Dodie Bellamy’s breakthrough hit novel The Letters of Mina Harker (a new edition of which was released fall 2004 by University of Wisconsin Press) introduced readers to a brave new world where Dracula’s lady stalker resurfaces in grimy, polyamorous, contemporary San Francisco. Eileen Myles described it as a “luscious, deeply fucked-up extravagant work.” Bellamy’s other titles include Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allesandro (Talisman House), an epistolary collaboration on AIDS with the late D’Allesandro, and Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons), which won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. Her latest, Pink Steam (Suspect Thoughts Press, http://www.suspectthoughts.com), takes the horror genre further than anyone has dared: the confessional memoir.

A Q&A With Dodie Bellamy

Pink Steamis classified as “fiction/essay/memoir.” Do you worry that booksellers won’t know which shelf to put it on?

Too much publishing is based on forcing books into various arbitrary categories that it’s believed will sell books. One of the advantages of publishing with a small press such as Suspect Thoughts is that the writing comes first and the marketing, second. I imagine bookstores will choose either “fiction” or “memoir” and place it there. Either’s fine.

You’re working with Suspect Thoughts Press, whose list seems to be full of edgy gay male writers like Matt Bernstein Sycamore and Justin Chin. What’s it like to be a woman on a list with all these guys?

I’m friends with Matt and Justin, and they’re wonderful guys — as are Greg and Ian, the Suspect Thoughts publishers. I think I’m in great company. Suspect Thoughts calls itself “pansexual,” and they’ve published some very interesting women, and they’re committed to publishing more.

How did the book come about — did you set out to write primarily a memoir, or a realistic novel, or a series of vignettes, or did it come together in a different way?

Pink Steam is a collection of work written over the past 20 years. I began by gathering what felt urgent to be included, and I started noticing various themes — such as an obsessive sense of watching, and all the autobiographical references. So I looked through my files for more work that focused on watching, and I edited and arranged the book to operate as a fractured autobiography in which the culture I live in is as much my autobiography as are the “facts” of my life.

Pink Steam is really rich with feminist theory and thinking, but also uses an engagement with sex that seems to be lacking in a lot of feminist texts. It’s more raw and flagrant than a lot of women’s writing I’ve seen, in a way that I associate more with gay men’s writing. Talk a bit about your connection to that tradition.

I was involved with the feminist writing communities of Chicago and San Francisco in the late ’70s, and they were very important to my development as a writer. I did feel uncomfortable with a certain primness I often found there, although there were a few gloriously wild women in the Feminist Writers Guild. In the early ’80s, I became involved with a group of gay male fiction writers who were exploring sex in their work, and through them I was encouraged to explore sex and I learned many techniques, such as how to objectify men. I’m pleased to see that feminism has changed, and so many young women, particularly queer women, are now exploring alternative sexualities in their writing.

The horror flick is such a generative theme or device. Why do you think you’re drawn to writing about trashy movies like Night of the Living Dead while some of us don’t have the stomach for them?

What I enjoy about horror films is that, if you allow yourself to drop your sophisticated judgment of their schlockiness, and open to them, they can lead you into tapping into very deep parts of yourself and whatever culture they originate out of. Many horror films are obsessed with the division between inside and outside, with the very integrity of our bodies, a sense of physical invasion. I think these are core concerns for many women. I find it enlightening to study how women are so often associated with the monstrous.

Near the end of your book, you write about watching the 2000 Republican convention with your mother in Indiana. Did you watch the conventions in 2004? Any thoughts you’d care to share?

I watched the Democratic convention and ended up feeling all hopeful that the dreadful situation in the United States could improve, but then I visited my mother in Indiana and lost hope. It’s very Republican there, and Kerry was hated, mostly because of his long face. Elections aren’t won, sadly, by rationality and good intentions.

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