L’Esprit Featured Writer || Issue Three

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A conversation with author Ella Baxter. Read Ella’s work here.

L’Esprit Literary Review: How did your piece come to be, and what do you want our readers to know about it? Is there any context you would like to provide?

Ella Baxter: I wanted to write a revenge fantasy void of revenge, and I wanted the piece to initially read as a nonfiction but then warp around the midpoint and move into an subversive and absurdist realm.  I like making nebulous, sinister, jokey things. I enjoy this work being in no man’s land. For context, I was stalked by someone who did write violent and obsessive letters. It has been a personal fantasy to confront them about it. 

LLR: What is your creative process like? When you sit down to write, how do you approach your work?

EB: Generally, I try to document the thread of ideas as they come, and be as receptive as possible to any muse that may fall in my lap. I don’t engage with word counts or daily goals. Monitoring progress (in any capacity) frightens all my ideas away. I have become more comfortable with not knowing what something is for quite some time. I work in bursts- so I don’t write anything for months, and then work obsessively. Though, even when I’m not working, I am constantly working, documenting small things or making notes. I think a creative process is less about how an artist completes a project, and more to do with their approach to life. 

LLR: How do you approach revision?

EB: Revision, if you let it, can be eternal. Once the manuscript is on its third or fourth draft, and I feel the story is in the place it wants to be, I comb through it another six or seven times focusing on various things. One revision focusing only on verbs, another to focus only on tension etc. I also try to look at the beginning and ending of chapters and paragraphs to see if they can be improved. Re-write. Re order. Read everything in sight by authors I admire – regularly I revisit Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin. The amount of tinkering is eye watering. It’s eighty per cent of the work. 

LLR: Which books, writers, and movements do you cite as your principal influences on your work?

EB: Kate Jennings. Lorrie Moore. Anna Weyant. Donald Barthelme. David Lynch. Cielo Félix-Hernández. Barbara Hepworth. Carmen Maria Machado. Joseph Bueys. Ana Mendieta. Carolee Schneeeman. Leonora Carrington.  For my second book, Woo Woo, which is coming out next year, I have drawn inspiration from Beetlejuice. 

LLR: This piece plays, rather inventively, with the blurring of lines between fiction, personal narrative, and ‘autofiction,’ whatever that might be. There is a sense, in other words, that our fictive narrator, the Ella who tells this story, is more overtly–and perhaps more fundamentally as well, it is suggested–aligned with you, the Ella who wrote this work, than is typically found. How do you negotiate that distinction, should there be one, and what was the inspiration for this piece?

EB: Emily Dickinson writes, Tell all the truth but tell it slant — In this piece the distinction for me is really clear, none of the characters in the piece are me, and they are all me. I have written as close as I can to the emotional truth, but that involves mostly fictional elements, although there is an unruly amount of truth and fiction in this piece. I found permission to write like this in ‘Rape Joke,’ by Patricia Lockwood. She placed horror and humour so close together, that it removed any pause the reader might take to emotionally veto the work. That poem lit the way for me. 

LLR: Along the same lines, how has motherhood informed your writing?

EB: Being this sleep deprived is like being on hallucinogens, time warps and instead of day and night, there are just long periods of being semi lucid. Postpartum is psychedelic, demonic, heavenly. I don’t know how anyone survives it. Being awake this much forces me to be a constant and unwilling witness to the world. I’m certain that sleep deprivation makes me take more creative risks. 

LLR: There seems to be a parallel between the violence of birth and the external violence in the story, either the violence the fictional Ella desires to inflict on the Stalker or the potential violence the Stalker might inflict on Ella. However, the truly visceral images of violence only come from Ella’s referencing of giving birth, which is rendered in somewhat horrific detail with a nurse slipping on blood and all that jazz. Could you speak a bit about the violence of the story, both the real and the fantasies of violence that especially Ella seems to have. How are these kinds of violence related in the story, if at all, and how does this relation connect with the running theme of ownership, or lack thereof, of the body, especially the feminine/feminized body? 

EB: I think being repulsed by violence is a privilege. When I was being stalked, I lived on the same street where Jill Meagher had been stalked and murdered, and across the road from the park where Eurydice Dixon was stalked and murdered. I wrote most of Woo Woo postpartum, in a traumatised body, while being stalked, looking out my apartment window onto a traumatised landscape. Everything around me, from the hospital system, to the aftermath of birth, to the police, to even the fucking park was embedded with violence against women. Initially I felt fear, but it quickly turned to anger, and it shows in my work.

LLR: In that same vein, the character of Ella seems to be both in and out of her body, especially at the moment when Ella’s subterranean woman empties out of Ella “into the car” to stay with the baby. It’s such an interesting moment, entering into conversations surrounding childcare, the “split self” and motherhood, the writer Ella, the mother Ella, the stalked Ella, etc., especially since it’s the “subterranean” Ella that stays with the baby while the other “real” Ella goes into the house and so into the narrative. Could you speak a bit about the “split self” here and how it might relate to the many selves of  the mother-artist? 

EB: It was a conscious decision for the mother to go inside, and not the subterranean woman. I don’t want to write a mother character and make her pious and meek. I want ferocious, disgusting, beastly mothers in my work. I want mothers who are rude and hate filled. I think the common narrative around motherhood is that it is a total hijacking of the self, turning everything that was once flawed and human- floral and sweet. That has not been my experience.  I make art and build things and mow the lawn and think about aliens and god, but now I do it with my baby in my arms. I seek success and vengeance (with my baby in my arms).

LLR: In an essay for the Sydney Morning Herald, you write about your complicated response to signing a book deal–the long-awaited sense of legitimacy mingled with a stubborn disquiet.

“Finally, I wasn’t an unemployed pregnant person bobbing aimlessly through life, I was a novelist. I tried to explain to her that as good as this was, I still felt the need to read every review of my book.”

This reminds me of a question I often return to surrounding art, especially literature and the current state of the marketplace. Kierkegaard writes of ‘the despair over the earthly,’ a conflating of one’s own worth with external laudations. I always think there’s something in that concept for the modern novelist: how to balance an intrinsic pursuit of one’s artistic vision with the (oft-economic) realities of society and the marketplace. Can you reflect on that dichotomy some, and your personal experiences with it?

EB: Aside from this opportunity, I am strategic in that I often refuse work. I did the math a while ago on how long it takes me to write an essay or a short story compared to a chapter of a book and it’s roughly the same amount of time. In Australia the average payment for a short story or essay is between $500-$800. If I compare this to what I can make on books or shrouds (I own a small business making death shrouds), my time is better spent on bigger projects. I earn my living through my creative work. When I am not writing, I make bespoke death shrouds. Each death shroud takes between three days to two weeks to make depending on the design. I am constantly working on long, time consuming projects.

LLR: Did you have a favorite (perhaps here meaning ‘most amusing’) review of  New Animal, be it positive or otherwise?

EB: I have had a lot of throuples tell me they feel seen. I love throuples. Love quads. I love everyone. I see you all. 

LLR: For all the tribulations of your first book, you remain undaunted! Can you speak a little about Woo Woo, and how you’ve seen your artistic vision develop and evolve from your debut to your follow-up?

EB: Woo Woo began as a formal response to being stalked, but has since turned into a wicked story of anger and art and love and obsession. Writing Woo Woo has completely dominated the last three years of my life. Every creative project changes me in some way, but Woo Woo has perhaps pruned me so severely I now grow in a completely different direction. With New Animal, I was largely unaware of what I was doing but still somehow, assumed writing another book would be easier. In many ways I had to start from scratch with Woo Woo. I had a three month residency early in the process and I used the entire thing to learn how to write. I read craft books, read classics, – really read and re-read to see what the writer was doing. I am proud of the evolution of my writing from New Animal to Woo Woo.

LLR: What was the last book, story, poem, or work of art that moved you?

EB: Lately, I have been reading gothic horror, and the first page of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, dazzled me- and there’s a passage later in the novel where she talks of a ghost that is thumping around outside her room in the night, and she’s deliberating, (did it move back and forth across the hall? did it go on feet along the carpet? did it lift a hand to the door?), the turn of phrase- did it go on feet, is so wildly horrifying. It’s as if the creature borrowed some feet. It has stayed with me for weeks now. I wake up in the night thinking about those feet- whose feet?

LLR: Anything else you’d like to say to our readers?

EB:  I want to say there can be significant rewards to sticking with a project until its end. I think letting the work change, and letting yourself be changed by the work, can be one of the most beautiful things about being creative. 

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Ella Baxter is a writer and artist. Her debut novel, New Animal, was published in Australia, the UK, the US, and France. Her second book, Woo Woo, will be released with Catapult next year.

Photo Credit: Sarvin Parviz (she/her) is a writer, poet and visual artist from Tehran. She enjoys blurring genres and trying different mediums. Her focus is on the intersection of diaspora, identity, language and belonging. Her other passion is opera. During her training, she was serendipitously introduced to micro-fiction which led her to leave professional singing behind to create her own characters. She is a graduate student in the MFA creative writing program at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale). Website: sarvinparviz.com IG @sarprvz Twitter @parviz_sarvin Bluesky: @sarprvz.bsky.social