Mostly Human, Most of the Time: Barrelhousing with Sheila Squillante
Sheila Squillante’s Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Prize from Brickhouse Books, is a different kind of poetry collection. Called “lovely and harrowing,” these poems track the growth of a character named Round Baby, who we meet in the very first poem as an infant with “fat stumps of leg poking out from under the walker,” holding a ball that looks like a planet, or a tumor. From there, we follow Baby through most of the Eighties, and we track her growth from chubby infant to teen navigating band room trysts with hair metal boys. But Mostly Human explores more than Baby’s “mostly human” evolution — Baby also experiences much of the tumolt of the Eighties, including SkyLab falling, Mount Saint Helen’s exploding, Chernobyl melting down, and the rise of MTV and hair metal. The book equal parts coming of age and cosmic exploration of a decade that was more harrowing than its legacy of dopey music videos might indicate. Our Dave Housley sat down around the virtual email machine to chat with Sheila about Baby, the Eighties, and the process of writing these wonderfully unique and affecting poems.
Buy Mostly Human from Sheila’s local, the White Whale Bookstore in Pittsburgh, PA.
DAVE HOUSLEY: What was the first Round Baby poem, and how did she arrive? Was she called Round Baby, or was she more of an idea in the beginning?
SHEILA SQUILLANTE: The first RB poem I wrote is the first one in the book, "Round Baby Hangs on No Matter How." Originally, in the earliest drafts of that poem, I had no idea I was writing a character who was going to continue across a series of poems, let alone a whole collection. I was doing my usual thing, writing from my life. In this case, remembering a photograph of me when I was a baby...a round baby! It was just a description at first.
DH: It's interesting how much of the Round Baby stuff is in there. "It looks like a planet. It looks like a tumor" feel very much (to me at least) like a few lines that are consistent with the rest of the book, the Round Baby-verse. How did the next one come? Were you surprised when RB returned?
SS: At first I thought I was writing a thinly veiled metaphor for my own anxiety and depression (ha!), so for the first couple of poems, I just figured she was still me and I was just reimagining my own life. You know she's doing her thing, there are some kind of eerie parts, but so far she's recognizably human. Nothing too strange going on. Leaving aside the Transmission poems, which were composed separately and then woven in later, I think the first time I had an inkling that, woah, maybe she's more/other than I thought, was when she climbs Mount St. Helens before it explodes.
But I'm so glad you see the book's themes emerge in the first poem! This is a rare case where my nonfiction writing has informed my poetry writing and not vice versa. When I'm writing essays or memoir, I'm striving to plant the seeds of the theme and the focus very early on for the reader. I wanted to do that here, too.
DH: I want to ask about both of those things, actually. One thing I really like, and I'm definitely not a poet so this may be a thing that I'm noticing more than somebody who is more familiar with how poems work, is when the narrator speaks to Round Baby. How do you think about the narrator of these poems?
SS: Right, there's a narrator! That's not a thing I've ever done in poems before. It started out as a limited third person voice, someone telling you the story of this weird girl's life. But suddenly, in the writing, the voice turned and spoke directly to Baby. I wasn't sure it would work, but I went with it. I guess I think of the narrator as someone who is a little detached, outside the story, who can give us the big picture. And then also someone who cares about Baby, who knows her well and wants to help her or warn her or even comfort her.
DH: Yes, I loved that about these poems! She seems to be, like you said, detached and somewhat omniscient but also she definitely cares for Baby and seems to want to look out for her. As a fiction writer I thought it was a really effective and efficient voice. She seems to know things we don't know about Baby but she's also invested in things working out okay for her as she navigates, you know, most of the major disasters of the Eighties.
On that note, as a full on Gen-Xer, I really loved how these events come to be present through the poems. Todd Kaneko called the poems "lovely and harrowing" and I felt the same way. You mentioned Mount St. Helens and I believe Baby is, not sure of the best way to say it, so "present at" or maybe "a part of" Chernobyl and the Challenger crash, and I think the cold war also hangs heavy over these poems in a very real way -- she has maybe the same nightmares that I had after watching The Day After. As I said above, I think those elements are present in some way from the very first poem, but I really loved the specificity of, for instance, Skylab hanging over Baby's head (literally). How did those elements, and specifically these Eighties disasters, come to be a consistent element in these poems?
SS: I'm so grateful to Todd for his generous read of these poems, which, yes, are definitely made of Gen-X DNA. Once I knew I had a character moving through these poems, someone who is like me but not me, I realized I could open them way up, take them to unusual places. All of the disasters or historical events you mention (and also the Halley's comet fly-by in 1986) were things I clearly remember from my growing up. They made a mark on me, so I figured they would have made a mark on Baby, too. And then there were others, like the first test tube baby and the UK broadcast interruption, that I did not remember or even know about. I found them through research and thought, oh yes. That's going in! I wanted the time period, the era, to be the setting for these poems, more than I wanted them to be set in a particular place. Does that make sense?
DH: It totally makes sense. I also feel like her presence there is a little magical, or it felt that way to me, at least, more like science fiction than not. I'm curious how you think about these poems -- do you think about them as science fiction or adjacent to that kind of thing? A new kind of poems? Or are these "just" poems that you made with some of the things that you had available to you? I don't want to force you to back yourself into a corner but they feel like something different than, say, the poems in Beautiful Nerve (which I also love).
SS: I have no problem calling them sci-fi adjacent, what with the aliens hovering around and Baby's obsession with space and all. But another term I've been using is "domestic fabulism," which I think Amber Sparks coined a few years back, right? Which comes out of magical realism and fabulism--and I think those terms work too, if poets are allowed to use them!--but domestic fabulism, she says, is focused more on the home, on relationships, family, and how we belong or do not belong. I actually learned the term when one of the poems from the collection ended up in a terrific anthology called Fiolet & Wing, edited by Stacey Balkun and Catherine Moore. Balkun talks about how she prefers her domestic fabulism to have just a sprinkle of magic to it, and I feel that way, too. It was much more interesting to me to make Baby mostly human, most of the time. That way the magic comes as somewhat of a surprise to the reader and even to Baby herself. So, not a new kind of poem, but new for me, surely. Very different from Beautiful Nerve, which was not narrative and certainly did not have a weird girl turning into a cricket and a pencil and listening to 80's hair metal at the center of it!
DH: I love that term and I think it absolutely applies. Much more so than science fiction. There's definitely an Amber Sparksy vibe to these poems and I know you know me well enough to hear that as a huge compliment. Which brings us to Vrillon. I really love this part of the book. I know we had talked about this before but in my first reading of the book I thought it was kind of thrilling when the first transmission came in -- all of the sudden there's this Other Thing and I just loved the way it fit in with the overall project of the book. I'm interested in them as content -- I mean, come on, they are very very Round Baby -- but also as structural elements in the way the book is put together. Can you talk a little bit about how the transmissions came to be a part of the book, and if you agree they form a kind of structure, what you were looking for there? Keep in mind the person you're talking with doesn't really have any experience with what it might be like to create a book of poems, of course!
SS: I do hear it as a compliment! Thank you! So, the transmission poems. I think these are maybe the head scratchers of the book for some readers, so I'm glad you're asking about them. In my research, I was kind of going through each year of the 70s and mid-80s to see what had happened in the world that could have some relevance to Round Baby, and this is how I learned about this wacky thing that happened in the UK in 1977. An "entity" that called itself (himself? themselves?) "Vrillon," interrupted a broadcast of the Southern Broadcast television station. They claimed to be representatives of the "Ashtar Galactic Command." Isn't that awesome? The transmission that followed was an entreaty to Earth citizens to basically get our shit together and stop killing each other. It was a hoax, of course, and one that I knew had to find a place for in the collection. Six transmissions later, I had these strange touchpoint poems. Yes, I totally see them as a structural element in that I wanted them to kind of grow and change the way Baby was growing and changing. So the early transmissions are officious and authoritative. They basically boss Baby around. They also warn those around her of her power, which is growing. As the poems progress, and Baby's self begins to really cohere, they lose a little of their bossiness (at one point they get frustrated with her because she's not listening to them! So like a teenager.) and become more of a guiding presence that follows her throughout her growing up, just in the periphery but always there. I didn't want there to be too many of them, and I also wanted them to be very different from the rest of the poems in terms of voice and structure. The poems are actually collages of the original Vrillon broadcast language with some tweaking, all sent through an online text mixing gizmo for further syntactic scrambling. Now you know my secret! I like them. I think they bring a needed texture to the book. (And I remember early on you said you liked them too, so I figured I was on the right track.)
DH: I really love them and the way they act in the book. I forgot that you had fed them through the online text mixing gizmo to further weird them up, which was brilliant. Did you have any hesitation about introducing that element, which strikes me as the kind of thing you might be more likely to find in a nonfiction book or an experimental fiction project? I'm asking because whenever I do something like that I usually have a feeling of oh shit, I can't do that, can I? Did you have any of that either in the initial impulse or as you were trying to find a publisher?
SS: I hesitated a little, I guess, but once I got some initial positive feedback reading the poems to audiences, I felt more emboldened. I wanted to make a weird book about a weird girl and they helped me accomplish that. (Plus I love playing with the text mixing gizmo!)
DH: You succeeded! I'm glad you held your ground on that, for sure. Are you still writing Baby poems? If not, was it hard to move on to a different writing project after having your head in Baby's world for so long?
SS: I'm not, though I've had people ask me to! It was hard to leave her behind at first because I had come to love her so very much. And you know, I'd encounter some crazy thing in the news and automatically think, "Huh. I wonder how Baby would deal with that?" But I'm happy with where and how the book ends for her. I like the ambiguity of it. I think anything more would be writing past the organic end of this part of her story, you know? The book was so much fun to write. Really a pleasure in the way not much writing has ever been for me! And now I've moved back into a memoir project that's been gnawing at me for about twenty years. Definitely not what I'd call fun writing, but necessary, and, I hope, equally compelling.
DH: Let's talk about the music in the book. There's a specific reference to Twisted Sister and several references to MTV. How does music work in these poems and in Baby's overall development?
SS: I wanted to include musical references as part of the world-building. Because music is such a strong and immediate memory trigger for me, I couldn't think of writing the 70s and 80s back into existence without that soundtrack. Some of the singers or bands are ones that Baby would have listened to on her own, like Sean Cassidy and Culture Club. And some of them are bands whose music was just in the pop music air around her, like Bon Jovi and Boston. And since there is indeed a Cold War thing going on, I wanted to include songs that spoke to those fears, too. The hair metal references felt important because there was such artifice and campy sexuality to those guys. Baby's a teenager for much of the book, dealing with her own changing body and its desires, trying to navigate sex and relationships and self. I wanted to borrow from that spectacle.
DH: Hair metal really is kind of a perfect vehicle for all the dumb urgency of teen sexuality. Was Baby's sexuality kind of tied up fairly tightly with hair metal? Or am I reading too much of my own sad teen hair metal hopes into all of this?
SS: It was in that she kept falling for boys that listened to it earnestly. But I think she ends up seeing through it somewhere in there. She recognizes it for both its fluffy fun and its damaging sexist garbage. Baby's all about ambivalence.
DH: Yes there definitely seems to be a recognition that its all actually kind of stupid fun. Baby is so much smarter than I was at that age. One poem that always stuck out a little to me is "I'm a Loaded Gun." Is that kind of a first person metal song? If I'm way off, you know, that's cool. I mean, its not *impossible* to read it through pretty smoothly in an Axl Rose shouty voice...
SS: Yes, that's one of the few first person poems in the book. The original manuscript was all in that narrator voice (and the voice of the aliens, natch), but I realized that I wanted to let Baby speak for herself, too. But if you want to read it in a Bon Jovi shouty voice (Come on, Dave. Get your 80s rock straight, man!) be my guest. ;)
DH: I will split the difference and go with the previously mentioned Dee Snider!
Baby also watches The Day After and Night of the Comet, and listens to the song “Russians” by the Police. The Cold War definitely hangs heavy over Baby. I think I'm a little older than Baby but I remember all of this and it did indeed loom over those years. Young people might not really understand how *heavy* it was. Is that something that's more autobiographical in the writing here?
SS: Dee Snider. King of glitter makeup!
So this is kind of a trick question because you know me so well and I'm pretty sure we've talked about how The Day After scarred me for life? (Incidentally, this is also one of the ways I bonded with my husband in the early days of long ago. Nothing like a little nuclear war to bring young love together!) That movie is serious. I watched it on broadcast television when it came out in '84, I think? and then it aired again at some point in the last decade. Paul and I were like, hey, let's watch this thing again. Surely it wasn't as bad as we remembered it being. Wow, were we very wrong. I won't go as far as to say I recommend Gen Z go seek it out, but if you wanted to get a pretty good sense of what it felt like to grow up under the threat of mutual assured destruction, that would be it.
DH: Hahaha well I think it definitely makes sense that The Day After freaks Baby out but what would not make sense would be if she watched it *again* some 35 years or so later.
SS: Yeah, why would anyone do that to themselves? Baby's way smarter than some of us. She's better at self-care, which was not, I don't think, a term we used in the 80s.
DH: She is!
Okay I guess that's the end? Of course this is a BH interview so there IS one more question: what's your favorite Patrick Swayze movie?
SS: Round Baby's favorite PS movie is Red Dawn, obviously.
Buy Mostly Human from Sheila’s local, the White Whale Bookstore in Pittsburgh, PA.
Sheila Squillante is the author of the poetry collections Beautiful Nerve and Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from BrickHouse Books. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, where she is Executive Editor of The Fourth River, a journal of nature and place-based writing. She has long been a Barrelhouse affiliate, sometimes as an editor, sometimes as just a hanger-on, but always a loyal friend of the best rag-tag bunch of hooligans in the whole lit world.