AMIE SOUZA REILLY, AUTHOR OF HUMAN/ANIMAL • Interviews

Interview by Catherine Parnell
AMIE SOUZA REILLY, AUTHOR OF HUMAN/ANIMAL (WLU Press)

A bestiary in essays, Amie Souza Reilly’s Human/Animal chronicles the nightmare that ensues when Reilly and her family purchase their dream home and move in only to be harassed and stalked by two neighbors who own the house next door, brothers Wes and Jim. Their intent? To drive Reilly’s family out so they could buy the house. The torment and escalating fear destroy the family’s hope for happy, peaceful living, and there’s no respite, no help from law enforcement. After three years, the family moves because the fear of what might happen is too great. But Reilly analyzes more than stalking in this hybrid, experimental book; she explores the use of animal names as verbs: to badger, to dog, to cow. A visual artist, Reilly’s narrative is interspersed with drawings and definitions that expose more than a Wiki entry about the animals; they expose the multiple ways in which the English language is “full of brutality.” Take, for example, the slug, violently defined as “to punch,” yet a slug has no shell and is vulnerable. There’s twinning of the linguistic meanings linked to animals, that then connect to adversarial physical action, a philosophical dive that reveals an expanded understanding of language and image—and of who we are.

In the “Preface” to Human/Animal Reilly writes, “Come with me, and let me tell you an animal story.” In this interview with author and editor Catherine Parnell, Reilly discusses not only her particular story, but the other “animal stories” we encounter everyday, particularly in the current sociopolitical climate.

Catherine Parnell: Human/Animal raises questions about accepted boundaries found in families, neighborhoods, communities, towns and cities, states. The list is endless, but the boundaries are generally treated as bright red stop signs by civilized people. These days, the color red signifies GO! with the ultimate threat to democracy in the US: the current president, his administration and their lackeys, and his MAGA disciples. They persist in invading accepted privacy and tearing down carefully constructed government agencies, social norms, and boundaries. Yet it didn’t begin with Trump. It was pushed forward by the male voices behind Waco and Ruby Ridge, where white men took center stage, threatened violence, and demanded obedience from their followers and freedom from governmental regulation.

Voice is paramount in your bestiary in essays. What is lurking in, behind, and underneath the brothers’ voices, especially Wes’s? To what extent do you think the polluted river of entitlement, hate, violence, and threats enabled the brothers who stalked you and your family?

Amie Souza Reilly: I love the metaphor of the polluted river here—a reminder that contaminated water, land, neighborhoods, bodies…all of it…is tied to entitlement, hate, violence, misogyny, and racism. That is also what’s lurking in Wes’s voice, though I have been struggling to articulate what I’m thinking as I revisit that voice now, post-publication, post re-election.

We moved into our house in 2014, before the first Trump administration. When he was running for office and then became President in 2016, his speeches—in content but also just in the way he spoke—had an uncanny familiarity. My husband and I would hear something on the radio and look at each other and say, Whoa, he sounds like Wes. Both men have the same voice, the same way of repeating and looping around ideas and fragments of seemingly disconnected thoughts, the same affectation and tone.

As I wrote Wes, it was impossible not to hear these voices concurrently, though I’d thought that by the time I was done, by the time the book was out, both Wes and Trump would be part of a past. Now that we’re back and things are worse, there’s something extra horrifying rereading. I can hear a folding together of the two—not just because I saw and wrote through Wes to understand American culture, but because of how even their voices represent how prevalent this violence is, has always been. The pervasiveness of a voice, the way it seeps, like that polluted river.

Catherine: Women are creatures too, and they’re far more vulnerable to verbal and physical attack than men. Yet they’re often made to feel guilty for their vulnerability. Misogyny feeds this on both sides of the chromosomal aisle, and as a result, women feel responsible for things that go wrong, and when they fight back, they’re branded as criminals.

How did you reconcile your deep responsibility to create a safe haven and the impulses that verged on uncivilized behavior that crossed boundaries? You mention feeling shame in some instances.

Amie: There’s this weird sense that in a conflict, the person with lesser power needs to show an attempt to fight back or else they didn’t try hard enough to get out of danger. I think that complicates the responsibility to keep a safe haven, too.

When we were living next to those brothers who wanted to take our house, I did, frequently, seek police help, which I think is what most folks would consider to be the “right” course of action. I knew calling or stopping into their station was never going to actually result in change, but I also knew that if I didn’t then there was no way to show I had tried to stop them. It was quite clearly a waste of time and energy, especially when what was happening couldn’t be proved or wasn’t actually illegal or I wasn’t taken seriously. Sometimes when I was there filing a report for them to keep on file, I would catch myself trying to be as cool and aloof as they were, in an attempt to get them to listen or somehow be on my side, as if they might do something if I was less panicked. But it was hard to balance my urgency with level-headedness. The shame, which as you note was so often linked to my desire to hurt them and watch them, also came from my inability to do anything more than talk and from my own ingrained misogyny. It’s hard to shake this feeling that as a mother I should be able to do better, so I turned the anger inward instead of being furious at the failing system.

Catherine: Many will see Human/Animal as a horror story—and it is—but there’s something playful and joyous in the drawings and examination of language. It’s as if you translated an unknown into a known and thereby claimed an essential part of yourself through language. So, how did you use a form of multilingualism to explore the years you lived beside Jim and Wes and dealt with their acts of intimidation?

Amie: I just did my first post-publication reading and was so relieved that people laughed a little, that I hadn’t just written about personal and historical horror. I think that multilingualism comes through partially because this is a thinking-through process for me; in order to think through what I can’t quite grasp, I look to art, film, and books to help me find connections that might lead to some larger insight. I usually end up somewhere new again, and I kind of love that it is impossible to reach one answer.

Incorporating drawings into this narrative is also an attempt at multilingual exploration. We’re accustomed to having illustrations support a narrative when we’re children—that’s how we learn to read—and I am interested in how images supplement text now, when they are not expected. For me, they work as a reminder of my own smallness. There’s so much not-us in the world, and the forced attention to badgers and larks and squirrels decenters my own self-importance. But I hope they are also a comfort, a support for the immediate story but also for the larger examination of culture and history.

Catherine: There’s an exquisite paragraph in Human/Animal about metaphor: “a small story. There is tension between the description and the descriptor… You may understand something by the end of the metaphor that you didn’t know before.” Let’s posit your book as metaphor. What do you know now that you didn’t know before, and what do you want your readers to know?

Amie: I think I knew there was no single answer to why the brothers acted the way they did, that their behavior both was and wasn’t about me at all. But I don’t think I realized how many answers there would be. I also don’t think I realized how much this was going to be a motherhood book, and I don’t think I’m done with that yet. I wrote a line toward the end about Wes being a mother figure, about how I needed him to be far away but not so far I couldn’t still study him, try to figure him out, and when I wrote it, I was so excited. I hadn’t thought about him that way before. I’m pretty sure I won’t write specifically about these brothers ever again; I am ready to put that away, but I am curious what other events have this same tension, this same pull of desire and repulsion.

Catherine: What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Amie: The writer is an archivist, an activist, and an artist. No matter what we are writing, we are marking the time we live in. And writing, all art-making, is an act of care and community, which is an act of resistance right now. I think writers and artists are perhaps uniquely inclined to slow down, turn something over, then step under the lights and share what they see with others. We need that stopping/thinking/sharing now more than ever.

Mixed in with all the horrific news is the continued gutting of the arts, and I keep coming back to Electric Literature’s response to losing NEA funding: “Creative expression is the lifeblood that vivifies a free and democratic culture. Trump is obsessed with a heritage and legacy of his own imagination. For him, literature is forward facing and therefore dangerous. Every story, even about the past, is a new story. Every story a writer tells is one Trump cannot control.”

I think this gets at exactly what I’m thinking, what writers and artists have always said and done, and that’s bring newness, refuse to be controlled or believe in the limitations of humanity.

Catherine Parnell is an editor, educator, co-founder of MicroLit, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, reviews, and interviews in LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines and journals.

Amie Souza Reilly is a visual artist and multigenre writer from Connecticut. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Wigleaf, HAD, The Chestnut Review, The Atticus Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, Barren, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere. She holds an MA in English Literature from Fordham University and an MFA from Fairfield University, and is the Writer-in-Residence and Director of Writing Studies at Sacred Heart University.