Bearing Witness in Vixen: An Interview with Poet Sandra Ridley
Sandra Ridley is the author of three chapbooks and five books of poetry. Vixen is her most recent collection, published by Book*hug Press in 2023.
Sandra Ridley reads in Ottawa on Saturday, March 23, 2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.
Margo LaPierre: You write about violence, fear, power, dread, and relentlessness with abundant care and lucidity, often in the interrogative mode. What kind of invitation do these questions extend? What questions would you like readers to ask themselves after reading Vixen?
Sandra Ridley: Thanks for asking about this. The interrogative mode is definitely purposeful.
Questioning someone (and being questioned) is felt in the body. There’s an immediate shift. And when there’s directness and clarity, there is no room to deny the meaning or its implication. In its own way, questioning holds to account the perpetrators of violence. Survivors rarely have a (safe) chance or (secure) occasion to ask anything of their hunter-stalker or violent offender. In Vixen, through direct questioning, it’s possible for the speaker to be both fiercely confrontational and assertional.
In the section titled “Thicket,” interrogations like “Does she take steps to avoid her stalker?” come from the language of law enforcement and criminal justice systems. In highlighting (or jacklighting) the notion of “victim” blaming, the questions in this section are meant to expose some of the absurd and deep-rooted biases, dogmas, judgements, and fallacies surrounding criminal harassment.
I’ve always seen the questions in Vixen acting as leg traps set to catch perpetrators (and would-be perpetrators), akin to the hunter’s snap traps that he sets for his prey. As for what I’d like readers to ask themselves? No questions. If anything, I hope that those who feel afraid, or may have ever felt afraid, will feel less alone.
ML: Did you run into any surprises or challenges while researching for Vixen?
SR: The source material on the medieval hunt, in particular the chronicles detailing fox hunting as aristocratic “chaces,” was appalling. As is the practice. It has been banned in many places, though bans are often ignored. And incredulously, fox hunting, as chase, continues to fall within the law in several countries, including the United States, Ireland, France, Australia, and Canada. These chases or field hunts have special rules. In Ontario, you can still chase red fox, raccoon, coyote, and wolf, in accordance with the province’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act.
Considering the intersection of crises and the need for practices and ethics of appreciation, care and respect, it isn’t an aside to mention that Toronto and forty-two other Ontario municipalities declared gender-based, intimate partner violence an epidemic in 2023.
Each depiction of a chase that I found for “The Season of the Haunt” felt equivalent to a real-time live stream, experienced in present tense. Gathering the details from treatises and records, then needing to integrate them into the manuscript, then rereading for revisions… with each of these steps, I was disturbed for days.
Even if the language at times works as a healing balm, Vixen needed to be filled with brutality. Because that reality exists. We’re encouraged (shamed) to not to think about it or talk about it, and even more so for the ones experiencing violence.
What could I hope for from a reader? Would the text be asking them to experience a trauma? It troubled me that I was writing a piece that even I as reader wouldn’t want to sit with. I had never understood when someone said they felt “compelled” to write something until I began this project. But there was no other way to write it.
Like a writer, a reader will do what they can with a work. This might mean a phrase isn’t read, or that a reader slips in and out of a passage or a page, or that a book is read in entirety in one sitting. A challenge for us all sometimes in life, and in what we read or write, is in how we bear witness and how we accompany a being living with unrelenting fear and pain. Whether or not we can. And if we can, for how long.
ML: In the collection there is a list poem, “The Beasts of Simple Chace” (which appeared in an earlier version in periodicities): the gray, the vixen, the dammula, the hind, the wilkatt, the roe, the hare, the gilt, presented from the perspective of the hunter. Would you tell me a bit of what went into the making of this section—choosing and conceptualizing these hunted creatures?
SR: “The Beasts of Simple Chace” threads three elements into an arcing storyline that cuts across time—loss of language, loss of species, loss of self. I wanted this serial poem to salvage an aspect of the essential, inherent strength from each of them.
Many of the creatures in this poem were selected because of their feminized, archaic, non-extant names. And because historically many of them were killed for the thrill of blood sport or for the bragging rights of trophy hunting, as described in my sources; in particular The Master of Game: The Oldest English Book on Hunting, by Edward of Norwich, Second Duke of York (1406). The features and qualities that this “hunter” had assigned to each creature were also captivating. In writing the serial opening foray, the upper tier of refrain for this poem, lines were taken from the Duke of Norwich, and torqued.
In reckoning the repetitive, age-old, and universal patterns of intimate partner violence, this serial piece also embodies the notions of part/whole, then/now, self/other, singular/plural, I/her, and individual/collective.
The serial or sequential form felt necessary for this material, so that the reader could uncover or recover the vital overlapping details, bit by bit. And like the pattern of violence, and through the stalker’s voice, it repeats.
ML: I adore these lines in “Thicket”: “And it sickens me, it does, and who wouldn’t despair? / There are some who don’t despair. I do not want to know them. I know them. / I do not want to know them.” Would you speak more on these lines, and perhaps on the value of feeling and writing uncomfortable emotions?
SR: Like any of our experiences, there is no requirement or guarantee that poetry will make us comfortable in an easy-chair way. I keep thinking about Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic by Jana Sterbak and about the film Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance. Uncomfortable emotions (like fear, disgust, or rage) are formidable. They can be powerful inciters.
We all hope that everyone has the same moral compass, same
ethics, same values, same desires for the individual or for the collective, as
we ourselves do. And it’s shocking when they don’t. Or is it?
Undeniably, there are times when we feel alone, isolated, splintered off. Sometimes we are. It’s demoralizing to come to realize that people, maybe loved ones, are unable to see the suffering happening in our world—be it up close or farther afield.
It’s worse when people can’t feel it. Not feeling it lies too close to denying it.
What’s worse than that? Someone who enjoys suffering. Someone who thrives by perpetrating it.
I worry that we’re becoming numb. We are becoming numb. With Vixen, I wanted somebody to feel something. Feeling something, even if the sensation is traumatic, means we’re still alive. And if we’re feeling alive, there’s a chance we can still care and can try to try to make this life of ours better, and by that I mean our all-creature-encompassing Earth life better. The hardest part, for me and for my work, may be finding the balance between despair and hope.
I wanted to write hope and despair. Small triumph.
And yet…
The 2020 Wild Species report produced by the Government of Canada tells us that 4,883 species or 20 percent are currently at risk of extirpation, meaning that they are vulnerable, imperilled or critically imperilled. 135 species are presumed already extirpated or they are no longer found in Canada.
Also in Canada, in 2022, there were 129,876 victims of police-reported [italics mine] family violence and 117,093 victims of intimate partner violence aged twelve years and older. “The rate of family violence was more than two times higher among women and girls than among men and boys. Meanwhile, the rate of intimate partner violence was more than three times higher among women and girls than among men and boys.”
In 2023, in Ontario, there were thirty femicides in thirty weeks from November 26 to June 30, according to a report by the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses. In 2022, the organization’s statistics showed fifty-two deaths in fifty-two weeks.
Margo LaPierre is a neuroqueer poet and freelance literary editor. She is Arc Poetry’s newsletter editor and a member of the poetry collective VII. She won the 2021 Room Poetry Award and the 2020 subTerrain Fiction Award. She is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.