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Previously on Danika Stegeman LeMay: The Psycho Holosuite Years:

• A ‘Midsommar’ piece for film dada with lines like: ‘It’s winter in my heart. Hey baby. How you feeling?’ or ‘Drop the curtains. The day is unspeakable.’
• Her hybrid novel PILOT deconstructed but not really [the process for the De-con-struc series is still finding its feet i.e. both tone and style seem to be different with each piece].

Now, she’s swooping in with another hybrid-ish book of poems called ABLATION, a word that has been giving me a lot of trouble as, no matter how many times I look it up and stare at the letters, it just won’t stick in my brain. I heard it in ‘Star Trek’ once – ablative shielding on the ship – but I didn’t really know what that meant, only that the Borg couldn’t seem to penetrate it.

For the Chinese translation of the novel title, I went with ‘person who is losing skin.’ But I think ablation might mean limbs, not skin.

Okay, just checked for the seventeenth time and it’s the removal of body tissue.

Does that mean medical removal? Or a natural occurrence?

I’m gonna stick with the translation I’ve already got cos I don’t know what body tissue is in Chinese and skin sounds more poetic e.g. shed skin and there’s new skin underneath.

What’s ABLATION about?

Here’s the synopsis:

‘Ablation is an elegy to Stegeman LeMay’s mom, who died in 2020, and, simultaneously, a love letter to Stegeman LeMay’s young daughter. The book was written in the liminal spaces opened by birth, death, and trauma. It contains poems, hybrid text, images as windows and thread as a form of healing. The book’s materials coalesce and surface, waves washing along the thresholds of control and chaos, form and formlessness. These thresholds become points of divergence, where what’s essential is carried forward, where all else is transformed and unshored.’

I’ll be honest, I was a bit wary about writing something about this as it’s clearly quite personal for Danika and my style can sometimes be a bit abrasive [ablative?].

Not intentionally, it just ends up like that somehow.

But then, there are some questions in the liminal space between my brain and all the miscellaneous stuff, mostly around methodology and subject-matter permission, so I’m just gonna plough ahead and ask them [to myself] and then probably do a spec too.

Or I’ll do the spec first.

From my experience reading PILOT, Danika likes to anchor things with a central metaphor and then scrawl like a passionate lunatic around it. You’d think there are only so many things that can be done with a deserted island, but if that island is also unmoored in time and space then you have permission to do anything really.

That was a PILOT reference. The island from ‘Lost’ is in it a lot. Kind of.

I don’t think there will be a central metaphor in ABLATION, not such a specific one at least. Maybe the loss of body tissue/skin and the growing of a new batch? That is a central metaphor. But it must be abstract in this case. Not absorbed directly into the whole text and reconfigured as a physical set. I mean, there won’t be a mystical clinic, or a phantom surgeon popping up and slicing off Danika’s body tissue or memories. Or if there is, no one told me about it.

Rephrase: there will be a central metaphor in this, but it won’t be an island from an old TV show.

Okay, guessing time.

Spec: The synopsis says this is a mix of poems, hybrid text and images so I’m expecting a heavily fragmented thing. It won’t be linear but will instead mesh/juxtapose things by theme or feeling. Example, a memory of the mother figure being stubborn phasing into a scene of the daughter-figure being stubborn and Danika in the middle, thinking, ‘family, fucking hell.’ I’m fairly certain this will be poetic but not romanticised. The middle section of the book might focus on the aspects that have been passed on from the mother to the author, good and bad, and will perhaps have a more whimsical feel to it. The end can go one of seven thousand ways: the daughter will also begin to show the same characteristics [as well as some different ones], or she will be unmasked as a robot created by the mother to help the author deal with the future loss of a parent figure. Probably the first one. There’s likely to be no end in the traditional sense. How would you do that? Focus on the daughter. But then what about the mum? She doesn’t have to be gone in a hybrid book of poems, she can be immortal. I think the final scene will be Danika sitting on a beanbag, watching her mum play with her daughter. And the final line has to be a contradiction of some kind. It’s the LeMay way. Maybe something like: ‘mum didn’t know who Elsa was. Ice powers came naturally to her.’

It’s a bit of a cheat to say it, but there’s no real way to predict how a hybrid book will go, you just have to read it. Like seeing a basic synopsis of Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror’ and trying to map out the whole film based solely on that, it’s impossible, just too deeply personal to permit such a thing.

Obviously, because I’ve said this, my spec above is pretty much useless.

But I still have those initial questions.

The biggest one: with how much depth/honesty can you write about someone close to you, especially one who has died?

Is there a line that shouldn’t be crossed?

If I wrote about my own mother, technically, it would be my impressions or recollections of her, so it would also fall under the category of my story. But if I wrote about the darkest parts of her, the humiliating things, even from my own admitted perspective, then what? Can I permit it?

I don’t think there is an answer to that.

Writing out real things in an abstract fashion can help a little, I suppose. It would still be truth, just costumed. Or you could even things out with confessional elements of your own. Make yourself look like a twat too. Maybe a bigger one.

Of course, it’s easier if your mum is/was an analogue of Piper Laurie in Carrie. Then you can unleash. But realistically…

Spec 2: The author dressed as a child scrawls punishment lines in the shadow of an eight-foot tall, blood-smeared crucifix, muttering in terrified code about-

Another question, kind of an inversion of the first: how do you write about your daughter without making it overly sentimental?

Again, abstraction probably helps.

And balance.

The synopsis says this is a love letter to the daughter, but in Danika’s other writing that I’ve seen, contradictions are queen. She will have no problem showing the strops or tantrums or anxieties of anyone cos there’s truth in that and she can balance it out with the more positive aspects.

There must be positive aspects.

Even when I was a kid, I remember helping my mum with the shopping. And selling her VHS of ‘The Pillow Book’ so I could go out drinking. Having a chair thrown at my head. Making her endless cups of tea. Calling her a fucking psycho right to her face etc.

There will be positive aspects, it’s a love letter. I’m just jaded from dealing with kids as a teacher before. One little shit used to just sit there throwing LEGO pieces at my head. And when I threw them back [more accurately] he would start crying. He was a Christian apparently.

I’m kind of interested in the form the love letter will take.

Is it for the daughter to be able to read and understand now, at their current age? Or just a release of emotion/grief/trauma for the author?

If the kid is really young, they can’t read it.

If they’re a teen, they won’t read it.

If they’re bored, they might look at the cover and the first poem but as soon as they get to-

I really don’t think they’ll read it.

But that’s okay cos things like this should be read when the author is not hovering nearby, measuring the other’s reaction face.

And the daughter will read it one day.

If they haven’t already.

Won’t they?

I really have no idea about any of this.

But I think they will.

They have to.

They’re a character in it.

Can’t resist that.

The cover?

According to Mike Corrao’s Instagram page, it was done by Mike Corrao.

Which means it will be an experience of and in itself. Or in and of itself. Did you know his last book was made out of sandpaper? That he literally wanted you to wound your hands before opening to the first page?

Hmm.

I suspect it wasn’t a satanic blood ritual disguised as new book, but I can’t prove that.

ABLATION isn’t made out of sandpaper, far as I know.

You can buy it here, at 11:11 books