What Matters: A Conversation with Swimming in Gilead’s Cassie Premo Steele
Every sound from my mouth
is sacred, holy prayer.
I am the priest and the power.
“Declaration”
Cassie Premo Steele is a passionate ecofeminist writer and seasoned author who holds a PhD in comparative literature and women’s gender and sexuality studies. She currently resides in South Carolina but enjoys connecting with other writers and audiences by participating in events and readings across the country both virtually and online. You can find video clips from several events on her website cassiepremosteele.com.
Cassie’s poetry chapbook Swimming in Gilead will be released by Yellow Arrow Publishing on October 10, 2023, and is now available for preorder (click here for wholesale prices)! Follow Yellow Arrow on Facebook and Instagram for Friday sneak peeks into Swimming in Gilead. This collection of poems deals with themes of identity and relationship, the creative witness to collective trauma and healing, and respect for the seasons of ourselves and our world. The incredible photograph used on the cover of Swimming in Gilead is by Sofia Tata (sofiatata.com). According to Cassie, “The combination of sea and land formation creates an image of a woman in silhouette and draws readers into an intimate dialogue with the poems.”
Cassie engaged in a dynamic conversation through email and over Zoom with Melissa Nunez, Yellow Arrow author and interviewer, where they bonded over a shared admiration for powerful feminist writers like Gloria Anzaldúa and the call for restoration and balance in the world.
Can you share some of your writing background and your journey to writing Swimming in Gilead?
I went to an all-female Catholic school called Immaculata for high school. I know many people hate high school, but I actually loved it. I would consider the nuns and the teachers there as feminists who were really empowering. They saw us as intellectual women who would make a difference in the world.
I was the president of the student council my senior year, which was the same year the bishop announced that he was going to close the school. His reasoning was to blame the girls for not becoming nuns after graduating, but that was a form of scapegoating, blaming the victim, gas lighting, all of that.
When the announcement was made, I called everyone to the auditorium, and we literally took over the school. I said, “This is not OK. We’re gonna fight back against this.” We created a plan for letting the media know what was happening. We lost in the end, but it was really an example in contrast for me showing that feminist community is possible. We felt that connection as had the generations of women who had gone there before. We also experienced how it can be destroyed with one flick of the pen. This experience, which generations of women, and immigrants, and people of color, are all too familiar with.
This experience stayed with me. I went on in my life. I got a PhD, I taught at the university level, I became a stepmom and a mom. I came out and married my wife. I went through a lot of changes. But always that idea of that Gilead-type community stayed with me, like a seed.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I had a sense that we needed to do the things that were really important to us. I enrolled in a class taught by Natalie Goldberg (who has also been a mentor to me in terms of reading her work). It was mostly recorded lessons, but there were some big group sessions that were live with her, which was wonderful. It had people from all around the world in it. They randomly put us into small groups of like six or seven people. Her method is that you get a prompt, you write for 10 minutes, you read your work, and your group listens but does not comment. So, it’s not really a writing workshop, but more a witnessing to each other. And there was a woman in that first small group who was sobbing while I was reading, and she individually messaged me and invited me to join a writing group. And I said, yes.
I ended up in a group with six women. Three were from Canada and three from the United States. If you remember that summer the killing of George Floyd had happened, then there were unmarked black vans rounding up people in Portland, Oregon, our COVID rates were through the roof. We started meeting weekly and as we were sharing, we realized those of us in the United States couldn’t really even feel what was happening to us. I realize as a trauma scholar that you can’t really know the trauma until it’s over, and as we were living through a collective trauma at that time, people from the outside could have the emotions for what was happening in a way that we couldn’t here in the U.S. Many of the poems in the collection were written during these group sessions with these women, the Sisters of Gilead, which is what we started calling ourselves as inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale.
Everything matters.
No matter how light or slight,
all matter weighs something.
You matter, too.
“Six Things the Feather Taught Me”
Which women-identifying writers inspire you?
I think of myself as having a poetry team made of women such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Anne Sexton, Louise de Salvo, Joy Harjo, and Marilou Awiakta. All these women, whether here on earth still or not, are very much alive and active in my mind and body and soul.
Audre teaches me the creative power of difference when we break the many silences that try to teach us to be afraid. Gloria tells me the spirit is an animating and healing force in both individual and collective trauma. Anne allows me to cherish my sexual power and the power of laughter. Louise reminds me to keep some things secret because they are too sacred to be shared. Joy sings of the joy of the land, in the land, and in our bodies, which are also land. And Awiakta, who goes by her chosen Eastern Cherokee name, reminds me of the Native, indigenous, and female roots of our national government, which we are still coming to terms with as a continent and as a world.
How did you connect with Yellow Arrow Publishing?
Poets & Writers Magazine did a feature on the press, and I looked it up immediately. There seemed to be something speaking to me about the mission, the vision, the ethos. I’d recently typed up all the writings I’d done with my writing group called the Gilead Sisters over the course of the pandemic, and I went back into that document and, like a block of marble, began to chisel out what felt like the right shape for this book. I sent the manuscript to several writer friends for feedback, listened to them, made changes, and kept shaping until I was sure this was the book I wanted to send, and then I sent it.
Yellow Arrow was the only place I sent the manuscript. And I got the email of acceptance a few months later, on October 15, which is my grandson’s birthday.
Do you have any writing rituals you routinely follow?
Most mornings after making tea, I light a candle on my altar, which holds an arrangement of stones and feathers and spiritual objects depending on the seasons and cycles in the natural world, and I meditate, and write in my journal, and watch the sun come up with that delicate blue light on my skin and on the fur of my dog, Lenny, sleeping next to me as I write. By the time my wife begins to stir in the kitchen, putting away dishes and making her coffee before work, I feel my most important work of the day is done. Everything else—emails, paperwork, scheduling, revision, submission—all the work of being a writer is just gravy, is easy, and flows smoothly because I’ve had this time with my pen in my hand moving on the page, making a sacred circle with my belly and my heart.
My hand with a pen.
Writing it down.
Rhythm.
Calm in heart and limb.
There is no end.
The story keeps going.
One word at a time.
Beyond mind.
“Writing”
Can you speak a bit on the ecofeminist perspective and how it informs your writer’s voice?
Ecofeminism is a word I use as a shorthand to describe what I do as a writer, but it’s beyond words, this sense I’ve always had, even as a child, that the world is alive and “alove,” a breathing, living, knowing, speaking being that loves us and created us and is connected to us and actually, deeply, is us.
We have, in the west, in the patriarchal and global capitalist, linear world, mostly forgotten this. And it’s why we’re dying. Our physical and mental and emotional and environmental illnesses—these are all warning lights flashing and beeping and sounding the signal for us: Remember! Remember! Remember!
My intention with all my writing is to help us do just that. This book is a reminder of the balm in Gilead, too.
I love nature imagery and am drawn to writers that include it. These images can be perceived as universal but utilized in ways that are very specific to each author. How is the natural world reflected in your work?
Because of my sense that the world is “alove,” I would say that the natural world is not just reflected in my work but speaks in and through it. I remember the morning after my wedding when I heard the flowers singing to me in the voices of goddesses like Juno and Hestia and Demeter, the ancient female figures who still carry the memory of what it means to be a woman and a wife and a mother.
It’s there in the flowers and in the beautiful petals of our own flowering female bodies.
It’s in the mother daughter tulip poplar trees in our backyard who told my wife and me, “You are home now. Unpack your pasts and stay. We will shelter you.”
We discovered later that the ancient names of these trees are connected to the names Susanne and Lily, which are the names of my wife and daughter. The names are still there. We need to remember to listen.
Can you elaborate on the moon as symbol in your poetry?
The moon is my witness and companion. As I said, I wake early most mornings, and I greet her in the dark. She teaches me about change and staying consistent through the changes. Sometimes she is increasing as I am working toward a goal or the completion of a writing project. Other times she is full and says, “Sit. Light a fire in the backyard with other women. Celebrate.” And then there are times when she decreases and I’m reminded that I need times of rest, too.
When my daughter was in elementary school, I enrolled her in an aftercare program, even though I had no clients to see or classes to teach in the late afternoons, so I could take a nap if I wanted to before picking her up. I once admitted this to an audience at a women’s and gender studies conference, and there were gasps. We’re not supposed to take care of ourselves like that as women, as mothers. And there’s something very wounding about that—not only for the women but for the children.
The sun bleeds peach tea,
and the mother tree lights
her leaves and drips yellow
sweet from cups as the day
goes belly up . . .
“Tuesday Night”
Many of the poems in this collection involve movement and growth. Are these important themes for you as a woman and as a writer?
Everything in nature is always moving and growing in the right seasons. If a tree stops putting out leaves, it’s either winter or something is wrong. But our economic system has taken this beautiful proficiency and abused it, so we feel we always have to be producing. This is injurious to our bodies, minds, and spirits, especially as creative people who must maintain our ability to be sensitive in order to do our most important work.
The metaphors of movement and growth in my poetry are reminders that we don’t really have to try and push and strive as much as we think we do. The wisdom of the woman’s body and the natural world teaches us that periods and seasons and cycles happen whether we try to control them or not. I’m talking about a kind of surrender that is not a loss, not measured in economic terms, but is a gathering and an embrace. A profit that profits every living being.
One theme that comes across very clearly in this collection is that of woman wisdom. What would you tell your younger self?
I would tell my younger self one thing:
Good job.
Good job.
Good job.
Good job.
No matter what you think you’re failing at, you’re doing a good job.
What woman wisdom are you hoping to dispense in these poems?
I would hope that one thing a person reading the poetry collection could do no matter what their identity markers would be is to ask themselves: Where is my power and how am I free?
I do think that there is an essential freedom of consciousness that we each have as human beings. I would even go so far as to say that a lot of nature also has this kind of consciousness, but in reference to humans in this context, I think sometimes we focus too much on the horizontal plane of existence.
And what I've learned from teaching writing with women over the years is that when we focus externally, we give away a lot of our power because the deep voice of creativity and wisdom comes from that vertical alignment with who we are that changes over the course of our life. It is separate from external circumstances. It must come from inside us. As much as we might ask the external world to grant it to us, it must exist within us first.
When readers encounter the poems in Gilead, I hope that they feel that very deep strength and faith in themselves and who they are.
We speak.
We listen.
We survive.
We survive.
“No Certainties”
What writing or publishing advice would you share with other women-identifying writers?
When my stepdaughter was seven years old, she came home from school and asked me, “Do you know how many elections Lincoln lost before he won one?” I stared at her because I knew she wasn’t asking me to show off her newfound knowledge or to engage in trivia with me.
She was saying, “Keep going. All the rejections you’re getting now are preparing you for what is to come.”
I loved that kid with all my heart then, and still do. She taught me so much about the love lessons we can learn as stepmothers—about loving those who are in our families that we did not choose—and the fact that she and her wife with their two children live near my wife and me means that, like Lincoln, I feel I’ve won the really big election of life.
What I’m trying to say is that you let the writing come and you work and love with all your heart and you send the writing out for publication and it’s a long game. You’re in it for life.
Did you want to share some of your experience in attendance of the Woody Guthrie Poetry Festival? Do you do a lot of speaking events? How important do you think they are for a writer?
I just returned from Oklahoma where they hold this music and poetry festival each year, and I have to say that just physically being with other writers is so powerful now that we know what it's like not to be together. I think it reminds us that we have bodies and that these bodies are important and connected to the environment. They’re probably more important than our minds really. If we start to really care for the body and see it as sacred, as something that needs to be healthy and in balance, then we can see our connections between what’s happening here and what’s happening in the earth.
I am really comfortable in front of a crowd. It’s actually easier for me to get up on a stage than to do small talk at a party. I tend not to know what to do besides talk about the weather. I want to go very deep right away and not everybody wants to do that. If I have a microphone, I can go there. I know they wanted to be here, to listen to me and my poetry. I think I have always been kind of bossy and a teacher and it’s easy for me to lead. I love giving readings. I love teaching workshops. I love feeling like I’m helping to create a safe space for people to listen, to think, to feel, to write. When I give a poetry reading and I see people in the audience crying, I feel like I hit a home run because that's really what I want. Not for them to be sad, but to feel so moved and so safe that they can feel whatever is coming up for them and express it freely.
Do you have any future projects you’d like to share?
In November, I have a novel called Beaver Girl coming out. I’m excited about this because it takes a lot of the themes from Swimming in Gilead and puts it into a narrative format. The main character is a 19-year-old girl who has been through a pandemic and climate collapse. She wakes in her house to wildfires that are encroaching upon her neighborhood, and she goes into a national forest to try to escape the wildfires. There she befriends a beaver family. The reader learns about beavers as a keystone species for our environment. For example, most of Texas and New Mexico, which we think of as desert areas now, were lush green forests before the Europeans got rid of all the beavers for the fur trade. Beavers create these wetland areas and even after an individual family has moved on those beaver ponds become part of the water table, which can help us during times of drought in later years. So, it’s a bit of a morality tale about what we have done to help bring about climate disaster. It is also set in the kind of postapocalyptic time and shows what beavers and humans could do together to restore faith and strength and a sense of family and community. That will be out on November 15th.
You can follow updates on Cassie and her writing on Twitter @premosteele and her website cassiepremosteele.com and can order your copy of Swimming in Gilead from Yellow Arrow Publishing.
Melissa Nunez is a Latin@ writer and homeschooling mother of three from the Rio Grande Valley. Her essays have appeared in magazines like Hypertext and Honey Literary. She has work forthcoming in Lean and Loafe, Fahmidan Journal, and others. She writes an anime column for The Daily Drunk, interviews for Yellow Arrow Publishing, and is a staff writer for Alebrijes Review. You can follow her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez.
Cassie Premo Steele, PhD, is a lesbian ecofeminist poet and novelist and the author of 18 books. Swimming in Gilead is her seventh book of poetry. Her poetry has won numerous awards, including the Archibald Rutledge Prize named after the first Poet Laureate of South Carolina, where she lives with her wife.
*****
Thank you, Cassie and Melissa, for sharing your conversation. Preorder your copy of Swimming in Gilead today.
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