Words by: Phoebe Robertson (she/her)
TW: sexual assault, suicide, trauma, and chronic pain.
I was given the opportunity to review Tracey Slaughter's latest poetry collection, The Girls in the Red House are Singing, which is set to launch by New Zealand poet laureate Chris Tse on 16th August during Hamilton Book Month. However, I quickly realised that a traditional review wouldn't do it justice. Last week, I attended a moving Writers on Mondays session where Slaughter spoke. Inspired by this, I decided to shift my review into an interview with Slaughter, incorporating discussions from the event. This is a condensed version of the full interview, which can be found online by scanning the QR code below this article.
The most moving part of the book, for me, is how much of herself that Slaughter gives to the audience. The collection begins with opioid sonatas, a series of poems that not only won the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2023 but also recounts a traumatic car crash involving Slaughter. In discussion, Slaughter tells me that “as a writer I’ve always believed in giving everything [to the audience] ... I think the best work rises from those who ‘take aim with the whole body’ as Jane Hirschfield says… The truth is though if I try to draw lines, keep something back, write from a place of reserve I end up being unable to write at all — it’s an all or nothing deal for me.”
If you can’t tell by now, Slaughter’s collection is a heavy one, touching on themes of sexual assault, suicide, trauma, and chronic pain. These themes carry significant weight and preconceived connotations. I asked Slaughter if she had any ‘red lines’ she was unwilling to cross while putting together this collection. Once again, she was movingly vulnerable in her response. “The deepest red line for me was not hurting my children — the thing that blocked me for a long time was a feeling that, though they’re grown, my job as a mother was still to protect them. I couldn’t burden them with ever exposing these poems or the trauma they contained.” However, she recounts that “their response to this work has truly released me from these fears… Their love has helped me find my voice.”
Something I found particularly moving was when, at the Writers on Mondays event, Slaughter remarked, “We have to speak about these things somehow, whatever it may cost.” This prompted me to ask her if she felt there was any ‘cost’ to what she had written. She explained to me “The reality of living with chronic pain is that you can shut yourself away so you don’t impact your nerves and inflame it, but ultimately you’re going to feel the pain anyway — so I wanted to take the risk. I think not voicing these subjects only leads to more damage. The industry we enter when we publish too can often be an incredibly harsh one — I’ve often found my nerves shrilling with fear of what reception my work might face.”
Despite this fear, Slaughter has gone on to publish the collection. At Writers on Mondays, Slaughter remarked that she believes “A piece of writing just manages to find the ears, the heart, the hands of someone who needs it the most in that moment.” She hopes this collection will be just that for someone who may need it. To end the interview, I asked her what the latest piece of writing to impact her in this way was. She told me that most recently, “Anne Michaels’ Infinite Gradation was just that, because it cuts through the human heart of why we write — ‘against amnesia of every sort, against every form of oppression… Poetry is a dispatch from the front.’”
Full Interview Transcript:
TW: sexual assault, suicide, trauma, and chronic pain.
Something that struck me at the event is when you said “I fear that I wrote a book that I would struggle to read from.” But from an audience's perspective, you looked grounded, and spoke like a natural performer. Was it ‘easier’ than you expected to be speaking at Monday’s event?
It’s comforting, but also quite a miracle, to know that I appeared grounded from the outside. I really wasn’t sure until I reached the lectern that I’d be able to withstand reading those poems out loud. As soon as I said yes to the session, I felt that the right thing would be to find the courage to read the most political poems from the book – but I was also aware they’d be the most challenging to deliver because they were the most personal. And I didn’t feel certain at all that I could subject my body to the impact of voicing them. So I left it to the very moment that I reached that spot on stage to make the call. I’d read the piece about chronic pain once before to pay tribute to a fellow sufferer at her launch, and had utterly cracked in trying to get it out. So I knew there was a chance I might dissolve. But once I’d gotten through that piece, although shaky, I felt like I had it in me to push on. It was a threshold I felt I needed to steel myself to cross.
Likewise, what made you choose the specific readings that you did?
With the session’s focus on political impact I didn’t feel I could go past them – I think women are so often silent on the subjects that we most need to speak about because the shame and fear that surrounds those topics can be so cripplingly intense. Usually it impacts our bodies and we wear the damage directly in our flesh – I know I for one have lived many years with the physical symptoms that come from that silence, and in my work I see so many women who carry the same kind of nervous-system scars, who live with their bodies jammed into fight or flight because of disavowed trauma. I wanted to find a way to break through that shame. It felt like now is the time too – every time I flinch I see a screen awash with footage of a rapist running for the world’s most powerful office so I feel like we can’t afford to stay mute any longer.
When you read, lifetime prescription (for the moving), you talked a bit in discussion about your experience with chronic pain, and how that poem spoke to it. Would you be willing to tell me a bit more about your experiences?
I’ve had fibromyalgia/chronic regional pain syndrome for 18 years – it began with an unknown virus that somehow travelled up the nerves of my spine, then just as I was recovering I had a car accident that ruptured a disc and crushed a nerve in my neck. The ongoing pain hasn’t been treatable by any mainstream meds – in fact painkillers only made the pain worse, as if my body dialled up the signals in response. In consequence I had a hell-ride through the health system in the early years, with a struggle to receive diagnosis or get any constructive help, rather than judgement and dismissal – and I’ve discovered that many women have a similarly retraumatising journey through the medical realm. I’ve learnt over the years to make my way with the pain, which is some days only blessedly mild, other days unaccountably red-line. What has helped over the last few years, and what the book partially delves into, is finally exploring the trauma that was underlying the symptoms, learning how fear and bracing have fed into the pain. And finding the friendship of women who have gone through similar experiences. Women are all too prone to bearing the pain that arises from unacknowledged trauma, and the mistreatment we receive when we seek help only sends us deeper into shame: there’s power that comes from speaking amongst ourselves about this experience, and I’ve been lucky to have encountered other brave women who have found a way to give pain a voice.
Something I found particularly moving was when, in discussion about the content of your book, you said “we have to speak about these things somehow, whatever it may cost.” Do you fear that a “cost” will come from your book?
To tell the truth, I’ve had a couple of days of pain since the reading – but I knew that might be the price, so I was kind of prepared for the body to feel a bit of backlash if I pushed myself out there. The reality of living with chronic pain is that you can shut yourself away so you don’t impact your nerves and inflame it, but ultimately you’re going to feel the pain anyway – so I wanted to take the risk. I think not voicing these subjects only leads to more damage. The industry we enter when we publish too can often be an incredibly harsh one – I’ve often found my nerves shrilling with fear of what reception my work might face. With this book, because it’s been so hard to coax those inner ‘girls’ out of the darkness to finally speak, it felt especially dangerous to subject them to a public realm that might just revisit harm again. But again, the price of ‘safety’ is just more silence – I find myself often chanting Audre Lorde’s line that ‘when we are silent we are still afraid, so it is better to speak.’
In a similar vein, and probably already covered but I would quite like a direct response, the content of the book explicitly talks about themes of sexual abuse, suicide and the relationship between trauma and pain. What was the process like for you deciding what to include in the book, and what not to?
Most of the poems that speak of sexual abuse, rape, and suicide were vented in a process which was solely for me, to keep myself kicking in particularly tough moments – many during lockdown when I found myself boxed in alone with the pain and with memories of trauma resurfacing. It was a case of poetry for pure survival, to stay out of the spiral down, and I’m so grateful I had that capacity to write my way through the worst of the crisis. But I wasn’t sure I could ever let those poems go – this book lay in the dark for a long time because I didn’t know I could ever face publishing it. So much of what it voiced still felt unspeakable to anyone other than the private page. It took a long time to move slowly towards being able to relinquish the manuscript.
Likewise, did you have any “red lines” you didn’t want to cross?
The deepest red line for me was not hurting my children – the thing that blocked me for a long time was a feeling that, though they’re grown, my job as a mother was still to protect them, so I couldn’t burden them with ever exposing these poems or the trauma they contained. The mother in me is a fierce bitch and it was a damn hard battle to convince her otherwise. So while I couldn’t tell the truth to my children this book wasn’t going anywhere. But ultimately I’ve raised two beautiful humans, and their response to this work has truly released me from those fears. I think speaking these stories to them – which my body found almost physically impossible in the moment, locking my throat, stopping my tongue – has freed me to take the kind of step I took Monday. Their love helped me find my voice.
Something I’m very personally interested in is, as an author, how much of yourself are you willing to ‘give’ to the reader. You’ve written a book that’s so honest and raw about your life. How did you decide how much of yourself you wanted to make public?
As a writer I’ve always believed in giving everything – I can’t see the point in writing if you don’t put yourself on the line, hold nothing back, use everything you’ve got. I think the best work rises from those who ‘take aim with the whole body’ as Jane Hirschfield says. That’s much harder writing memoir than fiction of course, so now I’m moving into that territory the stakes are much higher. The truth is though if I try to draw lines, keep something back, write from a place of reserve I end up being unable to write at all – it’s an all or nothing deal for me.
Did you write the book with an audience in mind, or for yourself? If it was for yourself, can you tell me a bit about your decision to find a publisher?
It was a deeply personal book – but I was lucky to have an existing relationship with a publisher that I knew I could trust with this material if I could ever bring myself to share it. They knew for a while that the manuscript existed, but they never pushed me for it – just waited quietly for me to find the courage in me to hit send. It was a huge blessing to know that when I did take that step, it was going into the right hands.
Finally, I’d just like to end on a note that you brought up at the event. That you believe “a piece of writing just manages to find the ears, the heart, the hands, of someone who needs it the most in that moment.” And ask if you have ever been that person, finding the writing that you needed, and what impact it had?
The first book I can remember reaching me like this was a battered copy of Jane Eyre – I would have been about eleven years old and stranded in a house I hated, and when I read Bronte’s account of the ‘red room’ I was filled with a sense that someone else had lived through the same. And most recently Anne Michaels’ Infinite Gradation became a thin paperback bible for me, because it cuts through to the human heart of why we write – ‘against amnesia of every sort, against every form of oppression…Poetry is a dispatch from the front.’
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