Books From the Margin: Katie Hale Talks About 'White Ghosts'
"I hope that the finished collection acknowledges shame, and white guilt..."
I’m pleased to be able to bring you this interview with novelist and poet, Katie Hale, whose debut collection, White Ghosts, I read a few months ago. It is an extraordinary collection; a bold collection, I would go as far as to say a ‘brave’ collection in which the poet navigates her own place in the history of a family who, at one point, were slave owners. The poems are probing, testing the ground and examining the links and emotional weight of familial legacy. I was intrigued by the concept, as someone who comes from a family who are very proud of their farming heritage, a family whose identity, in part, rests on the people who came before them. I share that pride, and this collection made me question where, in my own legacy, there might be shame, or elements of cruelty that might be brushed aside for the need to feel pride. It’s a thought provoking collection, but it’s also a very beautiful collection, with an attention to craft and an awareness of the potential of poetry, the poems push away from the traditional in places, and the collection sings because of that pushing away. I highly recommend White Ghosts. And I love the cover!
This collection is published by Nine Arches press (an excellent publisher).
Photo credit: Phil Rigby
Katie’s bio: Katie Hale is an internationally recognised poet and novelist, who has held residencies and fellowships around the world. Her novel, My Name is Monster, was shortlisted for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award and has been translated into multiple languages, and her second pamphlet, Assembly Instructions, won the Munster Chapbook Prize. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, Hawthornden Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, and was awarded a 2021 Northern Debut Award for White Ghosts. She lives in Cumbria, where she also writes for theatre and immersive digital performance, and mentors emerging poets.
You can find out more about White Ghosts Here: Nine Arches Press
Where did the original idea for the book come from?
White Ghosts arose out of a visit to my extended family in Kansas, and learning more about my great grandmother, whose name – by sheer coincidence – was also Katie. I knew I’d always wanted to write about my own grandma (Katie’s daughter-in-law), but what struck me learning about Katie was the repeating pattern of women being put upon by difficult husbands. Originally, I suppose it started out as quite a feminist book, about the burdens women in my family have had to bear down the generations. It was only as I started to do more research that I uncovered some of the more problematic elements of my family’s history, and the book changed course.
How did you research the book? There are so many layers to the work - personal and social history, racial and sexual violence, family, relationships and more – did you start with one focus and others emerged or did you set out to investigate a number of threads?
I started by researching the women in my family, going back through the generations. I had planned to write about them – not quite as victims, but certainly as bearing an unjust burden. So I started by researching their individual lives, or at least as much as I could; there tend to be fewer historical records about women than about men. I supplemented what I could glean from census records and marriage certificates with research about specific periods: social history, fashions, pastimes. The Picture Collection in the Schwarzman Building of New York Public Library was a fantastic source of inspiration.
It was only as I was doing this family research, back through the female line, that I came across the 1810 census. The first thing that grabbed my attention was that, unlike more recent censuses, in 1810, only the head of the household was named. Everyone else – the women and children – were merely tally marks in various columns. On seeing this, I was all ready to be struck by a righteous feminist outrage about the de-naming of women – until I looked further across the page, and saw tally marks in the columns marked ‘slaves’. Suddenly, my pride in my heritage (of strong-but-burdened white women) became more complex. Or rather, it became as complex as it probably ought to have been all along, had I thought outside my own privilege before beginning.
How long did the book take to write?
I started writing White Ghosts in 2016, although I don’t think any of those very early poems made it into the final book. I wrote the newest poems in 2022, while we were doing one of the final shuffles to reorder the collection. From speaking to other poets, I think it’s fairly common to insert poems into a long-worked-over collection at the eleventh hour, but in the moment, it can feel a bit daring. Like throwing a new ingredient into a tried-and-tested recipe.
It’s such a challenging concept – a white woman exploring her family links to slave ownership – what emotional impact did the research have on you? Were there any points at which you felt you were not the right person to tell this story?
These were both things I wrestled with constantly while writing the book. When I first learned about my ancestors owning enslaved people, my initial response was shock, followed quickly by shame. Followed by guilt at feeling shame in the first place: was shame a self-indulgent thing to be feeling, when exploring a heritage in which my own family were the perpetrators? I hope that the finished collection acknowledges shame, and white guilt, but also that it goes beyond those things; I hope it is a useful contribution to the ongoing conversations around the legacies of slavery, of colonialism, of historic and continued racial injustices.
…we cannot continue to talk about atrocities in passive voice, as though they were committed by bodiless entities…
There were many times when I asked myself whether I was the right person to tell this story – or rather, these stories, since there are many within the collection. I hope I have told them in a way that is respectful and sensitive (while writing the poems, I was conscious of not trying to appropriate the voices of enslaved people) – but I believe white people have to talk about our own heritage as enslavers. So often, we see slavery discussed in terms of Black history – which of course, in many ways, it is. But it is also the history of white enslavers; we cannot continue to talk about atrocities in passive voice, as though they were committed by bodiless entities, and we cannot place all the burden of interrogating these histories on Black writers.
In this collection, there are poems about enslavers, colonisers, farmers of claim land; this is my heritage, and I didn’t feel I could write honestly about my ancestors without exploring it.
You spent time travelling as part of the research for the book, how did that affect your writing process?
I was lucky enough to receive a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England, to research and write a number of poems within the collection. Part of this research process involved me driving from Christ Church, Virginia (where the first recorded women in my family are buried), along the route they would have taken, on their eastward migration down multiple generations, through West Virginia, Kentucky, and into Missouri. Initially, I was seeking the sense of place which I knew would be key to the collection, and so I mainly wanted to visit towns and parishes where I knew from census records that my ancestors had lived – but the research trip turned into something more than that.
As with any journey, there were numerous unexpected encounters – with people and with places – which made it into the collection. Some of these were fictionalised as historical poems (the poem ‘Prayers’ was written after the owner of an antique shop, in a town in Kentucky where my ancestors lived, told me to visit Cane Ridge Shrine). Some made it into the book more literally (‘In a Guesthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, a Telecommunications Engineer Shows Me His Semi-Automatic Handgun’ was a direct encounter I had during the trip). The result is that, whether overtly or not, the two journeys travel in parallel throughout the collection, mirroring one another, the present and past always in conversation. Occasionally (in poems such as ‘Talking with My Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandmother at a Fast Food Diner off the Interstate in Virginia’), they meet.
How did you achieve the portraits (which are so vivid) of people you’ve never met?
Since there was so little first- or even second-hand information about most of my female ancestors, the women in the collection are mostly characters, created by building social history and imagination on top of those lean historical foundations – in much the same way I would create characters for a novel. So in many ways, they are fictional. In other ways, however, they are entirely real. They are based on real women, inspired by real women, their dates and places and lives are in many ways real. I can’t know what all of them thought or felt, but I can piece together information from their lives, and use this to imagine. I can fuse history and imagination into something that hopefully feels real.
I’ve already mentioned New York Public Library’s Picture Collection; I tend to think quite visually, so this was an enormously important resource. While I had pictures of very few of the actual women I was writing about (none further back than my great grandmother), being able to look at photographs of their contemporaries, or of the landscapes and societies they inhabited, was key to building up my own mental picture of their lives, and then (hopefully) bringing them to life. This is perhaps also why photography, painting and the captured image are motifs that continue to occupy the book, because they were key to so many of the poems’ creations – that, along with my own fascination with the framing of history, with the artists’ gaze, and with the portraits of our own heritage which we choose to display.
What do you want the reader to take away from the book?
Firstly, perhaps like every poet, I hope readers enjoy the collection. I hope there are moments of beauty, moments of sorrow, moments of tenderness, moments of self-reflection, moments of renewed reflection on the rest of the world. In an ideal world, I would like white readers to use it to start interrogating their own whiteness, their own white heritage. I hope that for readers of colour, and especially Black readers, it represents at least an acknowledgement of my place in that heritage, and a willingness to take up my own part in those difficult conversations about the legacy of slavery and enslavement. Mostly, I would like readers to come away with a sense of the humanness of these women: neither stoic saints nor Disney-esque villains, but humans, capable of the same empathy, but also the same cruelty and culpability as all of us.
Of course, I wasn’t certain of any of these things while I was writing the collection – and now that I’ve written it, those reader responses are out of my hands. But I hope very much that they’re there.
You are a novelist as well as a poet, how does your writing practice for each genre differ?
In some ways, poetry is easier, because you only ever have to think about the single poem that you’re writing – usually a few pages at most. As someone who thinks visually, I find it editing poetry easier when I can see the whole thing laid out in front of me. With a novel, it’s harder (even impossible) to hold the whole thing in your head at once.
That said, with a novel, it’s easier to write to a routine. There’s a plot to convey. I can turn up at my desk in the morning and just pick up where I left off the night before. I don’t always write fiction chronologically, but it’s certainly a more chronological process than writing a collection of poetry.
Do you have a room set aside for yourself to write?
Not really – I do have a desk in the corner of my living room, but I tend to write all over the house: at the kitchen table, on the sofa, in the garden, sometimes even in bed. I live alone, so I don’t have to worry about disruptions, and I like to vary where I write.
That said, a number of poems in White Ghosts were written during residencies – at MacDowell (New Hampshire), Passa Porta (Brussels) and Hawthornden (Scotland). At each of these residencies, I had a dedicated writing space (a cabin in the woods, a book-lined office, and a room in a castle which wasn’t technically private, but which I mostly had to myself), and this did help me get into a particular headspace which felt conducive to writing, and particularly to writing poetry. So perhaps a dedicated writing space is something I need to look into in the future!
Is there anything you wish you had done differently when approaching the subject? Are there any poems that didn’t make the final cut?
There were so many poems that didn’t make the final cut – some published in other places (pamphlets, journals etc), and some just consigned to the discard drawer. I think I probably have half the length of the collection again in discarded poems. Some didn’t make it because they just weren’t good enough to include. Others ended up no longer fitting as the shape of the collection changed, or being replaced by other poems doing a similar job but more successfully. But published or otherwise, all of them felt necessary to write, in order to get the collection to what it has eventually become.
In 2021, I received a Northern Debut Award from New Writing North, which gave me an opportunity to work with Malika Booker. Her mentorship was invaluable in not only giving me the confidence to address these difficult subjects, but in encouraging me to be honest about the women I was giving voice to. In a number of the poems, I was sanitising their voices, their flaws and personalities, trying (often unconsciously) to inject my own twenty-first century political perspective. To assuage my own guilt, and to let them off the hook. But this was its own form of dishonesty, and how can we talk about our heritages openly if we aren’t honest about not only where we come from, but also from whom. In many ways, it would have been easier if I’d understood this before starting to write the collection, but if I had, I don’t think White Ghosts would have been the same book; I think the writing of it has been a process of continual discovery, which has been necessary to its creation. I think I will go on discovering even now it is out in the world.