Dana Elle Murphy
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by Cody Putz
Fourteen Hills: In your poem Arachne there is a profound sense of loss, with a mother detailing the absence of the many mouths she used to have. I read this as a loss of narrative, of voice and of selfhood– what was your intention here as the author?
Dana Elle Murphy: The mother and daughter (and another mother in the form of the grandmother) in this poem are a refraction of my maternal family—and one characteristic, a skill or trademark, I have observed in them is how much they retool loss, part of a unique kind of fullness in their approach to life, a way of bending reality that I’ve grown more hungry for—and impatient in the absence of—as I’ve grown older. I wrote the poem to try to highlight an unexpected story flowing from a mother to daughter in an everyday moment—as I’ve often been surprised by select moments of shocking lucidity, how a new anecdote or dislodged memory shared in the kitchen can shatter linear memory, history, one’s perceived sense of individuality. While such stories as I’ve heard are always pretty much about loss in various ways, I’m also very interested in their pockets of agency, ways in which speakers evade judgment or despair in favor of stubbornness and never-failing contentment-seeking, however seemingly small or perhaps self-contradictory. In this poem, I think of legacy as something ephemeral being passed to the daughter, who ostensibly sticks around despite her teen disdain, and who is changed.
14H: Arachne is the origin story of the spider from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, how did this become the inspiration/title of your poem? Did any other spider stories influence this work?
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DEM: I have tended to read Robert Hayden’s poem on Arachne as a generous rejoinder to various translations of Ovid’s telling of her story that stifle Arachne with shame (a mere mortal, she had the gall to try to be more successful a weaver than a goddess, who abuses her to the point of death and then turns her into a spider). What if, like Hayden suggests in his version, itself an homage to a Richard Hunt sculpture, such a metamorphosis could instead be a new beginning in a more positive sense? Also, as someone with a degree of arachnophobia, thinking about key memories of spiders has been important therapeutically to me—they do so much narrative work by virtue of their ecological significance but also they align with so many of the cultural landscapes of my childhood as I wandered through gardens at home and at friends and family’s homes and as I often witnessed the people around me engaging in arts and crafts (especially quilting and sewing). A favorite poet-critic mentor of mine also once described himself as a spider sitting in his web, so while my poem features a rather negative spider interaction, I, too, wanted to play with my own bit of wryness around reclaiming the Arachne identity.
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14H: Reframing this very grounded story of a moment between mother and child into a mythological narrative carries this story into new meanings. Can you speak to the power and reclamation that is happening within this poem?
DEM: My mother indeed has a smallpox vaccine scar that formed during her immigration process to the US from Cuba—it is the kind of “portal” that I imagine she and her late mother would have met across if they were to communicate later, bridging life and death. My own mythos around my maternal family probably started quite early on; I remember identifying with my mother’s scar as a unique part of her as someone I loved but it wasn’t until much later that I learned its story, the pain it also contains, and of course it’s an ongoing story. As a poet and writer who is also attracted to lyric traditions, I know the personal material of daily lives is often the most meaningful to me, but in many ways, I have also been that teen rolling her eyes, turning up her already rather upturned nose and not valuing, often perhaps because the larger narrative culture hasn’t encouraged me to value, uncovering my own home language and literature. So, there is an imperfect and unfolding empowerment across the poem and my work broadly, and I truly for whatever reason cannot seem to sustain myth outside my own perhaps sly interest in specific characters or speakers’ lives whose stories ring out to me with underexplored importance.
14H: Who are some authors who inspire you?
DEM: In 2005, my mother took me to see the new Pride & Prejudice film as soon as it was in theaters—I was a teen and have been hooked since on this vision of the novel that more closely resembled my lower-middle-class background and I experienced it as a very porous, malleable narrative. In the past few years, I have tended to toggle between re-reading, searching for unanswered questions in the works of “classic” women writers: Jane Austen, the Bröntes, Emily Dickinson, and their later counterparts: Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé, Julia Alvarez, models for the kind of literary work I want to do in fiction and poetry. In recent months, I have been focusing on reading contemporary poets and am currently especially inspired by the “after” poems in the “Oracle” section at the beginning of Leila Chatti’s Wildness Before Something Sublime; by Bernardo Wade’s “fox” poems in A Love Tap; by the exploration of divorce and re-beginning in Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth; and by Patrycja Humienik’s “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter” poems in We Contain Landscapes.
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In general, I am hungry for works that provide people with what I’ve been calling “a third option.” As someone who has been very disappointed with the limited choices facing characters I write about—where it seems like the two options with which they’re presented at a given moment in their lives are both unsatisfactory—I have been intrigued by the unexpected veering off course, the unfurling, suddenly, of “a third option.” Musicians engaging similar questions have also been influential for me. I recently enjoyed Mitski’s NPR Tiny Desk performance of “Class of 2013” (performed several years ago); FKA twigs’ music video and dance choreography for “Drums of Death” which is more contemporary—itself another representation of metamorphosis and I especially saw my own journey to becoming a writer reflected in that video; in the glitch in Bad Bunny’s repetition of “suelta’” halfway through the song “KETU TeCRÉ.”
14H: You have recently published a book, can you tell us a little about foremother love?
DEM: I truly love to see the book’s title styled in the lowercase! That was not originally my intention, but it emerged through the beautiful graphic design the press developed and is a lovely rejoinder to the book’s overall ethos. Overall, this was a project that formally emerged from my doctoral dissertation but that also absorbed elements of my wider life as a woman of color who is especially interested in women writers’ lives. I like to think of the book as my current equivalent of a period drama with contemporary notes—I wanted to do for Phillis Wheatley Peters what, for example, Gillian Armstrong did for My Brilliant Career in 1979 or for Little Women in 1994. Truly, I noticed so many similarities between Phillis’s archival and published traces and the lives and work of late-twentieth century Black feminist critics and writers. Like Evie Shockley imagines in her poem “wheatley and [sally] hemmings have drinks in the hall of the ancestors,” it was not hard for me to understand Phillis as participating in, if not predicting, modern feminist forms of sociality and survival because she herself engaged in such in ways that are legible in her extant print culture.
14H: What inspires/drives you as a creative and as an educator?
DEM: Every day I seem to discover new works that validate my longings for my life and for the world—for the sanctity and respect shown to poets and writers whose works deepen or plumb the deepness of what it means to be human, rather than flatten, commodify, or prettify it. But no one can carry the literary endeavor singlehandedly, linearly across an entire lifetime. So, I am inspired by the people who stick with writers through thick and thin: the select family members, friends, colleague-friends, mentors, and students who rise up and carry you and your work when you cannot. My mother, just the other day, told me—as she put away her wallet before we stepped into a used bookstore during a bitter cold snap for Los Angeles—that a man experiencing homelessness had once told her: “The only people who give me money are Black women.” I have thought a lot about that in the days since. Black women weaving gossamer safety nets.
14H: Is there anything else you would like to say to the readers of 14 Hills?
DEM: Thank you so much for reading this—and for reading my poetry amongst the riches gathered in issue no. 31. I hope this inspires you to write a poem about a spider in your family today…
Dana Elle Murphy is originally from Altadena, CA and is currently living in Los Angeles. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in journals such as Obsidian, Poet Lore, and West Trestle Review, and she is the author of the academic book Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism (Duke University Press), a poetics that reads “Phillis Divine” as a poet, writer, and critic.
Cody Putz is a staff member of Fourteen Hills and they are in their fourth semester of their Creative Writing Masters at San Francisco State University. They are an avid lover of speculative fiction and poetry.