The Myth of Bodily Knowledge: Chapbook Interview with Mira Stone

Amelia Gothreau Newett: Your chapbook, The Myth of Bodily Knowledge, is a collection rooted in honesty and transparency in relation to female harm. What was it that prompted you to center your poems around this hurt?

Mira Stone

Mira Stone: I’ve been writing about this kind of harm for a while, but tend to censor myself, or rather to diminish the harm to make it more comfortable for myself or the reader. Ultimately, I centered my chapbook around this hurt because I wanted to prove to myself and readers that it’s okay to write about pain honestly and vulnerably. I wanted to write something truthful.

AGN: Did you find a need to protect yourself from the themes you were focusing on at any point during the process? If so, how did you?

MS: Constantly. This chapbook started with the sestina “Remedios,” which I wrote about girls and women in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s a poem where it was pretty easy to protect myself since I was turning my thematic concerns onto a world other than mine. Quickly, though, I realized the more essential poems were the ones from my own experience, and so I started to write those. It was uncomfortable, but those poems came faster because I needed to write them. I protected myself by balancing those vulnerable poems with lighter ones, or at least with ones that turn to other worlds, specifically mythological worlds, to voice the same concerns I was too tired to write directly about. Poems like “Lovers Descending to Lethe” or “The Birth of Ganesha” are easier for me to sit with because as truthful as they might be, they’re centered in myth. It was just a question of balance.

AGN: When you started your collection, the plan was for it to be a collection of sestinas. How did you make the choice to let go of the form requirement? Even without each poem as a sestina, what role does form play in your book?

MS: I love working with the sestina form, but it just didn’t make sense for every poem to be a sestina. I was drawn to the sestina because of its potential for re-contextualizing words and ideas. I wanted to write a chapbook that took harm and re-contextualized it in hope. It’s hard to feel hopeful, though, when you’re stuck reading a whole chapbook of thirty-nine liners. I turned away from the sestina in part because I wanted to let the reader (and myself) breathe between heavier poems, but also because the sestina form wasn’t right for some of the poems I wanted to write. Poems like “Six Places I’ve Lain on My Back” or “Remedios” feel natural to the sestina, but there were things I wanted to articulate that made sense with fewer formal constraints. The sestina overall, though, serves to emphasize the cyclical nature of harm and also to voice my own obsessions. There are a few words I needed to come back to, to fixate on, and the sestina is really the perfect vehicle for that.

AGN: It was so fun to get to see the process of creating this collection and reading all the drafts that eventually led to this beautiful book! Which poem came the easiest along the way/felt most natural in its beginning stages? Which poem took the longest to feel complete?

MS: “Eating Prasad” came to me most easily. I’ve always struggled with the idea that if you’re given prasad, you have to eat it, no matter how full you are or how little you want to eat. It is food blessed by God, so you can’t throw it out. This poem is just me voicing thoughts I’ve had for as long as I can remember, so I had to do less active work in writing the piece. It’s also a piece I revised very little, because it needed to have that stream-of-consciousness feel. The hardest poem to write was “The Myth of Bodily Knowledge.” It took me a long time to complete because I was agonizing over it being too vulnerable or revelatory. Adding the “my body” in the first stanza was a difficult choice, because I resisted any self-identification in earlier drafts. Eventually, though, I’d written other more vulnerable poems for the chapbook and decided to just let go of my inhibitions and let this poem be as intimate, and potentially uncomfortable, as it needed to be.

AGN: If you could pick any poem by any poet that you wish you had written and could include in this book, what poem would you choose? What do you think it would add to the conversation of your collection?

MS: I would pick Brenda Shaughnessy’s “Parthenogenesis.” It grapples with questions of eating, femininity, and hurt in such a haunting way. That line “Stop the madness and just eat the mirror” is one that I think about often. I write in The Myth of Bodily Knowledge about a lot of these same questions, but Shaughnessy’s poem would add a kind of edge and harshness that I want more of in my own poetry.

AGN: Now that the process is over and you have the book, does it feel done or do you think you’ll continue to go back and adjust this collection specifically?

MS: The chapbook does not feel done to me. I want to grapple a little bit more with the sestina form. While the form isn’t necessary to each and every poem, I do still want to pick apart the sestina and see how I can better integrate it into the overall shape of the collection. I also want to work on better re-contextualizing the collection in hope. I speak so much about harm in this chapbook, but I know that there’s still space for me to write more about what there is beyond that harm, because there is so much. In revising this chapbook, I want to celebrate the body.

AGN: After creating this book, do you think you’ll put together another poetry collection any time soon? If so, is there any idea you have in particular? If not, is there a project you have in the works that you’re excited for?

MS: I don’t have plans to put together another poetry collection any time soon, but I am working on an exciting fiction project. I’m writing a collection of short stories that explore narratives of South Asian American community, identity, and belonging and, more specifically, experiences of femininity and mental health. It’s a project I’ve been thinking about for quite a while, but I’m now devoting more time and energy to researching, writing, and assembling. I will, however, be continuing to revise The Myth of Bodily Knowledge while I work on my short stories. These projects feel thematically related in some ways, so it’ll be good to be working on them simultaneously.

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Mira Stone is the author of the chapbook The Myth of Bodily Knowledge. She is a junior at the Johns Hopkins University, where she studies Writing Seminars and Spanish.

Amelia Gothreau Newett is a graduating senior studying Writing Seminars and Social Policy at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of the chapbook hand-me-down resistance, a collection that explores and challenges the relationship of the personal and political. After graduation she will continuing her time in Baltimore and pursuing her Master’s in Education at Johns Hopkins through the Urban Teachers program.