BRATTLEBORO-A poem by Brattleboro writer Diana Whitney introduces a narrator clad in a bandana, slinky bracelets, and “the pearly jelly flats everyone craved.” When she gets laughed at by mulleted, bra-snapping “JT,” she takes revenge by striking him out in gym class softball.
JT’s friends boo him, and as our protagonist relishes in her victory, a spaceship explodes on live TV.
This childhood recollection of the 1986 Challenger disaster is one of many visceral moments in the poems that make up Whitney’s fourth book, Girl Trouble, published April 7 by CavanKerry Press.
“What I love about poetry is its compression, and how language is heightened,” Whitney said in a recent Zoom call. “It really allows me to just focus right in, on a line at a time or word at a time, and really take that care, and find that precision.”
Whitney, a teen in the 1980s through early ’90s, places us in time with minute details, such as clothing, patterns, and products tied to certain eras. Now 52, she draws inspiration over the course of her life, from coming of age as a queer youth in a small New England town through becoming a mother of daughters.
Born in England, her family moved to Washington, D.C., when she was 2. She spent her childhood in the nation’s capital, and the family moved again to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Whitney spent her middle and high school years.
“There was, in a way, a sense of freedom, compared to maybe today,” Whitney said of what in one poem she refers to as the “unsupervised ’80s.”
“It was before the digital age, but it was also a really hard time to be someone who was different. I was very much in the closet as a queer kid, even to myself.”
Her first relationship, she said, was with her best friend in seventh grade.
“That was a shameful secret that was very defining for me in Williamstown, in this small town,” she said. “And so, there are some poems about that.”
Whitney also writes of living through sexual violence and highlights the stories of other survivors in a section titled “Open Secret.”
“I wanted to amplify the voices of survivors, to really show that my story and my experiences are totally not unique,” she said. “I wanted to really shine a light on this epidemic — pandemic, I guess — of violence against girls and women.”
A resident of Brattleboro since 2005, Whitney started writing the book during the height of the pandemic, just as allegations of longtime abuse by a former Brattleboro teacher were in the news.
“I started to see the way institutions had failed survivors, and that was what I wanted to convey in that section,” she said of “Open Secret,” which, out of the book’s four sections, contains arguably its heaviest material.
“It’s not just the open secret of, for example, Epstein’s global empire of sex trafficking and crimes against children, but it’s this open secret that can happen right here in our community.”
Mindy Haskins Rogers, who in 2021 authored a piece [“Breaking the silence,” Voices, Aug. 11, 2021] detailing the reported abuses in Brattleboro, said she is eager to read Girl Trouble.
“Diana writes the everyday violence of women’s lives with so much force and grace that we can’t look away. And why would we want to — her poems are vivid and beautiful, even as they reveal brutalities,” Rogers, a writer in Northampton, Massachusetts, said in an email.
Michelle Dussault, of South Newfane, a writer who has shared work with Whitney for about 15 years, said when she thinks about Whitney’s poetry, she feels like she’s outside.
“I can feel the sun. I can feel the elements, the dewdrops. She infuses the natural world into all of her work. But then there’s also nostalgia and these vignettes from childhood and motherhood,” Dussault said. “She’s just got this beautiful way of undulating between womanhood and childhood.”
While preparing for the release of Girl Trouble, Whitney took some time to talk with The Commons about her beginnings as a young poet, reclaiming her queer youth through writing, Courtney Love, and “jump scare” lines.
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Gen Louise Mangiaratti: How did you start writing poetry?
Diana Whitney: Even as a child, I loved books and reading. My mom read to us a lot. As a child, I was really lucky to be well-loved and nurtured, and stories and poems and language were really part of growing up.
So I started writing really early, like in elementary school. I would have journals, and I would write short stories, mostly for school.
There were some young poems that I did, probably acrostic, where you make your name and you do the letters. But I really discovered poetry in junior high, which is, you know, what we call middle school.
During that time that I was writing about in the book, of coming of age, it was one of the hardest times of my life. I struggle with depression, cyclically, and it really began around that age: 12, 13.
For me, poetry was a real outlet, and it was often very private. I would write it in my journal.
Again, I was lucky to have a wonderful mother. Sometimes I would share something with her, and she would be very affirming, tell me it was wonderful — which is what you should always say to a young person who’s writing.
Then in high school, I started sharing more, with some wonderful English teachers who supported me. I was editor of a literary magazine in high school.
It was really in college that I became more serious. I was a creative writing major and found my mentors there.
G.L.M.: Can you talk about the poems that explore your experience of coming of age as a queer individual?
D.W.: I kind of thread them through. “After School with D’aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths” is a childhood poem, but it was really clear to me when I was doing this project of excavating my own childhood and girlhood that I was a queer kid.
I had sort of crushes on all my best friends — it wasn’t romantic. It’s presexual. That poem is really about celebrating that and also the sort of confusion around it.
The same with “I Bring My Secret Home from Junior High.” That’s the secret — the best friend. There’s a lot of darkness in that poem. There’s that line in that poem: “the ache to trade bodies with another girl. What witchery is this?”
Once we get into the last section of the book, which is “Praise the Ending,” that’s where it’s more the reclaiming that I felt I was writing through towards the end of the book. I discovered that some of these hardest times that I’d had — junior high, high school, college—I could actually go back and rewrite them.
“Prom After-Party Revisited” is me getting to hook up with my girl crush at the prom, instead of just going with a sympathy date and pretending, like I had to do back in 1991. It was me getting to imagine what that would have been like. And it’s totally exhilarating.
At the end, there’s one of my favorite ones, “My 16-Year-Old Self Makes Out with Jaimie Rossi.” The first line is, “Forget the football team. I watched the cheerleaders.”
She was a real person — I changed her name. She was incredible. Back before we talked at all about gender, she was dressing up as Axl Rose, and it was so hot and so bold.
So I got to reimagine myself as a sophomore, 16 years old. What if I could have expressed that desire and curiosity? As a middle-aged woman, it’s really empowering and healing to get to feel like, through your writing, through your own imagination, that you can actually have a do-over.
Another one was “My 17-Year-Old Self Gets Voted Best Body,” where I position myself as kind of like a Wonder Woman character in a rainbow bikini who goes back into the halls of the high school. It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
G.L.M.: How much of this book would you say is autobiographical?
D.W.: One of the things I love about poetry is: It’s not nonfiction. It’s not memoir. If you write a memoir, you’re really coming out and saying, “This is fact to the best of my memory.”
I do write from personal experience. There are elements that are very much autobiographical, but there are also multiple speakers that you can have in poetry. Some of them echo my own experience, and some of them don’t. There are daughters in the book. Some of them are echoes of my own daughters and what they’ve been through, and some of them are not.
One of the beauties of poetry as a genre is that there are really so many possibilities. There are so many forms, so many things you can do with these different voices and speakers. [Some are what] I guess you might call “persona poems,” or poems that are actually in the voices of the Epstein survivors. Those are clearly not me.
G.L.M.: Girl Trouble contains an acrostic poem that references Courtney Love. Can you talk about the inspiration behind it?
D.W.: Her band Hole put out a really seminal album in 1994. I was an activist in college, and it was a very formative time, kind of that riot grrrl, punk ethos. She’s a survivor. She wrote really openly and with a lot of rage and power about surviving sexual violence.
I put the lyrics to the song [“Asking for It”] — “Was she asking for it? / Was she asking nice? / Did she ask you for it? / Did she ask you twice?” — down the side of the poem and made an acrostic from it.
We hear that phrase of blaming victims. It’s still everywhere. It permeates the culture.
So that was my way of being playful about it and paying homage to Courtney Love and Hole.
G.L.M.: This is more of an observation than a question. Your poems contain something similar to lyrics by Liz Phair and Taylor Swift. Some people call them “jump scare” lines. For example, the line about the Challenger exploding while you were in gym class. You also have a poem where a young girl says, “It happened to me, it happened when I was 12,” which reminds me of a Liz Phair song where she says, “even when I was 12.”
D.W.: Actually, I’m glad you mentioned Liz Phair because — a huge influence, right? We’re talking about that sort of ’90s, really raw. I think that line is actually a little bit of paying homage.
One of the poems in the “Open Secret” section talks about the ages of the victims: “Don’t ask how they got there, some young as 13, young as 11.”
I want people to feel shocked. I want a reader to feel shocked when they see those ages, because we should be. We should be absolutely appalled and enraged and devastated that this happened and is happening.
So I think you’re right. I like that “jump scare” reference. I don’t want to shy away from that.
G.L.M.: How does it feel to see this collection of poems go out into the world?
D.W.: Getting to share this work with the world is so important for me, not because of my own story being special in any way, but because I really want to shine a light on the experience of girls and women, and the world that we want to build: a world of safety, where we get to feel at home in our bodies, where there’s not threats of harm.
I’ve been very involved as an advocate for survivors right here in this town. I want survivors to know that they’re not alone, and that there’s incredible strength and resilience in telling our stories and sharing them.
That is really part of my mission with Girl Trouble — to use it as a jumping-off point and a springboard for conversations about these issues, so they’re not continually silenced or swept under the rug.
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A book launch, set for Friday, April 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Next Stage Arts in Putney, will feature Whitney in conversation with poet Eve Alexandra, followed by a dance party featuring music from the ’80s, ’90s, and today.
There will be snacks, a cash bar, and books available to purchase.
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Editor’s note: Stories presented as interviews in this format are lightly edited for clarity, readability, and space. Words not spoken by interview subjects appear in brackets, as do editorial clarifications.
Gen Louise Mangiaratti is the former arts and entertainment editor for the Brattleboro Reformer and its sister newspapers and worked in a variety of editorial roles at the Greenfield Recorder and the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Massachusetts.
This Arts item by Gen Louise Mangiaratti was written for The Commons.