Hillary Leftwich is the author of the new book Saint Dymphna's Playbook. Her other books include Aura. She is also an educator.
Q: What inspired you to write Saint Dymphna’s Playbook, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: Saint Dymphna’s Playbook originally was a longer hermit crab essay titled, “No Likelihood of Conviction.” This essay is centered within one of the signature experimental pieces in the collection using my sexual assault police report as the “shell” of the essay. I wasn’t trying to write a collection, but the more I wrote I realized it was turning into one.
The (now) title piece started as a hymn I was experimenting with about suicide and my own suicide attempts and ideations over the years. Saint Dymphna is the saint of the mentally ill, and I thought how she really encompasses the theme of this book’s root. How it acts as a playbook in so many ways.
Q: The writer Alex DiFrancesco said of the book, “A volume of poems. A diagram of loss and trauma. A book of prayers. A compendium of incantations. Hillary Leftwich’s Saint Dymphna’s Playbook is all of these things and more.” What do you think of that description?
A: Well, I love Alex, and I feel a very strong connection with them. We share similar interests, and it shows in our writing styles and themes. So of course, I love the idea of diagrams and volumes—prayers and compendiums. I think it might be all or one or two of these for different people. For me, it’s also a blueprint in bibliomancy, a strategy for resonance.
Alex and I share an intimacy of brutal, vulnerable issues, so I think we both understand the need for multiple definitions.
Q: Over how long a period did you work on this book?
A: SDP is a pandemic work. I started writing it with a friend and poet, Shoshana Surek, who I always want to impress—so she really pushed me with this collection (though she probably doesn’t know how much she supported me). The only piece that existed prior to the drafting was “No Likelihood of Conviction,” which I had been working on for two years prior.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: People who are survivors don’t necessarily want to be praised for our strength, we want our truth to be told and heard.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A lyric essay collection involving sex and all its layers—the porn industry, women’s bodies, the loneliness epidemic.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Books like SDP and so many others involve matters that our current administration are trying to ban or gaslight us into thinking they don’t exist. Place blame on the victims even more than what has historically been present in the past.
Support your local authors, support your indie presses and indie bookstores. We need you now more than ever.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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