Le spectre de la rose by Valentine Hugo, 1912 via New York Public Library.
Yesterday on the Tin House blog, Robert Ostrom shared a recent conversation with Carey McHugh about her book American Gramophone, taxidermy, and flying, among many things.
CM: …There’s a lot of taxidermy in the book. And in fact, we had this one deer head hanging in our living room for a long time. It was a deer that my dad had shot, and I was always appalled by it. I didn’t understand it. Why was it inside the house? Why did it have eyes? I remember being really young and looking up at it, and I remember this panic but also intrigue. How did this come to be here like this? And sometimes they’d take it down to dust it and I’d just pet it and be like, “Is it creature? Is it ornament? What is this thing!?”
It’s a reminder, maybe, of some history that I visit but don’t completely enter. Because I don’t hunt like my dad and my uncles and my brother. I’m a vegetarian in fact. But it’s something that’s always been present in my life. There was always talk of camo and bird dogs and guns. It wasn’t like those things were foreign objects. They were always in the mix somehow. And that’s so foreign to my life now that I think I go back there in my memory and I try to pull it up somehow and understand it.
Come for McHugh’s always wise musings on poetry, memory, and the writing process, stay for the smart (and adorable) questions Ostrom relayed from his seven year-old niece.
American Gramophone is available for purchase online through Amazon.