Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez is a Chilean poet and novelist working at the intersections of text, image, archive, and translation. They are the author of La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas) and A/An (End of the Line Press). Their work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from The Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, Lambda Literary, The Center for Book Arts, TAKT Residency in Berlin, The Frost Place, Studios at MASS MoCA, and MacDowell. They teach creative writing at Clark University in Worcester, MA.
Who is a witch? Is s/he a maligned wo/man, or someone or something beyond categorization? In A/ An, Gutmann-Gonzalez delves into the legal transcripts from the Salem Witch Trials and treatises on witches from the 15th through 16th Century. They reconfigure the words into lyric and needlepoint patterns to interrogate the power dynamics of the witches on trial, the magistrates presiding over the trial, and the “afflicted” accusers. The quirks of legalese and the fluidity and idiosyncrasies of spelling before the English language was standardized as presented by Gutmann-Gonzalez belie deeper, structural misgivings against beings who are perceived to disrupt the status quo in that era, in turn a mirror to our present time.
Tiffany Troy: Can you speak to us about the title A/An? And of course, it’s different from the typography of the cover. What is important for your readers to know as they delve upon your unique Observations upon Witches?
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez: The title is taken from a moment in the poem “Examination of Tituba, Shapeshifting Witch:” “ ‘& am I a/an Woemen?’ ‘am I a/an Negro?’ ‘am I a/an Indian?’ ‘all wrapped up.’ ” In asking these questions, Tituba points to the power the magistrates have to not only decide her fate but also name and categorize her (in fact, the act of categorization is central to the trials). Scholars, in turn, have made claims about who Tituba was—even her race has been debated. Very little is known about her, because as an enslaved person, the only aspect of her life colonists considered worth recording was her trial.
An article’s function in a sentence is to introduce a noun, a being. Here, not only is the being unstable (hence “shapeshifting witch”) but the article can’t make up its mind. You could say that the unstable being throws everything around it into instability and into question (which is very trans). The title gets at this alchemical quality, where beings may not be who they appear, or they transform before our eyes. All of this is enacted further in the typography of the cover, where both “A”s appear on the left side of the slash and the second “A” is missing its horizontal line. It’s as if the letters themselves disobey the words they belong to, drifting away. That long slash also reminds me of the “stick or pole” witches were said to ride.
TT: Thinking about how the article of “a/an” is used to denote uncertainty of the noun that is to follow in Tituba’s 1692 trial is fascinating and I love how that is shown through the typography on the cover.
Next, can you tell us about the process of putting together this collection? Do you consider it “writing,” “curating,” or something else? I am wondering if you could also speak of the research process and what it was like to encounter the primary and secondary source materials in trial transcripts and the scholarship surrounding said trials.
MGG: A/An is a project that delves into the textures of court documents to understand the power relations and motivations of different historical actors: the witches, magistrates, and afflicted. I don’t think of myself as writing but rather emptying myself out so that the voices of the witches can spill through me into the present. In that way, A/An engages in divinatory poetics. Divination is the act of looking into the future using supernatural means. In A/An, the witches look into the future, and speak into the future, through me. The poems act as a portal to bring glimpses of that world into the present. In this project, I don’t constructa world but rather act as a vessel to bring the past into the here and now. Could something be activated today by letting these voices from the past spill into the present?
I began this project at the beginning of the pandemic, when death wrapped the planet like a shroud. My way of moving through that time was reading Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and writing poems about witch interrogations using online archives. Being able to visit physical archives a couple of years later was thrilling. At the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library I saw a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches, an incredibly misogynistic 1486 treatise on witchcraft written by the German Dominicans Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer which was later used as justification for burning and hanging women accused of witchcraft. This copy had wooden covers and tiny holes that passed right through the thick wood and crossed the majority of the books’ 350 pages. When I asked the archivist what had made them, she said they were wormholes made by woodworms. Wormholes connect two points in spacetime. Woodworms: witch familiars come to eat the words of misogynist men.
While reading the court records, I was snagged by the idiosyncrasies of the text: kennings, syntactical inversions, archaic spelling and diction, numbers as organizing principles in legal documents, the capitalization of nouns—all these textures acted as a burr, trapping me in their spell. I intuitively collected language from the trials that called out to me and used the tools of poetry to transform that language. These transformations had to occur over and over until, months or years later, something alchemical happened. So another answer to your question is that I’m engaged in an act of translation.
TT: Speaking of American-English from the turn of the Sixteenth Century through the turn of the Seventeenth Century, and of the legalese and formal speech from the court records from the archives, how do you utilize poetic form to highlight and showcase the political underpinnings on the trial? By that, I mean how do you render it accessible to a reader while retaining the idiosyncrasies?
MGG: Although the majority of the language in the poems is transformed, I wanted readers to experience the feelings I had while reading these archives, in particular, the thrill of reading this English that can be understood by English-speakers yet feels foreign in an almost uncanny way. Since English spelling was not yet standardized in 1692, spellings vary wildly by scribe or even within the same “hand.” Spellings had a fluid, almost irreverent quality in their lack of standardization. This doubleness of recognition and uncanniness was one quality that I wanted to retain in the poems. So even as I transformed the language using imagery, repetition, musicality, rhythm, juxtaposition, and other poetic tools, I tried to remain faithful to the spirit of the original documents, which was as much a formal spirit as it was a historical (content) one. Archaic spellings in the poems lead to visual immersiveness that is here and there rudely interrupted by anachronisms (e.g. “groceries,” “x-ray,” “extension cord”) that some readers have described (for better or for worse, depending on their tastes) as jolting them out of the text (and into context?); they are flung from the past back into the present through a wormhole of contemporary language. I am interested in these kinds of slippages, these moments of textual disobedience. Swerves of register as a suturing of unlike (or like!) times. I see these moments as opportunities for readers to make political connections across time, without delimiting what those linkages could be.
TT: How is A/An like or unlike your other interdisciplinary projects? I feel the incredible humility in unearthing and helping us see the archive in a new way. Do you feel like your work outside of writing filters itself into A/An?
MGG: A/An has refused to stay contained within the confines of its covers and has spilled out of the book. Text developed a tail and became textile. My textile poems are artifacts from the Salem witch trials world, cousins to the samplers that the young girl accusers would have been embroidering at the time of the trials. This project has expanded into a collaboration with artist/broom-maker Cate O’Connell Richards who is making a series of brooms and broom hoods (linen bags that protect the broom heads) which I am embroidering with the voices of the afflicted. The afflicted stitch through me into the present with sharp needles. As if possessed, I stitch for hours. Like words on a Ouija board, the voices of the afflicted start appearing on linen cloth.
The movement piece, Alphabet Poem, casts spells through coordinated body movement and spoken text. The score for Alphabet is a poem I wrote in the form of The New England Primer, a 17th century text that was used in New England for 150 years to simultaneously teach children how to read and how to have appropriate religious feeling. The primer consists of the alphabet and corresponding woodcut images and couplets. I took this form and inverted the content, perverting godliness into witchcraft. Performance artist Millie Kapp and I are creating a series of tableaus for each letter. Images metamorphose one into another through my body while I recite the alphabet and memorized text. Linking movement to sound is one way in which children are taught how to read, a method called Kinesthetic Motions for the Phonemes – thus, the project engages with both historical and contemporary forms of reading tutelage.
What links all these projects together is their point of origin, the witch trial archives. But a formal crossover also triangulates my work in different media: my interest in unstable or fluctuating meaning. It is tempting for me to think about abstraction as the evacuation of the literal but I think it is likely the most extreme manifestation of the literal. One of my textile poems reads:
FA CE TH
EAN IM
ALFA
CES
Simple spacing choices run a kind of static. Out of this nonsense, meaning eventually arrives. In the meantime there is a glimmer of raw possibility.
TT: The concept of needlework in print is quite astonishing. So too is the idea of “Out of this nonsense, meaning eventually arrives” especially in thinking about how your source material is ridden with prejudices, even if often very dry material. How do you realize spacing out letters in print? Do you use plain old Microsoft Word or specialized software?
MMG: Mostly text boxes in plain old Pages, I’m afraid, though I am planning to use InDesign in the future, which should open up greater possibilities for typographic performativity.
TT: What are you working on now and do you have any closing thoughts to share with your readers of the world?
MGG: I’m expanding A/An into a full length collection called O/ccult. In an ironic use of the witch interrogation, I’m planning to interview my mother, who is a witch.
My closing thoughts are for you, Tiffany! Thank you for these thoughtful questions. I’ve enjoyed our conversation immensely – you’re a very generous interlocutor!
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote. She co-edits Matter with Darius Phelps.