“Art as a sacred event.”

An Interview with Joyelle McSweeney

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of two new books: a play, Dead Youth, or the Leaks, which won the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights, and The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults,a book of criticism in the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry series.

Her previous six books range from a story collection, Salamandrine: 8 Gothics, to The Red Bird, the first selection in theFence Modern Poets Series. She also edits, along with Johannes Göransson, Action Books, a publisher of translated works. She teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

Joyelle is endlessly inventive and aware in her treatment of language. Although we wrote to each other from Indiana to New Jersey, this interviewfelt like a Catholic art-school reunion, a corner-conversation under a
listening crucifix.

—Nick Ripatrazone

I. THE FATAL AND/OR

THE BELIEVER: During
your appearance on Brad Listi’s Other People podcast, you spoke of your
Marian devotion, and your interest in Catholic iconography. It is rare, and
refreshing, to hear a writer—particularly
a writer of work that pushes boundaries of form and genre—speak about being Catholic. Your critical
writing, to choose one genre, contains observations that only a writer
intimately familiar with this faith would include, ranging from your note that
“in Catholicism, all Our Ladies are the same Lady,” to the fact that “Being able to
think among many materialisms and see them as cognates, as incarnates of one
another, is a Catholic way to think.” How has Catholic faith contributed
to your identity as an artist—your
creative and critical senses, languages, interests?

JOYELLE MCSWEENEY: My notion of art is very maximalist and souped-up: I
love spectacle, overload, magic materials, magic words, incantation and litany,
incarnation and possession, spilling and wounds. Art as a sacred event.

I’ve begun to recognize myself as a
Catholic writer because my whole notion of the image, of symbol, of art and
what it can do, has been conditioned by my immersion in Catholic culture,
ritual, and art since my earliest days. Catholicism seeped into me through
every pore. Catholicism is about seeping and pores!

Let’s just pick one example: The Virgin
of Guadalupe. The story of the Virgin’s apparition to Juan Diego is a story about art’s revolutionary potential, about mediumicity. She appears to the peasant;
he tries to tell the Archbishop, who doesn’t believe him; so she meets him
again and points him to a clutch of flowers (roses)
blooming in December; he gathers them in his cloak and brings them to the
Archbishop; when he opens his cloak, not only do roses...