In 2005, I interviewed Maggie Nelson in New York City about her book Jane: A Murder, a verse narrative of exploration and detection. In Jane, Nelson scrutinizes the 1969 murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, and its relevance to her own life as the daughter of a mother who lost a sister to violence and as a girl growing up in America. When Nelson was writing the book, the common assumption was that Jane had been murdered by alleged serial killer John Collins, who was tried and convicted for the killing of one of the other young women murdered in Michigan during the same time period. However, Collins was never tried for Jane’s murder and around the time of our interview, Nelson had learned another man, Gary Leiterman, was soon to be tried for the crime based on new evidence obtained by Michigan law enforcement. Recently, Nelson spoke again with me (by e-mail this time, as she now teaches at California Institute for the Arts in Los Angeles) about her forthcoming memoir about the case, The Red Parts.

Jane Carr: By the time we spoke about Jane, you had begun thinking or devising a prose project about her case. Did you see it from the beginning as a memoir? What about the story made it, in your words during our first interview, “too wild” for poetry?

Maggie Nelson: I myself wouldn’t have chosen to call it a memoir, but that’s how it goes these days, in certain spheres. I don’t really think of it as memoir, but the fact is that the speaker of the book needed not to be a cipher with no past or present of her own. Otherwise the book would have run the risk of being just another account of a bizarre violent story, or, on the more positive extreme, a good piece of journalism, a la Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer or Philip Gourevitch’s A Cold Case. But I wanted to walk the line between the personal and the political in a way that felt risky and unusual to me. Hence, “memoir.”

As for the “too wild” part—there was just too much weird information (such as the Ruelas question) to sort through and lay out for the reader; poetry would have wilted and died. In writing Jane, I had already borne the burden of trying to make lyrical language carry narrative information, and this go round, I knew from the start that I wasn’t up to explaining DNA markers or lab contamination scenarios in, say, sonnet form. Jane took time—it was the result of a many-years-long investigation—but The Red Parts is the record of a legal frenzy. Even one line break felt like an undue adornment.

JC: I remember very well having no adequate response to your disclosure during our last interview that the case of your aunt’s murder had been reopened. Unsure of cultural protocol in such a situation, I found myself torn between responding with sympathy or curiosity, both of which seemed wrong. What was your response to the news?

MN: I’m not sure there is any protocol, so your response really couldn’t have been wrong. But to answer the question: in a sense The Red Parts is but an elongated response to the news. I felt incredulous and nervous, as one feels when a deep hope or fear suddenly comes true. It was unnerving to feel that art and life had collapsed. That said, it was one of a string of shocking events that year, so there was also a part of me that just said, of course this is happening. There was also some sadness—a sadness which pales in comparison to the real-life consequences for everyone involved, especially Leiterman (the accused), but which existed nonetheless: I was sad for the loss of the book Jane as I had written and conceived of it—i.e. as a tribute to a forgotten life and unsolved death. The reopening of the case vanished that book before it ever came out. Maybe not for its readers, but for me.

JC: As it stands today, what is the status of the case?

MN: Gary Leiterman has begun serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. He can appeal, of course, and he has, with a new lawyer, but as of last summer his first request for a new trial has been denied.

JC: What are “The Red Parts,” and what do they say about your story? Is there significance to the dual participation of your mother and a writing teacher in directing you to consider The Red Parts?

MN: The Red Parts are the parts of the Bible that Jesus speaks, as in a “red letter” Bible. I’m not a Christian, but in a Christian culture, what Jesus preaches is generally taken as the pith of ethics, so that seemed an appropriate place to focus. The Red Parts are also our insides, and our genitals—the nasty bits, the blooded parts, our simple flesh.

You’re right to notice some tension around my being directed by these two “authority figures” to consider The Red Parts. This may be but a literalization of an age-old question in ethics, i.e. where does one look for them? In a priori truths? In divine revelation? In authority figures? In books? In our own hearts? In the bodies, faces, or hearts of others? In that title chapter, The Red Parts also refers to the blood of the nameless Chinese man I saw die on the street. The blood of strangers can have something to tell us.

JC: Did you (or your publisher) consider alternative titles?

MN: Certainly. It wasn’t an easy book to title. I’m intensely bothered by the Book of Revelation and Christian teleology in general, so why would I want to go straight into that forest? But there I went, and there you have it.

JC: How did you devise or choose the literal “red parts” that you include from Luke and Revelation?

MN: Well, I spent a fair amount of time reading the Bible, especially those two books. I picked out red parts that hold within them an idea I find beautiful and which also contains potential for serious perversion. Despite the separation of church and state, it’s impossible to sit through a trial (or an episode of Law & Order, for that matter) without noticing the narrative similarities between the courtroom drama and the New Testament, which culminates with a revelation of truth and a judgment. This is especially so when the court case is a homicide, and the content of the case, a study of wounds. But women have a very different relationship to wounding and martyrdom than men, so the terms get all screwed up. As my friend Eileen Myles, who grew up Catholic, puts it in her book Cool for You: “What would be the point in seeing [a woman] half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? Could that have driven the culture for 2,000 years? No way.” I thought about that a lot in the courtroom.

JC: Is there a spiritual dimension you hope to animate for/in the reader?

MN: Not more than posing questions, as per above. It’s all well and good to exhort people to feel compassion and empathy, but it’s hard, if not impossible, to push other people’s feelings around. I would make for a terrible proselytizer.

JC: You open The Red Parts with a chapter entitled “Murder Mind.” Can you describe what “murder mind” means to you, and speak about why you position it as the opening frame for the reader?

MN: I think the book explains “murder mind” pretty thoroughly, so I might beg off the question. Basically I think the mind works in grooves, and it grapples with the material that gets thrown into it, so if you take in a lot of violent content, voluntarily or involuntarily, your mind is going to stay pretty busy dealing with that. We tend to treat the habits of our mind as reflections of reality, but some would say that’s precisely where we go wrong. Of course there may be such a thing as a priori psychic violence, but that’s a different subject.

JC: When we spoke about Jane, we both commented on the utter rightness of subtitling the book “A Murder” and not an “elegy.” Conscious subversions and deployments of genre were so critical to that text. With that in mind, did you consider other forms or genres for your story in The Red Parts?

MN: You’re right—when I wrote Jane, I thought a lot about form. In some sense that book is all about its form. Writing The Red Parts was more like trying to get a huge octopus off of me that had just fallen down from the sky. I was trying to be as honest and efficient as possible while struggling to free myself of the tentacles of the beast. Perhaps for this reason I read Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams over and over again while writing, which starts: “My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide. Yes, get to work.” So that was the credo, which I followed compulsively.

JC: You told me two years ago that Jane did not come easily to you, in contrast with other writing. How would you characterize the composition process for The Red Parts? As a scholar and a poet, what concerns do you face that other memoirists might not? What generic difficulties, exhilarations, or noteworthy experiences distinguished the act of writing memoir for you from the acts of writing poetry or criticism?

MN: I’m sorry to say that The Red Parts was even more excruciating to write than Jane. I have no idea whether this is due to the subject matter, or whether writing just isn’t any fun for me anymore, or what. Luckily The Red Parts didn’t take as long. But it wasn’t the form that gave me trouble. It quickly sorted itself into short chapters, and I wrote scenes in clumps, then used a screenwriter trick of making the clumps literally detachable, so I could shuffle them around without worrying about chronology. It was the sentences, and their tone, that was the problem. I started out with so much I wanted to say—about criminal and social justice, about media spectacle, about ethics, about sexual violence, about grief, about cruelty and misery, about empathy—and I had to edit all that discursive crap out. As anyone who does a certain kind of autobiographical writing knows, it eventually boils down to honesty—what you can bear to know or say about yourself, and, to a lesser extent, about others. You get disgusted with your self-deceptions, and you need to find the tools to cut through them, and the courage to make the cuts. That’s hard.

But about genre: I think some of the difficulty also stemmed from the fact that before writing The Red Parts I had bifurcated a lot of my writing: poetry for scarily straight talk, parsed details, and emotional overwhelm; critical prose for complicated theoretical ideas and impersonal dissections of other people’s thoughts and words. The Red Parts was neither of these—or maybe both—so it needed a lot of rinsing.

JC: In Jane, you invoke Plath’s female detective in the service of a kind of poetic witnessing. Alternatively, how would you describe the experience of serving as a more literal kind of witness? Were potential tensions or complementarities between detection and witnessing at play in your writing process for The Red Parts?

MN: Being a detective requires guts. But I have come to think that being a witness requires a more subtle, and perhaps a more profound, set of skills. Skills I didn’t have, incidentally, at the time of the trial, and which I probably still don’t have. The Red Parts is about that—about wanting to be more spiritually equipped for hardship than most of us are. There’s not a clearly demarcated line between noble witnessing and exposing yourself needlessly to awful things that reactivate agonies and disallow healing; there is no “right way,” no “right condition” under which to encounter trauma. The good news is that there are a lot of spiritual practices out there that offer excellent and workable methods of turning poison into medicine, on the spot—what the Buddhists call tonglen, for instance. Most religions have, at their core, some narrative of alchemy as to how to transform suffering into something bearable or meaningful. But I’m distrustful of many, or most, of these narratives. And neither detection nor witnessing is the same as standing in protest, which is a whole other can of worms.

JC: A November 2005 news article quotes you as saying of Jane, “I thought I’d put the story between two covers and into some sort of container…But life itself always exceeds those containers.” Is The Red Parts your artistic or personal accounting for this kind of non-containability?

MN: Yes, that’s a great way of putting it. That’s why the book ends where it does—it may sound like some kind of closure, until you realize that I’m ten, so all of the events that the book recounts have yet to occur. This collapsing of temporal realities may be but another sort of non-containability, as you put it.

JC: Do you agree with Mark Seltzer that ours is a “wound culture?” If, as Seltzer argues, the violated body mediates between private fantasy and public space, then mourning may be either the ultimate act of fetish, or the most fertile site for resistance. Can mourning or the study of violence be recuperative, or are we simply a nation of voyeurs and fetishists?

MN: Brilliant question. That’s the nail on the head, isn’t it? I’m tempted to run on and on in response, but instead I will simply point toward the two best recent books I know on the subject: Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence and Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. Both have crucial things to say about the uses and abuses of grief, and the problem of the wound as fetish. Together they have served as a precious dyad for me throughout this time. But I will say this (along with Butler and Sontag): Americans have a lot to answer for, and a lot of work to do, on this account—work we’ll be doing, vis a vis the war in Iraq, for the rest of our lifetimes. The effects of all the repressed deaths and of the physical and psychological wounds that Iraqis and American soldiers will continue to bear in the years after the violence stops— if it stops—will be with us all for some time.

JC: Films and popular culture are ubiquitous in your memoir. Most terrifyingly, your use of Scorcese’s monologue from Taxi Driver synthesizes the misogyny and sexual violence prevalent in films. What formal, theoretical or actual aspects to film make it such a powerful medium for reproducing this kind of violence and fear?

MN: Film is bossy: it unfolds to you in inexorable sequence, and for the most part you sit there passively and watch it. In fact part of its pleasure is being its prisoner. Then there’s the problem (noted by Sontag) that any image of an attractive body that has been violated or wounded is in some sense pornographic. That’s not a good or bad thing; it just is what it is. But it means that the kerzillion movies that begin with, end with, or feature throughout, dead and brutalized women, have some real work cut out for them if they don’t want to turn people on, and most of them do.

Recently I read the most brilliant novel, Young Adam by Alexander Trocchi, which I hadn’t wanted to read because the dead female body that dominated the movie version that came out a few years ago annoyed me so intensely. But the book was terrific, and its use of the dead woman metaphysically fascinating. But because of the inherent titillation that comes with watching other people’s bodies on the screen (even, or especially, when the bodies are involved in sex and violence), and because of my overwhelming boredom with the visual trope of the rotting female corpse being rolled out of some bog and the question of what happened to her, or avenging what happened to her, becoming the film’s narrative engine (cf. Clint Eastwood), I usually prefer to read the books.

A lot of early feminist writing on film (i.e. Laura Mulvey) drew attention to the male gaze and the female object. That was an important moment, but I’ve always been much more interested in the female gaze. How it feels to be a female viewer, growing up with this stuff. That’s why I focus so much on movies and popular culture in The Red Parts. I try to use myself as a case study. I spent over half my life feeling guilty about being turned on by rape scenes in films until I realized that that’s what they are supposed to do. But I’m not interested in saying what kinds of films people should or shouldn’t make, or what should or shouldn’t turn you on, or that sexual humiliation can’t be hot. My goal in The Red Parts was to retrace my steps through a certain minefield of imagery.

JC: Two years ago, you asked me rhetorically why men kill and hate women. A question with no definitive answer, to be sure. But I’m interested to know whether your observation of a trial, interaction with police, participation in a primetime television broadcast, or any of the other experiences you recount in The Red Parts have changed your approach to this question.

MN: I guess I’m less interested in the “why” of misogyny than I am in the fact that men have been able to articulate it freely and extensively for thousands of years, but when a woman points it out—even via the simple act of repeating back exactly what a man has said, be it Nietzsche or James Ellroy or my grandfather, it’s obscene. But perhaps that’s as it should be: feminism is, in some sense, a means of holding up a mirror, of adumbrating misogyny or patriarchy with self-consciousness so that one conception of the world ceases to masquerade as sole and natural order. As to your question, I don’t exactly see primetime “crime porn” shows, as a friend of mine calls them, as bearers of such adumbration. They like to have some sauciness or disobedience around the edges, but in the final hour the lure of the same-old story is usually too seductive, as one would expect when it’s about the bottom line. People really like to hear the same stories.

As for my experience with the state’s prosecuting office and the police, I found every single detective and attorney I met a pleasure to know and work with. They were terrific. And there was one female detective on the state’s team, Denise Powell, who was especially keen and intriguing. Midway through the trial she left to become a protector for Michigan’s tough female governor; I would have liked to have written a whole other book about that.

JC: How and why did you choose to weave other aspects of your personal life—a junkie boyfriend, lost love, geographical relocation—around your account of the hearings and trial of Gary Leiterman? Put another way, your book seems less chronological than associative. What compositional and/or personal issues arose from trying to incorporate writing yourself into a narrative where you serve primarily as a witness to something?

MN: Basically the compositional principle governing my personal life was strict: I thought of it as a certain kind of Chinese ink painting, in which you get three strokes of the brush to make the likeness of a face. For each nugget of the story of witness I wanted to tell, I added a few brushstrokes from my own life, using only the details that seemed to me the most relevant, the most pointed.

I was feeling very broken while writing this book, and inevitably I bumped up against the whole comparing-tragedies-problem, i.e. however bad I may have been feeling, I hadn’t been sentenced to life in prison without parole, nor had my body been butchered, nor had I suffered as acutely as my mother had at the trial, and so on and so forth. But I recognized that a lot of that noise comes from the paranoia that currently surrounds American memoir (and, perhaps, American issues with suffering at large): no matter who you are or what you’re writing about, there’s always some wise-ass who may step in to say, I don’t know what he or she is complaining about, things could have been worse, etc. etc. Which is almost always true, and almost always irrelevant to the felt fact of suffering. Joan Didion deals with this question well in The Year of Magical Thinking. If you throw out the zero-sum economy in which people have to compete to have their suffering acknowledged, you instantly arrive at a much more humane place, one in which one kind of suffering doesn’t have to obscure or beat out or render meaningless another. In fact, the opposite can occur. You can make more space.

JC: Ultimately, legal chaos ensues from the determination that DNA from another person, John David Ruelas (who was four at the time of Jane’s murder), is present on Jane’s belongings. You write in the memoir that you can only allow yourself to think about this while swimming laps, that “thinking underwater” seems somehow appropriate. Why is this true for you? As a multi-generic investigator of Jane’s life and death, what are your feelings about what you call “the Ruelas question”?

MN: Well, there would seem to be but two choices: the blood was in error, or a four-year-old boy bled on my aunt’s dead body. There was never any indication of the former, nor any explanation of the latter. And the jury just threw the whole issue out within the first few minutes of deliberating because Ruelas wasn’t on trial, Leiterman was, and Leiterman’s cells were all over her. Fair enough, I guess. Honestly I don’t know what to think. Four is very small, a very small human. It was quite painful and unexpected for my family to have to imagine, all these years later, that Jane’s death was something more bizarre than a lone freak with a loaded gun and sexual issues and homicidal impulses. Putting a child at the scene—and the possibility of other people, other places—added a set of uncertainties to Jane’s last night on earth that none of us saw coming. None of us wanted to contemplate her murder as being any more freakish, drawn out, or torturous than it obviously already was. That’s why I needed to go underwater.

JC: What do you think or feel about Leiterman, Ruelas, or John Collins?

MN: I don’t think about Collins or Ruelas too much—I haven’t met either, and I don’t have any desire to. (I was overwhelmed, however, by Ruelas’s family at the trial—their story is simply astounding in its brutality and oddity. But it seemed too hard, and not right, to include it in The Red Parts, so I didn’t.)

Leiterman is a different story. I feel a sort of active emptiness around him. He claims he’s innocent, and it’s hard, at least for me, to disbelieve another human being. And prison is a foul, tragic, and deeply flawed place, so imagining a man in his 60s in increasingly ill health aging and eventually dying there does not bring me, or anyone in my family, if I dare speak for them, any happiness.

JC: Childhood seems such a fraught enterprise in The Red Parts, from your sister’s rebellion to your ritual of combing your mother and stepfather’s home with a butcher knife. Surely childhood is an invention of modernity, along with mass cultural disseminations of violence. How might we resolve the two? Or, more broadly, how should childhood be characterized or mapped out in our society—culturally, psychologically, or politically?

MN: Our culture seems obsessed right now with making things “safe for children,” which strikes me as a grand cover for something else, or all else. Under the reign of Bush II the country seems to have turned into a household of children strung out on the bad parenting of a toxic father who keeps promising safety but delivering chaos. I don’t get it. Whatever happened to Freud’s notorious insistence that children are little vessels burning with innate sadism and explosive sexuality? I think we should stop using the welfare of children as an excuse for nefarious adult ambitions and neuroses.

JC: You present yourself, your mother and your sister as women whose rebellions and suffering are mediated, or at least understood in part, through literary texts. You also portray situations in which you cross-pollinate with one another—your sister Emily’s readings of Plath and Rita Mae Brown, or your mother’s urging you to think “What would Jesus do” – “she was probably just influenced by something she read.” You respond to this urging yourself by turning to other texts—Merton, and then ultimately, “The Red Parts.” This prompts two questions in my mind. First, is “red” a play on “read?” If so, is all this textual interaction a way of urging yourself and urging each other to revisit the past, to read the parts that you have already read before? Is there danger, or potential, to all this re-reading?

MN: You are very smart, Jane! I did indeed intend the play on “red.” As an avid reader, and the daughter of an avid reader, I have thought a lot about the extent to which other people’s words can sustain us, and the instances when they cannot. Fanny Howe once wrote that the purpose of art is to demonstrate that life is worth living by showing that it is not, or something to that effect, and this formula holds pretty true for me. When I am despondent, uplifting texts make me insane. I think a lot of people like to read about other people feeling as bad as they have felt, or worse. Of course it helps to know the writer made the journey and stayed alive, which is why suicides present such a painful conundrum. Suicide breaks the pact, the completely undeclared but nonetheless felt pact between reader and writer. The Red Parts is haunted by such betrayals.

JC: Do you think victims of crime ought to have more of a say in the judicial outcomes for perpetrators? Can closure ever be attained? Should it be?

MN: One of Matthew Shepard’s parents—I think it was his father—once said something to the effect of, the state cannot do your mourning for you, and I think we’d all be better off acknowledging this simple fact. Justice and mourning can be linked, but they are not the same thing. As for the negotiation between perpetrator rights and victims’ rights, I have many thoughts but few to no answers. That’s why I list a number of websites in the back of The Red Parts that link to organizations such as INCITE!, which works on community-based programs which aim to reduce the impact of the criminal justice system in the lives of people of color, and Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, which works on restorative justice projects. These are the people who are doing the direct action.

JC: Your make powerful use of Plath and Poe in Jane, and I thought of them when reading your account in “An Inheritance” of Angela Carter’s re-envisioning of Bluebeard. Does she exert a literary influence in your memoir? Are there other authors you would cite as influences, especially in a new genre?

MN: I love Angela Carter, and The Bloody Chamber is a terrific and important book, but her prose is way more baroque than I would ever feel comfortable writing.

JC: In our previous conversation, you described Jane as a “hungry ghost.” Has the trial of Gary Leiterman affected this characterization? Did it color your reaction to Detective Schroeder’s claim that Jane’s spirit visited him?

MN: It was a little spooky to hear of Schroeder’s haunting, I admit. But for whatever reason, Jane herself doesn’t really haunt me anymore. I went through the looking glass or something. Maybe I just got tired.

JC: Even in scenes describing your childhood in The Red Parts, you talk about wearing on your body the fear of violence and the cost of investigation or knowledge. I’m thinking of the episode where you break a bone in “pursuit of a book,” which you follow closely with a description of a recurring dream of falling to your death and “a deep sadness, and some discomfort in watching my body be scrutinized as a corpse.” Does this anxiety over scrutiny relate to the shared fear you and your mother discuss later, of finding dead bodies?

MN: Yes, I think so. Looking closely at oneself, and at others, is a perilous enterprise. But whatever its costs, I prefer it to mindlessness.

JC: The situations you describe in which you and your mother are afraid of finding a body—hiking, the bathroom of a bar—are striking for their geographical dimensions (expansive terrains for your mother, compressed spaces for you) and their anonymity. Nonetheless (or perhaps with that in mind?), is the body you and your mother so fear to find Jane’s? Or does it signify or embody some other fear?

MN: Well, for me the feared body was never really Jane’s. You could say that for me, it’s my father’s, but I think the fear is more generalized than that. A first significant loss may always function as the template for future losses, but that’s probably more a matter of brain chemistry than anything else. We know that as we go along in life, we will stumble upon wondrous and terrible things. We just don’t know what they will be. And the unknown can be frightening, especially if your psychology tends toward worst-case scenarios, which mine does.

JC: I was struck by your brief recounting of correspondence with your father’s brother, and the ensuing implication of mystery surrounding your father’s death. Your father seems to inhabit the memoir as a kind of twin haunting presence to your aunt, in much the same way perhaps that you seem to be a twin to Jane in Jane. Your articulations of both of them move from the strictly embodied—in the descriptions of Jane’s autopsy photos and your father’s remains in “The Book of Shells”—to the wide-ranging temporality and emotional expansiveness of your father’s essay about manhood and the “mountains” that never had time to become molehills in the estrangement between Jane and your grandfather. What kind of reconciliation were you working toward in your beautiful, often searing, descriptions of these two figures from your life?

MN: My father was the ghost-in-the-machine of Jane, which is to say that I knew he was the book’s implicit subject, but I embedded that knowledge, and kept it mostly to myself in order to maintain the focus on Jane’s life. But here I knew I had to deal with my dad head on. I was also in the throes of losing a man I loved very much in my personal life, and, as they say, one loss conjures another. It became clear that I had some sorting out to do, which is no fun. But I suppose it beats blundering along as we tend to do, blurring one situation into another. That usually comes to no good.

JC: You write in The Red Parts about your identification with Jane in Jane as becoming monstrous to you in some way. Did this identification make the writing of the memoir more difficult? Drawing on comments you make later in the book about why you became a poet, was it difficult to integrate the autobiographical gesture into the story, not at a remove or through poetic persona, but as a participant in events that were emotionally damaging?

MN: Yes, the autobiographical gestures, as you put it, of The Red Parts, were much more difficult for me. I write personal poetry, but there’s something about poetry’s formal qualities—I wouldn’t call it poetic persona, per se; for me it’s more about how the container of the poem holds or distills experience—that’s not entirely naked, no matter how vulnerable you feel while writing. In poetry, strong emotion appears to me like a landscape I am trying to sketch with accuracy. This usually involves a “you” and an “I,” not people with proper names. There are no legal issues, for example, in poetry, because it sets up shop outside of the polarity of fact and fiction; somehow the reader knows that simply by the ragged right-hand margin.

JC: Your description of the experience of participating in 48 Hours Mystery seemed to touch on a real tension in American modes of mourning. The objectification of the dead female corpse, from Poe to present, seems symptomatic of one strain of mourning—as fetish. Another strain, evidenced most strongly by your memoir, seems to subvert this kind of fetishizing through circulation, literally “making a claim on public space” with your grief. Your analysis of grief reminded me of a comment you made during our first interview about beauty, and its nefarious quality as an organizing trope or valuation for the mourning of a life. Do you have opinions or claims about how we, as poets, scholars, citizens or sufferers, might grieve or mourn ethically, actively, or politically?

MN: It’s a bit outside my province to proclaim how others should grieve. Grief defies every proclamation put upon it. It is its nature to disobey orders from above. But again, Judith Butler’s Precarious Life is very good on the subject. In it she asks all the right questions about how one might let the intense vulnerability and devastation that grief brings reattach us to a sense of social responsibility rather than cut us off from it. This is a personal and political exercise of the most demanding order. I don’t think the United States is the best place to look to right now, however, for examples of this process in large-scale public practice. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid in South Africa, or the Gacaca courts in Rwanda post-genocide, offer two more compelling, if inevitably controversial, examples.

JC: Why do you think beauty operates an organizing principle for public grief? Jessica Lynch was lionized, then terrorized in the public spotlight because of her blonde, girl-next-door looks, while as you relate, producers and writers are drawn to Deborah Gardner’s tragic story because of her great beauty. As a catalyst for feeling patriotism, tragedy or loss, beauty seems to operate everywhere. For you, what gets lost or ignored in this equation?

MN: In the case of white women, I think it possible that beauty often operates as a red herring. Watch The Birth of a Nation, for example, and you’ll get a sense of what’s really at stake. The corruption and brutalization of lovely, pure white girls quickly merges pornographic fantasy with long-standing American paranoia about racial purity and paternalism. It’s an intoxicating mix we seemingly haven’t grown tired of. I like it best when the image-architect is upfront about what he or she is doing—I’ll take 100 Days of Sodom any day over a single, hypocritical word from CNN about JonBenet Ramsey.

JC: As a cultural critic, what did you most notice or observe about the experience of participating in a show like 48 Hours Mystery? Were there things that were surprising or exactly what you expected?

MN: Most of the people I met through the show were exceedingly smart women who probably wished they were not working on a show of this nature, or who were doing the best they could within the context to make their work worthwhile. Since moving to LA I’ve found this problem to be so endemic that it’s become something of a ritual, to listen to the shame so many people in the industry feel in being associated with so many dumb projects. It makes me relieved to stand apart from it, but I don’t say that in order to proffer some image of myself as an especially principled person. I’m complicit in many other things that trouble me ethically. We all are, I would imagine.

JC: Drawing a line from 48 Hours Mystery to the cultural glorification of violence against women to your portrait of Nancy Grow, I want to ask first how you think shame operates in your memoir, and more broadly, how it ought to operate in society.

MN: I like psychologist Silvan Tomkins’s work on shame. In particular, I like his idea that shame can be a spur as well as an inhibitor. That we communicate our shame as much as we let it shut us down. In shame I may turn my head downwards and avert my eyes from you, but you watch me doing that, so the shame is communicated. Tomkins also talks about shame as a signal that you are invested in something—you don’t blush, for example, unless you care about the situation in some way or another. I believe in deepening investments, and unfortunately that means living with the tidal wave of shame more often. As for how it ought to work in society at large, I don’t have a clue—like grief, it’s too unruly a force for any edicts. But I think, on a personal level, one can learn to bear it a little better by getting to know it. Here comes that tidal wave of shame again, you might say. I guess I really cared.

JC: Related to media coverage, you talk in your book about the Hartford Courant’s coverage of death-row inmate Michael Ross. Your description of its “tally of grief” caught my eye originally because of your poem “Tally” in Jane. Beyond that, however, I’d like to know what personal and political impact your observation of Leiterman’s trial has had on your views of the justice system. What function does the death penalty serve, in your opinion, in our society?

MN: I had planned to write something excoriating about the criminal justice system, and despite myself I came away from the trial with a palpable appreciation of how well the system can work. This trial showed the system at its best, I think—there was dignity, humanity, and intelligence in the courtroom, and I think Leiterman had as fair a trial as one could get. But that has a lot to do with his race and class, and the fact that he had a good lawyer, a good judge, and a good jury, and the fact that the trial was under intense scrutiny. Not every case in the country is being streamed live on CourtTV, and the State of Michigan probably spent over a million dollars on Jane’s case, to have independent labs verify all the DNA work, and so on, which is a rarity, to say the least.

JC: A surprising number of people whose politics are progressive or “compassionate” in other areas are steadfast in their support of the death penalty, and in our last conversation about Jane, you spoke eloquently about how public displays of protection (the war on terror, for instance) can obscure the daily terror women face as victims of violence in private spaces. What does the death penalty efface or hide from view? Why do you think so many people are comforted by the cultural presence of the death penalty? Does society have “murder mind”?

MN: Well, as I write this, thousands of people around the globe are undoubtedly sitting at their computers and watching Saddam Hussein be executed online. It wouldn’t be right to call anything about his ghoulish execution heartening, but I do think it revealed, and will continue to reveal, over time, the emptiness at the core of capital punishment—its failures in both efficacy and spirit. Many people have justly felt that Saddam’s grim and abrupt execution cheated his victims of a more thorough, public accounting for the atrocities committed by his regime, which is at least a different sentiment than a call for blood. But to return to the States: while The Red Parts laments the first execution in New England in many decades (Michael Ross), I’m heartened that as I write, New Jersey is fast moving toward becoming the first state to prohibit capital punishment in many decades. That would be something. And our last domestic election gave me some hope that in the coming years, Americans might wake themselves up to the fact that a road lined with preemptive war, legalized torture, and butchered civil rights is the wrong one, and I hope that the abolition of the death penalty will be part of that long-overdue waking up.

JC: In “A Live Stream,” you codify your impulse to record the “gory details” of the trial, because “some things might be worth telling simply because they happened.” Does your autobiographical or personal experience of these details relate to your theoretical explication of “the detail” in your forthcoming scholarly work? I’m interested in the tension you illustrate from Naomi Schor’s work, whether the detail signals the triumph of the feminine or its appropriation of the masculine. This structural relationship seems analogous to the question of how women can or should respond to violence.

MN: I think isolating details is a beautiful and fraught enterprise. Fraught because the temptation is to make them evoke a lost whole, and also because when one is isolating details and images from one’s own life, it’s satisfying to look for patterns, which do, of course, exist, but if you get too enthusiastic or creative about uncovering or inventing patterns, you may find yourself caught up in a certain kind of self-mythologizing that I find treacherous. Surrealism (or Hegel, for that matter) taught us that if you put any two objects or images side-by-side, no matter how disparate, the mind will quickly invent a bridge, or a synthesis, to connect them. Given that, I try to trust in individual details without pushing at them too hard. Give the mind space to do its work.

JC: In Jane, you comment on the potential relationship among menstruation, rape and murder in the Michigan murders, and in The Red Parts, you describe the physical evidence of Jane’s bodily substances and fluids. Does your consideration of these issues relate to the contrast you construct in your scholarly work between artistic associations of men with a “trash aesthetic” (Rauschenberg, Ashbery) and women with “pollution.” Does your impulse to create art that witnesses (your impulse to list, make poetry, record the details) from bodily evidence subvert this dominant interpretation of women’s production as pollution?

MN: You’re right—I’m interested in women’s trash. Because like the image of a female Christ, female pollution is a redundancy. My feeling is, if the state is going to preserve Jane’s bloody tampon from the night of her murder in a glass vial, I can write about it.

JC: You write that you find “the grammar of justice maddening.” Is this because victims or the families of victims have no direct agency or contact with respect to accused perpetrators? Was this “maddening” exacerbated by the lack of women involved in the process of Leiterman’s trial?

MN: No, I’m not really saying that a lack of contact between families and perpetrators is what’s maddening. In fact part of the problem with restorative justice projects is that not every victim of a violent crime wants any further contact with the perpetrator at all—even just seeing the perpetrator again in court can be an unwanted trauma. But again, the websites listed in the back of my book can speak to that subject with more intelligence than I. The grammar of justice is maddening to me because it links criminal justice up with notions of divine justice—the State with God—and defines justice as something essentially out of our control. Whereas the language of social justice tends to emphasize what we can do for each other on this earth, in this lifetime. Criminal justice and social justice have parted ways; the grammar is a symptom of that problem.

JC: As a follow-up to that last question, what did you most notice about being a family primarily composed of women, standing in witness to a process dominated by men?

MN: The intensely male-dominated aspect of Jane’s trial had a lot to do with the fact that her murder transpired in 1969, so the assembled cast of characters harkened back to a real man’s-world time in the medical and police professions. Basically I felt grateful to be at the trial with my mother—she doesn’t suffer fools, she asks hard questions, and she’s one of the smartest, toughest, and most sensitive people I know. We dissected what happened in court every evening at dinner, and I think we both felt lucky to have each other as sounding boards.

JC: In some chapters, you seem to assemble time associatively through the use and contemplation of objects and words in concert—most notably in your chapter, “The Book of Shells.” How do you approach these objects more personally, outside the arc of a narrative or a relationship to language? What does the evidence box mean to you, or your father’s ashes?

MN: It’s odd—the remains do so little for us, really—it doesn’t make me remember my father any better to poke at his ashes; seeing Jane’s blood on her headband probably didn’t bring my mother any wistfulness. But insofar as these things are markers of presence, they matter. Our attachment to them marks our amazement that we exist at all, that others exist or once existed, and that while we’re here, we often love each other.

JC: What narrative function do your descriptions of Jane’s autopsy photographs serve? What strategy did you adopt for trying to insert her body, or the violence she suffered, into the text?

MN: The pictures are the strategy. Because The Red Parts isn’t really about Jane. Jane was about Jane. In The Red Parts she’s more of a gathering principle, and, for better or worse, a spectacle. The display of her autopsy photos in court presented the most acute occasion to meditate on that. Again, in film or photography, you can frame and present, or present with context. But in writing there are other choices. Mostly I described the photos to get them out of my mind, to transform their bludgeoning effect. Somehow it worked—I’m not as haunted by them as I thought I might be.

JC: I found your references to Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song fascinating, in part because I am in the midst of trying to finish it. More relevantly, I wonder what you think about memoir versus nonfiction accounts of crime. Gilmore’s brother famously wrote his own account of some of the events described in Mailer’s book. Is there a necessary element of authenticity on the one hand, or detachment on the other that is required in offering accounts of traumatic or violent acts? How would you compare The Executioner’s Song to Gilmore’s brother’s account, or to another account of violence crime, like In Cold Blood?

MN: The Executioner’s Song is brilliant, as is In Cold Blood, and I reread both this past year. But in the end, beyond being American classics of crime literature, they don’t really have much to do with my project in The Red Parts. I wrote The Red Parts in the midst of all the hoopla about the movie Capote, which I found extremely disappointing in terms of the ethical dilemmas it dramatizes. The question of whether one should derive fame and fortune from the hardship of others is far less interesting to me than the staggeringly difficult questions that attend problems of truth-telling, the violence of representation itself, and the role of language in both. Given the very stringent protocols I set myself surrounding “truth” in The Red Parts, the idea of letting my imagination run wild in the form of a “nonfiction novel” was about as far away from my sensibility as you can get. The work of someone like W. G. Sebald, with his anguish over individual and collective memory, over what can be known (about history, about the souls of others) and what cannot, ended up a better guide.

JC: It seems to me that in both Jane and The Red Parts, you position your own experience of having grown up under the literal threat of violence (having lost a family member to a violent death) as analogous or emblematic of nearly all American women, who grow up under a more figurative threat of violence. Perhaps this is the same question as the one above, but how can women set their own index of fear, or define the threat of violence?

MN: Fear and statistical occurrences of violence are often but distant cousins. Both need attending to, but they need to be disentangled. Meanwhile, indulging in the fantasy of a risk-free world in which our “security” is endlessly protected is a trap with disastrous psychic and political consequences. Americans need to face that fact. And while we’re at it, we might also recognize that the dream of such security should not be purchased or maintained through the bloodshed of nameless others. Besides, the things we fear most—our own deaths, and the deaths of those we love—are virtually the only things in life that are guaranteed. That’s rough news, but a solid ethics starts from acknowledging that reality, not from denying it.

JC: What does it feel like to occupy the role of witness, either to justice or to traumatic violence? What ethical responsibilities should adhere to such a role? Must it be personal, as it is with your family in Jane’s case?

MN: Even when it isn’t personal, I think we can still try to take whatever experiential knowledge of vulnerability and compassion we’ve managed to gather and extend it out to others, to other situations. That isn’t the same thing, however, as saying that ethics is simply a matter of “identifying” with others—of putting ourselves in their shoes, or of practicing the Golden Rule, etc. Here I would point toward the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who has written a lot about ethical imperatives, and the surprising places they might derive from: from a constant negotiation of the equally human urges to cause harm and to alleviate harm, for example, or from the face of an Other, and so on.

JC: After our conversation about Janee, the following quotation jumped out at me while reading Plath’s journals:

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy…to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my femininity…all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”

You write so incredibly about the desire to “walk freely at night,” to move and to take space, and you mention the suspension of the fear of doing so that can so feel so gorgeous in intoxication. While you refer to the suspension of this fear and illustrate it occurring through drunkenness, I am left wondering, where does the fear go? How do women suspend the fear instilled in us by society with open (i.e. non-intoxicated) brazenness? Is the intoxication of mobility an intoxication with power or the subversion of power?

MN: I deal with this issue at some length in my forthcoming book on women and the New York School, since the “streetwalking” that was so pivotal to the identity of poets like Frank O’Hara and other mid-century flaneurs cannot remain intact when the “streetwalker” is a woman. I mean, the word “streetwalker” itself, when feminized, means whore. That’s food for thought. Anyway in that book I compare the passage of Plath you cite above with Cookie Mueller’s story “Abduction and Rape—Highway 31 Elkton, Maryland, 1969” from Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, in which Cookie tries to get out of a rape by acting crazy. “In all my years I’ve never seen a crazy woman get chased by man,” she writes. “Look at bag ladies on the street. They rarely get raped, I surmised. And look at burnt-out LSD girls. No men bothered with them much. . . . So I started making the sounds of tape recorded words running backwards at high speed.” I won’t tell what happens next. For me, reading brazen work by women such as Mueller is an excellent antidote to unnecessary fear. One of the best. Because your desire to be similarly brazen ends up trumping your fear. I don’t think the fear “goes” anywhere; I think once you see its needlessness, you can annihilate it on the spot. After all, as soon as you find yourself in a bad situation, there will be plenty of fear to go around. The rest is just a waste of time.

JC: A feminist perspective animates your poetry, prose and scholarly work, and I’m curious how you approach masculinity, particularly in light of the figures in The Red Parts, who embody loss (your father and grandfather), betrayal (your stepfather and ex-lover), personal violation (your boyfriend who reads your journal), and violence (Ruelas, Leiterman, Emily’s boyfriend who punches you). What theoretical or political awareness do you see as necessary in considering masculinity from a feminist perspective?

MN: I don’t think about masculinity or femininity much except as floating concepts which can apply to men and women fairly equally. That is to say, masculinity certainly has to do with men, but they’re not one and the same. I have many men in my life and I love them very much; in fact I couldn’t do without them. (Nor could I do without masculinity.) Much of the pain in The Red Parts has to do with losing men that I love or loved. It can be a challenge to sort through the intensity of that love in the midst of all the other crap that comes along with it—crap that may become especially salient if you spend several years of your life working on sexual murder, for example. But that’s only one lens; thankfully there are an infinite number of others, which I look through as well. They just aren’t at issue in this book.

It’s a feminist truism, but one that bears repeating, that men have as much to gain from feminism as women. Part of the reason why Ellroy’s My Dark Places plays a role in The Red Parts is that in it Ellroy explicitly takes on the question of what growing up male under the shadow of a woman’s (his mother’s) sexualized murder did to his own psychosexual life—which is, in some sense, the same problem of my book, but reversed. That really interests me. Unfortunately, both Ellroy and his readers seem all too willing to inflate these psychic configurations into vainglorious archetypes, which I find pretty dull.

JC: Can you speak briefly about how the publishing experience with a large trade house like Simon & Schuster has compared with the experience of publishing with Soft Skull Press?

MN: I’ve been very lucky—I’ve had good experiences on all counts. My editor at S & S is terrific, and she really understood the book from day one. And Soft Skull Press is, to my mind, one of the most exciting publishers in American letters today. I have a book of poems forthcoming from Soft Skull in the fall, as well as a critical book from University of Iowa, and watching these three projects proceed simultaneously has been a bit like watching one of those electronic Kentucky Derbies, in which the horses of indie, university, and trade publishing stutter across the screen at different speeds. In general I would say that starting off as a poet is a good thing, a beautiful thing, because it empties the begging bowl, and instills a DIY attitude which I hope never to lose. From there, anything anyone does on your behalf is just an opportunity to feel grateful.

JC: As a scholar, you’re having quite an exciting time. You’ve started teaching in California, and you have a book forthcoming on women and the New York School. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience writing that book?

MN: Oh, well, we should probably schedule another interview to talk about that! The critical book is called Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, and it was not difficult to write, although I cannot imagine writing it now. I can’t imagine having the patience to do all that research and close reading now, but I’m glad I had it then, especially as the book aims to pay tribute to some of the women artists and writers who have meant the most to me, such as painter Joan Mitchell and poet Alice Notley.

JC: In your memoir, New York City and the East serve as a kind of escape for you. What is it like for you to be back living on the West Coast? How has your experience been so far teaching there?

MN: It’s been great. I teach at CalArts, which means I’m on complete vacation, perhaps permanently, from academic solemnity. It’s all art, all the time, gloves off. And Los Angeles is gorgeous, which is something of a well-kept secret that I am here blowing. Add to that the fact that some of the living poets I respect most in the world—Claudia Rankine, Cort Day, Aaron Kunin, Brian Blanchfield, Eileen Myles, and Anthony McCann—have all recently moved here, which is terrific. I came out here as an escape, for sure, and while I’ve mostly felt myself to be in exile, that may change. For the moment, I think I’ve stopped running.

JC: You and your mother were approached by 48 Hours and other media outlets. Has anyone contacted you about (I hesitate even to ask this) turning your story into a film?

MN: That’s OK—a lot of people ask that. It has a certain made-for-the-movies quality. But nothing is in the works right now. Given all the meta-discourse in the book about cinema, and given all I’ve said here about the difficulties of onscreen representations of the subject matter, it would be tricky. Interesting, but tricky.

JC: You mentioned a project about the color blue the last time we spoke. Are you still working on it?

MN: That book is done, more or less. It’s sitting quietly, and bluely, in a box under my desk, with my feet resting on it. It’s called Bluets.

JC: You have another poetry collection coming up. Can you tell us a bit about that?

MN: It’s called Something Bright, Then Holes, and it will be out in the fall. The title refers to a once-blind girl’s description of a hand upon gaining vision, and the book has a lot to do with sight—with observation, with looking closely. As does The Red Parts. As does Bluets, come to think of it—I guess I’m fixated. Anyway the first part of the book is a 40-page sequence of poems called “The Canal Diaries,” which was written at the shore of the Gowanus Canal, a place of much garbage. The rest of the book is mostly short love poems which contain a lot of condensed excitement and distress. Its publisher, Richard Nash, called the book a long hymn to eros and melancholy, or something like that, which seems about right. I haven’t written a poem since I moved to Los Angeles, and I don’t really know what a poem is anymore, so at the moment Something Bright seems a little odd to me—like a relic, or like it was written by a stranger. Perhaps it was.

JC: Any other projects you’ve got going?

MN: I swore, after the women & the NY School book, not to do any more critical writing, but somehow I find myself plotting, against my will, something having to do with Artaud, Plath, Francis Bacon (the painter), and a few other characters bound together by what I’m calling, after Artaud, a compositional principle of cruelty (though what he means by “cruelty” is kind of up for grabs). But really I’m just playing around. Mostly I aim to give myself a bit of a break, at least for a little while.

JC: You mentioned that you haven’t written a poem since moving to LA? Do you miss that?

MN: The book about the color blue was going to be poetry. LA is more spaced out, and you have time to think in ways you don’t have living in New York City. It’s less hectic in some ways. Walter Benjamin writes about poetry as a record of shocks, and I’ve had fewer shocks out here. What poetry I’d been writing was about that kind of experience. Jane broke me out of lyric poetry, and working on a bigger container feels more seductive to me right now. I’d like to write poems again, but I’m going to wait around for the right time.

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Maggie Nelson is most recently the author of The Red Parts: A Memoir (2007). She is also the author of the forthcoming critical study Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (December 2007) as well as four collections of poetry: Something Bright, Then Holes (September 2007), Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001). A recent recipient of an Arts Writers Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, she currently teaches on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles, CA.