INTERVIEW: Lauren Parker
In 1976, David Bowie released his art rock album Station to Station, departing from iconic personas like Ziggy Stardust and the lightning bolt-painted Aladdin Sane. The figure who emerged from Bowie’s glam and soul eras was the Thin White Duke. Dressed in a white shirt and black waistcoat, the Duke was a severe aristocrat infamous for drug-fueled, fascist ramblings while “throwing darts in lovers’ eyes.”
Lauren Parker says her new poetry collection, Dark Way Down (Animal Heart Press, 2025), is not a eulogy for David Bowie, who passed away in 2016. In fact, readers don’t need familiarity with Bowie’s music or his catalog of personas to appreciate this book, which Parker describes as a speculative continuation of Station to Station. That’s because Dark Way Down isn’t Bowie’s story or the Thin White Duke’s. Parker wrote these poems from the perspective of a fictional Daughter of the Duke: a queer woman who drives across the American Southwest, destined for where her father was last seen.
Parker invited me to her Oakland apartment to chat about Dark Way Down. Our conversation covered the Station to Station album and the Thin White Duke, the necessity of queer poetry and stories, the pervasiveness of toxic masculinity, writing about the desert, and more. Here are the best parts, edited for brevity.
Lauren C. Johnson: I haven’t been able to stop listening to Station to Station (and other David Bowie albums) since I read Dark Way Down.
How do you hope your readers will experience this collection alongside Bowie’s work?
Lauren Parker: For Bowie fans, there's a billion and one Easter eggs. But if you just came across the collection in a Little Free Library and decided to read it, I wanted you to understand the story and what was happening. I wanted to make sure it read like a road story and you could understand the characters, what they were doing, and what they were feeling. Then, if you wanted to go back and listen to Station to Station or get into David Bowie from there, you could go back through the collection and find [the Easter eggs]. I don't know if I imagined anybody reading it to David Bowie because, for me personally, having the lyrics of David Bowie and the words on the page would make my eyes cross.
Would I recommend Station to Station as an entry point into Bowie’s music? No, actually, I'm not sure that I would. I don't think it's the most accessible album, but I thought it was the most interesting to work with. It's this album that no one knows what to do with, and I expected this book to be somewhat similar and somewhat alienating; it’s unusual to write a collection that has an arc like this; it's more of a novella-in-verse. Bowie fans can appreciate it, but people examining speculative character development can also enjoy it.
LCJ: Do you think the poems in Dark Way Down are best enjoyed in the context of the whole arc of the story or individually, or does it matter?
LP: There are bridge poems in there that don't stand alone very well. When I started writing the collection, I knew some poems would be the connective ligaments to the following poem, and that's okay.
LCJ: Why did you gravitate toward the Thin White Duke rather than other Bowie personas like Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, or Halloween Jack?
LP: No one knows what to do with the Thin White Duke, and I like a thing that no one knows what to do with. I thought it was interesting that the Thin White Duke was the last character that Bowie did. Really, he hung up his personas after that, and something about that feels very final.
Whenever Bowie talked about the Duke, it was with an element of fear about that whole period in his life. The Thin White Duke persisted and hunted him down. Out of his personas, it's the most alarming in how straight-laced and very out of place it is.
Bowie was a man in crisis when he wrote it. It's obvious in the music and obvious in the creation. And I’m always trying to figure out what to do with our problematic art. Of course, David Bowie is dead, so we can play a little ‘Death of the Author’ here, but that was a bad time for Bowie.
LCJ: Let’s talk about the desert. Place is one of the elements I admire most about this collection. I can see those lonely roadside dive bars with the lurid blue light, the saguaro cactuses, and the transmission towers, and I can feel the heat and hear the wind. I know you traveled to New Mexico while writing these poems. Would you have been able to write them if you had stayed home?
LP: I grew up as an army brat who moved all over the country. My hometown is the backseat of a station wagon on any stretch of highway, driving to the next place. When my frame of reference is seeing things from the road—seeing things from cars—and trying to gleam what those environments are like, then it didn't make sense to write a road story and not get on the road.
I wrote Dark Way Down in 2020 in about six months while we were in deep lockdown. I told my partner at the time that I needed to go back to New Mexico, and a big part of that was because of the film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. So much of the shooting happened there.
I'd been to New Mexico before, but I wanted to go back and see the mesas in what was probably the most desperate time I could imagine. In the middle of a pandemic where there's no one, and we're all hiding from each other. It is the emptiest, scariest stretch of desert you can imagine.
LCJ: When you write poetry or fiction in general, how do you approach the setting? What is important for you to pay attention to? What is important to get right?
LP: When it comes to small towns, I’ve developed a kind of muscle memory to pattern-recognize things to look out for. For example, I was in Kingman, Arizona, and it’s a truck town where you can find every chain that’s ever been created. If you get any of that food, it is predictable and bad in a way that is somehow worse than every other Denny's you've ever been to. There's this sort of an end-of-the-world quality to it. There was a Golden Corral across from a Ponderosa. But you go into the local place that's offbeat, full on a Friday night with mariachi music coming out of it, and the food is great. Anytime you try to pick something predictable in places designed [to be predictable], you have to push into the weird, offbeat intimacy to escape the toxicity of comfort.
And again, as somebody who's spent a lot of time driving all over the US and moving here and there, it becomes about sitting in a chair and watching the place move and exist around you. Can you pay attention to the way people drive their trucks? Is their arm hanging out the window? When they run into neighbors, do their neighbors lean into the truck? These are the cultural idiosyncrasies to watch out for in addition to the flavors, smells, and colors. The refined details come out with spending time in a place.
LCJ: I’m eager to talk about the Daughter of the Duke because Dark Way Down is primarily her story—not the Thin White Duke’s or David Bowie’s. At least, that’s how I read it.
LP: True. Bowie's not really in it at all.
LCJ: It’s always satisfying to read about queer characters and queer love poems—and there are many love poems in this collection. Given that the LGBTQ+ community is perpetually under attack, I don’t think there can be enough queer stories in the world.
LP: And ultimately, trans stories. What David Bowie represents to queer people is so important. Take, for example, the Thin White Duke. It’s Bowie’s most butch character, yet he’s a dandy. That feels quintessentially David Bowie.
Dark Way Down comes from a place of examining, from a very queer lens as a queer person, the ways in which we absorb toxic masculinity, no matter what our gender is, and how we all become our fathers. It’s a good thing that we have more language to analyze and frame our trauma, but I don't know that we always apply it to our actions and the ways that we show up for other people, in the ways that we're showing up.
It’s unclear whether the Daughter of the Duke really is the Duke's daughter or whether they’re a queer person putting on a persona to survive a context. I wanted to talk about the kinds of characters we make of ourselves, what kind of legacies we build, and what kind of ancestry we build to give ourselves a better framework for how we're breaking down.
I wanted to talk about toxic masculinity and how it’s not isolated to cis men. It lives pervasively in just about every gender I've ever met.
LCJ: I see the Daughter of the Duke struggling with and repeating her father’s patterns with women. She’s so fixated on finding the Duke and numbing out her pain that she’s reckless with the lover who joins her for part of the journey. I think she’s aware of and regrets these tendencies, but she also can’t help herself.
LP: Ultimately, this is a collection where I'm examining my own toxic masculinity. I like to think I'm better in relationships than this person, and I've been very fortunate to love and be loved. But I think there's a degree of romance that I would love to perform and perform and perform forever, and never get too deep with it. Because the second you do, you become responsible. You can take it all so incredibly personally, the degree to which you can feel like a failure in a relationship.
With the Daughter of the Duke, there’s so much yearning in all directions. There’s the pursuit of this mythological impact site of the Duke. Then, you know, queers yearn. That's what we do. We yearn and pine and maybe aren't so great at transitioning into normalcy. Especially, I think, in our characters and our stories. So, the Daughter of the Duke is kind a Heathcliff character. She [expresses to her lover], ‘I can treat you better than all those men because I can at least see you.’ But does she really see her?
LCJ: “Daddy was a Fascist” is such a searing, bitter poem. It references some of Bowie’s bizarre cocaine-fueled ramblings during the mid-70s, but it also made me think about the double standards women experience. Male rockers like Bowie, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, The Who, etc,. were free to be hot messes and were celebrated and admired. Their recklessness was part of their mystique. But when women behave similarly, especially in the public eye, they’re ridiculed.
Can you speak to some of these ideas?
LP: The potential for judgment is infinite because we judge women differently. Men can be horrible, exploitative assholes, but somehow, we build this contrivance of their honor. Whereas with women, women have no honor. You have to prove yourself somehow and withhold. And even then, you can't be too withholding. So you can't win if you're a woman.
There was no way I would get to skirt around the Thin White Duke without talking about the hard stuff. If you're gonna do this character, you can't just be like, he was a dark and dangerous man. It's like, no, David Bowie did what he did and then did a lot of apologizing. This isn't a eulogy for David Bowie. It's an analysis. That means I spent a lot of time staring at all the things that were hard to look at.
A lot of people have a hard time with David Bowie as a person because of the accusations of sleeping with underage girls, which is proven. I get that, and maybe we don't come back from that. And so, when it comes to the fascism accusations, I have no response other than rage. I have no response other than disappointment.
For a lot of people, especially from a daughter's perspective, we're used to getting let down by our dads in one way or another. At some point, they disappoint us. Especially when we have ones that are withholding. The Duke, as a character, is very much withholding. And what is the daughter of a withholding father going to do? Be highly confrontational.
That’s where “Daddy Is a Fascist” came from. It also took some inspiration from Sylvia Plath's “Daddy” and other similar pieces of work. But what it came down to is how I am in a nation that disappoints me often with its ties to patriarchy and patriarchal fascism. So, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fascist.
LCJ: I noticed the words “priest” and “demon” appear several times throughout the collection. Of course, those are words Bowie wrote in his lyrics, but I also get the sense the Daughter of the Duke is trying to perform an exorcism. Can you speak to exorcism as a theme?
LP: As I mentioned before, David Bowie was reading a lot of Aleister Crowley when he recorded Station to Station, and there’s a lot of occultism in the album. It's bad—all of it. There's occultism in my book—a lot of crass references to Kabbalah—and it's bad. That's very much a call and response. The dark, foreboding things about demons are high-level occultist symbols that have been dumbed down into an offhand thing you say at a party to impress a girl.
I referenced Prospero from Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Dark Way Down. In the play, Prospero is basically a man on a beach throwing a tantrum about all the magic he used to have, how it's gone, and how unjust that is. I think with Station to Station, David Bowie is experimenting with this weird pseudo-slap-dash magician. He's like, this is my occultist idiot album.
As for the Daughter of the Duke, there's so much purging. And when yearning is an identifying character marker for her, will she cease to exist when the purging and yearning are done? Will she be undone? I don't have a great answer for that, and I don't want one.
LCJ: I circled the word “Saturn” a lot, too. What’s your interest in Saturn in relation to the Thin White Duke and the Daughter of the Duke?
LP: If we're going to talk about Saturn, we have to talk about a lot of things. We have to talk about Bowie. So Bowie was a Capricorn ruled by Saturn. Bowie was a big fan of Elvis, who was another Capricorn ruled by Saturn. The album Blackstar—the other name for Saturn. “Black Star” is a song by Elvis cited in Bowie’s Blackstar album about death. And the thing about Saturn is that Saturn rules linear time, limits, depression, structure, and patriarchy.
Ultimately, Saturn is like the Titan Kronos, who ate his own children to hang on to power. I was playing with that mythology of fathers consuming their children. The biggest threat to your empire is your son.
LCJ: Do you think we’ll see the Daughter of the Duke again in your future projects?
LP: We ultimately saw the Thin White Duke again in Blackstar, so you never know. Bowie contained multitudes and they all showed up for that album. But do I think there is any more road left to ride together with the Daughter of the Duke? At this point, probably not.
I went on the market with Dark Way Down immediately after I wrote it in 2020. And now that it’s out in the world, it's cool to talk about it and share it, but I recently bragged to somebody that I'm out of poems. But, you know, I’m always writing. I'm ultimately a storyteller more than I am anything else.
