Savannah Slone interviews Olivia Gatwood
You can preorder Life of the Party here. It releases on August 20, 2019.
Olivia Gatwood is a poet whom you’ve likely seen on the internet. Her spoken word videos, including “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” and “Ode to My Bitch Face,” have accumulated over 3 million views. As a queer, emerging poet myself, I’ve appreciated the issues she’s explored in her work. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a copy of Gatwood’s new collection, Life of the Party, which explores the identity politics surrounding femininity, as well as autonomy, obsession, sexuality, hyper-sexualization in this heavily gendered society, toxicity, female-targeted violence, and most prominently, fear.
Gatwood doesn’t shy away from the grotesque societal truths that are too often suppressed. Using the intricacies of sensory recollections, she creates a collective we in solidarity with the victims most often violated by cishet white men. In addition, Gatwood utilizes her privilege as a white cisgender woman to shed light on the majority of marginalized victims of violence and brutal murder, who, of course, don’t get equal media representation or prioritization. As she wrote in her Author’s Note, “It is a privilege to have your body looked for.”
Savannah Slone: How do you hope readers will respond to this collection? Particularly readers who identify as trans women, women of color, and sex workers, whose murders have often been ignored by the media and the public?
Olivia Gatwood: To me, having a conversation about the murder of women that doesn’t specifically acknowledge the women who are most likely to be victims of homicide (black trans women and indigenous women) is not actually a conversation about the murder of women. It’s a conversation about selective empathy. It is not enough to just say “women are at risk.” Because what that does is it allows the listener to choose which women they want to consider victims and which men they want to villainize. I cannot tell a story about being a trans women, a sex worker, a woman of color, or a black woman experiencing violence, but what I can do is actively resist using general language in order to avoid having intersectional conversations. I want the women who read this book who do not see their faces in true crime stories to know that they are a part of these stories, whether the media and the police recognize that or not. And I want white, cis women readers to know that our relationship to fear is not the pinnacle example of violence against women. Because of our whiteness, our fear and survival needs to be challenged and complicated at all times.
SS: Many of those who have experienced brutal sexual assault and violent murders are slut-shamed and victim-blamed, even in their deaths. They’re often treated as “somebody’s girlfriend” or “somebody’s daughter.” Even individuals who are painted as responsible are objectified and questioned about how exactly they could have allowed themselves to end up in these situations. If some of the famous deceased victims could have access to this book, what would you hope they’d take away?
OG: What keeps coming up for me is the poem about JonBenét Ramsey, which I wrote as a found poem made up mostly of lines from People Magazine’s coverage of her murder. The poem is written in the rhythm of a nursery rhyme, and is meant to be read as a very critical, borderline satirical analysis of the mania and coded language that followed a young white beauty pageant girl being murdered. What would JonBenét think? Of course, I want to believe she’d feel seen, like finally someone was giving her permission to be angry and rebellious and more than just a “beautiful blonde.” But assigning her that reaction is more for myself than it is for her. I don’t know how she’d feel. Or how Aileen would feel. Maybe I hope they would just be relieved to see themselves as characters in a story that feels a little different than the rest.
SS: Throughout Life of the Party, there is a distinct variation between murdered women versus you, an un-murdered woman, versus Aileen Wuornos, a woman who murdered. There is a clear fascination with Aileen Wuornos here. Why Aileen? What does she represent for you? Tell me more.
OG: Aileen was a woman who murdered, which is in direct contrast with so many of the women in the book. But Aileen fascinates me because I think she has more in common with the woman as a victim or survivor than she does with the perpetrator. I believe Aileen was, more than anything, trying to survive. In one of her final interviews, she says, “Seven men tried to rape me so I killed seven men. If a hundred men had tried to rape me, I would have killed a hundred men.” I’m not trying to excuse her violence, but I do want to complicate it. Because in my eyes, Aileen was also a murdered woman at the hands of the state when she was executed. And I don’t believe the media has done her justice by presenting her as a crazed misandrist who murdered innocent men. She was a sex worker, she was a queer woman, she was suffering from extreme trauma at the hands of men, and at the expense of those men, she took her power back in the only way she knew how.
SS: Did you watch Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile? I’d love to hear your take on the film’s perspective.
OG: I haven’t watched it! Not for any particular reason, I’m just bad at committing to sitting down and watching things on Netflix. I will say that I’ve read both the defense and critique of it and understand both sides. The critique makes sense to me and is a critique I make frequently in the book, that it further romanticizes and celebritizes a man who was a serial rapist and murderer like we so often do with white men who go down in history for being evil. I’ve also read the defense of it saying that the film seeks to illuminate the culture around Ted Bundy while he was active, which so often was one of romanticization. That to tell his story and not include all of the women waiting outside of the courthouse to defend him, the newspaper articles describing him as smart and handsome, would be inaccurate. Part of why he got off for so long was because he was glorified as a “least likely”—AKA a conventionally attractive white man with a college degree. I do find it interesting that they chose to tell it from a woman’s perspective, his former partner, and I’m curious about how telling it from that angle complicates the presentation of him as a character. Anyway, I’ll get back to you.
SS: How would you say your experience as a queer person interacts with the fear of dying violently, in contrast with the more heteronormative narrative the media delivers?
OG: As a very much straight-passing cis woman, in a world that relies heavily on physical signifiers of “queer” (which are often dictated by straight people) in order to perceive someone as queer, I wouldn’t say that my fear is in conversation with my queerness in the way it might be for other people. I don’t feel necessarily that my queerness endangers me. I do know, though, as a woman who has dated women and men, as well as feminine and masculine people, I think a lot about how differently I’ve connected with my partners over fear, how fear determines the way we walk through the world, and how or if I am believed. I’m thinking about how, as much as I hate to say this, I feel safer walking with a masculine person. But also how I feel more seen when I’m commiserating over fear with a feminine person. Both of these relationships feel significant and useful in different ways. It strikes me though—would I rather feel protected or seen?
SS: As an artist, do you feel you have a social responsibility in the work you produce?
OG: I’ve been trying to re-think what it means to be “responsible” as a public figure and artist. I think so often that that word is used to imply that an artist should be consistent or careful or maintain the spirit of a role model, and I especially think these expectations are placed on artists with a younger audience. And I disagree with that, I don’t think that’s my responsibility, nor do I think it’s useful for anyone if I hold that over my head. It robs my readers of growth. I think it is my responsibility to challenge my readers, to share when my thoughts and feelings are evolving away from previous work I’ve created. And to allow myself to be challenged and change in the process—because as a person whose medium is language, which is in a constant state of flux—to be stubborn to that change is so, so detrimental.
SS: How has touring and your ever-growing platform played a role in the evolution of this fear of being murdered? Has it heightened it or challenged your mental health?
OG: I wouldn’t say it has heightened it, more so that it just presented new places in which to be murdered. So naturally, when you’re a woman traveling alone through the country, checking into hotels, stopping at gas stations at night, there are all of the threats that you’ve been raised to understand are threats. But before becoming a performer, I had never considered how vulnerable it is to stand on a stage. When I was on tour a few years ago, one of my poems went viral within the men’s rights/incel corner of the internet and I was getting hundreds of death and rape threats from men on every platform. Meanwhile, I was posting my location online every single day and was brutally aware of how easy it would be to find me. I looked at the profiles of the men threatening to kill me, and they looked like the men who opened fire in movie theaters, malls, and in lecture halls like the ones I was performing in. They were young, straight, white men with a violent hatred for women and an affinity for semi-automatic weapons. I ended up changing my whole show around—house lights needed to be on, no spotlights, and a new hyper-awareness for the audience and how they moved. It was that paradox of justified paranoia in which I always felt both insane and completely within my right to be terrified. I still get jumpy when I’m on stage, but I have a team now that helps relieve the labor of keeping an eye out while I’m trying to perform.
SS: Would you say you’re transitioning away from spoken word, to some degree? How has your relationship evolved since the conception and release of New American Best Friend?
OG: I won’t ever not read my poems aloud. The Life of the Party Tour will be all spoken word with musical accompaniment. Performing is really important to me—it allows me to momentarily control how a reader consumes my work, which I rarely have a say in at all. I also firmly believe that all poetry should be read aloud, whether that be by the person who wrote it or by a person who loves the poem reading it to their best friend on their bedroom floor. I have transitioned away from slam poetry and competitive poetry because I no longer feel that assigning a number to my work serves me, though it did for a long time and was where I workshopped so many of my pieces and learned how to perform them.
SS: What have you read, watched, or otherwise consumed recently that moved you?
OG: Dead To Me on Netflix and Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney.
SS: I’m obsessed with both! So, to close, what’s next for you in your writing life?
OG: I’m working on a novel right now which is an excruciating process. I’m also writing the show for the Life of the Party book tour, during which I will have Cailin Nolte, a cellist from Albuquerque, accompany me and Ari Chi as an opening music act.
Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Olivia Gatwood (@oliviagatwood) has received national recognition for her poetry, writing workshops, and work as a Title IX Compliant educator in sexual assault prevention and recovery. As a finalist at Brave New Voices, Women of the World and the National Poetry Slam, Olivia's performances have been featured on HBO, Huffington Post, MTV, VH1, and BBC, among others. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Muzzle Magazine, The Winter Tangerine Review, Poetry City U.S.A., Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and The Missouri Review. Her Amazon bestselling collection, New American Best Friend, reflects her experiences growing up in both New Mexico and Trinidad, navigating girlhood, puberty, relationships, and period underwear. Olivia is a full-time touring artist, and has performed internationally at over two hundred schools and universities. Online, her videos, including “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” and “Ode to My Bitch Face,” have gained over 3 million views collectively. She currently lives in Santa Cruz, CA.
Savannah Slone (@sslonewriter) is a writer, editor, and English professor who currently dwells in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in or will soon appear in Paper Darts, The Indianapolis Review, Glass: A Poetry Journal, Crab Creek Review, FIVE:2:ONE, Pidgeonholes, decomP magazinE, Crab Fat Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Homology Lit, as well as the author of Hearing the Underwater (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and This Body is My Own (Ghost City Press, 2019). She enjoys reading, knitting, hiking, and discussing intersectional feminism. You can read more of her work at www.savannahslonewriter.com.