INTERVIEW : Kathleen J. Woods by Lauren C. Johnson
White Wedding
Fiction Collective 2
Interview by
Lauren C. Johnson
When Kathleen J. Woods began writing the ecstatic, surreal, and pornographic fragments that fill the chapters of her first novel, she wondered, “How do we consent to our own desires?” White Wedding (University of Alabama Press and Fiction Collective Two, February 2022) explores this complicated question through the lenses of gender, race, and class—but never attempts to answer it.
Desire and sex—or the suggestion of sex—are found on nearly every page of White Wedding. When the novel begins, an unnamed woman has decided to crash a wedding in white, middle-class, suburban America. The woman arrived from a pleasure mansion where she satisfied fetishes from shaving to corset piercing. After leaving the mansion by foot in the middle of the night, the woman encounters Charlotte, the college-aged stepsister of the bride, at an empty gas station. Charlotte is wary, but the woman convinces her to give her a ride into town. It’s a decision Charlotte will soon regret.
The woman wanders into the ceremony with bare feet and a sundress stained with bodily fluids. Yet, she charms. No one listens to Charlotte’s warnings, and no one asks the woman to leave as she flits between guests and family. To their benefit and detriment, the woman gives everyone she encounters exactly what they want.
Woods earned her M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she served as Managing Editor for the journal, Timber. She’s a member of The Ruby, a Bay Area-based collective for women and nonbinary artists, and she was a 2018 Writers Grotto fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Bitch, Western Humanities Review, Bartleby Snopes, Apeiron Review, and more.
White Wedding contains some of the best erotic writing I’ve read in recent memory. There’s a dreamy, psychedelic quality to the way scenes shift from the pleasure mansion, with its color-changing walls, to the wedding ceremony. At the sentence level, the language is explicit, purposeful, and controlled.
Eager to discuss this gem of a debut novel, I met up with Woods at The Ruby. Our conversation spanned pornographic literature, Susan Sontag, Stephen Sondheim, the writing and revising process, and so much more. Here are the best parts, edited for clarity.
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Lauren C. Johnson: If I were to attempt to place White Wedding in a genre, I might describe it as “Wedding Gothic” (though I would never argue that this novel squarely falls into any one genre.) You capture the titular white wedding in all its messiness. It’s too hot. The guests are sweating puddles, staining their nice clothing, and breathing tar fumes from the next-door neighbor's new roof. The father-of-the-bride gives a mortifying first toast. It’s all very grounded in physical details and it’s very unromantic.
In terms of setting, what interests you about weddings?
Kathleen J. Woods: I first started this project at a time when I was attending a lot of weddings (none of which were disastrous in this way, of course). Something that became really fascinating to me—as someone who's not interested in having a wedding of my own—was this idea that a wedding is so integral to the American life script, especially the Christian American life script. Weddings are considered among the most normal things you can do even though they're kind of like constructed play-lands of fantasy, in some ways as elaborate and silly as porn.
Speaking in very broad and overly cynical terms, weddings, and straight weddings especially, can seem like a celebration of heteronormativity, but also a performance of it at the same time. And of course, there’s the performative aspect of purity that goes into the white dress. Though the virginal bride isn't something people expect at this point, it's still in the costume. This is a very cynical take on weddings, but something I find interesting to think about.
And I think weddings bring out a lot of unexpected emotions for those in attendance; they're these fantastical play lands, but they also remind people of their own heartbreaks and their own desires for love. And sometimes they make people really horny.
LCJ: To piggyback off that first question, you could have easily set the entire novel at the pleasure mansion—which you describe in such lush, vivid detail. Why did you center this novel around the wedding?
KJW: I was playing with the idea that a wedding can be a space for fantasy—just like a pleasure mansion.
I thought a lot about the novel, Story of O by Pauline Réage. Story of O takes place in and out of a mysterious, French sex chateau—which is kind of a mainstay of this luxurious pornographic genre. Aesthetically sure, I'm super into that, but I also find it a little boring. So, I wondered, what if we had to leave the chateau? Where do we go if we leave the site, the enclosed site where sexual fantasy is approved of? Where it's safe to do unsafe things?
LCJ: Did you always know you wanted to center the novel around the wedding rather than the mansion, or was that a decision that evolved as you wrote?
KJW: Actually, it started in the mansion. White Wedding began as an exercise in one of my grad school classes [at the University of Colorado at Boulder]. Our professor either assigned us—or had us pick—an artist of some kind to respond to in fiction. The assignment was to reflect the brush strokes through our language and prose. My professor gave me the painter Lisa Yuskavage, and her painting “Triptych” inspired the three mansion scenes. I wrote those scenes as their own kind of triptych: three self-contained stories for our workshop. And Yuskavage’s use of color influenced my color-changing rooms in the mansion. But early on, I didn't even know this was going to be a book.
LCJ: I absolutely love how this novel plays with and subverts fear—especially women’s fear. Before hitchhiking with Charlotte and crashing the wedding, the unnamed woman—the novel’s close third protagonist—wanders and seeks her next destination. At an empty gas station, just before dawn, she squats “on a pump’s concrete base, her knees spread toward the empty highway, her skirt crumpled to the crease of her hips.”
A woman wandering alone at night tends to signal danger, but this woman seems relaxed, patiently waiting for her next opportunity to find her. What were your intentions when crafting this scene?
KJW: I think that if there's a place [in the novel] where my own fantasy is on the page, it’s in the sentence, “She walked slow and alone through the night.” Imagine walking calmly and alone through the night!
I was interested in the idea of a woman who is untethered to normal—and often gendered— fears, but as I wrote, I was also troubled by the idea of a neat binary flip. Maybe if I were a different kind of writer, I would feel more comfortable leaning into that fantasy of a world in which there is no gender violence, but I didn't.
In my Lit Hub article, “What Pornographic Literature Shows Us About Human Nature,” I wrote about how Susan Sontag, in her essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” describes pornographic literature as “an extreme [form] of consciousness that [transcends] social personality or psychological individuality.” The pornographic genre invites moving through the world with a singular goal of lust. But how are bodies perceived in terms of race and gender? These are questions that troubled me as I wrote. The woman's whiteness is also part of her ability to move through the spaces that she does, especially this wedding full of white guests.
There is so much that goes into the shaping of a person, and I found exploring the very knotted ways in which we exist, and what informs our desire, and our relationship to our bodies compelling as I wrote and, especially, revised.
LCJ: In the pleasure mansion, the woman plays the role of a dominatrix. She makes her guests feel uncomfortable physically and emotionally. But these are all vital services her guests have requested. By giving them exactly what they want, she paradoxically assumes a subservient role. How would you describe the woman’s sense of agency?
KJW: I'm hesitant to interpret her interiority any more than what’s on the page. I’m not trying to be clever about it, but her lack of a backstory is one of the ways in which she’s free.
LCJ: When it comes to craft, I’m in awe of your use of language. White Wedding is rendered in precise, razor-edge detail, and it’s clear that you’re a writer who cares about verisimilitude. When writing descriptions, how do you know when you’ve struck the right tone and landed the right word?
KJW: Thank you so much for the compliment, first of all. I think that happens on a case-by-case basis, depending on the project; I have a different approach to the details for everything I write.
Thanks to the pandemic, my obsession with musicals came back in full force. I've been thinking a lot about composer Stephen Sondheim and how he talked about getting to know his characters deeply, and then the lyrics and details of expression would follow. The details must come through the mode of storytelling and the mode of the character.
While I was in this pornographic genre, I was exploring constructed fantasies like heteronormativity, whiteness, and desire. What I wanted to reflect the mode of the woman’s “extreme consciousness” drove the physical details. I mentioned the woman’s lack of interiority, except for the fact that she’s taking in all the sensory information around her. So, that’s where the real fixation on smell comes from, for example.
LCJ: Let’s talk about porn! In your Lit Hub article, you wrote: “In conceiving White Wedding’s nameless woman, I was uninterested in shame, turmoil, and those wells of trauma so often used to frame queer narratives and/or “solve” a female character’s pursuit of sex. I imagined her unmoored from linear time and unconcerned with any assumed guardianship of sexual morality. This was cathartic.”
Can you speak more to that statement? Can you share why you found writing the unnamed woman so cathartic?
KJW: It's fun. The woman isn’t necessarily immoral, but she is amoral, right? She's just a force, and it was exciting to write in that space, inhabiting someone who doesn’t share my shames or ethical concerns. It was fun to think, ‘what nasty thing can I write through her?’
LCJ: I can’t underestimate how much I appreciate how the words “cum” and “cunt” (in that order) appear within the first paragraph on the very first page. As the author, you’ve chosen words other writers might shy away from: labia, vulva, semen to name a few. You describe genitals in detail. This is all very fun to read, and at the craft level, these explicit scenes come across as deliberate and necessary. Can you speak more to the importance of pornographic writing?
KJW: I was very much against using euphemism. I didn’t choose this language for shock value: it’s about looking at the body, as complex, messy, and rich as the forest, and reveling in the actual parts. That’s important considering how many people confuse anatomy when talking about their own bodies, right? Many people misuse "vagina" when they mean “vulva.” And the labia are not the clitoris, but are full of nerve endings. Reflecting at least a little bit of the broad spectrum of human bodies was important, too. I wanted to portray a variety of vulvas. I wanted to include women with penises.
I also wanted to be specific about the body because of its potential for pleasure. How our bodies are sexualized, racialized, medicalized, and otherwise read and interpreted by others can make them feel like a trap. But the joys we feel through them, the ecstasy found in all those nerves, also makes our bodies a source of wonder, connection, escape.
LCJ: I love the final story that the woman tells Charlotte—about the college roommate who leaves gifts, white board messages, and even an electric candle, but is impossible to meet in the flesh. I read this as an unexpected and beautiful nod to the myth of Eros and Psyche. What do you think Charlotte got out of her encounter with the woman? That’s to say, how do you think listening to the woman’s sexual tales shaped her character development?
KJW: That was the very last scene I wrote. In previous versions, there was a different story in that passage: a fun, polyamorous, sex fest in a hot tub. But it ultimately didn't fit the book and had to go.
And then pandemic lockdowns happened. I’ve always loved the story of Eros and Psyche, and I thought, ‘who knows what's gonna happen tomorrow? Maybe the world's ending.’ So, it felt like the right time write my Eros and Psyche story, which I discovered meant exploring yet another room of desire.
This was a beautiful, serendipitous moment of writing exactly what I wanted to write and finding that it worked thematically within the book.
As for Charlotte, she’s another character who refuses interiority. What’s going on with Charlotte? I don't think I can say, I don't think she has some tidy epiphany or end goal.
LCJ: Who’s your favorite character and why?
KJW: The woman. I also have fondness for the bartender.
LCJ: Which books and literary traditions would you say helped shape White Wedding? That’s another way of asking, for readers who finish your novel in a sweat and wanting more (it’s me—I’m readers) which books would you point them to?
KJW: Story of O by Pauline Réage and Hogg by Samuel R. Delany were big influences. I’d also recommend Tipping the Velvet and The Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. Waters writes these amazing lesbian historical romances, but in a Dickens-y style. The Handmaiden, which is the film adaptation of The Fingersmith is also great.
In terms of theorists, Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”; Judith Butler’s, “The Force of Fantasy”; and The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure were also influential.
There’s also Mary Gaitskill’s early, short story collection, Bad Behaviour; Kathy Acker’s novel, Blood and Guts in Highschool; and Natalie Diaz’s poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem.
And, of course, the music video for “Haunted” by Beyoncé.
