Candice Wuehle's MONARCH, a humorous novel based on a popular '90s-era conspiracy theory, about a former child beauty queen who falls in love with a fellow pageant girl and, with the help of her riot grrrl babysitter, decides to take down the organization that secretly programmed her as an assassin, to Sarah Lyn Rogers at Soft Skull.
After waking up with a strange taste in her mouth and mysterious bruises, former child pageant star Jessica Clink unwittingly begins an investigation into a nefarious deep state underworld. Equipped with the eccentric education of her father, Dr. Clink (a professor of Boredom Studies and the founder of an elite study group known as the Devil’s Workshop), Jessica uncovers a disquieting connection between her former life as a beauty queen and an offshoot of Project MKUltra known as MONARCH.
As Jessica moves closer to the truth, she begins to suspect the involvement of everyone around her, including her own mother, Grethe (a Norwegian pageant queen turned occult American wellness guru for suburban housewives). With the help of Christine (her black-lipsticked riot grrrl babysitter and confidante), Jessica sets out to take down Project MONARCH. More importantly, she must discover if her first love, fellow teen queen Veronica Marshall, was genuine or yet another deep state plant.
Merging iconic true crime stories of the ’90s (Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, and JonBenét Ramsey) with theories of human consciousness, folklore, and a perennial cultural fixation with dead girls, MONARCH questions the shadow sides of self-concept: Who are you if you don’t know yourself?
"If the vacant, robotic gaze of the beauty queen has ever seemed sinister to you, Ms. Wuehle provides a possible reason... Wuehle pursues her gonzo premise with satirical gusto, mixing together some curious brew of Robert Ludlum and Don DeLillo.. [A] lively debut." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Intoxicating and strange . . . A novel that's as addicting as it is heartbreaking." —Sophia June, NYLON, One of the Must-Read Books of the Month
"Candice Wuehle had me at 'Jon Benet Ramsey.' The poet's new novel follows a former child pageant star as she discovers ties to her previous glory and a deep state government program. Add an occult wellness guru to the mix, a heaping of mommy issues, and a queer romance for taste and this might just be my ideal book." —Kerensa Cadenas, Thrillist
"Bizarre delight of a debut novel . . . A natural page-turner." —Lily DeTaeye, Little Village
"Wuehle’s net of insights, jokes, linguistic will-o’-the-wisps push the definition of surreal . . . Wuehle is a poet writing a thriller, and the cerebral, beautiful poetry intoxicates the story . . . A maze of lyrically breathtaking imagery and storytelling that rivals the stepping-stone pathways across the dream-river in the films of Charlie Kaufman (see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synechdoche, New York, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, etc) . . . ‘90s pop culture, espionage, occultism are all bonded in an amalgam of feminist folklore for the 21st century." —Jesse Hilson, Pink Plastic House
"Monarch is a novel of ideas welded to the structure of a page-turner . . . Darkly comic, cynical, thought-provoking, and strange, Wuehle’s novel is a rare offering." —Mara Krause, ZYZZYVA
"Wuehle is catching a wave of nineties nostalgia and retrospective media criticism, in large part ushered in by the immensely popular podcast, 'You’re Wrong About' . . . As much as MONARCH is a conspiracy-theory-thriller, inviting the possibility that an amorphous, terrible something in one’s environment might be located and made legible, it is also a story about piecing together the fuzzy impressions of childhood, watching as they form into a coherent whole the way a photo develops in a darkroom. Wuehle is masterful . . . An artisan; one senses while reading her that she has absolute control over the page—could conjure any emotion or image with startling concision, no matter how surreal or uncanny." —Lily Houston Smith, Chicago Review of Books
"A sinisterly fun novel . . . For fans of Stranger Things mixed with Little Miss Sunshine. It doesn’t sound like it works, but it sure as hell does." —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
"What does it mean when you’re not who you thought you were? Alternately: the categories of 'beauty queen' and 'sleeper agent' have, historically speaking, not had much overlap. Candace Wuehle’s forthcoming Monarch poses the question: what if someone could lay claim to both of those job descriptions? Throw in a touch of the occult and a bit of punk rock and you have an intriguing combination." —Tobias Carroll, Tor.com
"Fantastically strange . . . Monarch feels a bit like the folks behind You’re Wrong About teamed up with the writers of Killing Eve, and they all did some psychedelics and wrote a script together." —Molly Odintz, CrimeReads, A Most Anticipated Book
"A deeply introspective novel with a notable metaphor for reinvention after trauma in the form of a weaponized pageant girl." —Kirkus Reviews
"Readers sturdy enough to peer into this glittering, multifaceted novel will find weaponized beauty reflected back." —Publishers Weekly
“A wise, unsettling, and multifaceted masterpiece, MONARCH succeeds on all levels—as a portrait of an endearingly dysfunctional family, as a shadow history of Y2K and the hidden power structure underlying and undermining contemporary life, and as a profound exploration of the extremely dicey prospect of being a self in a body in the world. Unless you’re hiding in an underground city or frozen in a kryokammer in the desert, you'll want to run out and get this one right away!” —David Leo Rice, author of The Dodge City Trilogy, Angel House, and Drifter: Stories
“In this riddled pageantric, insomniac, photographic, and university-infused world of eating disorders, triple suicides, astral projections, enigmatic bruises, and uncontrollable impulses, Candice Wuehle’s poetic and narrative gaze on everything she Midas-touches is eyelined, eyeshadowed, polished, Norwegian lip-penciled, and loose powdered with her devilishly inventive, singularly imaginative beauty and a devastating wry sense of humor. Her brilliance in MONARCH will lacquer, enamel, and wax you and turn your mind inside out like a monarch butterfly macerated in emulsion.” —Vi Khi Nao, author of The Vegas Dilemma and Swimming with Dead Stars
"Don DeLillo can only dream of being Candice Wuehle, who's wrenched the maximalist postmodern novel from the hands of old white men and given it an enticingly feminist spin. MONARCH is a smart, weird, funny gut punch, the kind of book that will blister your brain in the best possible way." —Rafael Frumkin, author of The Comedown
This book is really quite sinister, and I mean that in the Latin sense--MONARCH takes the left-hand path through a chilling (and, if you're honest with yourself, quite real) landscape as Jessica, a decommissioned MK Ultra-esque beauty queen traces back to her origins as such. Along the way, she has to tell the true from the false, which can be difficult when you have a closet full of alters and a lot of gruesome off-label memories.
Underneath it all is a question you can probably relate to even if you aren't the progeny of a cryogenically preserved mother and a father who lectures on Boredom Studies: How do we know which of our reactions belong to us? How can we tell apart the conditioned self from the one we actually live with, especially when we've been trauma-trained into not looking too closely at certain facts? What happens when our frozen selves start to thaw?
If you've always been suspicious of the institutions of childhood, beauty, and sentimentality, this book is for you. If you crave a frosty narrative voice with the whip and torque of a bitchy gymnast, this book is for you. It will make you smarter. And it will also upset your schema for the world--but you'll be glad, I promise.—Sarah Elaine Smith, author of Marilou is Everywhere
Poet Candice Wuehle's irresistibly weird debut novel Monarch is the kind of book that you want to start reading again immediately after turning the last page — not just to trace the conspiracy at its heart, but to appreciate how its kaleidoscope of beauty pageants, Y2K anxieties, famous dead girls, and deep state machinations synthesizes into an exploration of what makes up a self.
Jessica Greenglass Clink self-consciously narrates Monarch as she attempts to make sense of how much of her life was ever her own. We start with her parentage. The daughter of Grethe, a Norwegian beauty queen, and Dr. Clink (always Dr. Clink), a professor at the fictional Midwestern University, Jessica is "basically like what would happen if Barbie and Dr. Strangelove had a lovechild." Swap nuclear war expertise with the study of extreme boredom and crimes of passion — research that gains notoriety in the wake of Lorena Bobbitt's trial — and you get Dr. Clink.
Though they live in what Jessica calls "the oeil de taureau of America" (that's French for bullseye), and though her 1990s adolescence is littered with the pop culture hallmarks of the decade—looping news footage of Nicole Brown Simpson's murder scene, the "ethereal yodeling" of The Cranberries, AOL CD-ROMs, tanning with a Playboy Bunny sticker on your hipbone — her upbringing is anything but average. She won't wake up to the clues of its sinister core until the end of the millennium. "The thing about being a teenager is that everything seems normal because nothing is normal," Wuehle writes, a diagnosis that feels apt until it isn't.
In the first half of Monarch, Wuehle conjures enthrallingly eccentric formative years for Jessica. She spends her days training for mother-daughter beauty pageants, helping Grethe at bizarre Tupperware parties as she demonstrates a plastic cryogenic freezer she sleeps in to halt the aging process, and traveling to her father's alma mater of Desert University — an "ivy-less Oxford" where Chancellor Lethe (like the river of oblivion) drills her with riddles in catechism.
This is a portentous crucible in which to be forged, compounded further by a home environment thrumming with "subtle panic." Only "essential personnel" are permitted inside this fortress where Dr. Clink manically draws up an academic journal issue responding to "the modern condition" (aka the internet) and Grethe stalks around the house with a knife "in a macabre before-bed ritual." Jessica originally assumes that Grethe, like many women who steep themselves in stories about misogynistic violence, was simply spooked into vigilance from watching too many episodes of her favorite true-crime and shadow history show, Unsolved Mysteries. But she notes in an aside to the reader, "Is this enough to explain to you why I believed there was some serious and maybe immediate violence always near me?"
Jessica's only tether to the outside world is her babysitter Christine, a Norwegian American riot grrrl in black lipstick who "possesse[s] an unfettered sense of revenge accessible only to people with a supreme, nearly supernatural sense of self-worth" — exactly what Jessica lacks. It is Christine who teaches Jessica to critically examine the power structures around her, to understand that "any kind of narrative [is] a blinder; the tiny screens that convince the horse there is only one path." And it is Christine who convinces Jessica to quit pageantry at age 13, after her coach forces her to sabotage fellow beauty queen Veronica Marshall — her first love, who gave her a taste of normal teenage life. Soon after, she begins waking up with a bitter, "bad-good" taste in her mouth, covered in bruises.
The reality of the violence Jessica felt near to her reveals itself gradually as she comes of age in her own body and soul. As the days count down to Y2K, Jessica, now 19, is working part-time a photography store. She develops photos reminiscent of JonBenét Ramsey's murder scene — a bloodbath that recalls for her "images of myself in another country, images of myself with bloody hands." In the second half of the novel, Jessica learns that she had been programmed as an agent in an offshoot of Project MKUltra known as MONARCH, trained to transition between personas in order to gather intelligence.
Readers hungry for the motives of MONARCH — or even what the cryptonym means — won't find much here, a choice that pays off. Wuehle is less concerned with deep state spycraft than with the question of how to differentiate who we are from who we are programmed to be. Jessica's conditioning via pageantry (her coach was really a plant), Chancellor Lethe's schemes, and her parents' complicity puts this quandary to an extreme. But as Dr. Clink explains toward the end of the novel, all of us experience the difficulty of untangling our essence from our context: "My life has been the same as anyone's: I was born into a system and I never saw it from the outside." This makes for a far more interesting novel than the international espionage thriller it could have been without Wuehle's poetic, haunting touch.
"Power, Chancellor Lethe had once told me, is knowing the rules don't exist," Jessica reflects as she sets out on a quest — for feminist vengeance, for the truth about Veronica (was she yet another plant?), for her own self. As she breaks all the rules that the creators of MONARCH had instilled in her, instead drawing on Christine's lessons, Jessica takes control over the narrative of her life, the story that she is telling us now. Wuehle's decision to put the reins of pacing and structure in the hands of her narrator — who speaks many tongues and takes us through a "study in circles" until she is ready to "start talking about spirals" and drive us into the darkness of the underworld — reinforces the radical potential of having the final word.
Monarch is ultimately a story about stories: of Jessica's erasure and reinvention, of the Norwegian folklore that Grethe carried from her homeland, of true crime narratives that tell us that no one is more perfect than a dead girl, of memory and trauma and consciousness. Jessica's testimony reminds us that "nothing — no memory, impression, emotion, or idea — is ever lost." We can always remember who we are, even when the forces around us demand that we forget. - Kristen Martin
Every day, a new uncovering. People, places, and ideas are revealed to no longer be what they’d seemed to be. The tricky thing about masks is what they really show: the performative nature of the self and the fractured, amalgam nature of identity.
After we broke up, my high school ex instructed me to “remember who you were before we started dating.” This instruction followed a period of prolonged misery in which I attempted to convince him by any means possible to take me back: a revived relationship with his friends, petitions to return to that feeling from when we first started dating, and an email containing an entire monologue spoken by Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, which I’d dreamed he’d whispered in my ear before I went on stage to deliver some kind of speech. At the time, the performance of the dream felt unrelated to my life, but in retrospect, I think it may have foretold the life I was about to live. A year after the breakup, I acquired a collection of colorful wigs, could quote diligently from The Power of Now, and got mixed up into the world of immersive theater.
Immersive theater is a whole other beast from, say, the musical The Lion King. When people hear “immersive theater,” I assume the first thing that comes to mind is Punchdrunk’s Macbeth-inspired Sleep No More, a New York City site-specific theatrical installation that leads audience-participants through a series of well-decorated, dimly lit spaces. The immersive theater projects I got involved with shared some elements in common with the New York-based show, including an eclectic cast, an air of mystery, and a reliance on heavy, rouge-colored fabrics, but were different in their explicit content ratings and exclusivity. The main project I worked for was a members-only goth-themed nightclub set in an abandoned warehouse in Chicago (you had to follow a strict all-black dress code just to get in the door), catering mainly to rich and often Insta-famous partygoers. When one of the club owners first contacted me, I had to pass a strange and foreboding first test: “sending him a couple photos of myself.” He never asked to see my work, though my job would be to type sibylline, personalized poems for the partygoers.I got the job, and I was excited to get started. From the time I’d spent reading Ram Dass and other spiritual self-help books following my breakup, I’d come to believe that my “true self” was unstable, ever-changing—a blank slate capable of containing infinite multiplicities. The club was an opportunity to explore that fully. I could pick a new name. Wear a mask. I believed I was enacting some secret of the universe. Good on my word, I was remembering myself.
The protagonist of Candice Wuehle’s Monarch, Jessica Clink, learns to perform, to wear masks, from a very young age. A child beauty queen of the late nineties, Jessica is a self-proclaimed “brat” who decides she likes her babysitter enough “to allow her to behold her Caboodles of industry-grade cosmetics, her closet of tulle and sequin, her tiaras.” The narrator even refers to her own storytelling as a “performance.” Jessica’s pageantry is at the behest of both of her parents: her father, Dr. Clink, who regards his daughter “with the neutral attention a trainer gives to a show dog” and works as a professor of Boredom Studies at Midwestern University, and Jessica's mother, Grethe, a former pageant champion who looks less like Jessica’s mother and more like her doppelgänger. Jessica’s parents hire Crystal, the wife of one of her father’s colleagues, to work as Jessica’s pageant coach. Over time, Crystal teaches her to look in the mirror and “remove her entire face and replace it with another.” Eventually, Jessica removes the mirror itself, letting “various faces flow over” her in “the darkened basement rec room.”
On the eve of the goth club’s opening, we were asked to arrive early to meet the team and set up. I wore a black pinafore dress with a mesh, sparkly black undershirt, which, upon seeing the rest of the performers' outfits, I worried introduced too much light into the environment. No doubt, the other entertainers were more practiced: half of them were flown in from a club in LA, paying little attention to me as I unloaded my typewriter and basket of trinkets, including a turn-of-the-century blue medicine bottle and a taxidermied alligator head. It was allowed, I guess, for props to not be black. One of the women had covered her face, arms, and neck in weird, black marks that looked like alien script and wore clothes I can only describe as possessing an unnecessary amount of adaptable features: straps, buckles, random pockets. Another guy wore gloves that looked like they were made for riding motorcycles, a leather vest, and a skeletal mask with a cross stamped in the center of the forehead. Others wore dog collars and strappy lingerie.
The owners and senior performers led us in a conversation about consent as people lit a few stray candles and snagged one last drink before opening—guests would be brought into dark, secret rooms, asked to reveal their deepest fears, even blindfolded. "We want this to be a safe space," one of the club owners said. "Seductive, but not sexual," was the refrain. I wondered what exactly that looked like. What that meant. Then, we were sworn to secrecy, instructed to never reveal what happened in the club, or else face eternal banishment and other, unspecified consequences. I made the promise. "Seductive, but not sexual."
When Jessica falls in love with a fellow beauty queen, Veronica Marshall, her performances in pageantry begin to suffer. She stops practicing the mirror technique and rebels against Crystal. Finally, her memory begins to fail, or the facade of memory Crystal has implanted in her brain begins to crack: “I missed the step in a dance routine” or “I forgot to smile as I walked on stage.” Eventually, Jessica quits doing pageants altogether, and something insidious enters the narrative, a sense that she has been tricked into believing an essential lie about her personhood. “I, too, believed my mask was my face,” she relates. Following a particularly poignant experience in a church, Jessica begins to question the reality of this sentiment. She becomes fixated on the words of the priest, Corinthians 6:19-20: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.” Later, she pores over the priest’s words at her new job at the University photo lab. How much was she bought for? And by whom?
The private rooms were supposed to help guests transform their lives, somehow. Like the books that taught me to revel in my many-parted self, the rooms were of the New Age-y "self-help" genre, only sexually-charged (sorry, “seductively-charged”), monochromatic, and full of drugs and alcohol. Some performers had jobs as "runners." They were responsible for locating prospective initiates and leading them to the private rooms’ top-secret locations. Twenty minutes before the doors opened that first night, after one of the owners handed me a little black membership card with the addendum that I should return it to him afterward (so, technically, my membership was only temporary, and so too, my oath to secrecy), one of the runners approached me and held out her hand. She looked at me with eyes that stank of the allure of some mischievous, unknown, future event, and I knew then what the owners meant when they encouraged us to use our powers of "seduction.” Refusing her hand, while technically permitted, would have placed me in a position adverse to the entire operation: the girl, the owners, the coolness of the club, the "privilege" to have been chosen as an initiate.
She led me out past the dance floor and down a flight of stairs, then through a set of heavy black doors, around a turn, down another flight of stairs. It was a kind of preparatory disorientation, being spun around and around, though I had no knowledge either of where or what my target was. We came to the basement. There were still pizza boxes, liquor-infused chocolates, and black lipstick strewn about from when the cast had gotten ready just half an hour before. I didn't see anyone as we walked across the large, open room, but it was brightly lit, a stark contrast to the candlelight illuminating the rest of the building. This was the only time I felt I could be in over my head. Something about the backstagedness of the space raised an alarm in me, but the alarm's sound came and went. I only need put on the mask of my courageous self and I would get through it.
What actually happened in the private rooms was less memorable, to be honest. In fact, every ritual I participated in at the club reminded me of the kinds of games I used to invent with my friends at sleepovers in the mid-2000's, except these were less inspired. I entered a room of three or four hooded figures covered head to toe in thick, black covers. It was kind of like entering a poorly-lit, gothic office and meeting a group of expectant, dementor-like business people. The girl, my runner, left and closed the door behind her, and one of the dementors shouted, "Sit!" I sat on the carpeted floor. Then, one of them turned their head and began to speak in a constructed language. It sounded otherworldly, alien-like, punctuated by clicks, consonant-heavy. In English, another one asked me, "what do you desire?" They gestured at three magical-looking objects laid out on the coffee table in front of me. I picked something. It was cube-like. They told me what it meant. That part I don't remember.
The sequined veil of Jessica’s beauty pageant life unravels even further when signs that she has been unwittingly involved in a deep-state operation start to appear. After uncovering a series of disturbing photos of herself with bloody hands in another country, Jessica begins to have intense nightmares from which she wakes up in actual pain and with in-the-flesh bruises, unable to identify their source. Eventually, it is revealed that she is a Multi-Dimensional Identity Acquisitor, part of the MKUltra offshoot MONARCH, which means she has several different “personas” she can “transition” into, each with “its own memories, education, talents, languages, gestures, postural and muscle memory.” The program is run by Jessica’s father, and every moment of significance in Jessica’s life no longer belongs to her. Jian, a fellow MONARCH agent, explains to Jessica why a recurring dream of hers does not reflect reality:
They do that to you girls. They implant narratives in your dreams so that you don’t ask questions in life. Mostly they do it to the honeypots, they implant these vivid dreams of fucking strangers so that the girls don’t wonder what compels them to seduce the assets. They think it was their own idea.
We tend to think of violence as an explicit physical act, as something we can see, but some of the worst violences are those which are less visible. It’s their invisibility that creates their treachery.
I worked at the goth club for six months, typing poems for people in that musty service elevator, warding off the advances of older men, occasionally requesting that some couple who’d decided to take over the booth I was stationed at when I went on break please find a different place to make out. Eventually, the owners decided the model didn’t work in Chicago like it did in LA (“the people weren’t cool enough” is what they’d supposedly said), and they shut down the operation. Then, a few years later, I discovered the LA club had closed its doors following a slew of sexual misconduct allegations. Multiple performers and guests had reported uncomfortable interactions to the club’s higher-ups, and they failed to do anything about it. They failed to see and acknowledge the environment they’d created. And it was easy, I suppose (actually, it was the perfect breeding ground) for perpetrators to hide behind the club’s boundary-pushing aesthetic, for them to believe their own convenient lies: that saying “yes” in that environment was ever a free expression of consent. That harassment doesn’t happen in the nuances of everyday interaction, in the presence of others. That the structures that enable such abuses of power aren’t intricately woven into everyday life.
Initially, I thought the irony of my ex’s advice to “remember who I was before we started dating” was contained in the fact that the person I’d discovered once I actually went on that journey was anything but a single entity. I was many, multiple, the potential to play the role of anyone, fearless, reveling in that mystery. Now, I look back on what he said and read the irony in a new way. His request is an impossible feat, lacking awareness of what it means to live in the truth that as a woman, my “self” was always shaped by men like him. Like Jessica, I was full of implanted narratives. All potential versions were impure, influenced. And like Jessica, I used my art to survive. As she says, “this is the story of the creature’s creature. At some point, monsters learn to create their own art.” Even the perceived “spiritual understanding” I had gained, my journey into mystical ideas about the self’s multiplicity and capacity for play, the thing that got me into immersive theater in the first place, can be read as another way I tried to cope following the traumatic relationship with my ex. Nothing is sacred or immune.
But Monarch offers us some hope. It contains glimpses of experiences Jessica may understand as truly hers, the most prominent being her love relationship with Veronica: “The idea was that if everything about her had been someone else’s idea, then that feeling with Veronica could only be her own.” There are certain felt experiences that can, maybe, escape the system of patriarchal influence. Perhaps the utility of masks, of the self’s fracturing, can be redeemed, depending on the shard of mirror you salvage. - Elise Houcek
https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/candice-wuehle-monarch
Luke Rolfes: Candice Wuehle is the author of several books of poetry, and, recently, the novel Monarch from Soft Skull Press—a wonderfully weird and beautiful book that takes readers on a strange journey from beauty pageants to Boredom Studies to micro-chipped government operatives. Thanks so much for talking with us, Candice!
I’d love to hear about the genesis of Monarch and what influenced this particular novel. Where did you get the idea not just for this story but this style of story?
Candice Wuehle: The plot is based on a real conspiracy theory that asserts a secret wing of the CIA, Operation MONARCH, recruits agents from beauty pageant contests because they possess a specific skill set—they’re attractive, obedient, and charming. From there, I developed my own childhood fixation on the murder of JonBenèt Ramsey into a story about a young woman much like her who lives, grows up, discovers she’s been an unwitting agent in a deep state program and takes her revenge on the forces that placed here there.
How I came upon this style of story is very related to research I was doing toward the end of my doctorate on trauma studies. I was really interested in the idea that trauma is marked by its unspeakability as well as its tendency to emerge in a non-linear manner, so the style is intended to represent the unpredictable, peripatetic mode not so much of speaking about trauma, but speaking through it.
LR: Following up on that, were there any movies, music, books, art pieces that were influential in your shaping, or that you see as companion pieces? This book is set in the late 1990s. Did you, for instance, listen to a bunch of mixed CDs from the time period to ground yourself in that moment?
CW: MONARCH dialogues with a pretty wide spectrum of inspirations and references, ranging from ‘90s dark comedies (like Drop Dead Gorgeous) to more canonical films about memory (like La Jetée). I’ve always been really obsessed with glitching in storytelling and I think the one element that unites all the different texts that went into writing MONARCH is the idea that a narrative can malfunction the same way memory malfunctions. In ‘90s dark comedies, this comes across for me in the tone—the way that these movies are aware of the culture they satirize, yet they also propagate that culture because they’re a part of it. In La Jetée, the glitch is much more direct. An actual screen freezing, a distortion.
As for mixed CDs, I actually didn’t listen to much music from the time period to ground myself. I mainlined pop culture so hard in the ‘90s that it’s pretty ingrained! Instead, I listened to what I thought the main character would be listening to, which was Joy Division, The Smiths, and a lot of actual white noise. This is a book about a person inventing a personality, so I wanted the tonal backdrop I worked into either be blank or totally affected.
LR: Monarch could potentially fall under many different labels of genre: Speculative fiction? Science fiction? Experimental? Postmodern? Sci-Horror? Slipstream? Did labels and whether or not your work fit under a certain genre matter to you in the conceptualizing of this book? Did you start out saying “I want to write a science fiction novel,” or did you let the story take you in whatever direction it wanted to go?
CW: I love this question! I was on a sci-fi panel at the LA Times Book Festival, which was a great experience, but I definitely felt out of place! So, no, I never intended to write any kind of novel other than literary. You’re right to guess that I just let the story go in the direction that it wanted to go in. I suppose I never worried about genre because most of my favorite books defy genre—I think of Orlando by Virginia Woolf, of Margret Atwood’s novels, of Kafka. Honestly, when I start thinking of books I think are great, it’s much harder for me to think of one that is solidly within a genre than one that is hybrid in some way. I went to one of Selah Saterstrom’s Sunday divination writing workshops recently, where she spoke about the three of hearts as the tarot card of hybrid genre because, to quote her really roughly, “all emotional stories are pierced by multiple ways of telling.” I don’t just believe that—I don’t know any other way to tell a story.
LR: The novel begins in a fairly recognizable reality—well, reality adjacent, perhaps. The setting, at least, is grounded in 90’s tropes that early Millennials and Generation Xers remember. Early on, we are treated to some vignettes and images of grisly nightmares, but we don’t know how Jessica (the narrator) fits into the strange world of beauty pageants, nighttime bruises, and odd parents who don’t seem to belong to normal, suburban society. The major speculative and sci-fi elements aren’t revealed until the middle of the book, and that is when readers get to see the uniqueness of Jessica’s identity and plight more fully. I really liked the pacing and slow build of this book, how the mystery of the world unraveled like a tightly wound ball of thread. Can you talk about managing the release of information in this novel? Was it hard to keep so much close to the vest early on?
CW: Yes!! As I got closer and closer to the end of the book, it became increasingly difficult to keep pace because I just really wanted to get to the book’s major reveals. Discipline is obvious a big part of writing—you have to write to, you know, be a writer, and you have to do that pretty much every day—but this book required a lot of discipline in terms of the plot pacing, especially at the end. Early drafts of this book jump pretty abruptly, in part because I wanted to make sure I got to those major plot points, and because I couldn’t wait! For me, a lot of writing a first draft is really just entertaining myself. Later drafts are for other people, so that’s where I step back and try to look at the pacing and the questions that haven’t yet been answered or the relationships that haven’t been fully explored and then re-pace by incorporating that information. I’m really lucky to have first readers who understand what I’m trying to do and who give me feedback that’s more geared toward pointing to what can be filled in than what can be totally restructured. They make the novel more itself, they help accentuate significant themes and characters. In short, the answer to these questions is pretty workshop 101: I draft, I get feedback, I have fun and make a mess early on and then I clean it up for a long time.
LR: Speaking of the 90s, Monarch gives readers tons of pop culture references. OJ Simpson trial, Lorena Bobbitt, Y2K, mixed CDs, just to name a few. Can you tell us what about this particular decade appealed so much to you for this narrative? Would this have been a different book if it were, say, set in the late 80’s or early 2000’s?
CW: Yeah, that’s a great question. The book naturally emerged as set in the ‘90s because I was aligning it with the death of JonBenèt Ramsey to some extent. And, of course, I grew up in the ‘90s and am pretty much the same age as Jessica, the main character (actually, in reference to your previous question—one way I kept track of the threads of the novel was to simply make Jessica’s birthday my own, which really did help ground me in the wash of cultural and political life at the time).
The book would certainly be different if set in the ‘80s or early 2000s. MONARCH is really engaged in beauty culture and fashion and trends as well as in the late ‘90s as a sort of fin de siècle, an end of everything but also a transformation. Themes of presentation, death, and a fetishization of death via beauty culture (anorexic models, heroin chic, etc.) as well as the Y2K obsession with prophesy and end times (I feel like there was a new Nostradamus documentary on the History Chanel every weekend of ’99!) shape the texture of the book quite a bit.
LR: A theme in this book is youth trauma (and violence). A scene that sticks with me is when Jessica experiments with the Dead Ringers (a neighborhood youth “fight club”). Jessica, for the first time, steps outside of her body, and can do things she didn’t think were possible. Her experience with Dead Ringers reminds me, vaguely, of her time in the beauty pageants. Can you talk a bit about the role of trauma in this book? Was it difficult to marry this theme with the speculative/sci-fi threads?
CW: The sci-fi thread actually emerged because this is a book about trauma, I think. One thing that gets said again and again about trauma is that its “unspeakable,” right? It both cannot and must be spoken, thus trauma survivors tend to depend heavily on metaphor until they retrieve or develop the language that can express their experience. The sci-fi element of this book (about freezing in a chamber that halts the aging process) is one extended metaphor that plays on the idea of the freeze trauma response. One of the moments that I think about the most from my coursework on trauma studies is watching the testimony of K-Zetnik in the Eichmann trial and reading Shoshana Felman’s incredible analysis of this testimony in her book, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Trauma in the Twentieth Century. In short, K-Zetnik was a survivor as well as a writer and when called upon to testify about his imprisonment at Auschwitz, he frequently employed metaphor. The court requested he contain his remarks to facts, which he attempted to do until eventually collapsing on the witness stand. It’s not just “easier” to discuss traumatic events through metaphor; it’s sometimes only possible to discuss them through metaphor. Sci-fi is often an extended metaphor, so discussing the structure of trauma through this genre seemed intuitive to me.
LR: I loved the college section of this book, especially the characters in the dormitory and the dynamic between them. My brother went to University of Iowa, and he lived in an off-campus building called Mayflower—which is the name of the dorm in the book. Just out of curiosity, is that dorm an inspiration for the one in Monarch?
CW: Yes, It absolutely is! You’re only the second person to ask that. I was always fascinated with the Mayflower dorm at Iowa (where I did my undergraduate) because there was a rumor of a triple suicide in which three girls jump off the dorm’s roof and then haunt the dorm. So, that rumor emerges in MONARCH during Jessica’s time there. I just looked for evidence of this ghost story online and I can’t find anything, so it must not be a big part of campus lore. It’s possible I knew some people who lived in that dorm that believed it was haunted? It’s really odd to write about a memory, because at some point you realize how much you’ve modified it.
LR: Reflections (physical and figurative) come up time and again. In the climax of the book, Jessica sees her reflection on steel boxes, and she seems to ruminate on the idea that her identity is bigger than the self. Why did you see that particular moment as the end of her journey? Is it the end?
CW: One of the ideas that interested me most while writing MONARCH was the idea of where one’s identity actually comes from. How much is shaped by family, culture, education, and how much of your identity are you born with? I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of the Original Face (which is featured in a college lecture Jessica attends at one point in MONARCH), which is the concept of “the face you had before your parents were born.” I think her journey ends with this thought of the Self going onward and curling tendrils into the future because only a person who has truly come to “know thyself” can intentionally extend beyond what’s right in front of them. To put this differently, I mean that really knowing your own motivations and desires and truths can allow you to see yourself outside of context(s), which is/are inherently always decided by other people.
Yeah, I think this is the end for Jessica. I see her as a character that has answered the major questions of her life and now has to do the work of existing. To quote Anne Carson, “to live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.” As hinted in the epigraph to MONARCH, Jessica gets to a place where she survives, but she doesn’t really live after the trauma she’s endured. I’m not saying people who endure trauma don’t come to live full lives eventually, but I do want to provide a representation of a character that isn’t there yet. Healing takes a long, long time and before that long time, there’s the long time of just being—and that’s where Jessica ends MONARCH.
LR: What’s next for you and your writing?
CW: I’m tentatively working on a companion to MONARCH that goes back to the origins of MONARCH, MKUltra, and Jessica’s parents. I thought of this book while writing MONARCH, so there are certainly some open ends or oddities in MONARCH that will be addressed in its prequel, if it ever comes to be.
More immediately, I’m finishing up my next novel, which is about a ballerina who joins a cult that choreographs a ballet to end the world. It’s inspired in part by Russian occultist and composer Alexander Scriabin. Like MONARCH, this next novel deals with performance and memory, however the idea of the listener or witness to memory is a more integral aspect. So—another weird plot with serious ideas told in the voice of, like, your annoyed older sister.
https://laurelreview.org/candice-wuehle-interview
‘Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed navigates interior landscapes, personal cosmology, and the manner in which language shapes our being and being shapes our language via acts of séance, tarot, alchemical interpretation, and psychoanalysis. These are poems written in the wild swing of the scrying stone, poems that ask how to create an identity in the way of perpetual change, constant self-interrogation, and ever shifting psychogeography. What does it mean to live in the orb of uncertainty? To be neither here nor there, neither fixed nor fluxed?’
FIDELITORIA IS WHERE POETRY AND SORCERY WALTZ TOGETHER. CANDICE WUEHLE HAS A MASTERFUL LENS ON THE VEILED EXTRAORDINARY OF OUR WORLD. POETRY REORIENTS ITSELF TO EPISTLE THEN BACK AGAIN, WITH A STRENGTH AND DIRECTION I LONG FOR IN EVERY POET'S WORK, "FRISK YOUR OWN NATURE MOST ARDENTLY, ADORN YOUR EDGES WITH BLOOD-BRUISES."— CACONRAD
THERE IS AN IRRESISTIBLE MELANCHOLY OF CHAOS LIVING HERE, BINDING AND UNWINDING LIKE TREE'S LEAVES AND SEASONAL DIURNAL GOWNS, NOT RESISTING A FLUORESCENT MEDIUM OF ABUNDANCE AND SNOW. HERE THE SPEAKER TRAVELS THROUGH HER OWN TONGUE TO FIND HERSELF OVER AND OVER, IN HERBS, IN ALIENS, IN THE QUIET SPECTACULAR. IN THE BANQUET OF TAROT AND BUCOLIC POETRY, WHERE THE LEXICAL GRASS GROWS THINGS SUCH AS PROHILIL AND EXNIHIL WHILE THE POET TAKES US THROUGH HER UNDERTONE OF LUGUBRIOUS SURRENDER. TIMELESS AND ELONGATED, WITH REPETITIVE MANTRA THAT BEHAVE HYPNOTICALLY LIKE FALLING FLORAL FAUNAS, CANDICE WUEHLE HOPES, IN THIS WILD SPELLBINDING OF LEXICAL RESTFULNESS, TO ACHIEVE ACCRETION OF SELF THROUGH THE ORACULAR AMNESIA OF SELF.— VI KHI NAO
FIDELITORIA COMPRISES NOTHING LESS THAN A DECK OF SPELLS—SPILLING OVER WITH POEMS THAT SEETHE AS THEY SEEK OUT WHATEVER’S BEYOND THE LIMITS OF BECOMING. I FEEL CAN THE WARP OF ALICE NOTLEY’S NECROMANCY, AND PERHAPS THE WEFT, TOO, OF HANNAH WEINER’S CLAIRVOYANT VISIONS. YET WEUHLE’S POETICS SUMMON HER OWN “ZODIACAL DARKENING”—BOTH LUCID AND SPOOKY—AS SHE THREADS HEX-LIKE VERSES INTO A ROILING HALLUCINATION. I HAVEN’T BEEN THIS ECSTATICALLY DISTURBED BY A COLLECTION OF POETRY SINCE I WAS SOMEBODY ELSE. TAKE THIS WEIRD BOOK WITH YOU WHERE YOU’RE GOING. OR DON’T—AND SUFFER. BUT YOU’VE BEEN WARNED NOW, HAVEN’T YOU?— JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON
CANDICE WUEHLE’S FIDELITORIA: FIXED OR FLUXED IS A DYNAMIC, ENTHRALLING COLLECTION WHOSE ELECTRIC LIVE WIRE LINES TWITCH AND QUAKE AS ALL DIVINATIONS DO—ANIMATED WITH EXCESS WISDOM AND ANCIENT ENERGIES. THESE POEMS ARE SEARING, CELEBRATORY, AND INTIMATE; WUEHLE USES POETRY AS A CONDUIT BETWEEN BEWILDERMENT AND FORECAST, UTTERANCE AND OCCULT, TRAUMA AND PAIN SONG, ARCHIVE AND DIRT. THE SPIRITS ARE HERE, AND WUEHLE WARNS “ONE THING YOU CAN’T DO / IS GO BACK AND DRAW THE CARDS / IN THE TIME BEFORE.” LET THESE POEMS SERVE AS CLUES TO OUR SHARED FATE.— CARYL PAGEL
Excerpt:
Demiurge
As if a blueprint of author’s imagined
garden could begin without the 28 leathern paws
of 7 unassigned dogs halting, holding
their howls at the edge. If you draw me a map
I won’t find you. This poem is for the cartographer
offering an alternate arcadia, I mean, a third
arcana. I mean I believe in spoil, wineskins accelerating
unlit wars, ending ends. As if this poem
isn’t populated with obese angels and outsized
stars, muzzled strong-men. But this poem is also
for black smart phone screens not networked
or worked and inelegant without intelligence,
molly-mirror unreflective of the un-shiny other’s
intent, only an idea in abstraction upon lack
of electrification. This poem is clearly for myself
alone. My mother may have wrapped me in
a cloud. Because of this arrangement, I have
insisted on some theories regarding Ash and Hair.
Instead, I ask myself if I mean Vapor and Ocean,
Air. I got good at this somewhere and now I need
to get de-skilled; I am now only a spouse
to my true nature, a digger of foundation, fence
posts. True. I have stayed here long enough to
achieve, and now my arms are the arms of evident
strength. I really want to be the one in the kitchen,
inhaling mint, wetted basil: artifacts of exposed
hearth. Upon first encounter,
sugar was qualified as honey without bees. This seems to
suggest that strength—for a Cashiered Soldier or Bad
Poet—is only intention without integrity. Howls
echo in the uncharted empty even if the animals are
not near; the nature of the canyon is to act and act again;
reverberation. I mean to admit I remain
in the self-styled wild
not out of an attitude of endurance
but in avoidance of the ultra
charted zone, the solid city
structured and clay-hardened.
Upon identification of the subject,
I collapse. Just as I cannot kiss the counter,
I cannot, cannot caress the fur of the domestic dog,
I cannot even accept
the rope
that made the animal so,
can only
insist a cloud
cannot be contained
or rent
Soft
Sort of error. My real hair, unhinged
from my head. Was I a blonde-girl
anymore or an experimental light, a
way for others to see through water,
ashes? I have already said what I am afraid
of. Yonder. I ask my father on the other
end about procession, peaceful
parting: Candie, keep yourself and give
your things. He means give up, give
way. Keep falling from windows
in order to assure the greatness of your
own height, if only to be the wreck
of your own pure lightness. Only
on a second story hotel balcony, bonds
can be broken with the world one
can come to skim, to see as surface. Chlorinated,
incalculable current unbearable without
tallied reflections. Stop. In the rented
room’s mirror, the face I deserve and under-
neath, another atmosphere I have never
endured: I doubt it is oceanic, operable
by infallible salts or expanse of warm blues,
cool blues. An indigo, a lapis, a lazuli. Instead
I suspect a smallness
No—a clarity
No—a clarity
No—a clarity,
a cross at a crossing,
a dryness delivering, upending as does specifically dirt
in demand of a grave. Just
a thin yield, as earth under blade, giving
to pressure within freeze, shale.
I know the odd dumb organ breaks
beneath my breasts, never showing
and only even aware of itself because of the
occasioned hand pushing back my hair to comment
I can hear your
self. Have I already said
what I am afraid of; I have already
tried to fuse this, this
bare flicker
nude synapse
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Candice Wuehle
Candice Wuehle, DEATH INDUSTRIAL
COMPLEX, Action Books, 2020.
Candice Wuehle's DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX is a meditation on the cultural obsession with the bodies of dead women and an occult invocation of the artist Francesca Woodman. Like Woodman's photographs with their long exposures and blurred lenses, this book is haunted and haunting, hazey yet devastatingly precise. These are poems as possessions, gothic ekphrases, dialogues with the dead, biography and anti-biography, a stunning act of "cryptobeauty."
“i have a compulsion to place a mirror on every tombstone.”
Fashioning her Francesca Woodman from gloves and veils, eels and electricities, Candice Wuehle’s Industrial Death Complex is the most exquisite pen pal, a Pretty Pretty Poltergeist, a portrait that evades as it enchants. “Writing with both hands,” Wuehle’s “unsuicide note” is a Josephus Thimister gown of a book, rawing its silks, shedding its skins, letting all that sad/badgirl beauty bleed on, bleed out. —JoAnna Novak
Does this book expect you to hold its heels as it hovers? Does it want you to see it crawl from a tv set and then lock fingers with its girlish ghost? Is a mirror a weapon? Is ekphrasis a ghost mirror? Is there a stage, can you see it sideways, do you see the veil now? Do you take pleasure in the kind of gazing that turns your eyes into shimmery séance light? Do you want access to the “gate out of this world”? You bet your sweet ass you do, reader. “You can get married to a thing they say doesn’t even exist.” Did you see that glitch? Did you feel it in your curtain-y skeleton? Can you hear this call to cult from the broken record player, you little glitch baby?
“This is a story about how clothing was invented,” and sometimes this is an ekphrastic act, a companion text to the images and biography of Francesca Woodman, sometimes it’s memoir via possession (but how it defies “the petty/ contours of memoir”!), sometimes it’s poems as organelles, sometimes a study in trachophobia (fear of speed), sometimes a treatise on light and fashion and parents, sometimes an inquiry—deliciously terrifying—into “the extra stuff.” The stuff that impossibly lingers around liminal gates, salt crystals, “the rivulet of oil between/ the living dermis and the dead fil/ aments” of the scalp, light from the corner of a room, “pure gothic deep inside the erotic.”
I absolutely love the world of this book. It’s “something that sounds like bubbles of air bursting on the water’s surface” and that is the only place I ever, truly, want to be. It writes with both hands so that it can touch itself in the middle. It killed mary jane shoes. It made itself the gate and refused to demur because some lipsticks are better than others/ for writing your name on a mirror.” —Olivia Cronk
Candice Wuehle: An Interview by Paul Cunningham
From “FIRE”:
“I open up my laptop
and write against
history===I update
the browser, I keep shopping. I open to
The Guardian, to Forever 21, to Netflix. I
buy nothing most days but I do
some days. I’m here. I think of if there is anywhere my body
my whole thing
can’t go now, I think of the fire
wall, I think of you.”
Candice Wuehle, VIBE CHECK, curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs,
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