Poet and novelist Emmalea Russo exists on my Instagram as a wild-haired, tattooed practitioner of the occult who sometimes wears a party dress, sometimes carries a pitchfork, and lives in the green world outside our urban spaces. In the past year, she has advertised online courses on the Psycho Cosmos, an exploration of “overlaps and divergences” between psychoanalysis and astrology,and the Alchemy of the Word, alchemy through the lens of thinkers like Carl Jung and Emily Dickinson. Her timeline is an intriguing scroll of images of medieval and religious art and female archetypes—Kate Moss sleeping in the back of a car in a fur coat, a tousle-headed Michelle Pfeiffer. Russo’s first novel, Vivienne (Arcade Publishing, 2024), which follows four previously published books of poetry, employs a similar mixture of alchemy, archetype, and their overlap to comment on art-making in our time.
The book tells the story of the late-in-life cancellation of transgressive artist Vivienne Volker and its effect on her daughter and granddaughter, Velour and Vesta. This outsider trio live together in a small town but find their lives disrupted by Vivienne’s past and sudden attention from the internet. Russo’s characters seek human connection but also freedom—“a vision of freedom in which the terror of gravity is momentarily escaped as suffering and ecstasy enter the body,” as Vivienne says. Another character, an online commenter, writes: “Human beings, regardless of gender, we are in this together, together. . . . HUGS inside the terrible crystal we are all incubating inside of and under.” Russo’s language, with its repetitions and stormy, romantic imprecisions, becomes a kind of medium for this freedom and connection. And her tiny details are as lovely as fine embroidery.
In the following interview, conducted over email, Russo talks about Catholicism, fluids, boundaries, and the value of transgressive art.
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The Rumpus: You’ve published four books of poetry. Why did you decide to try fiction? What did the new form allow you to do that you weren’t able to before?
Emmalea Russo: I wanted to tell a story. I thought I’d write a book made entirely of comments, tweets, texts, all digital speak. But very quickly, the heart of the book emerged as a family drama. “The last days of a great house,” as my husband put it. Still, I smuggled some poetry in.
Rumpus: Are the online exchanges a kind of poetry? I was curious where you saw them taking place.
Russo: I see the online exchanges in the book playing out on the internet and in a dream arena. Almost, but not quite, our world. While the online personalities congregate around videos of Vivienne’s life and work, they make connections with each other. Sometimes, the book switches back and forth between characters’ off-screen experiences and the comments playing out on a screen in front of them. Maybe the poetry gets birthed from that back-and-forth, those two worlds merging and diverging.
Rumpus: You’re also an astrologer, and I think you read tarot as well. Do you use either to inform your writing practice?
Russo: Astrology and tarot are forms of divination, which is all about synchronicity and timing. Synchronicity has to do with correlation, not causation, and I was thinking about this concept while structuring Vivienne. Example—it opens with a flood of contentious internet comments about Vivienne and her work. Then, we cut to the house in rural Pennsylvania where Vivienne [lives with] her daughter and granddaughter, Velour and Vesta. I included time stamps because it’s important that their morning is unfolding at the same time as the internet drama before they’re made aware of it. Inner states correspond with events in the outside world.
Rumpus: Vivienne is a historical reimagining in which the real-life surrealist artist Hans Bellmer had a child at the end of his life with a fictional woman named Vivienne Volker. Why did you choose Bellmer?
Russo: I had mentioned Bellmer, along with many other artists, in Magenta, the book I wrote immediately preceding this. A poem in that book spoke about an old woman in a red embryo, which was a reference to one of his drawings. The novel unspooled from that moment—an old woman’s life, a church-going reclusive ex-artist who lives outside of cultural centers. Hans Bellmer, this present-absent, famous, dead lover, looms over her world.
Rumpus: I loved an image you had of a fetus being a little purse connected by a ribbon to the mother. There’s a sort of omnivorous creativeness about Vivienne. She makes art. She sews. And she’s also a mother and grandmother. Are all these forms of creation an aspect of the same thing for you? Where does destruction come in?
Russo: I like the term “omnivorous creativeness.” I was thinking about my paternal great-grandmother, who worked as a seamstress in New York’s garment district for most of her life. Destruction and creation are forever linked. Hans Bellmer is sometimes considered a surrealist photographer but is most well-known for his life-sized female doll sculptures made in the 1930s. He destroyed and rearranged those figures in order to make something new. Like art, divination is a creative act, but the moment of divination requires a question. A good question is a risk and a loss. Knowing you don’t know.
Rumpus: Why are you drawn to transgressive art?
Russo: So much good—and bad—art is disturbing and transgressive. It’s disturbing to encounter something new. I have epilepsy, and the movements my body makes during grand mal seizures are automatic and quite creepy, disturbing. Surrealists, Hans Bellmer included, were very inspired by automatic movements, convulsions, et cetera.
Rumpus: The character Velour, who is the daughter of Hans Bellmer and Vivienne, spends a good portion of the novel on her period, and at one point, she fishes a blood clot out of the toilet and puts it in her mouth. Are you echoing the kind of transgressions that Bellmer practiced? What kind of effect do you think transgression has on the audience of today, and how do you think those effects are different than they were in Bellmer’s time?
Russo: Velour was in a bad mood that day, repelled by herself as she posted things online, in and out of dream states, wandering around the house. The clicks of the internet and screen lights contrasted with her body’s secretions and cycles.
With regard to the impact of transgressive writing and art—then as opposed to now—this is one of the questions of the book. Vivienne Volker and her work in the past both fall under scrutiny in the novel’s present. In art and life, to transgress requires a limit. Where are the limits now? On the one hand, we see art that acts as a kind of mouthpiece for the establishment. Maybe this is a response to a culture with seemingly less limits or gatekeeping. I’m talking about art that lets its audience know it’s on the right side of history and emanates a smugness which, ironically, in its attempt not to harm, is in a way harmful to culture. Plus, it’s a buzzkill.
On the other hand, we see so-called transgressive art that appears to be a reaction to the above that ends up being reductive in a similar way—a blob of “shocking” or “transgressive” nonsense that’s simply oppositional. To truly shock, disturb, or transgress, certain boundaries are necessary. I would argue that this kind of work isn’t capable of disturbing or altering the reader [or] viewer in a lasting way, no matter how much apparently disturbing content it contains.
We can intuit when a work doesn’t care much about its characters or its audience and wants instead to teach or to punish, to appease or to shock. This can suck the pleasure and ambiguity out of the room. A friend told me that it felt like Vivienne really cared about its characters, even the unlikeable ones and the many commenters. That was exciting to hear not only because I do care about the characters, but because I think it’s easier than ever to slip into using art as a vehicle for ideology.
Rumpus: Vivienne Volker gets canceled at the beginning of the novel in part for supposedly having been the impetus for Bellmer’s partner’s suicide. In your novel, the partner is fictional, but in reality Bellmer’s longtime partner was Unica Zürn, who is a fascinating story in her own right. Why did you choose to fictionalize her?
Russo: All of the “real-life” characters in the story are fictionalized. Hans Bellmer, Dorothea Tanning, and other actual artists are mentioned by name, but I wanted them to be tilted or off-kilter versions of themselves so that the reader doesn’t need to know about these figures to enjoy the ride. I respect these artists very much, and I respect Zürn’s life and work, but they weren’t really part of the story I wanted to tell.
Rumpus: Are you intending to be transgressive with your fictional appropriation of these historical figure’s lives?
Russo: No. I wanted to pay homage to them, in a way, and also create something from certain fragments of their stories. Perhaps the most transgressive aspect of the book is that I made artists throwing themselves [or] getting pushed out of windows into a running joke. My dark sense of humor.
Rumpus: Bellmer illustrated a 1940 edition of Georges Bataille’s 1928 novella Story of the Eye, which made me wonder, was Bataille an influence on this book?
Russo: Yes, probably. Vivienne was actually published on Bataille’s birthday. I’ve studied and taught courses on him. Initially, he wanted to be a Catholic priest. For him, sacredness and transgression are connected. The book explores this connection.
Rumpus: There’s something very Catholic about the treatment of fluids in Bataille. One thing turns into another. What appeals to you about Catholicism?
Russo: I was raised Catholic, and my grandmothers on both sides were devout, so I was thinking of them while writing. There is something very sensuous and magical about the Catholic Mass, and I have vivid childhood memories of incense, bells, Christ on the cross. I grew up around so much Catholic imagery too. The saints, Jesus. While writing, I was thinking about iconography, religious imagery, and the sea of online images we’re swimming in.
Rumpus: Vivienne is a Catholic and goes to church to confess her sins. Was the confessional aspect of Catholicism particularly interesting to you?
Russo: One of the most beautiful parts of Catholicism is confession. We are all guilty. So much of the public-private split has collapsed into one slippery thing. Tell-all culture seizes these private moments, and we willingly make even our most private moments into images. How do we act when no one is watching? Who is watching when no one’s around? The public? God? I was thinking of confession as a kind of original therapy but also, more importantly, as a private form of repentance for Vivienne as opposed to a public one.
Vesta, Vivienne’s seven-year-old granddaughter, is also in church during that scene. Overcome by its sensations and atmosphere, she zooms in on His body on the cross, imitates her grandmother’s perfect kneeling posture, and feels sick, elated, confused. They spend hours there. No internet, no comments. I was thinking, too, of the God-like fathers in the book: Bellmer and his infamous art but also Max Furio, Vesta’s dad, who haunts the book. It was one of the last scenes I wrote and maybe the most crucial.
Rumpus: One of Bellmer’s themes was the fragmentation of the human body, which he accomplished in various ways, including making creepy doll art and figures with bird heads. There’s a lot to discuss about this, but my first thought is that the bodies of your three main characters seem pretty inviolate, but other forms of fragmentation are suggested by the text. Can you speak to that?
Russo: Bellmer said he thought of his dolls as sentences—fractured, broken, rearranged—poetry. I was thinking of how the internet fragments via breakneck-speed responses to events, people, videos, news. The violence and disconnection of that but also its accidental poetry. The book needed to move back and forth between the slippery vertical world of internet comments and the family’s slower life in Pennsylvania. Or, between vitriolic shit talk and real period blood.
Rumpus: Yes, you write at one point that “screens, like dreams, are a form of mediation and expurgation without which we’d all kill ourselves,” which seems like you appreciate some aspects of the internet maelstrom.
Russo: Ha! I was thinking of the kind of madness and, on the other hand, revelation, ecstasy that can be induced by lack of mediation—seeing too much, like how some of the mystics describe direct encounters with God, beyond language. But there is also the mediating distance of screens, contactless everything.
Rumpus: Do you think art can ever be “harmful,” either because of its maker or because of its content?
Russo: Control and surveillance masquerading as care and obsessions with safety can be harmful and life-draining. Art, because of its content or creator, can certainly be harmful. Art doesn’t have an obligation to comfort, affirm, make us feel fuzzy. The question is, how do we respond and react?
Rumpus: This is a book about three generations of women: Vivienne, her daughter Velour, and Velour’s daughter Vesta—great names, by the way—as well as the artistic legacies that each generation leaves each other. Do you think artists have a duty either to the past or to the future?
Russo: Thank you. And you have a V name too. We have a duty to both the past and the future. Kathy Acker said, “Culture is one way by which a community attempts to bring its past up out of senselessness and to find in dream and imagination possibilities for action. When culture isn’t this, there’s something wrong in the community, the society.”
Rumpus: There seems to be a contrast between, on the one hand, the art world and the online world, which are enmeshed with each other, and, on the other hand, your characters’ lives in a rural small town. What interested you about the rural location?
Russo: I left New York a few years ago. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and live there part of the time now. That landscape is so particular and foundational to me. The novel’s landscape is an amalgam of a few different places around that area, and I wanted to evoke the feeling of winter there—snow, old houses, hex signs, animals, barns, dreary but bright and uncanny. Vivienne exiled herself from the art world decades ago but gets dragged back via the online world, which is a tricky mercurial landscape, at once a wild west brimming with freedom and expression and a zone of captured attention, of all sorts of capture.I’m actually sitting in my backyard in Pennsylvania right now, listening to the birds. It’s only an hour and a half from New York, but it feels like another world.
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Author photograph courtesy of Emmalea Russo
