April Mail Club | Heather Taylor-Johnson

This month, we're excited to feature a personal essay from Australian writer, Heather Taylor-Johnson, exploring the work of feminist artist, Ana Mendieta through the lens of the politics of women's safety. We caught up with Heather, to introduce you to her ahead of the release of her piece in this month's mail club. Sign up by April 26!

How would you describe your feminism?

My feminism was a major part of my upbringing and very subliminally ingrained. My father worked interstate 5-6 days a week and my mother was a full-time nurse who cleaned the house like mad and drove my brother and I all over the place for sport. She hated cooking, but we always ate (lots of Sunday night leftovers and breakfast food, like eggs).

Before then she worked in the court system and was the only woman to do so in not only the building, but the entire state. This was America in the 70s. We moved around a lot and always lived in fairly-well-to-do suburbs, where most of the mothers I knew stayed at home and took care of the domestic side of things. My mom worked herself silly inside and outside the home and didn’t ever complain to us – I think she loved how independent she was, particularly as she grew up in a neglectful household with a single mother who couldn’t cope at all.

I wrote an autofictive novel called Little Bit about her trauma, her mother's and how it sits in my genes, and it’s made me respect her feminism even more. Having watched her during my own supportive and loving upbringing, not once did I ever think I’d be a stay-at-home mother, but chronic illness had its way with me in my mid-twenties and pretty much dictates that I do work from home, as a full-time writer. Our lives have proven themselves to be so very different, as has our feminism. She lived by example and I use my art to express mine. In a poem called ‘Thump’ from my collection Alternative Hollywood Ending, I write about Trump’s initial threat to overturn Roe v Wade:

I look to my own mother

her endless movement & ripple

her fight wasn’t planned or talked about;

feminism hung around her neck

like an iron sling

But it’s true things are better now

It’s true that things are the same.

What preoccupies you as a writer?

I am most passionate about writing about the body, specifically a sick one, which obviously stems from living with chronic illness. But I’m also rather obsessed with the both the objectification and the ultimate power of the female body. Being a migrant, ‘home’ seems to be something I can’t step away from, and now that Trump’s a part of our everyday, how can I NOT write about the politics that live outside of our bodies yet make them quake, especially if one lives in an othered body? I find I write about these things, more and more, through discussions of visual and performance art.

I wrote a novel manuscript called The Guggenheim that hasn’t been picked up, but it started me on the visual art quest, so I have to be grateful to it for that. Then I started writing essays with art as foundation, and they’ve been completely eye-opening to me in that they keep surprising me; I never know where they’re going! Like, who would’ve thought an essay about Frida Kahlo and her Wounded Deer would move away from her lifelong pain and end up being about my daughter’s experience of puberty? It’s so weird to me what happens with nonfiction. My latest poetry book is called I Lost Someone Then Found Them In My Body and there is a lot of art referenced in it – Francesa Woodman, Andy Warhol, Suzanne Duchamp. It’s amazing to me but I can’t see myself stopping. I just want to write about art and the body constantly.

What are you reading?

I’m finally reading Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal book The Body Keeps Score. I’ve read snippets for research in the past, but now I’m digging into the full tomb. It’s basically a psychology of trauma and the way the body carries it. He’s such a great writer, so accessible and humble, and he really changed the landscape for war veterans and abused people with PTSD. I’ve also just opened Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s poetry collection Autobiography of a Marguerite, which completely speaks to me in prose poems about the body and disability. I read poetry mainly in the bath, so it’s really good we’re getting into cooler nights now. Next up is Miranda July’s All Fours because I’m super into writing about menopausal stages of the body, too. Perimenopause was a 9-year nightmare for me. I need her quirk!

Tell us about your piece being featured in Feminartsy this month.

I love Ana Mendieta’s siluetas, which are, for the most part, impressions of her body in the earth and then things coming out of the impressions, like flowers or fire, which she finally photographs. She has said they’re about displacement from her Cuban homeland, but I think a complexity of thoughts and emotions can come of them from women who make contact with them. She was murdered by her artist-partner Carl Andre (who was not convicted), thrown out their apartment window, which give the siluetas an entirely new hindsight meaning. She was so young and so incredibly creative. In many ways I wanted to write an essay about her because I want more people to look up her artwork, but really she’d become an obsession and the only way to deal with an obsession for me is to write about it. Even though she created her art in the 70s, her work is incredibly urgent.

Sign up to the Feminartsy snail mail club, and receive a hardcopy of Heather's essay, and a feminist art print to your letterbox.