know that it’s got ancestors or roots, or a whole population behind it. I carry small notebooks a lot, and sometimes I’m just growing a slow poem. Like, I’ll write a line and then [realise] it could possibly be related to the line I wrote yesterday.

That’s the kind of thing I’m doing right now. It’s funny, but I kind of miss teaching. I haven’t taught a real semester-long class since 2019. And it’s not that I did that so much, but it’s been a piece of my life for 20 years. For whatever reason, NYU just didn’t ask me to teach again. And I was like, fine, you know, so I’ll teach weeklong workshops or something. But there’s a way in which by teaching poetry, I’m always reading poetry.

I’ll usually get [my students] to read something that I feel like I need to read. Like, I’ll make them read The Collected Poems of George Oppen or something, because I’ve always wanted to read all his poems. So, there’s a kind of intake [of poetry]. And poems come from poems.

I still read; I read poetry and always have a couple of books hanging around that I read a little bit of every day. But there was that way of really consuming a lot that I wonder: If I don’t do that, do I not put out a lot of my own work? You know, it’s a good question.

AC: It kind of reminds me of like, how a mushroom will grow, and it has its mycelia networks: you’ve got that starting point – like a line of poetry – but it reaches for all kinds of other stuff, and connects to other poems. It’s tangled and intertextual.

EM: You’re thinking the poem may be down there and growing?

AC: Yeah… something is under the surface. These networks connect in interesting ways, but only sometimes do they sort of emerge like a mushroom.

EM: Yeah, yeah. That makes total sense to me.

 

AC: Something else that I wanted to chat about – which resonates with my poetry, too – is the value of humour in poetry, especially when I feel like there’s sometimes a lot of pressure to take it seriously. In a “Working Life”, I loved this line: “nothing more trans than taking a shit in the men’s room in a hotel”.

Do you wanna talk about the use of humour, surprise or play within poetry?

EM: Well, in a way, I feel like when you write a poem or when you’re just a poet, you’re always facing your community. It’s sort of like you’re always that same network of roots. Not that I’m writing to anybody in particular, but I’m talking to my people.

Part of my bag of tricks is I’m funny, you know? That’s part of how I survive. Part of being queer and uncomfortable was being laughed at, and then realising that you could manage that. You could manage that by being funny and controlling how they laugh.

I was a class clown growing up, so humour is part of my personality. And I think that was, of course, the big revelation of the New York School of Poetry. I loved Sylvia Plath when I was younger, and I loved Dylan Thomas and Wordsworth, and— who else did I love?

I mean, I guess I knew Allen Ginsberg, and I didn’t know that he was funny. It’s like, there was just this sense that poetry was about my heavier feelings. It was such a relief to discover [Frank] O’Hara and all of them and realise that they were funny people, but also that poetry was a world – a world that you could laugh at.

AC: Hmm, yeah. I like that a lot. Sometimes when I do a poetry reading, I have to preface it by telling the audience that it’s okay to laugh, or to emote however they feel. Just because it’s a poem, doesn’t mean you need to act like you’re at an opera or ballet. It’s good to have a giggle, actually. I encourage it.

EM: It’s the hard thing about reading to say, freshmen in college… Or recently I had a really cool experience: I’m in this small town in West Texas and I was asked to read at the local high school, which I’ve never, ever done.

It was really fun, because I went to a Catholic high school. They would never ask me to read. Never, ever. They don’t know what I’ll say, and they know I’m queer. But anyway, so it was just like these kids, you could tell they just didn’t know what to do with this. And so, they didn’t know they were allowed to laugh.

It’s just like, poetry is such a part of your educational experience, usually in a bad way. We have to explain that, you know, if you haven’t taken a poetry workshop or anything, you need some grooming [around the genre].

 

AC: I also wanted to talk to you about poetry and politics. Obviously, your poems are very like anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and pushing against those institutions. To put it in a neat slogan, you’re not gay as in happy, you’re queer as in ‘Free Palestine’.

How do you embed your politics into your poetry? What role can poets play in political change? And how do you find the experience of writing during times of crisis and genocide and atrocity after atrocity?

EM: These are all things I think about. Allen Ginsberg was alive when I came to New York in the ’70s, and he never had any problem writing about politics. Then there were like the whole world of Adrienne Rich and all those feminist poets. And they never had any trouble. But it’s like the New York School was a little bit apolitical.

So, when I first came to town and started writing poetry, that was the kind of advice of the slightly older poets: we don’t do politics. Politics don’t belong in poetry, you know. And I kind of accepted that because I didn’t have much to stand on. I mean, I guess I went to Washington for a gay march in the ’70s and I sat in parks and for all sorts of anti-war protests when I was in college and stuff, but I didn’t consider it, like, a deep part of who I was.

I didn’t see myself as an activist; I protested as a part of my generation. But that changed as time passed, in a lot of different ways. I got sober in the ’80s, and so my relationship to the world changed. I started to understand that homelessness was a deep fear of mine.

I understood the childhood traumas I had. I mean, I wasn’t going to be tossed out of my house, but I felt like I was going to be, you know? So, I was always afraid of being homeless. I felt homeless and I wasn’t much of a money earner when I came to New York. It was different in the ’70s and ’80s, ’cause you could get these cheap little apartments, but if you were a real fuck-up, you could even lose one of those, you know?

So, I was always very anxious about keeping my home. When I got sober, homelessness just very organically became what I said, what I saw, what I wrote about.

When people talk about New York School poetry, they often wonder why New York School poets often talk their friends in their poems, whereas earlier generations of poets used nature – because that’s where they were – or they used classical references because they were so embedded in Greek and Roman mythology, like beauty.

Keats talked about beauty through this like Greco-Roman lens. I mean, he’s great. I love Keats, but that was his world to some extent. It was part of the definition of poetry. Again, O’Hara and all of them changed it by putting their friends in the poems.

The first time I spent time in nature, I thought, oh, I can write about nature. It’s just the same as writing about the city. And it’s just that the city was how I learned to write, you know? And nature came second. And so same with politics.

When politics became an organic part of my existence, there was no way it was going to stay out of the poems, you know? My friends started dying of AIDS. How was I not going to write about that? So, it wasn’t deliberate. It was just the material of my existence in the same way that being in this location [Marfa] during the pandemic, say, meant a whole different materiality to the poem.

And Palestine is intense. I mean, I’ve written a couple of poems [about it]. I’m sure I’ve done more. I wake up every morning and I look at my phone and there’s dead kids, you know, and I cry, and then I go to the gym, and then I go bring down my recycling.

So, I wrote one poem that was just putting those things next to each other, which is not like a new thing, but it felt new because it felt like the only way to be present in this war was through the irony of my existence. I’m so there, and I’m so here. Do you know what I mean?

I was very grateful when I was in New York because every fucking day there was a protest. Every day, you know, four o’clock, if I felt like going out and screaming, “From the river, to the sea,” I could do it, you know?

[In Marfa] I’m now in a different position and I can’t do that, you know, so I’m having to figure out [what I can do]. I’ve posted things, and I received a shipment of keffiyehs. Then I ordered more keffiyehs. What else do I do? Do I wear one every day, all day long? I don’t know, but I’m trying to figure it out. Poet and person – these things are right next to each other, the same way Palestine and my daily existence are right next to each other.

 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. And I think with internet, the proximity to everything is just ever, ever present. We’re co-existing with all of these things, and so are our poems. On another topic, sorry if this is a little bit naff, but for our readers, I was wondering—

EM: A little bit what?

AC: Oh sorry, naff – like, it’s kinda cheesy… that might be regional slang, sorry! But yeah, do you feeling comfortable talking about what gender means to you, if anything? I was wondering particularly if you identify with the idea of like butch and lesbian as forms of gender, not just forms of sexuality. I’m particularly interested in gender diversity from generations who have come before mine.

EM: Yeah, yeah. I just feel like the fact that it keeps changing, the fact that there keeps being new language and new ways to see who we are and how we are seems like an opportunity to me, you know? But not everybody of my generation feels that way, so I know some dykes who are really digging their heels in. They think, “I’m a dyke, what is this? And is Eileen not a lesbian anymore?”

But I feel very accumulative about it. Every 10 or 20 years has changed since I’ve identified as a queer person. You know, it’s like when I came out in the ’70s, it was lesbian feminism. You were supposed to be woman-identified. There wasn’t a butch/femme thing, even though you would go to the bars, and see those old-school dykes with their funny hairdos. They always seemed like very working-class people, and they seemed like [something of] the past.

But then within 10 years or so, everybody was like, “Are you butch or are you femme?” Not to me personally, but that was the thing. Then not long after that, it was tops and bottoms, and thinking about what you were doing sexually, what you were into. And then after that, it was queer. So, it’s just been an interesting ride, you know.

I have a more or less stable/unstable idea of myself and who I am gender-wise or sexually, whatever. But I also feel very grateful that like, for instance, I had a therapist in the ’80s – my first therapist – and I remember I had an uncomfortable problem. I was having an affair with somebody, and [two people in my life] embarrassed me around this affair, and I was trying to figure that out with my therapist.

And somehow, I can’t remember how we got there, but I remember him saying, “Well, maybe you have a secret – maybe you’re hiding something.”

I said, “What could that be? I mean, it used to be that my secret was that I was gay…” and he responded, “Well, maybe you’re not gay. Oh, I don’t mean that you’re straight. Maybe you’re a transsexual.”

I was shocked, and he had to keep talking me down – you know, “I’m not saying you have to get surgery”, or something like that. He was a sliding scale therapist, and it turned out that his specialty was trans people. This was the ’80s, and I was pretty mind blown. Like, whoa.

I identified as butch, but I always felt like I was hiding something. When I was younger, I felt like I was a boy, you know? And when I was trying to perform as a heterosexual, I was sort of getting away with it, but I thought, When are they going to find out that I’m actually male?

I was then given language to be a lesbian and permission to be as masculine as I felt. Then suddenly, I had this new opportunity to ask myself whether I actually considered myself male, whether that was who I was. And it was – I remember going around to every butch I knew and asking them, “Do you feel like you’re a man inside? Do you feel like you’re a man?” and everybody said yes.

It was kind of an amazing moment. It did seem like there was a way in which butch was kind of a meta-step for many people’s identities, and then things went on since then. So, I really started to understand [my experiences].

I mean, early on, I think there was a transness to my gender, and I knew it. And it didn’t even seem to be as simple as that I was male. It was something else much more transitory entirely. I really relished when I finally found [they/them] pronouns – I thought they feels very, very, very right.

I feel like “they” is exactly who I feel like, and who I’ve always felt like. Also, I thought it was fun when I realised I had to tell my publisher to not use the “she” pronoun on my work. They fought it at first and said, “That’s not professional,” and it’s just like, wow, really? Um, that was eight years ago now.

 

AC: That’s so disappointing. I know a lot has changed since then.

EM: Yeah, and they gave me what I wanted, but they resisted at first, y’know? It’s still very tricky in with my friends because it’s like, how much do you police your relationships? Like, “It’s they! I use they!”

And I let it go a lot [when people misgender me]. But I think I’m realising that how we’re apprehended is a new layer of understanding. Presence and discomfort and queerness in the world. Especially here in West Texas, where every fucking store I go to, they call me “ma’am” and “lady”.

I just realised the dissonance of the culture continues in the importance of queer relationships and spaces where we know who we are and how to talk to each other. So, it’s interesting. I feel like in my professional life, it’s totally cool. Like, everybody’s very quick to understand pronouns. But in the quote-unquote “real world”, or daily world, it’s just like weird as fuck.

 

AC: Yes, I totally get what you mean. It’s something that hits me a lot when I step out of my usual circles, or into the “real world” that’s full of gender taxonomies, rules and assumptions. Thank you for talking about this stuff.

On a different topic, I wanted to talk to you about dogs, because I love dogs and I know you love dogs, too. When I look at my dog, I sometimes recall one of your poems, ‘Irony of the Leash’: “Dogs do not believe in God or Art. / Intrinsically they have a grip / on things.” I don’t know why this comforts me so much, but it does.

So, I wanted to know how you feel about the relationship between queers and their pets when I feel like – especially with rescue animals – it’s kind of like this sense of camaraderie in marginality. Like, underdogs supporting underdogs. I’ve had two dogs in my life, both of them of stigmatised breeds with trauma backgrounds and high needs. I feel like it’s not a coincidence that I share such a connection with animals deemed to be broken or disposable in the mainstream.

Do you feel a special kind of queer kinship with your pets?

EM: Oh, absolutely. The things we were just talking about, about gender and language and identity, you know, are absent in my relationship with my dog. It’s like she knows exactly who I am. And she knows me in a mammal way. She knows me by my smell. She knows me by our habits and our ways so that there’s such a congruence, you know?

I mean, there’s just something very profound about the way that the animal life is a miniature life, too. It’s sort of like [Honey’s] passage of time helps me deal with all sorts of other things in my life. She was a high-energy puppy. And now she’s like getting on, now she’s 10 or 11, and that just happened in the blink of an eye. I think that’s really profound.

There’s nothing more Buddhist than our walks and her pace and what that feels like. Every day is different with her.

We take the same fucking walk most of the time, you know? And I have to really respect her need to stop and sniff… yeah. I don’t know. Her existence is just a total gift – it’s queer and it’s beyond queer. In a way, that’s where I really want to be. [There are] limitations in the way we describe ourselves. When you connect to something bigger, when you’re alone in nature, you just don’t have a gender at all, in most ways.

AC: It’s really freeing – a relationship that you just never have to explain anything. Truly being known.

EM: I share everything with Honey. I’m not in a relationship right now. So, I just share everything with Honey. We sleep together, we walk together. I do bad – I give her food of mine. Her presence is profound and it kind of enables mine, too.

 

AC: You edited The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Literature almost 30 years ago. I wanted to ask: if you edited a Newer Fuck You, what writers or stories would you want to include?

EM: You know what? I think the weird thing is: there’s a huge relationship between The New Fuck You and Pathetic Literature.

In terms of backstory, my co-editor on The New Fuck You, Liz Kotz, was an art critic. She’s the person who turned me on to the notion of pathetic masculinity in the art world in the ’90s. And basically, she gave me the word “pathetic”.

We talked about doing Fuck You 2 [or Fuck You Too], but it just never happened. [Liz and I] had an amazing collaboration working on the book. It wasn’t going to be the same on the second volume, so we just kind of pulled away.

But Pathetic Literature can be seen as a quasi-sequel to Fuck You, absolutely. With The New Fuck You, it was a moment when everybody was doing lesbian anthologies. It seemed like every publisher was like, “lesbian anthology, what a great idea!” And each one seemed wrong in some way. You know, the categories, and even the carefulness about genre.

I think gender and genre definitely – well, they sound alike – but they have this relationship in that they both have so much policing around them. So, we really decided to do kind of an anti-lesbian anthology. The point would not be about lesbians, but to make a reading vehicle for lesbians.

It’s a book for lesbians to read, rather than making it be an identity-based thing.

We wanted to include performance texts, poems and fiction, and our joke was to put a man in there, too. And it’s so funny because right now what I’m working on, his book. His name is Joe Westmoreland, and he’s just one of my dearest friends.

Joe wrote a book called Tramps Like Us, and his chapter in The New Fuck You is from that book. He was living with HIV, and it came out with a very small press. It felt like the ’90s, but it was actually 2001 when it came out.

It seemed very unlikely that Joe was going to live, so we found the first publisher who would take his book and publish it before he died.

It came out, and then Joe didn’t die. The publisher moved over to a university press, and Tramps Like Us just sat there quietly, and they just let it go out of print. It was a really great book, and it never quite had its moment. But in the past year or so, it’s come to the attention of publishers and editors.

So now, Tramps Like Us is coming out in this really wonderful way in 2025. I’m writing the introduction to it. It’s beautiful how everything’s connected in this very funny way.

But again, back to The New Fuck You, we just wanted to even violate the very nature of lesbians by saying, “We can add a guy. Our lesbian book can include a man.”

And that was, I think, in some ways a push at gender. Of course.

 

AC: I really know what you mean about gender and genre – they do sound similar, for one thing, and there’s a lot of arbitrary rules that people want to enforce around them, rather than letting people define themselves within, without and beyond these concepts.

My poetry gets labelled “confessional” a lot, which feels quite gendered. All poems tell secrets, but I rarely hear men’s poetry described as “confessional”. I just want the poems to be read: do they need to be genred (or gendered) beyond poetry? Genre and gender both feel sticky to me.

EM: Oh man, I feel that about my prose, for sure.

I have one book, Afterglow – the one about the dog – that I call a memoir. Calling it a memoir was very deliberate because I felt a great deal of sentiment about that dog. And to me, the word memoir is a really sentimental term. I’ve never wanted to write something that’s just: here’s my memories. I’m not interested in that at all.

But people keep insisting that Chelsea Girls is a memoir, and even that all my books are memoirs, because I use my name. I also think that it is about them considering me female, so they [feel entitled] to tell me what it is that I’m doing. Exactly what you said about genre and gender. It’s maddening.

I remember sitting in a cafe with a male friend and this female friend – a dyke – but very kind of bossy know-it-all type person. And I remember her saying [about one of my books], “Well, why do you think you can say that this is a novel? Why do you think it’s a novel?”

It was just so much like irritation and anger and classism and contempt. And I remember my male friend said, “Because [Eileen] said so.”

Like, a man just had the ability to say that and get through to her. She wouldn’t have ever said that to him.

 

AC: We’re getting to the end of our chat. I was going to ask you about the Australian poetry scene, but I’m not feeling super motivated by that topic. Do you wanna talk about puppets instead?

EM: Oh! Very much, very much.

AC: Great! Tell me about puppets and how they intersect with your work. Have you made any puppets recently? I love Casper, the puppet speaker in your poem of the same name.

EM: Well, the thing is, I feel like everything is a puppet. Do you know what I mean? I just think that all the objects in our homes are ready to speak. Yeah. I think a really good writing practice is to observe things as a play – have the couch talking and the vertical shades behind you talking. And then suddenly, your glasses start saying something. So, I think of the whole anima.

I think these ideas vary from culture to culture. Like, I’ve seen some interesting independent films coming out of Palestine, and there was a way in which buildings spoke. For a culture that is losing their homes, losing their edifices and losing their buildings, of course these buildings have souls and speak.

I don’t know if you’ve read a book of mine called For Now. Do you know this book?

AC: Yep!

EM: Yeah, it talks about the fact that I lost cache of early poems. Devastating. But I have not lost my puppets. And it’s just like, so great and weird and wonderful that the puppets have survived, you know?

Part of it is the puppets don’t travel so much, you know? And so, they were very important to me. I mean, they were really the beginning of performance in my life, because I made them when I was eight or nine.

The woman who taught us puppetry was so interesting. She was this German woman, Miss Ursula. She got us to put on little shows out of that kind of German puppet theatre tradition. I went around my neighbourhood with my friends, and we would put on shows on porches.

In my neighbourhood, some families lived there for their entire lives. I mean, I lived in one house for most of my childhood. But there were a few nicer houses in the neighbourhood where new people were always moving in. They’d live there for about two years and then they would leave, and they’d be going to New York or someplace.

So, there was this family, the Pfeiffers, and they had a really great house with a high porch in the backyard, and they said that we could do our puppet show up there. It was really great, and we charged money. I was very entrepreneurial as a kid, and I loved that we were making money with the puppets. And then Mrs. Pfeiffer said, “Well, wouldn’t you kids like to give it to the Jimmy Fund?”

The Jimmy Fund was a charity for polio when I was a child. We felt like guilty, like, Yeah, of course we’re supposed to be good and give our money to the Jimmy Fund, but we want our money. And we were like not rich kids. But anyway, the puppets were just such a piece of art.

I always wanted to perform as a kid, and I would put on costumes and talent shows. I never played a musical instrument, but I would play these little bogus toy instruments and then puppets were this way to a bigger world.

They were my first art form, I think.

 

AC: Everything is a puppet. I love that.

EM: Yeah. Do you know Michelle Tea? She had this residency that she held a few years ago. I’ve been to some fancy residencies – where they bring you meals and treat you like a king or whatever – but Michelle’s residency was different.

We didn’t have our own room, and in some cases, we didn’t even have our own beds. Like, you would share a bed with somebody. We would all be silent from 12pm to 2pm, and then we would have lunch, and then we would all be silent from 4pm to 6pm, and these were our writing hours. So, we were writing around each other in silence.

I read part of Afterglow [to the group] while I was there. And then somebody said, “Is Rosie going to talk?”

This is how my mind works all the time: somebody will ask me a question and I’ll think, What a silly question. And then I’ll sit with it and then I think, Hm… under what conditions would Rosie talk? Well, if she were invited by the puppets to be on a talk show, she would talk.

And she was already dead, of course. So, it was like she would talk from the afterlife to puppets, who had never been alive.

So, I had this one idea, and it was so great because I wrote it with people all around me. The idea felt so solid that it just told itself, and it was really fun.

You’ve probably seen my film, the puppet film [The Trip]. The puppets have been coming out for years. In New York, there’s a place called Housing Works, and it’s like a thrift, basically, but their specialty is books. It’s very queer, and all to benefit people living with HIV. It’s a great place, and they’ll have these benefit readings. They asked me to read in A Christmas Carol, and I thought a puppet could be Marley’s ghost. Or when I did some activism, I had a puppet protest.

 

AC: Can I ask you a controversial question: how do you feel about Muppets?

EM: I don’t have much of an opinion. I think I was the wrong generation for Muppets. But the last year that I was with my ex, I was Kermit and she was Miss Piggy for Halloween. We looked really amazing. I know there’s a Muppet movie that I would really like to see. I’ve heard about it, but I’ve not seen it.

AC: When you said about a puppet playing Marley’s ghost, I was thinking about A Muppets Christmas Carol. Muppets play all roles except Scrooge, who’s played by Michael Caine, a human actor. Yeah.

EM: I have another thought about puppets and dogs. The thing that puppets and dogs have in common, and why they’re so important to me, is trauma.

My puppet film, The Trip, was actually very emotional because I made those puppets when my dad was alive. He gave me many of the names of the puppets. And they were like papier mâché, which is porous.

So, whatever the world of 1959 absorbed was absorbed right into the puppet’s being. They hold the trauma of my childhood. And I feel like they exude it when they perform.

And with dogs, I’ve only had rescues. Well, I took Rosie out of a litter on a street in my neighbourhood, and that’s not a very glamorous circumstance, but I was lucky to have her since the beginning pretty much. But Honey is a rescue, and I’ll never know what she lived through.

Based on her behaviour, I make up little stories or hypotheticals all the time, which is not always good. Like, what happened to her? How was she treated? I mean, I think that’s part of why I love rescue dogs so much – because I feel like they carry such a story in the same way that I do, and the same way the puppets do. They teach me.

AC: Yes, I know exactly what you mean. My dog has a tragic backstory from what we know. She is resilient, but has absorbed everything that has happened to her. Like a puppet.

EM: And the poet – the poet who absorbed everything when they were children, you know. And I think that’s why we write. We saw all this stuff, and nobody labelled it for us correctly.