After the Afterward: The Poetics of Cate Peebles’ “The Haunting”
Interview by Chris McCreary
In her latest collection, The Haunting, poet Cate Peebles doesn’t so much riff on the horror genre as disembowel its tropes and stitch them them back together in her own image. Throughout the collection, Peebles reckons with what she’s inherited from both her ancestors and artistic influences, and as The Haunting moves from prose poems to erasures, Peebles simultaneously pays homage to and overwrites classic gothic texts: she declares, “I writes new endings on blank pages/ after the afterward.”
In this interview, conducted via email, we discuss how her manuscript came together, how she constructed some of the poems themselves, and how she feels about upcoming film adaptations of novels that she engaged with in the The Haunting.
Chris McCreary: One of the things that I find most compelling about The Haunting is the book’s varied use of form and how these forms get deployed throughout the collection. Could you share a bit about how you arrived at the book’s overall structure? I know, for one thing, that this manuscript was an “expansion,” to use your term, of a chapbook-length collection.
Cate Peebles: Yes, initially I had assembled a chapbook called Revenge Bodies, which contained many of the various forms that you see in the final version, such as the Wuthering Heights erasures, and the segments of “The Worm.” I was interested in playing around with compression and release, absence and presence, and fragmentation—all of which are key features in horror movies and books. I also wanted the book’s structure to emphasize the overwhelm and jarring sensations that accompany emotional states like fear and rage, which play out thematically and imagistically throughout as well. I conceive of the book’s structure as an amplification of the book’s obsessive themes.
After the chapbook was selected by Traci Brimhall for Tupelo Press’s Snowbound Chapbook award, the poems continued to spawn—especially the ekphrastic “slasher” pieces that directly engage with horror films. There were fewer of those in the original chapbook, though the first few that I wrote (“Kwaidan”, which was originally called “Revenge Bodies”, and “The Alphabet” were the first film-poems I wrote and those were in the earlier version), were central to how the rest of the book took shape. I just kept watching and rewatching horror movies, which led to more of these ones. Rather than being ekphrastic in the traditional sense, I think of them more as inhabitations of the films, a mingling of my own voice with other artists’ creations.
Since these poems are so dense and compact, it seemed like a good idea to space them out and as I started adding them into what became the full manuscript, I decided to put them into smaller groupings interspersed with the, formally, more open pieces, like the erasures and bingo cards. As I shifted the ordering around, I began to conceptualize the book as a haunted house, which led to changing the name to The Haunting (after the great 1963 movie based on Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House)--as I worked on it, it also felt kind of like the Winchester House–one room led into another one that was never there before. When I’d assembled all the new stuff with the original chapbook, I mentioned to the editors at Tupelo that I’d turned the chapbook into a full length book and was considering submitting it around, and they asked to see it and, amazingly, said they wanted to publish the whole thing. I think it probably would’ve kept spawning had there not been a publication schedule, though the density of the more condensed forms sort of led me to err on the side of shorter manuscript than longer as not to completely overwhelm the reader.
Chris McCreary: You describe these poems as being “in conversation” with a variety of texts - gothic novels, horror films, and more. As you initiated each of those conversations, did you have a sense of what you were hoping for? For instance, when you began working with the original texts of Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights, did you have an inkling of what you were looking for within them?
Cate Peebles: The Wuthering Heights erasures came first–I actually made the first ones in 2015 as an art project. I used whiteout on pages ripped out of an old copy of the book and a couple of them were in a small show in Pittsburgh that somebody actually purchased, and I never typed them out, so those are out there somewhere in somebody’s home (I hope!). But I came back to making them in 2022 because it had been such a soothing process—partly because I didn’t have any idea of what I wanted to find and the results were always a bit of a surprise. I start with a pencil and underline phrases that jump out at me and then use the whiteout brush to erase around the parts I underlined, but I always ended up erasing more than I underlined.
The Frankenstein centos were some of the final pieces I added to the manuscript. I had originally envisioned writing an actual conversation with the monster as a script, and as I re-read the book, I underlined things, similar to what I did with Wuthering Heights, but when I started to type things out, I pieced the words and phrases together completely out of order.
My guiding question going into both interactions with the texts was “What happens to the words when I do this?” in the spirit of pure experimentation as a way to 1. get my brain out of its own way, and 2. to let Bronte and Shelley lead me around their works in a new way.
Chris McCreary: Speaking of adaptation and re-envisioning of texts, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives this fall, and the trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is currently inspiring some hot takes and think pieces. Are you looking forward to either / both of these adaptations, or do you feel like your current relationship to those written texts (and maybe earlier adaptations) is all that your psyche can hold?
Cate Peebles: Generally, I’m all for adaptations and re-envisionings. It’s interesting to see how a story’s telling changes over time and how different artists choose to retell them. But, yeah, not all of them are for me–-for example, I really liked the new adaptation of Interview With the Vampire and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, but the adaptation of Suspiria from a few years ago didn’t do it for me. Telling and retelling stories is an ancient human activity, and there’s something comforting about the balance of familiarity with surprise when familiar stories are adapted. And yet we’re in this age where we’re inundated by remakes, which does get old…but at the same time, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of repackaged entertainment that we’re constantly faced with, and the commercialization of it all, that makes some of it feel like lazy storytelling? It all depends on who’s making it, I guess.
I’m excited to what del Toro’s does with Frankenstein. His work is so visually incredible that I’m in without even seeing the trailer, but I’m less sold on Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. I don’t have a great answer as to why because I’ve really enjoyed the over-the-top-ness of her other films—the casting seems off to me. Maybe it’s just that I feel Cathy must be a brunette? Ha. It’s funny how Wuthering Heights always gets sold as this romance when it’s really a revenge story, and a violent, cruel one. Of course, when I first read it, I thought it was romantic, and that Heathcliff was peak boyfriend material, but now it’s like yikes. These characters are mean and hurtful and they destroy each other. So, I do wonder if Emerald Fennel will tap into that violence—her previous work suggests she might—and I’m kind of talking myself into wanting to see it now because I’m curious if she’ll get at the heart of it (it’s being released on Valentine’s Day, which could just be a cheeky f-u to all that). But to answer your question: I’m always game to make space for other/new interpretations of texts I like and/or feel close to in some way to see how they operate as unique artworks on their own terms.
The Haunting by Cate Peebles (Tupelo Press)
The Haunting is a book of feminist-horror visitations, incantations, and possession embodied in unruly forms that subvert genre and generic definitions of poetry and prose. This full collection— expanding and completing the chapbook Revenge Bodies, originally selected as winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award— is concerned with how the living and the dead coexist, how to survive trauma, and persistence. Drawing from a variety of texts including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, 20TH-century horror films, The Velvet Underground, and Ovid, The Haunting explores the anxieties of ancestral and artistic inheritance, rage, transformation, motherhood, maternal ambivalence, and the drive to create.