Making and Remaking Monsters 

“I begin this study on the side of the freak and the uncanny.”

—Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque

Sludge. Terror. Gross. Disgusting. Wound. When I asked workshop participants in “Writing the Grotesque” to respond to the word grotesque with a word or phrase, they typed out language that might describe a slaughterhouse, or a slasher film. We kept naming. Unrefined. Freak show. Uncanny. Social outcast. Other.

Alterity teaches us to believe in distance—an inherent divide existing between us and them. When we name someone monstrous, when we name someone grotesque or other, we’re claiming that only we and those like us have experienced the pain of losing a sibling to cancer or a car crash, the unfiltered joy of seeing the mountains take shape after miles of driving through the prairie, the consuming heartbreak of loving someone who doesn’t love us back, the terror and anticipation of watching a horror film for the first time. All those human moments that make us feel alive and real. The beautiful. The sublime. I’m interested in how we determine what defines them—the monstrous other opposed to our definitions of selfhood—as well as what defines we and us. What about a monster makes it a monster, and how do we go about solidifying that meaning? 

As a Southern Gothic poet and scholar, I aim to explore, reshape, reform what we consider monstrous—and why—in the American South. In my poetry, I’m invested in parsing out the dual meaning of how women’s bodies are sociopolitical centers of both desire and fear. I grew up steeped in the religious ideologies of the Southern Baptist Church. As a child, I loved stories about the devil. He was a sly trickster, a rebellious son. I was thrilled by the idea that the devil lived inside women. “The devil’s in her,” the church ladies would say about an unwed and pregnant teen girl. Was the devil her child, or was the devil her heart?

In our workshop, participants and I explored methods of reclaiming what it means to have a grotesque body, a monstrous body, an uncanny body. In the grotesque world, claims the scholar Wolfgang Kayser (1933), “the natural order of things has been subverted.” But, as we know, the word natural carries baggage. So does grotesque. Language shapes the ways we think about ourselves and others—our bodies and the bodies of those who live and breathe and love in our neighborhoods and across the world. How can we redefine the perceived unnatural as natural? Let’s reframe the monster for what it is—a cultural creation that helps social groups define borders and boundaries. Let’s take the grotesque and revel in the entrails, the excess, the impurities. 

With all this grotesquery in mind, I offer three prompts from our workshop with suggestions for timed writing: 

Monstrous Bodies

1. 2 minutes: What part of your life—past, present, or future—feels monstrous. Why?
2. 3 minutes: How do you imagine this monstrosity living on your body? 
3. 5 minutes: Create a poem incorporating imagery from your responses. 

(Im)Purity

1. 2 minutes: What does it mean to be pure?
2. 2 minutes: What does it mean to be dirty? dusty? impure? 
3. 5 minutes: How can you powerfully use the idea of impurity to reclaim the grotesque body? Take a poem draft (either your draft from the above Monstrous Bodies exercise or another) and imbue it with images and ideas traditionally considered impure. Throw mud on it. Allow the body—and your poem—to fill with dust. 

De-Fleshing

1. 1 minute: What does it mean to de-flesh? Metaphorically or physically. Go with your gut, as they say. 
2. 2 minutes: Describe a bucket of water sitting outside for too long. 
3. 3 minutes: Put your whole arm in the bucket. How does it feel? How does it smell? Note as many sensorial details as you can imagine. 
4. 4 minutes: How can your notes on de-fleshing and your bucket water images combine? Use as much or as little of each as you’d like to create something new. 
5. 5 minutes: Gather all the writing you’ve composed in your responses to our three prompts and mesh some unused pieces into a poem draft. This draft can and should be very messy—or grotesque.