Gina Nutt: How did you land on the epistolary form for this piece? 
Catherine Spino: To be frank, I never thought I’d be able to write something about this period of my life. Even though it was about 3 years ago now, I still consider it raw, like those feelings could circle back at any moment even though I’m much better prepared to face them head on. When I lived at home, I remember renting a lot of books I loved as a teenager from the library: Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Ellis’s Less Than Zero, and I reread The Bell Jar right before I moved back to New York. I first read it when I was in high school and I forgot a lot about it—mainly how failed Esther was by the mental healthcare system. Rereading it during such a painful time of my life reminded me of its everlasting wit and depth that exists among the darkness. People mostly tend to see the novel as “a cry for help” if you see someone read it, but I find the end incredibly hopeful. It doesn’t give us a perfect ending so to speak, but one that creates more hope than despair and when discussing healing and depression, I think that is the most honest. I just wish Plath had access to the help I had access to. It breaks my heart all the time to think of what her life could’ve been like in a different era.

Anyways, I was watching the Oscars when Billie Eilish was up for best song for “What Was I Made For” from Barbie, and while she was singing it, I found myself crying on my couch thinking of Sylvia and her struggles as a mother, writer, a woman dealing with depression amongst other things. And I just opened up my notes app and started writing a letter to her about giving her my Lexapro. And even though this essay is very much written towards Sylvia Plath, the more the piece grew, the more I realized I was writing to the old version of myself in 2022 who truly thought she was going to die. Without me knowing it while I worked, the form helped me access this line of communication back to that version of me. Even if this piece was never published, it’s ultimately done what it needed to do for me but I’m really happy it now has a home here.

GN: Cinematic imagery unfolds within individual paragraphs, and accumulates over the course of this essay. How do you juggle the details without bogging a reader down? What is most essential to you when dialing into clarity?
CS:  Thank you for this! I find that my clarity around imagery comes from constantly observing my world. In constant observation you realize a lot of cliché images don’t always access the specific feeling or emotion you want to convey. I always push myself to go deeper, darker, grittier when I can and I feel you have to maintain a balance for the right amount of uncomfortable images because it can veer into shock value which is a whole other can of worms. But the more specific you get, the more these images can be seen by a reader. As for not bogging a reader down, I sort of have this “tempo” in mind for my words and if it takes too much to get an image, I tend to whittle it down and if I can't, I take space from it and think of another way in. Maybe “tempo” like a boxing one coupled with a rhythmic one—I can’t dance around the ring too long without throwing a punch. And I want my punches to hit, I’m very conscious of that.

GN: The poetic cadences here also have a strong sense of flow, injected with forward momentum, as well as surprising detours. I’m curious how you approached pace in writing and revising this piece.
CS: Pace is always such a concern for me in writing. It oddly makes me think of the audition process when I was an actor. I was told that within fifteen seconds an audience can figure out whether they are invested in you as a performer or not, which is wild to think about. I never want something to be so slow people lose interest and tune out. I think this desire for strong pacing and getting in some good punches like I mentioned before is what informs my revisions; I keep tweaking until it feels right to me. My first draft of this piece was much shorter but a mentor of mine suggested challenging myself to go longer and working with the repetition of “I would tell you…”, which proved to be a great push. For me, it created this great sense of structure that allowed me to fool around with these surprising detours and go deeper into moments I never thought I’d be able to express or confront on the page.

GN: You’re also a collage artist. Do you find that collage and writing converse as creative practices? Or are they in separate lanes for you?   
CS: OK this is a tricky question. I unfortunately am a recovering perfectionist in my writing. I have the horrible mental dialogue that I shouldn’t put a sentence on the page if it’s not perfect the first go around (a really REALLY bad habit) so I get in my own way a lot and the constant questioning gets me out of my own creative flow. Collaging on the other hand, allows me to work with constrictions to maximize my practice and push it forward instead of being stuck in analysis paralysis. I’ll give myself the rule of only using one source (one magazine typically) for images and needing to have stuff glued down by the end of my creative session (basically however long I want to work). It allows me to actually finish something instead of noodling too much. I really try to go with my gut instinct on how to lay things. Things naturally shift and tilt if a breeze comes in and moves stuff before I grab the glue, or even when I start gluing, things could be off by a couple centimeters which can affect the initial vision but those moments also allow me to see other ways that the collage could flow. A little bit of divine guidance so to speak. Witnessing the play and the surprise at a final collage, most times working with images I never thought would work, is always cool to me. I’m a very visual person so when I see that I think, ok how can I do this with words in my writing? Most times it’s a lot of faith, a lot of patience, and a lot of trusting my instincts.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
CS: I’m really going to try to be concise here because my “creative mosaic” is like… a detective hoarder’s bulletin board, I tend to keep and return to so many interests. 

I’ve been really into diner culture this past year—I love the communal aspect of a diner, the informalness of it, how anyone could exist there. It’s really soothing and comforting to me. I’ve always been interested in “the other” and the best way I can describe that is with the golden era of freak shows: the bearded woman, the lobster boy, the Siamese twins. I did my college thesis about female freaks during the Victorian Era and always think about returning to that subject. I love any media about freaks—Diane Arbus’s portraits, William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Tod Browning’s Freaks. I’ve been researching prion diseases and how a body decays for a larger work I’m doing. In that same vein, weird reproductive issues: decidual casts of the cervix and teratomas to name two (both aren't fun google searches). I love how wild certain infections can be and how bodies can have these tiny shifts that can skyrocket our physical and mental selves into a new place. My mom’s a nurse so I like to think that’s one area of interest we both have (she keeps threatening to get me a medical encyclopedia and I really hope she does). Speaking of family, I love unexpected family heirlooms. I have my Papa’s college yearbook from 1951, my Nana’s American Airline wings my Papa had made into a bracelet for me, my Mom's copy of The Deer Hunter original movie score on vinyl and I’ve been harassing my Dad for a copy of his high school basketball portrait. I always have my hand in reading or watching something about the Manson murders; my comfort podcast is Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This, she does this incredible 10-part series on Manson’s Hollywood and the aftershock of the murders. I also love old Hollywood stories, specifically tales about these women who had this insatiable thirst for success—think Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard and Eve Harrington in All About Eve. Similarly, boxing matches and hockey games (I call them “blood sports”). The TV show Survivor. The stakes are so high, I love anything that feels that way for an audience. When done right, it reminds me that at the end of the day, we’re all still animals no matter how tamed we appear to be. 

I love weird images of power and obsession. Immediately I think of a scene from Sam Shepard’s play Buried Child where one character asks another character, a woman, to open her mouth as wide as it can go and puts his fist inside. And then he removes it wordlessly. God, such a great scene to show dominance. I also think of Mark Rylance in Bones and All and this scene where he is breaking apart a chicken with his bare hands, it’s so tactile and ominous in such a subtle way. And some may hate this, but the Saltburn grave scene…kind of brilliant! I really love Greek tragedies and epic poems. I'm quite interested in Orpheus and Eurydice’s story. I loved Cocteau’s Orpheus and I need to get a copy of Sarah Ruel’s Eurydice. I’m trying to stay off TikTok but I recently followed an account that gives niche perfume suggestions based on certain…things. Some examples include perfumes if you want to smell like Chernobyl, Vlad the Impaler, The Russian Sleep Experiment, the Goddess of Death Statue, and Putrefaction. I requested ideas for smelling like The Donner Party. I have yet to hear back but I assume it will be close to their suggestions for smelling like “blood.”

I’m currently back in my childhood home for a little and we had a power outage during the heatwave, maybe I summoned it as I often think back to thunderstorms of my youth when the power went out: we’d light camping lanterns and play games and the rooms would take on this bluish grey tone. I wonder if that could ever happen again with all the leaps and bounds in technology, like can we ever really be off the grid? I’m currently reading Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury as my appetite for Southern Gothics grows larger in the humid months. As I Lay Dying really blew my mind when I was in high school so I tend to reread that a bit for inspiration; I love the stream of consciousness, especially Darl’s last chapter—I think of that chapter constantly because of all the wild images and this air of mystery. Every time I reread it, I find something new to take in and drive my imagination wild. For music, if I’m not listening to 1 hour of Binaural Beats on Youtube, I’m leaning into Safe Mind’s new EP, Boyharsher, Ethel Cain, HEALTH, Yung Lean, Charlie Megira, John Lee Hooker, and The Garden amidst some old playlists.  

Lastly, I’m always thinking of Mary Shelley keeping her dead husband’s heart wrapped in a sheet of his poetry in her desk and her losing her virginity on her mother’s grave. She did for mothers what Sylvia Plath did for daddies.