Jordan Windholz’s second poetry collection, The Sisters (Black Ocean, 2024), begins with “The Sisters in the Night,” where two figures emerge from the center of a dark forest. Unsure of their origins, whether they are outcasts or “an ancient magic feeding saplings into a heretic bonfire,” they only know they are together. With gothic language to conjure the feeling of a fairy tale, the poem consequently sets the tone for the entire collection.
Windholz initially planned to write bedtime stories for his two daughters, but these tales transformed into the prose poetry of The Sisters. Two unnamed sisters of unspecified ages roam emperor gardens, the moon, attics, libraries, and country roads. Like any good fairy tale, Windholz’s poems swirl with surreal magic, elements of horror, and language that chases transcendence.
An associate professor of early modern British literature and creative writing at Shippensburg University, Jordan Windholz has centered his scholarly research on gender, sexuality, and masculinity. These are themes that echo throughout his poetry. I exchanged a series of emails with Windholz, where we discussed place and placelessness, the private relationships between sisters, toying with narrative form, and why we tell children—and ourselves—fairy tales.
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The Rumpus: These prose poems began as bedtime stories for your daughters. Which fairy tales, or fairytale traditions, informed how you wrote these poems?
Jordan Windholz: The collection did, indeed, begin with the idea that these would be bedtime stories for my daughters, though I haven’t yet read any of these poems to them. That inciting idea of bedtime stories quickly became a way for me to imagine and realize an audience for the book that was immediate and intimate to me. These poems were first and foremost for them, and then they became a space where I might work out all the ways of saying all those things that defy the communicative, the informative, the didactic. There is only so much you can tell your children about the reality of the world. So, to navigate that necessary withholding, we tell stories. We tell children fairy tales and folktales.
The book emerged, too, in the middle of a personal crisis, one where my wife and I were navigating how to talk to our young daughters about some scary stuff. It preceded and succeeded a diagnosis of my wife’s cancer, a late diagnosis that entered our lives like a wolf through the woods. [My wife] is cancer-free now, thankfully. I had been writing the book, imagining, like most parents, the kinds of realities and dangers my children might face in their lives. I poured my fears and hopes into the poems, and then my wife, my daughters, and I found ourselves amid catastrophe.
We knew we were telling ourselves stories about how things would go, even as we—and the many, many doctors—labored to make those stories come true. We still live in the wake of that. We still tell ourselves stories. We tell each other we will be all right, but, of course, none of us will, ultimately, be alright. You live in the fictions you need to and sustain yourself in the repeating reality of love for one another.
I don’t know if I would say there was one specific fairy tale tradition that informed this book, though I suppose it would be Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They have many representations of children susceptible to violence and danger. Most obviously, like them, I have written my own version of Red Riding Hood.
Kate Bernheimer’s meditation on the form of fairytale—her essay “Fairytale is Form, Form is Fairytale”—was also in my head. While I might, on the one hand, say this book emerged out of a desire to write bedtime stories for my daughters, I must acknowledge the many ways these are bedtime stories written for me—hopefully, for many parents—as a way to navigate those fears common to all parents: our children’s susceptibility to the world and its many experiences of violence, which erupt suddenly and alter our lives forever. The poems were often a way for me to reckon with the lack of control. In the face of such possible violence and danger, I felt how very susceptible my children, our children, all of us, are to it.
Rumpus: The language in these prose poems is precise at the sentence level, which evokes a specific theater-of-the-mind experience for the reader. Yet, these poems resist naming or describing any specific place that exists in the real world. Your collection reminded me of reading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino: grounded yet disoriented at the same time. What was your specific approach to writing the place we find in The Sisters?
Windholz: I love Calvino’s Invisible Cities too. “The Sisters in Imagined Cities” is an homage to his novella, a book I return to again and again. I am so glad that poem evokes a similar feeling for you, as my relationship to Invisible Cities is also one of feeling grounded yet disoriented. It’s a feeling of nostalgia of a sort, a desire to get back home. Marco Polo keeps describing Venice without naming Venice. There are many different cities, but they are all the same city.
My approach to place in The Sisters stems from an intuition to conjure the mood or atmospheres of a place, to call up all the ways a place can evaporate into placelessness as the memories of it live in and move through it. Growing up in Pennsylvania, then leaving it for a large span of time, and now living in it again but not where I grew up, informs that, to some extent. I have found it full of beautiful places, towns, and cities, but also a place with vast pockets of loneliness, vacancy, and disappearances. It’s a state with a lot of roads and hills and valleys, and so you can constantly move through it, both there and not there.
I resisted naming places because I don’t think we live in and experience a place through its names and mapping. What makes any place a place is how it defies the means of locating it. You can get to a place with a map, but you don’t live in it or experience it that way. That is what Calvino’s Invisible Cities continually returns to, the ways that the placelessness of a place—its ephemeralities, its evocations—defies mapping and naming. I always experience a place, when I am experiencing it, as a form of discovery and loss, of what I remember, or might, amid its flourishing presents.
Rumpus: The reader never sees the two sisters themselves or learns their names. We cannot see them differentiated from each other as they move through their worlds. Why is this?
Windholz: As I wrote these poems, and as I love and know my daughters, I was and am continually struck by their relationship of their being sisters. I am struck by the privacies that relationship affords them, its sacredness and profanity. I delight in how joyfully profane they can be. They have forms of knowledge and knowing intrinsic to that relationship, and I will never know what they know, not exactly nor fully. I know them individually, as my daughters, because that relationship is between us. If I individuated the sisters in the book, too much of my knowing would flood in. It seemed important to me to maintain the privacy of their relationship, the autonomy of it. As I wrote into that relation as an outsider, it continually unfolded as a space of possibility. From a writing perspective, such a space is useful. I hope that readers can feel the pleasurable tensions of being both inside and outside of that relation as they read The Sisters.
Rumpus: The sisters are not princesses or queens, as women are often portrayed in Western fairy tales. Instead, we see this pair as vampires, hunters, nuns, mother superiors, and even the executioners of kings. Did your background in gender and sexuality studies influence how you wrote the sisters?
Windholz: Surely it has. But amid the immense privileges I have been granted, my interest in gender and sexuality studies derives from how strange and outside of myself I often feel, being a straight, cisgender, white guy, as well as from the intellect, politics, generosity, and care of the people who have raised me, mentored me, or been interlocutors throughout my life. Often our culture wants to treat gender and sexuality as stable and knowable, but they just aren’t. We are so often strangers to ourselves.
I grew up in a Christian religious tradition. Religion seeks to overwrite how things “should be” onto how things are. That discrepancy, for instance, is central to the idea of original sin. It is perhaps easier for cis, straight men to fit “what is” into “what ought to be,” especially because they often benefit from the power that arises from such an alignment. One of the repeated experiences of my life is how I have not often felt at home in my masculinity, even as I identify as cis and straight. Probably most cis and straight men don’t, responding with anger and frustration instead of curiosity. For me, feminists, trans, gay, lesbian, bi, and queer folks, in their lives, friendship, and their work, have provided pathways for me on how to relate to gender and sexuality that were not a means of actualizing power over others. They have shown me how to be honest with myself and to listen to others when so much of American culture, especially now for men and young men, insists, “No, actually, you shouldn’t listen to anybody.”
Personally and professionally, women have been intellectual and ethical lodestars for me. That started with my mother, who has always been a fierce advocate of equity, even as her life has been sharply shaped by sexism. From when I was young, she was clear about the violence and discrimination women face regularly, and she raised me in that awareness and knowledge, though not in a didactic way. She showed me how to pay attention. Because of her, I came to see how the world was and is not fair to women. And my daughters know this, too, not because my wife and I teach them that, exactly, but because they live in this world, and they share their experiences with us. In writing the poems, I was doing my best to honor and bear witness to their experiences in this world.
Rumpus: These prose poems are rich with wildlife, portraying the sisters as animals and as wild spaces. Why did you decide to use zoomorphism, writing the sisters into a relationship with the wilderness?
Windholz: At one level, I’m drawing on a familiar trope: the alignment with nature and wilderness as both an inviting and dangerous space. It is often the setting of fairy tale and folktale. The turn to zoomorphism is my own preoccupation with the otherness of my daughters. The turn toward animals and insects is a way to materialize or imagine the fundamental otherness of children. There is also something in the tension that these children, which are in some way created by you or from you, are not your creations but something closer to creatures. They are creaturely.
Often, children are likened to this or that parent or family member, which seems like a way for families to corral the chaotic, eruptive, disruptive qualities of children, the very personhood of children, into a known relation: they are just like you. This is perhaps, too, another way to answer that earlier question about why I do not name the sisters. They are like each other but not like you, not exactly.
There are likenesses between my daughters and me, but I never feel or notice those similarities too much. Even when I do, I marvel at how completely they are their own selves and how my love for them is like perpetually swimming across the turbulent waters of our kinship and their autonomy—how they are always a shore I am moving toward.
Rumpus: “The Sisters as Captains of Industry”is one of the most striking poems in this collection. Here, the sisters leave the woods and rivers and are portrayed as business tycoons, “surprised at how good it felt to be evil, to love the love of money.” This poem breaks from the dreamy, naturalistic imagery in many of the other poems to make a statement about capitalism. How do you see it within the greater collection?
Windholz: I’m glad, if not relieved, you found it so striking. I almost didn’t include it in the book. I felt that, insofar as I was imagining possible lives for the sisters, it was important that I explore the ways they could be evil in some of the most banal ways. They might just love money, be comfortable in their privilege, and face no great consequences for that.
I suppose one of the vestiges of my Christian upbringing is my disdain and suspicion of those who love money, of those who hoard wealth. When I was writing that poem, I was thinking about how being evil probably feels good, especially if it provides you luxury. In capitalist systems, it is a tempting dream. It is a possible reality for my daughters, though I hope one that does not come to pass, and so it seemed an important imagined one to explore in the book.
Rumpus: You placed the poems “The Sisters after the Day They Die” and “The Sisters as Ghosts” in the center of the book, rather than at the end, making the narrative nonlinear, resisting the idea of a beginning at birth and an ending at death. How did you choose the beginning, middle, and end?
Windholz: I love that it appears like a deliberate choice. Maybe it was, but only upon rereading the proofs of the book, for the third time or so, did that one choice strike me.
When I ordered the book, I tried to resist those points of immediate connection between poems. Instead, I thought of layering, of trying to create tonal and thematic echoes and recurrences. I intentionally left the book without sections. I didn’t want to have clear indications of beginning, middle, and end because I also very much wanted this book to be a book someone could pick up, open, and read at any point in it. I wanted the feeling of being located and disoriented to be very close to each other. The poems themselves often toy with narrative form, but they are not given over to it, to its certainties, to its arcs, to its closures. I wanted the poems to feel like life in that way, the way we often long to be secure inside the stories we tell about ourselves, but also how we know we are ultimately outside them as their tellers.
Rumpus: “The Sisters Diving” is one of my favorite poems, staring into an objectively scary void and finding wonder there. It also echoes “The Sisters in the Night” and “The Sisters in an Immense Expanse.” When you wrote these poems, did you deliberately seed them with linguistic echoes of each other?
Windholz: I don’t think so. We all have our obsessions. Anyone who knows me would see the book’s ruminations on expanses, absences, and voids as very much in keeping with my own proclivities and fascinations. I also think many of those poems touch on a fear many parents have, which is the giving over of your children to their own fates, that however much you cast yourself as their protectors and guides, their future is there before them as their future. There is a lot of fear, even terror, as well as wonder, in that frank reality, and the poems that have these echoes, at least for me, reflect my own negotiation of it.
My daughters go into a world where I cannot be, and my hope, one of my hopes, is that without me, they might yet have each other as companions, as sisters.
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Author photograph by Fred Windholz
