A discussion with Beth Train-Brown about gender and mythology in Salmacis: Becoming Not Quite a Woman.
A couple of weeks ago, one of our editors Trina sat down (via Zoom) with Beth Train-Brown to talk about their recently published poetry collection Salmacis. Exploring the story of Salmacis and the concept of demi-gender, Beth manages to tackle a great number of themes in a gritty and intriguing way. This is definitely one to add to the bookshelf!
Firstly, Beth, amazing collection, it gave me The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy vibes and that is my favourite poetry collection ever, and this collection might have to go up with my favourites also.
So, tell me about the mythology surrounding the collection, where did the inspiration come from?
The whole collection is based on the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditis. Herm was the son of Aphrodite and Hermes to no one’s surprise. Salmacis was walking through the woods (or wherever young heroes walk) when he came across Salmacis, who was a lake nymph. She saw him, fell in love with him and begged the Gods to let them be together. When he came into her lake, they joined bodies and became one person who was both male and female. This is where we get the word hermaphrodite today. It was the first representation of intersex people in Western literature historically. That’s kind of the basis of the whole pamphlet, being not quite a woman not quite a man and a lot of Ovid’s Metamorphoses shows this idea of being not quite something. Daphne, in the collection, is another Metamorphoses inspiration and that comes from the tale of Daphne and Apollo. Apollo was chasing Daphne through the woods as all the gods like to do and to get away from him, she called up to her father who was some kind of river god and instead of doing absolutely anything else he turned her into a tree.
Makes total sense.
It’s a lot of taking the original myth and twisting it or modernising it. I really enjoy that process.
That definitely comes across, I really enjoyed the modern-day aspects you wove into the poems, like the Snapchat reference as I love the interweaving of myth and modern.
Do you think this concept has always been on your mind. Did you think this would be your first published collection?
I think it was never really in my mind. The first poetry collection I put together was for my family and friends for Christmas one year. It was very generic, the kind of poems I wrote when I was in my younger teen years. There was one called Read Me in the Bath which is very ‘destroy this book’ kind of vibes. The first book I thought I would publish was actually my second-year portfolio which is the one I am now approaching publishers about. It’s called Him and its only 10 poems and tells a story about what if God entered the narrators life but he was a 17 year old boy with a litre of vodka. It’s very crunchy urban grit mixed with celestial Godness and eventually she destroys him. It has such a special place in my heart, and I do really want it published but I think it’s less publishable as it’s a very short collection so this one was the one I was submitting alongside that as a full length collection. So, this was almost the fourth idea I was thinking would be published. It wasn’t going to be called Salmacis. When I read it (the story of Salmacis) for the first time I knew I wanted a poem about Salmacis, about this lake with the ability to transform someone into not quite a woman, not quite a guy but then I had this poem with the title ‘Salmacis’ at the top for so long and I couldn’t write anything for it. It was when I was putting this collection together and trying to find something which connected with this idea of gender euphoria, nonbinary and demigender that it kind of crept back in my head again and that’s where it came from. The fact I couldn’t write a poem about it for years and it came back out of the woodwork!
I think sometimes if you’re so passionate about writing something it can be hard to actually do it when you think too much about it.
Could you tell me more about the process of publishing itself?
I approached a bunch of different publishers. I actually have a spreadsheet that tracks all my different submissions, and it brings me a lot of delight. I do recommend to people that are submitting to have some kind of track record to keep. In this I found a bunch of different publishers that accepted the length and style of poetry that I was submitting, put them all on a big list and bulk submitted. When I got a response from Renard Press that wanted to publish it, I send an email to the others considering it to let them know. I had a couple then who were like “actually we are interested” but it was Renard Press that held the best offer for me. After that there was a few months when they’d accepted the original manuscript but then gave me space to edit it so anything I wanted to change. I don’t know if it’s the same for mainstream publishers and other indie publishers, but I cut some of the poems in half and they are much stronger now because of it. Then my publisher Will went through and did grammatical and typeface changes, it got put up into how it would be printed. He designed the cover and ran it by me to ok it at each stage. Then it was onto marketing and publicity so I reached out to local newspapers, and lit presses such as Swimpress to see if they’d interview me or review it. I got into the Lincolnshire telegraph and a couple of other local papers. I went on BBC Radio Lincolnshire. The more you put into it the more you get out. There was the organising of the book launch. It had each defined stage which involved a lot of work but obviously having an indie publisher helped as although they have a big workload for a small team they are so committed and so loyal to their writers which really helps. I definitely recommend indie presses especially for emerging authors.’
What’s the reception been like?
It’s been incredible actually, people have been so supportive. I think the biggest thing for me was people have been coming up to me on socials. I was on a pole social on Thursday night and people came up to me in the pub and asked me, “Did you publish a book,” and I’m dressed as Baby Spice or something and it’s utterly surreal. It’s a five minutes of fame kind of thing. But the reception has been insane and rewarding. Poetry became a viable thing when I was introduced to people like Carol Ann Duffy and Rebecca Tamas who wrote the collection Witch, which is urban grit style interviews with a witch and a witch hunter interspersed with poems of the witch shagging the devil and stuff. It was taking poetry out of this flowery canon of white men writing about women on hillsides. And people have been coming up and saying I was that for them which is the most incredible thing to come out of it. I do feel incredibly awkward every time it happens, I don’t know what to say and I’m just nervous smiling the whole time as I just feel out of my depth, but it’s been an incredible experience. 9-year-old me is jumping up screaming all the time.
I’m hard to please when it comes to poetry, and I thought I hated it at school but then I read Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife and it changed my mind. That’s what I enjoyed about your collection it felt more like that for me.
Have you got anything in the works at the moment you are hoping to publish?
I’m in the final editing stages of the first book in a Young Adult fantasy series, it’s called Bleed it’s about a trans man that gets bitten by a vampire. I’m going to start approaching agents in the new year about that one. There’s also Him. As I’ve been planning my third year portfolio, I’ve been writing a mini collection called Places My Womb Has Wandered which is kind of satirising the ‘wandering womb’ but the womb is its own entity except it’s a little bit evil. It goes through time and history and finds men at their most vulnerable, so I’ve been having a lot of fun with that.
Sounds fun. I don’t know how you manage to write this much.
A lot of it is in the shower. I’ll get out and be like this needs to be written down.
Do you feel like a running tap you can’t turn off with your writing or do you ever get writer’s block? I’m going to be controversial and ask if you believe in writer’s block?
I’ve definitely experienced some kind of writer’s block before, mostly for novel writing. It’s when I get a fatigue on a certain project, and it’s usually rooted in my own self-esteem and insecurities. I always feel like a dick when I say I don’t believe in writer’s block, but I think it’s one of those things when it’s not that you’ve got a block but you just keep treading the same furrow and it’s not working anymore and you need to find a new way to work for yourself. In the past when I felt I was experiencing writer’s block it was when I kept trying to work in a situation or environment that just wasn’t working anymore.
There was a part of the interview where I decided to read Beth some of my favourite quotes so here they are for your reference:
‘I feel like a woman’s words/ in a man’s book./ there/ but in his voice’ from ‘gods, monsters and complex ptsd’
‘you told me that god could never be a woman/ and I told her to strike’ from ‘the bearers of lightning still weather the storm’
‘she hangs in the sky, the too-changing sky,/ like a coin found suddenly in the pocket/ when our hands don’t know where else to be’ from ‘we all watch the same gods’
‘he’s had too long to practice/ being heard/ over the sounds of chaos’ from ‘fire for a throne and despair for a god’
‘people don’t need fins to swim in the sea’ from ‘I call her a different name in from of her parents’
If you would like to order yourself a copy you can buy it from Waterstones or directly from Renard Press.
If you want to catch Beth in person, they will be headlining Lancaster Herbarium’s poetry evening, Wordarium on November 30th. More info here.
Portsmouth BookFest, 22nd February 2023 from 7-10pm, Beth is delivering a workshop about working with myth and folklore in writing as well as appearing on a panel discussing poetry.
Photo credits: Peter Brown and Emily de Naeyer
swim press 